Birds of a Feather

Chapter Seven

The Central branch of the Seattle Public Libraries is located on the edge of downtown and takes up an entire city block. A modern, sleek building, looks like an ornately broken glass bottle. It feels almost ironic that I enter it to work with documents and works more than four times the age of the building.

The Special Collections Department is located on the tenth floor, also the top floor of the library. Taking the elevator up, I find the floor quite quiet on that particular Thursday morning. I liked this early shift, even though it often took me a couple of hours to take the bus from Madison Park to downtown factoring in rush hour traffic.

Yousef was already fingering through a collection of old newspapers when I came up to the counter. I had my suspicions that he secretly lived somewhere on the tenth floor. He never seemed to leave.

"Hey," I said, setting my things down behind the counter. "Quiet day, so far?"

"Mhm," he said, his eyes scanning over the computer. Collectively, we were all working on digitizing some old records. While it may sound as easy as scanning and uploading, it also required Yousef to spend hours looking over the scans and transcribing the loopy handwriting of people who died a century before either of us was born.

He finally looked over at me. "Just the regulars," he said, pointing over the sitting area where I recognized the familiar trilby hate sitting on the table.

Michael was a man from one of the nursing homes up on Queen Anne. He often rode the bus down to the library to look through newspapers from his childhood and when he was a young man. The doctors told him that his memory was fading and he was determined to remember. Even if that required spending the entire open hours of the library reading the same three newspapers from 1950 over and over again.

He rarely spoke or caused any trouble. It was often like nobody was on the floor at all. I signed into the computer to find out which box of records was up next for digitizing. On the slowest days, I could spend the entirety of my shifts working on the project, getting through three or four boxes.

I'd just opened up the archives software when my phone began to vibrate from inside my jacket. Normally, I wouldn't have heard it, but the eerie quiet of the tenth floor made it echo from underneath the counter.

It was Cal. I thought it was odd and felt the line form between my eyebrows as I considered whether or not I should answer it.

"Hello?"

"Hey Cece," Cal said. His voice sounded a little wary and breathy as if he had just come back from a run. "Have you heard from Dr. Burris?"

"Uh, not since the writing group meeting on Sunday," I said. "Why?"

My fingers instinctively curled around the edges of my phone. Anticipation was always something I couldn't stand. Riding the ferry over and having to watch as it took forever to reach the skyscrapers once they became visible. A text saying "let's talk" or waiting for the first reviews of my book in the weeks leading up to publication. Waiting for Cal's answer felt like that.

"No one seems to know where she is," he said. "She canceled class on Monday and Tuesday and today she just didn't show up."

That certainly wasn't like the Dr. Burris I knew. Sometimes, she would get to the lecture hall or classroom early. She was the type of person who planned for every tiny detail. This included her classes. Pages of typed notes for her lectures, pristinely prepared powerpoints, and the ease of speech that only came with practice.

Canceling class wasn't immediately alarming. All professors had to do it at times, though Dr. Burris tried to avoid it. But, to not show up, the thought made chilled me to the pit of my stomach.