The Book of Lies

74

Oh, believe me, we can always use Bibles,” Ann Maura says as we follow her through the prison library, which is centered around a large uncluttered worktable, with tall bookshelves lining all four walls and a small glass office in the far corner. Like the hallways, the room is a cheery, maddening sea-foam green, but as I look back to my dad, he can’t take his eyes off the library’s oddest pieces of decor: a collection of soda cans, bedsprings, peanut-butter jars, an empty spool of thread, a tiny cassette-tape motor, a set of chocolate Tootsie Roll Pop lollipops, a moon-shaped horn that soldiers used to carry gunpowder in, a rusted cigarette case, a zebra-print animal skin, and even rabbit ears from an old TV, all of which are glued directly to the wall and run like a junkyard border above the tops of the bookcases.

“What’re those?” my father asks.

She laughs. “The guards call it their trophy case—y’know, all the things they’ve confiscated over the years. See that cassette-tape motor? A prisoner ripped that out of a Walkman to make his own homemade tattoo gun. And those Tootsie Pops? They replaced the lollipops with tiny bags of heroin, then melted new candy around the bag so we wouldn’t find the prize inside. I’m telling you, you wouldn’t believe how viciously crafty these folks get.”

My dad nods. “I can only imagine.”

“Aren’t you worried about keeping the items on the wall?” I ask. “Won’t the prisoners grab them?”

“Oh, no—we don’t allow prisoners in here,” Ann Maura says, which explains why there are no cameras in the room. “With our population—no—we deliver the books directly to their cells.”

On my left, there’s a large industrial sink with two tall piles of paperbacks: one labeled “Clean,” the other “Unclean.”

“Some of the prisoners are a little . . . rough with our collection,” Ann Maura adds.

I look back at the piles. I don’t even want to think about it.

“So do you have enough Bibles for your entire population?” my dad asks as she approaches the reference desk on the right.

“Actually, standard Bibles are handled by Religious Services,” she explains as she realigns the stapler and the three-hole punch so they sit perfectly parallel on the reference desk. Librarians can’t help themselves. “We do foreign languages, other religions, things like that. In fact, if you have a few extra Korans, we’ve been getting lots of requests for those.”

“What about Russian?” I ask. “How’s your stock on those?”

“Y’know, it’s funny—I’m not sure if we have Russian.” At the card catalog that sits next to the reference desk, she kneels down on one knee and tugs open one of the lower drawers. “I know, I know—we need computers—card catalogs are dead—but I’d rather use our budget to acquire more books,” she explains. “The prisoners really are grateful.”

As her fingers flip through the card catalog, my dad can barely stand still. Once we find this book—

“Nope. Not here,” she announces.

“Sorry?” I ask.

“Chinese, Ukrainian, even Arabic,” she says, flipping forward through the cards, then back. “But no Bibles in Russian.”

“You sure?” my father asks. “At the Historical Society, someone said—” He cuts himself off. “A few years back, I could swear we sent an old Russian one your way.”

“Really?” she asks. “You don’t happen to remember the original call number, do you?”

“1.8.4 King,” we both say simultaneously.

Still on one knee, Ann Maura looks up at both of us.

“It’s fine if you can’t find it. It was sort of a curiosity—we just wanted to know where it went,” I offer.

“Of course,” she says. “Might as well take a look, right?” She closes one drawer and opens another that has a circular red sticker in the corner. Her fingers pick through the cards . . . and just as quickly come to a stop. “Here we go,” she announces.

“You have it?”

“We did. It arrived in 1998.”

“That’s the one!” my dad blurts. “Where’s it now?”

“Ah, that’s the thing. According to this, well . . . I hate to say it, but looks like we pulped it.”

“You what?” my father asks.

“You threw it away?” I add. “Why?”

“Doesn’t say. Sometimes a book gets worn apart—other times, an inmate rips their favorite section out, and the whole copy becomes unsalvageable. You have to understand, our clientele can be pretty selfish sometimes.”

“So it’s gone,” my dad says.

“Definitely gone,” Ann Maura says as she slides the card drawer shut. “I’m confused, though. Was there something special about that particular copy?”

