That Saturday the arctic weather softened slightly. I was walking in Central Park after my morning shift at the repository when a bear came bounding toward me across the snow. I froze.
Not a bear, I saw as it got closer, but a bear-sized shaggy dog making the frozen air echo with its barks.
“Griffin, stay!”
The dog skidded to a stop in front of me. I took a step back. It was wagging its tail—that was reassuring. It put its huge wet paws on my shoulders and tried to lick my face.
“Do I know you?” I asked the dog, trying to duck away.
“Down, Griffin! Don’t knock Elizabeth over!” said a familiar stern voice. It was Mr. Mauskopf. He snapped his long fingers at the dog.
This, then, must be the Beast.
The dog subsided onto its haunches, put its head to one side, turned its ears forward, and looked up at me with eyes as big as saucers. It didn’t have to look up very far; we were practically at eye level. It raised a big, hairy paw and offered it to me.
“How do you do?” I said, shaking the paw. It felt as heavy as a sack of onions.
The Beast took that as an invitation to put its paws on my shoulders again.
“Down, Griffin! I said down!” barked Mr. Mauskopf. The dog subsided again. “He seems to like you.”
“Good dog,” I said, amused. For all his famous sternness, Mr. Mauskopf didn’t seem to be too good at making his dog obey. He must be more of a softy than he let on. I patted Griffin’s lumpy, shaggy brown shoulder. He put his tongue out and wagged his entire hindquarters.
“Nice day for a walk,” Mr. Mauskopf said.
“At least it’s warmer than yesterday. I just finished my shift at the repository.”
“Yes, I’ve been wanting to talk to you about that. How are things there?”
“I love it. It’s like getting to take things out of museum display cases and actually touch them.”
Mr. Mauskopf smiled. “I remember that excitement,” he said. “Before I started working at the repository, I never thought much about objects. To me a spoon was just a spoon. Then my supervisor put me on Stack 9, and I saw those thousands of spoons, all different sizes and shapes and patterns and uses. I realized they didn’t just appear by magic. Someone had thought about each one and decided what it should be like, what shape, what to make it out of. It was like a whole new world opening up. I think that’s when I became interested in history.”
“I know what you mean,” I said. “Ms. Callender showed me Marie Antoinette’s wig. It makes you realize that Marie Antoinette actually existed.”
He nodded. “And what does she have you doing? Martha Callender, I mean, not Marie Antoinette.” Wow, a joke from Mr. Mauskopf!
“Mostly running call slips, reshelving, that sort of thing.”
“Good, good.” A pause; Mr. Mauskopf glanced at the Beast. Griffin gave a single bark, almost as if he and Mr. Mauskopf were exchanging words. Mr. Mauskopf turned back to me. “Tell me, have you seen anything to alarm you?” he asked.
“To alarm me? What do you mean?” Was he talking about the gigantic bird?
“My friends at the repository tell me there’s something . . . not quite right. I wondered if you’d noticed anything that could be helpful.”
“What’s not right? One of the pages—Anjali—she told me she’d heard about a . . .” It sounded so unlikely. Could I really tell Mr. Mauskopf? Wouldn’t he think I was an idiot to believe it?
“A what?”
Well, I’d started—no stopping now. “An enormous bird. It’s supposed to be following people around and stealing things.”
To my surprise, Mr. Mauskopf nodded gravely. “Yes, I’ve heard that too. Have you seen this bird?”
“No . . .”
“Did the page who told you about the bird see it? Anjali was her name, right?”
“She said she didn’t.”
“Hm. And have you seen or heard anything else that concerns you?”
“Well . . . I heard that there was a page who got fired.”
Mr. Mauskopf paused, as if trying to decide how much to say. “That’s right. Dr. Rust had to fire one of the pages. She tried to take a vase without signing for it or leaving a deposit. But that’s not all. Apparently, some more objects have disappeared since Zandra was let go, and I’ve heard of objects similar to the ones in the repository turning up in private collections.”
“Do they think another page is still stealing stuff?” This was alarming. “Or is it the bird, like Anjali said?”
“Nobody is quite sure what is happening. I have trouble believing that a gigantic bird, even if it exists, could get into the repository on its own and steal things. There must be people involved. So keep your eyes open for anything suspicious, and if anybody approaches you and asks you to remove any items outside of proper channels or even if you just get an uncomfortable feeling, please come to me or Lee Rust right away. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said. I had an uncomfortable feeling right now about the whole thing, in fact, but I didn’t think that was what he meant.
“Thank you, Elizabeth.” He turned to go.
“Hey, wait a minute, Mr. Mauskopf. Can I ask you a question?”
“Certainly. As the Akan proverb says, always ask questions.”
“Why are you and the librarians always quoting Akan proverbs, anyway?”
“Oh, that. It’s sort of a private joke. One of the pages when I worked there was descended from the Akan people—your friend Marc Merritt’s uncle, in fact. He liked to quote the proverbs, and the rest of us picked up the habit. I’ve always thought the proverbs chimed nicely with the Grimm stories. Was that your question?”
“No, but it’s connected—to the Grimm stories, at least. What is the Grimm Collection? Does it have anything to do with the Grimm fairy tales?”
“The Grimm Collection! Did one of the librarians tell you about that?”
“I overheard one of the pages talking about it with Ms. Callender, and then everybody got all weird when I asked about it.”
