Sorcerer on the Street

Case 2. Seeing and Believing

I sat in the museum and waited. There wasn't much else to do. John had laughed, which hadn't entirely surprised me. Most people didn't believe in wizards now, any more than they believed in fairies or demons. But he had listened, and then told me that he would think about it. He would come back to the museum when he had decided whether or not to take me up on my offer, and just an hour after meeting him I was already convinced that I could take him at his word.

Somewhere out there in the city, John Blake was searching for clues. It wasn't easy; he started out by searching for a phone book, but after checking a dozen booths he had to conclude that he wasn't going to find one. They were missing, if they'd ever been there, and half the telephones were also broken. But John was nothing if not resourceful. He walked the streets, taking in every detail he could remember, and hoped that another solution would jump out at him. In the end, it wasn't some tiny detail that made the difference; but a sign in letters two feet high.

'PUBLIC LIBRARY'.

Below the big letters, a smaller sign declared it to be the Justice Douglas Lyle Memorial Library; but there was nothing to indicate who Justice Lyle might have been, or why his descendants had seen fit to found a library on this dingy back street. It was a fabulously ornate building, its doorway flanked by pillars, but the ostentatious decorations only drew attention to patches of disrepair. Like everything else around here, the library had seen better days.

The librarian was more hostile than Evadne had been, when he first walked in there. He gathered that the library was another place where homeless people might try to spent their day; although that urge would have been diminished now the hail had stopped. It wasn't much warmer there than outside, and a cracked pane in one of the windows let in a cold draught that seemed to cut right through him. That must have been why the librarian was wearing both a jacket and a heavy sweater, too. John guessed that this place had suffered in recent funding cuts, especially after property values in Eastside plummeted. And he promised himself that when he was a famous detective, he would come back with some money to add to the window repair fund. Right now that wasn't an option; even if he could somehow escape paying for food, the cash in his pocket would barely be enough for a week in the tiny hotel room which he seemed to be sharing with an army of roaches.

"Look, I'm just trying to find somebody..." he stammered. "I thought I could go to a phone booth and look at the yellow pages, but they're all torn up. You have local information, don't you?"

The librarian sighed. She wasn't cruel, but most of the sympathy had been leached out of her over a decade in this job. If you let yourself care for every pathetic stranger who wandered in, the library would be filled with charity cases who never wanted to leave. On the other hand, providing information was what they were here for, regardless of how bedraggled the querent looked.

"Yes, dear. We can help you with that. There's a phone book in the reference section. If you're looking for a hair salon, I can recommend someone who'd be able to help you out. It looks like you've come through a rough situation."

"My hair's fine," John barked, but thought better of it. "I'm sorry, that's... My uncles insisted I keep it long when I was younger. I changed that the first chance I got, but a lot of people seem to have an opinion on what I should look like. I don't mean to be so sensitive about it. No, right now I'm looking for... spiritualists, I guess you could call them. Or someone I can ask about local history. Somebody who might know about the ghost stories around here."

This time, the librarian had nothing to say. She probably didn't know what to think about that; but was happy to show John where to find a phone book, as well as a flyer for a local history group who met occasionally in one of the library's meeting rooms. Two places to start, which was better than not having the first idea where to look. John felt more confident as he asked to borrow a pen, and wrote a couple of numbers down on the back of his hand. This was the closest he had come to any real detective work, or to finding out how well the things he had learned from his favourite series of novels translated into the real world.