The Tanner Annex

*This is pure fun, two smart women who like to push each other into corners, and the corner happens to be a very quiet library. If you enjoy characters who banter their way into arousal, this one's for you. Thanks for reading.*

Suzanne Brooks had a free hour between tastings and a bladder with opinions, so she cut across Main Street and pushed into the county library like she owned the place. She was forty-four that year, and she figured she looked it, grape juice on her knuckles and boots that had seen eleven harvest seasons.

The Main Street branch was her favorite ugly building in town. Old department store, 1920s, tin ceiling up so high the pigeons could have nested up there if anybody ever opened a window. The front desk sat where the suit counters used to be.

And there at the returns cart, sliding a book onto a shelf, stood the librarian.

"Well, hell," Suzanne said. "They let you out from behind the desk."

Betsy Vaughn didn't look up right away. She finished shelving, took her time about it, then turned around. She was forty-six, cardigan in summer, glasses on a chain, and she had the patience of a woman who had shushed three generations of teenagers.

"Suzanne." She said it the way other people said *check your engine light*. "Your books are two weeks overdue. Three of them. The wine-cookbooks."

"Are they?"

"You know they are. I sent you the notice. Then I sent you the second notice, which was not a courtesy, it was a warning."

Suzanne leaned an elbow on the returns cart. "Maybe I'm hiding them."

"From whom?"

"From you. Maybe I like the idea of you wondering where they are. Keeps you sharp."

Betsy pushed her glasses up. "The fines are four dollars and eighty cents."

"Bill me. Or bill the winery, we've got a budget." Suzanne straightened up. "Look, I need your bathroom, and then I've got an hour to kill and no interest in killing it at the hotel with the sales reps."

"You smell like a winery."

"I am a winery. Crush started Monday back home, I flew out for this tasting thing, and I've been sticking my arm in fermentation tanks since six this morning. I smell like work. Some of us work."

"I work."

"Librarians don't work, they get paid to be quiet." Suzanne pointed down the hall. "Bathroom. Then you can yell at me more."

She went, washed the purple off her hands, and came back out to find Betsy still at the cart, watching her now instead of pretending to work.

"There's a rumor," Suzanne said, hopping up to sit on the edge of the returns cart, which Betsy would have scolded anyone else for. "About this place."

"There are many rumors about this place. Most of them involve the head librarian and a man from the historical society, and all of them are lies."

"Not that one. The annex. The Tanner Annex. Somebody at the tasting last night said there's a sealed-off corridor in the back, staff only, from when this was a department store. Nobody's been in there for years."

Betsy went still. Not much, but Suzanne had spent a year learning her tells, and that was one.

"Who told you that?"

"A woman with a lanyard. She said it's where they keep the dead reference books. The ones nobody's checked out since the Ford administration."

"It's not sealed off," Betsy said. "It's just staff only. It's not interesting."

"Then you can show it to me and prove it's not interesting."

"Why would I do that?"

"Because you've got that face."

"What face?"

"The one you're making right now. The one that says nobody ever asks to see it and you've been dying for somebody to ask for a year."

Betsy took a stack of returns off the cart and held it against her chest like a shield. "The Tanner Annex is a narrow room with obsolete reference books and a table in it. It is warm and it is dusty and it has a light that hums. That is the entire description. There is no mystery."

"See, when you list it all out like that, that's how I know there's a mystery."

"The fines, Suzanne."

"The fines what?"

"The fines are still four dollars and eighty cents, and you're standing in my library trying to charm your way past a staff-only door."

"I'm not charming. I'm dared. It's different. Daring means if you say no, I go away and you go back to your cart and we both keep our little game going for another year, and god, Betsy, how long is that game going to last? A year now. You've had nine months of me coming in here and you yelling at me about late fees, and I've had a year of coming in here hoping you would."

The cart squeaked when Betsy gripped it. Down at the front desk, a teenager looked up at them and then back at his phone.

"You're a menace," Betsy said quietly.

