The Librarian of Boone's Hollow - Kim Vogel Sawyer Page 0,7
the other two letters, then folded them all together. She held the stack against her bodice and eased backward until her spine met the mattress. Her feet dangling toward the floor, she stared at the painted ceiling. When she was very young, before Mother and Daddy adopted her from the orphanage, she often lay awake at night and stared out the window at the sky, searching for a falling star on which to make a wish. The wish was always the same. She whispered it now. “I wish I had a daddy and mama to love me.”
God had heard her little-girl wish and sent Penrose and Fern Cowherd to rescue her from that dreary place. Mother and Daddy often said God chose her specially just for them, but she knew the opposite was true. She had a few fuzzy memories of the parents who’d birthed her, and they had been good people, but she couldn’t imagine better parents than the ones who’d adopted her.
“Even if you only want to rail at us and complain, we still want to hear from you.”
Addie pushed off the bed and hurried to the desk. She slid Felicity’s books aside, retrieved paper and a pen from the drawer, and smacked them onto the desktop. A letter formed in her mind. She would not rail at and complain to the wonderful people who’d taken her into their home and loved her as their own. First, she would apologize for not writing sooner. Then she would thank them for everything they’d done for her. Finally, she would promise to get them out of that awful boardinghouse. They didn’t belong there any more than she had belonged in the orphans’ asylum.
A plan unfolded. She would find a job, save every cent possible, and send it to Mother and Daddy. Lexington was larger than Georgetown. Surely there were opportunities here for a girl to make an honest wage. It meant putting off her own plans for her future, but what kind of daughter would she be if she gave in to her selfish wants and left her parents in need? They’d rescued her. Now she would rescue them.
She took up the pen and wrote, “Dearest Mother and Daddy…”
Addie
AFTER SHE FINISHED THE FLAVORFUL chicken and dumplings Felicity brought from the cafeteria—which she carried in a bowl, thank goodness, and not in her pocket—Addie set off for the Lexington Public Library. She needed solace and would find it there. Had she really awakened only a few short hours ago lighthearted, secure in her world, and with a carefree summer stretching before her? So quickly her life had changed, and the uncertainties now looming ahead rested heavily on her shoulders. Even so, she caught herself walking with a bounce in her step. And why not? How could anyone, even someone burdened with cares and woes, trudge along when something as wondrous as a library waited at the end of the pathway?
She’d thanked God dozens of times in the past three years for the opportunity to work in the beautiful neoclassical building that was constructed at the edge of Gratz Park thirty years ago, thanks to a generous donation from Andrew Carnegie. The one-mile route from the university campus led more directly to the library’s back door, but Addie always walked the additional yards needed to enter from the front. Every time she ascended the library’s concrete steps and crossed between a pair of its two-story-high fluted columns, she experienced a chill of delight. Books! How she loved books. The clean or musty smell, depending on the book’s age. The weightiness in her hands. The joy of discovery as the words printed on a piece of paper formed pictures in her mind. Was there anything more magical or satisfying than a book?
Had her fascination begun with the stories Mother read to her each bedtime from the first day of her adoption on, or did it go back even further to the short years before she became Adelaide Cowherd? She couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that books were a marvelous invention, and a novel bearing the name A. F. Penrose—didn’t combining her and her parents’ names create an authorly ring?—on its cover would stand proud one day on library shelves across the state. Perhaps across the entire nation.
She ran the last few feet to the wide stairway and pattered up the center, as she always did, taking a direct shot to the tall door framed in its ostentatious plaster casing. She