“Ah. Well, then I’d better let Dr. Rust explain. Don’t worry, if you do a good job at the repository, you’ll learn about all that soon enough. I have every confidence . . . Griffin, stop! Griffin! I’m sorry, Elizabeth, I . . . must run . . .” Mr. Mauskopf crashed through the snow after the big dog, who was urgently pursuing some important matter.
The following Tuesday, I planned to leave school as quickly as possible, hoping to get to the repository and see Dr. Rust before my shift started. But I passed the gym on my way out and paused to watch the basketball team practicing. The coach was making Marc do defensive drills with three of the guys.
Marc looked as if there were wings on his feet, he moved so lightly and stayed aloft so long. He even smiled at me from midair before he turned to snatch the ball out from under Jamal Carter’s nose, making my heart jump too. I smiled back, but he was no longer looking at me.
When I got outside, it was snowing hard, flakes creeping under my coat collar where the top button was still missing. I really needed to sew on the new one, but I wasn’t that good at sewing. I put my head down, turning it as little as possible to keep from exposing my neck as I hurried to the library. I shouldered the heavy door open. Through my steamy glasses I saw Anjali behind the circulation desk again. She waved me upstairs.
Marc was at the time clock, punching in ahead of me.
“Hey, Marc. Didn’t I just pass you in the gym? How’d you get here so quickly?” I asked, sticking my card in the clock to be chomped.
“I walk fast.”
“That fast? You hadn’t even finished basketball practice.”
“Long legs,” he said dismissively, heading for the stairs.
Was I prying? Had I annoyed him? I put my card back in the rack, kicking myself.
Ms. Callender sent me down to Stack 2. “It’s going to be a slow night with this weather,” she said. “You might as well sweep the shelves.”
“Okay—is there a broom down there, or a brush or something?”
She laughed, her cheeks bunching up into balls. “It’s not that kind of sweeping. Ask a page to show you. Marc or Aaron. Gumdrop?”
“What?” Was this a new endearment—had she gotten tired of “honey”?
“Gumdrop?” She held out a bag.
“Oh, thanks.” I took a green one and rode the elevator down, chewing.
When I got to Stack 2, Aaron was at his usual desk, reading; Marc was nowhere in sight.
“Hi, Aaron. Where’s Marc?”
“Downstairs, why?”
“Ms. Callender said one of you should show me how to sweep the shelves.”
Aaron looked irritated. “And you’d prefer Merritt, is that it?”
“No, I just—he came down the stairs ahead of me; I thought he’d be here.”
“Great. Another member of the Marc Merritt fan club.”
“No . . . well, of course I think he’s cool and all, but I’m not actually in the fan club,” I said.
Aaron gave me a look that, in other lighting, would probably have suggested that he couldn’t believe he was stuck on Stack 2 with such an idiot. Under the desk lamp’s dramatic highlights and shadows, though, it suggested that he was an ogre about to eat me.
“I mean,” I explained, “most of the kids in the fan club are a lot younger.”
The highlights and shadows shifted. Now he looked like an ogre who was going to choke up the idiot he had eaten.
“Some of their little sisters are in it too,” I said.
“You can’t be serious! You mean there’s an actual Marc Merritt fan club?” he said.
I was starting to get irritated myself. “Of course there is. I’m sure you could join, since you take such an interest. All those girls would probably enjoy having an older guy around, even if it’s just you.”
Aaron stood up and said coldly, “Sweeping the shelves means making sure there’s nothing out of place. Check the labels and look for gaps between items or for anything that doesn’t belong where it is. Make a note of any anomalies you find. You start on that end and I’ll start on this.” He strode off into the darkness.
I spent a painstaking hour examining shoes, rows and rows of them, enough to keep every homeless toe in the city toasty. Did you know that in seventeenth-century France shoes were one-shape-fits-both-left-and-right? Or that ancient Egyptians gave their mummies shoes made of papyrus and palm leaves? Or that in fourteenth-century Poland, shoe toes grew so long and pointy that fashionable gentlemen looked like they were wearing snakes on their feet?
I didn’t find anything out of place in the shoe section. There was a gap where a patron had borrowed a pair of size 12-D pumps, but I found a call slip for it on file.
Checking a row of platform shoes from Renaissance Venice, I turned the corner and was surprised to find Marc Merritt with a pair of brown work boots in his hand.
“Oh, so you are working on this stack today?” I said.
“No, I’m down in the Dungeon,” he said.
“What’s the Dungeon?”
“Stack 1.”
“So what are you doing up here, then?”
“Returning these.”
“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.”
“I would love to see that.”
“One of these days, perhaps. We like to get to know our pages for a while before we let them work with the Special Collections. Some of those objects are quite . . . powerful.”
If these were really the objects that inspired the famous fairy tales, then powerful was a good word, I thought. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to touch the spindle that inspired the story of Sleeping Beauty. When I was six, my mother took me to see Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty at Lincoln Center—that’s when I fell in love with ballet and fairy tales. How I wished my mother were still alive! I would love to see the look on her face when I told her about the collection.
If only I’d known about the collection when I was writing my paper for Mr. Mauskopf’s class! I wondered what he thought about all this. I hoped I would get to see the collection soon. I would have to work hard and show Doc and the others that I was trustworthy.
“Well, that sounds amazing. I would love to work down there,” I said.
“Patience,” said Dr. Rust. “In the words of the Akan proverb, ‘One eats an elephant one bite at a time.’”