Polly Shulman - The Grimm Legacy

“Oh, okay. Want me to file your call slip?”

“No, I . . . I didn’t fill one out. I just borrowed them for a little while—my shoes got wet and my feet were cold. I figured nobody would notice they were gone. Don’t tell, okay?”

“Sure.” I wondered whether this was one of those suspicious requests Mr. Mauskopf wanted me to look out for. Surely not—after all, Mr. Mauskopf knew Marc himself and had recommended him for the job. He’d even said he was friends with Marc’s uncle. If anything suspicious was going on with Marc, he would surely know more about it than I would. Besides, this was Marc Merritt, asking me for a favor! How could I refuse?

“Thanks, Elizabeth.” Marc hurried off.

A few cabinets later I found a terrible jumble in a section of leggings and chaps. I started to sort them out, but I couldn’t figure out the documentation, so I bit back my pride and asked Aaron.

“Wow, this is pretty bad,” he said. “It looks like my brother’s room when he can’t find his sneakers. Let’s take this mess up front and sort it out where there’s better light.” He piled the tangle of garments on a hand truck and pushed it to the work area by the dumbwaiters.

“Try to find labels for these things,” he said. “I’m going to see who took these out last.” He started flipping through cards in the circulation file. He snorted. “Thought so!”

“What?” I asked.

“The last request for II T&G 391.4636 B37 was run by MM—Marc Merritt. Same with II T&G 391.413 A44.”

“That doesn’t mean he put them back wrong,” I pointed out. “They could have been returned weeks later.”

“Well, they weren’t. They were returned the same day.”

“Does it say who reshelved them?”

“No, we don’t record that.”

“Then why do you assume it was Marc?”

“Why do you assume it wasn’t? He was on this stack that day.”

“Somebody else could have been with him.”

“Could have been. There’s no evidence they were, though.”

“There’s no evidence they weren’t, either. And somebody could have scrambled the stuff later too. Who knows when it happened? Maybe it was that page who got fired.”

“The evidence points where the evidence points.”

“What do you have against Marc?”

“I don’t have anything against him personally. I just don’t get why everybody melts around him just because he’s a basketball star. It’s like you think he can’t do any wrong. You ignore all the squirrelly stuff he does.” Aaron was clearly getting upset.

Well, so was I. “What squirrelly stuff ? And who’s everybody? You mean Anjali?”

“No, I mean everybody! You girls are the worst, but the librarians are almost as bad. I don’t like the way he’s always sneaking around the Grimm Collection.”

“No?” I asked. “So what’s in the Grimm Collection?”

Aaron looked even more upset. “Forget I said that!” he snapped. “I should have kept my mouth shut. I’m taking my break now. Leave this stuff. I’ll get a librarian to come check it out.” He stalked off through the fire door.

I thought about what he’d said. In fact, the business with Marc and the boots had been kind of squirrelly. And if Marc had been careless about filling out a call slip for the boots, couldn’t he have been careless about reshelving the leggings and chaps too?

On the other hand, he’d brought the borrowed boots back right away, which was pretty responsible of him. Probably this was all about Aaron’s jealousy.

That was understandable. I would be jealous too if I were a guy.

But what was this Grimm Collection, and why was it making Aaron so upset?

The stack door opened and an unfamiliar librarian came in. She was tall and skinny, with glasses and hair in a bun; she looked like a stereotype of a librarian. She was the first one I’d ever seen who looked like that.

“Elizabeth, right? I’m Lucy Minnian,” she said. “Aaron tells me you have a mess to sort out.”

“Yes, I was sweeping the shelves and I found all this.”

She poked at the tangle, then whistled under her breath. “I’d better send Lee down,” she said. She went out.

After a while, Dr. Rust came in. “What’s the trouble here?”

“I found all this stuff misshelved.”

“Hm . . . looks like the work of that Zandra Blair. She left a trail of chaos wherever she went. It took us a while to figure out she was the one doing it—she was great at shifting the blame. I’m glad to have seen the last of her! Let’s see, were there any labels with these?”

“Not that I could find.”

Dr. Rust began sorting through the chaps, separating the tangled straps. “I wish we could use something more up-to-date, like radio tags. Then we wouldn’t lose things on the shelves for years when they get misshelved.”

“Why don’t you, then?” I asked. “Too expensive?”

“No, we could probably find the funds for it. But the board of governors is conservative about technology—they call it ‘modern magic.’”

“What’s wrong with that? Modern magic sounds good to me.”

“Me too. But they prefer the old kind.” Dr. Rust held a pair of leather leggings up to one ear with a hand, as if listening for a secret, then scribbled something on a white tag and tied it to a buckle. I looked carefully to see if I could catch the freckles moving, but it was too dark to make them out.

Dr. Rust seemed to listen to another pair of chaps, gave it a shake, and listened again.

“So, Dr. Rust, can I ask you a qu—,” I began, but stopped. I knew what the answer would be.

“Of course. Always ask qu’s.”

“What’s the Grimm Collection?”

Dr. Rust put down the last garment and looked at me seriously for a long time, then said at last, “Stan Mauskopf has never sent us a bad page.”

Was that supposed to be an answer? “I really appreciate his good opinion. I’ll do everything I can to live up to it,” I said.

“I’m sure you will. Yes, I really do think you will.” Dr. Rust took a deep breath. “The Grimm Collection is one of the Special Collections on Stack 1—probably the most special of the Special Collections. The original holdings came to the library in 1892 as a legacy from Friedhilde Hassenpflug, a grandniece of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.”

“I know who they are. I just wrote a paper about the Brothers Grimm for Mr. Mauskopf.”

“Of course. So you know about their collections of märchen —folk tales or fairy tales. But stories weren’t the only thing they collected. They also assembled a remarkable group of objects.”

“Oh, that’s cool! I knew the Brothers Grimm were historians, but I hadn’t heard they were interested in the history of—of objects, of stuff too.”

Dr. Rust nodded. “Yes, it’s called material culture. The study of how physical objects relate to society and history. It’s relatively new as an academic discipline, but in a sense it’s always been central to our mission at the repository. It didn’t exist per se at the time of the Grimms—they were visionaries in so many ways. We’re very fortunate to have the privilege of caring for their collection.”

“What kind of objects did they collect?”

“Things mentioned in the märchen. ”

“What do you mean, like Cinderella’s slippers?”

“Something like that.” Did I detect a trace of longing in Dr. Rust’s voice? “We don’t have Cinderella’s actual slippers, but that’s the idea.”

I was relieved to hear Dr. Rust wasn’t crazy enough to claim they had Cinderella’s actual slippers. That would be going a little too far. “What do you have, then?” I asked.

“Oh, spindles and straw and beans and tears. A glass coffin. A golden egg. A number of things. The Grimms were serious and thorough collectors, and of course we’ve added to the collection a great deal over the years, objects associated with other fairy-tale and folklore traditions. I’m especially proud of our French holdings—we have the best collection outside the Archives Extraordinaires in Paris. And there’s some important material related to the Arabian Nights in the Grimm Collection too.”