"I'm a winemaker. Close enough." Suzanne slid off the cart. "Here's the thing. You've got an hour until your break, or until close, whichever comes first. I've got an hour until the bus picks up the reps. One hour, one door you've never let anybody through, and me, who's been coming in here every month for a year like clockwork just to hear you complain."

Betsy looked down the length of the room, toward the back wall where the biography section ran out and a gray door sat in the corner that most patrons walked past a thousand times without seeing. It had a brass knob worn shiny.

"If anyone asks," Betsy said, "you're getting a tour of the building's history."

"Aren't I, though."

"The light hums. It annoys some people."

"I've slept in bunkhouses above tank rooms with compressors running all night. I can handle a humming light."

Betsy put the stack of returns down on the cart. She smoothed her cardigan, which was the closest thing to nerves Suzanne had ever seen her show, and then she walked toward the gray door with the shiny knob, and Suzanne followed, past the biography shelves, past a wall of local history that ended in a fire-code sign nobody read.

"Swear to me something," Betsy said, hand on the knob.

"Name it."

"That whatever happens in there stays in there. That you won't turn it into a story for your tasting-room friends. That woman with the lanyard got that much out of me by accident, and I didn't care for it."

"On my grapes, I swear."

"That's the most sincere oath I've ever heard."

"Harvest folk don't lie about grapes. It's the one rule."

Betsy turned the knob and pushed the door open. The air that came out was warm and still, and it smelled like old paper and radiator dust. Suzanne had one second to think that this was exactly how it was supposed to smell, that the rumor woman hadn't even gotten that right, and then Betsy reached in and pulled a chain, and a bulb came on with a low hum over a heavy wooden table.

Obsolete reference books ran floor to ceiling on both sides. County ledgers, agricultural surveys, a set of state statutes from before either of them was born. One window, painted over sometime in the seventies by the look of it. The room was narrow and the table filled most of it.

Suzanne stepped in and turned a slow circle.

"Well," she said.

"I told you. Books and a table."

"You told me it wasn't interesting. You didn't tell me it was the nicest room in the building." She put her palm flat on the table. Solid oak, heavier than anything in her tasting room. "Who was Tanner?"

"A department. Tanner's sold work clothes. Coveralls, boots, jackets. This was the stock corridor, then they walled it off when the library moved in and shelved the overflow up here. Nobody's been assigned to it since I've worked here. Which is eleven years."

"Eleven years and you're the only one who knows the door even opens."

"I wouldn't say the only one."

"But you'd say you're the only one who comes up here."

Betsy pulled the door shut behind them. The latch was a hook and eye, old brass, and she set it without hurrying, like it was any other task, like shelving, like fines. Then she turned around and folded her arms.

"Four dollars and eighty cents," she said.

Suzanne laughed. "You want me to pay you. Now. Up here."

"I want you to stop owing me something. So we're even. So whatever happens next isn't about books."

"There's no way I'm paying you four eighty up here," Suzanne said, but she was grinning, and she reached into her back pocket anyway, slow, making a show of it. "What would that even make me? A woman paying fines in a locked room?"

"A woman paying her debts."

"I paid my debts in November. Cash. You took it and then you told me the fine had gone up again."

"That's because you returned the books with wine stains on two of them."

"Jalapeño jelly, actually. And it was one book."

"Splatter radius, two books." Betsy unfolded her arms and stepped back so the table was behind her and Suzanne had the whole narrow aisle to stand in. "So. Pay me or don't."

Suzanne didn't take her wallet out. Instead she put both hands flat on the shelf at her left and ran her fingertips along the spines, slow, top to bottom. Bound agricultural surveys, cloth covers gone soft with age, dust coming up in a thin gray line where her fingers dragged. The room was warm the way stockrooms get warm, heat rising through old floors, nowhere to go. "These are gorgeous," she said. "Nobody's touched them in years."

"How do you know?"

"Because you're standing there watching me touch them like it's the first thing that's ever happened in this room."

Betsy didn't answer that. She just watched. She had a stillness Suzanne had noticed across the desk a hundred times and never been close enough to feel. It made the