Chapter 9

Abigail Brannigan leaned on her bicycle and watched the main doors of the Burton Street branch of the public library like a hawk.

She did not really need to do this, but it seemed like good practice.

As the detectives in the book she read often seem to spend hours watching things,

waiting for something to happen, keeping in a state of cat-like readiness

while looking like they weren't really waiting at all.

They called it a stakeout, and it seemed like the sort of thing that would require a certain amount of practice.

Of course, in this case, the something that Abigail was waiting for was the end of Timothy Gould's volunteer shift at the library.

And there was no mystery about when that was going to happen. He had told Abigail

yesterday that he would be at the library until one o'clock. And Timothy was not the kind of person

who threw a lot of surprises at you, but Abigail thought staking out the library doors would still

be good practice, and also it gave her something to do while she waited. Abigail did not feel that

staking things out was nearly as complicated as the detective books seemed to make it. Although she had to

admit that most of the time the detectives in those books were plagued by self-doubt,

wondering if they had somehow missed the thing that they were supposed

to be watching for, and that this concern often led them to make a mistake or to stop watching

right when something important was about to happen.

Abigail had eliminated this possibility by locking up her bicycle on the same rack as Timothy's

bike, just in case he somehow slipped past her.

Of course, he did nothing of the kind. He appeared at the library door at precisely six minutes after one,

and emerged blinking into the bright sunlight. He seemed blissfully unaware that he was being observed

and paused to clean a smudge from his glasses

...