TWENTY.

    I hurry up the stairs in the book building, forgoing the elevator today. I ring the bell and wait for the sound of Ivy's heels clicking on the linoleum floor. She wears the keys to the library on a silver charm bracelet around her wrist; the doors are always locked, as we do not welcome visitors, unannounced scholars, or other riffraff.

    Her shadow appears before the milk-glass door, and she swings it open, stepping aside gracefully. "Good morning, Pennie!"

    "Good morning," I say, stashing my purse in a bookcase.

    "How's the mystery hunting? Any clues?" Ivy asks wryly.

    "No..." I say distracted by an object hanging from the ceiling above her desk. "Ivy, what is that?"

    "Oh! It's my witch's cap. It helps me think."

    "I see." Ivy is very disorganized. She rebels against her librarian nature by misplacing everything. Once, we went out to lunch and she drove; the dashboard of her Volvo was covered in post-it notes like tiny flags marking territory, warring against each other for space. "What is all this?" I asked her and she explained her need to write ideas and reminders down as she's driving, sticking them up on the dashboard to facilitate recollection. She's always handing me piles of books decorated with these notes, illegible instructions about where to shelve them, what to do. She writes down instructions that are unnecessary. I could invent my own system of organization and no one would be the wiser.

    I head back into the stacks, my kitten heels clinking like glass against the floor. The books swallow the sound, muffling it until it's a penny dropped into a deep well. My mother actually named me Penelope and expected it to stick, but like all long awkward names it was beheaded in school and became Pennie, tripping on the tongue, a hole in the pocket, a piece of luck. Fortunately I am not called Nell, a small favor granted from the unwary minds of my classmates. With the name came a host of superlatives: comparisons to the character from PeeWee's Playhouse; a collection of Indian head one cent pieces, comparisons between my coppery mane and shortened name. I often thought that one day I'd grow up and into Penelope but it hasn't happened yet. I'm not refined or elegant enough to wear it well.

    I love to hide in the library. I tuck myself up against the wall on a stool and thumb through the books, spreading pages like fans. Since we're private, no one comes in and there's little chance Ivy would catch me head-over-heels into a book since she talks on the phone most of the time, her falsetto voice vaulting from the partitioned walls of her office. I could disappear into the long aisles and be so quiet that they might forget and lock me in here all alone, where magic matters twice as much as manners. Nothing matters much to me. I sit on my stool reading a book of love potions and wishing someone would send me a Valentine. I'll bury an egg under an Elm tree at midnight wearing a yellow dress. I'll wear green, I'll wear red, I'll do anything and everything all at once. I know what seduction is like because I learned it from books the way I tried to learn card tricks, but somehow I can't bring myself to begin. Where do you start? With a pear and flighty kiss and a dark theatre? With a cigarette and a watch and a dark boy? Beauty is untrustworthy and too magnificent to be believable. What I like about Hollywood is that it is false, like beauty. It can only pretend. I like things that aren't real: wishes on dandelion puffs and plastic silverware and furniture made of fiberboard and cotton candy and the illusion of a movie screen. The idea of a woman turning heads, the grand entrance, the entrancing and hypnotization of an audience, the enchantment of romance and love at first sight, love unrequited always waiting two mechanical doves in a gilded cage. The site of an abandoned house and a new house rising from the foundation of the old. Bodies are homes we cannot return to. Once you leave you can never go back. Back to the beauty, something borrowed, something blue.

    What's the worst case scenario. A thief, a magician, a daughter. Incest, murder, dark family history. The disapproval of the gods, looming ominously over our lives. I think of the woman, briefly glimpsed, in that skeletal house. Something taking shape in the corner of my eye, seen but not seen, not attended to. What was it, after all? The idea of a specter, a case of deflection, a hypothetical bullet. A woman wronged! What could it have been? Almost anything looks like a woman. A long white curtain, a candle's shadow flickering on the wall, the silky hair from an ear of corn. Unabashedly female, irritatingly unidentifiable. I want to put a name to it, to categorize what it was that I saw, to prove that there is a purpose to all this speculation. Otherwise I'm fishing, seeking out only what isn't there, what can't possibly be, and depending on it to substantiate the past. What's most important is why. Why would a man, a successful man, want to murder his only child? Why would he abandon the passion that consumed his life?