“It was just— It was first donated to us by one of our board members, and we thought it might be nice to maybe track it down for him,” I say. “Sorta reunite him with his 1875 family Bible.”

“Hold on,” Ann Maura says. “Did you say 1875 or 1975?”

“1875.”

“So it’s an old book, not a new one.” Before I can even respond, she’s got that faraway look, like she’s checking the card catalog in her mind. “And it’s Russian,” she mutters. “Oh, how funny—I didn’t even think about that.”

I’m about to interrupt, but she’s already gone, dashing to the glassed-in office in the corner of the room. On the wall, she’s got framed head shots of the governor and lieutenant governor of Ohio, as well as a few other frames below those two. Staring down with her back to us, she grabs one of the lower frames from the wall.

“When you first said it, I thought we were looking for a modern Bible,” she calls out as she heads back toward us, carrying the frame, “which is the only reason I didn’t think of this. It was a gift from my predecessor—just to keep me on my toes.”

She flips the frame around, revealing a crinkled sheet of paper that’s yellowed like parchment and split into two columns: On the right is Hebrew writing, on the left is . . .

“That’s Russian,” my father says excitedly, rushing forward.

But what’s most noticeable is the crescent-moon-shaped hole that’s cut out from the center of the page and is about the size of a banana.

“Don’t you see? That’s the reason it got pulped,” Ann Maura explains, pointing to the hole in the page. “Somewhere along the way, one of our prisoners must’ve sliced through the pages to smuggle something inside.”

Or Mitchell Siegel did it years earlier, I say with a look toward my dad.

But to my surprise, he’s not studying the framed page. Instead, he crosses behind the librarian and stares up at the trophy room items that’re glued to the far left wall above the bookcases—or, more specifically, at the moon-shaped horn that’s—

I squint hard and give it another look. The moon-shaped horn. That’s not— That’s not for gunpowder. That’s an animal horn.

I glance down at the cutout in the Bible. A perfect animal horn shape.

Oh, God.

When Jerry Siegel’s Bible got transferred to the prison . . . they confiscated what was hidden inside, then put it up as a trophy for—

There’s a choking sound behind me, like someone fighting for air.

I spin around just in time to see my father’s hands gripping the librarian’s neck from behind. His face is red from squeezing, and a thick vein swells across his forehead. She thrashes and kicks but doesn’t have a chance. Before I can even react, she drops to the floor like a cut puppet, her head sagging down and her orange sneakers pointing in toward each other.

“Wh-What’re you—? Are you insane!?” I demand.

“It’s okay. She’s just unconscious,” my father insists, his eyes wide as he rushes to grab a nearby chair.

“Stop! Right now! Stop!”

“She’s fine, Calvin. I know what I’m doing.”

“You could’ve killed her!”

“She’s fine,” he repeats, his voice at full gallop as he runs with the chair.

I check the librarian’s chest. She’s passed out but definitely breathing.

“Lloyd, she was just—! Listen to me!Why aren’t you listening?”

“This is it—I finally got it. You see it, don’t you, Calvin? Cain’s murder weapon . . . the Book of Truth—it’s not a book!” he says, shoving the chair against the bookcase and climbing up toward the horn. “You can see the carvings—it’s written on the animal horn! This is it!”

“Lloyd, you can’t do this.”

But he already is. Standing on the chair, he stretches above the bookcase, up toward the trophies, where he grips the animal horn and tries to rip it from the wall. It doesn’t budge. He tries again with both hands. It’s glued on better than he thought.

“Dammit, get down!” I shout.

Undeterred, he yanks the nearest hardcover from the top shelf of the bookcase and flips it around so the spine is facing the wall. Turning it into a makeshift guillotine, he slices the book downward, slamming it into the horn and trying to cleave it from the trophy wall.

“Lloyd, I’m talking to you!”

“He’s not listening, Calvin,” a voice announces from behind me.

I spin back to the front door of the library, and my heart falls from my body. “Th-That’s not possible.”

“Sure it is,” the Prophet says as he slowly steps forward. “All I needed was a little help from your dad.”