the car, a skinny little thing in a salt-and-pepper man’s overcoat that was three times too big for her. I ignored her and went on scanning in returned books until I heard her take a small gasping breath. She clutched a battered reddish book with a brown binding, open to the back. Her delicate nose was bright red from weeping. She looked at me and smiled weakly and wiped at the tears on her face.
“Carry on,” she said in a chipper tone. “Just my allergies.”
“What are you allergic to?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, and looked up at the ceiling while the tears streamed down her pretty, pale face. “Sadness, mostly. Also lavender and bee stings, but mostly I’m allergic to feeling miserable, and when I am, this always happens to me.”
I picked up the box of Kleenex on the desk, got up, and came around to offer her one. “I hope this isn’t because we’re missing the book you want.”
She laughed—a miserable-grateful kind of sound—and snatched a tissue. She gave her nose a great honk. “No. Plenty to read here. I was thinking I’ve never read Sherlock Holmes and that maybe a few nice little mysteries in an English accent would go well with tea and Nilla wafers this afternoon. I looked in the back and saw my son’s name. Of course he took this book out. I think I even remember him reading it one weekend when he was home sick.”
She opened The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes to show me the cardboard sleeve in the back, with the borrower’s card stuck into it, and the skin on the nape of my neck crawled. That was when I knew she was one of them, a Late Return. Because those cards aren’t in modern library books. They’ve been replaced by bar codes.
There were half a dozen names written in pencil on the borrower’s card. The first was Brad Dolan, 4/13/59. She shifted the card, and her fingernail pointed to the name Brad Dolan again, lower down: 11/28/60. I felt as if I had drunk down a whole glass of ice water, in a hurry. My insides went ill and cold. One of Brad Dolan’s last great novels had been called Investigations! about a detective named Sheldon Whoms who deduces impossible facts from minor clues—looking at a woman’s chewed fingernails, Whoms determines that she had her first period at eleven and once owned a cat named Aspirin. I vaguely recalled Dolan telling my eighth-grade class that he’d always loved the Sherlock Holmes stories because they told a comforting lie: that the world made sense and that effect followed cause. In contrast, Vietnam had taught him that the army would napalm naked children to stop a political ideology based on people sharing what they have with one another. He said why they would do such a thing was a mystery that no detective, no matter how brilliant, could fathom.
I knew she had wandered into the Bookmobile from the past—knew from that icy chill sinking through my insides—but to be sure, I asked to see the book. She gave it to me, and I turned slightly away and closed it.
When it had been in her hands, it was an old, almost featureless hardcover, with a fraying binding. When it was in mine, it was a lurid crimson paperback that depicted Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman dashing across a red, impressionistic background. A Study in Scarlet, with an introduction by Steven Moffat.
“Brad Dolan?” I said. “I feel like I know his name.”
“Maybe he used to deliver your paper,” she said, and laughed.
“Maybe you used to deliver it,” I said. “While he slept in the passenger seat.”
I turned and handed the book back to her. By the time she took it, it was a battered brownish red hardcover again, with a gold Meerschaum pipe stamped on the front. She smiled, her face blotchy from crying.
“Thanks for the tissue,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
“What’s he doing these days? Your son?”
“He’s over there,” she said. “He volunteered. His father died in Korea and . . . he wanted to do his bit. He’s very brave.” She smiled a moment longer, and then her face wrinkled and she put a hand over her eyes and her shoulders began to twitch. She took short, gasping breaths. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I haven’t done this before.”
I put a hand on her back and let her bump her head against my shoulder. In her time maybe men could casually hug strange