The Quiet Librarian

by Allen Eskens

Genres: Suspense

Synopsis

After the murder of her best friend, a librarian’s search for answers leads back to her own dark secrets in this sweeping novel about a woman transformed by war, family, vengeance, and love, from award-winning writer Allen Eskens.

Hana Babic is a quiet, middle-aged librarian in Minnesota who wants nothing more than to be left alone. But when a detective arrives with the news that her best friend has been murdered, Hana knows that something evil has come for her, a dark remnant of the past she and her friend had shared.
 
Thirty years before, Hana was someone else: Nura Divjak, a teenager growing up in the mountains of war-torn Bosnia—until Serbian soldiers arrived to slaughter her entire family before her eyes. The events of that day thrust Nura into the war, leading her to join a band of militia fighters, where she became not only a fierce warrior but a legend—the deadly Night Mora. But a shattering final act forced Nura to flee to the United States with a bounty on her head.
 
Now, someone is hunting Hana, and her friend has paid the price, leaving her eight-year-old grandson in Hana’s care. To protect the child without revealing her secret, Hana must again become the Night Mora—and hope she can find the killer before the past comes for them, too.
 

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

The man steps through the door and into the library, no coat despite the late-spring rain. He stops to cast his gaze around the room. Maybe it is the way he focuses on people and not books that first catches her attention. Or maybe it’s the question in his eyes despite his confident demeanor, the look of a seasoned hunter in an unfamiliar wood.

Whatever the pique, it is enough to hold Hana’s attention.

The man pulls a small notepad from the pocket of his tweed jacket, a pencil slid into the wire spirals, old-school in this world of cell phones and apps. He opens the notepad, reads something, and looks around the library again, pausing on faces, holding for a few seconds on Deb Hansen, the president of the Friends of the Library, who sits in the reading room. He glances at his notes, gives an almost imperceptible shake of his head, and moves on. She is not the one he’s looking for.

Hana slips into a row of histories, pulling her cart of books behind her, keeping one eye on the man as she reshelves a tome on the Crusades. The man passes his gaze over a young mother and then a twenty-something girl looking through the DVDs. There are no other patrons in the library, yet he continues to scan.

The man is tall with sleepy eyes that droop at the edges. Dark hair sprinkled with gray puts him in his late forties maybe early fifties, Hana’s age or thereabout. His chin looks weak but probably hadn’t been so in his youth. He wears a jacket but no tie, and his khaki pants are creased at the hip as if he had been sitting—maybe in a car—before coming into the library.

When he sweeps her way, Hana holds still—a rabbit frozen in her tracks. She immediately feels foolish for reacting so. No one comes to the library looking for her. She has been invisible for far too long now, walking through the rows with her cart and her drab clothing. The Sweater Lady—that’s what the children call her when they think she cannot hear them. She tugs at the sleeves of her cardigan, an unconscious tic that she can’t seem to shake even after all these years.

She likes the history section. It is quiet there, and the aging books smell slightly of old wood, a scent that can sometimes whisk her back to the mountains of her youth and the peace of those days before the war. It had been a desire to find that sense of peace that drew Hana to the library in Farmington, Minnesota. That had been thirty years ago, and she still finds herself looking over her shoulder for those who might hunt her. Thirty years and she can still see the faces of the dead when she closes her eyes at night.

She peers over a collection of Civil War histories and watches the man make his way to the circulation desk, where Barb snaps on her best can-I-help-you smile. The man is probably in sales, hustling cleaning supplies or new software for the computers. He leans down and says something to Barb, who looks confused at first but then stands, scans the library, and points at Hana’s cart, which sticks out into the aisle.

Hana pulls the cart into the row with her. Maybe Barb was directing the man to a book. Hana picks up a treatise on the fall of the Roman Empire and places it on the shelf.

No, that can’t be it. Barb wouldn’t need to look around the library before pointing. She knows the placement of every book in the building.

The man walks toward the history section. Hana pulls her cart deeper into the row and picks up a book on the Louisiana Purchase, raising it toward the shelf as the man draws closer. When he enters her row, the book in her hand sinks slowly to her side. This man is not a salesman. A salesman would have no business with her.

He offers a weak smile, a gesture that seems forced. Practiced. Up close, his eyes seem more sad than sleepy, and his features are stronger than they appeared from a distance. He stops a few feet away and asks, “Are you Hana Babić?”

He pronounces her last name wrong, ending it with a hard K the way most Americans do.

“Bah-bich,” she corrects quietly, doing her best to hide what remains of her accent. “Hana Bah-bich.”

“Sorry.” He reaches into his breast pocket and pulls out what looks to be a wallet, then opens it to show her a gold badge. “I’m David Claypool, a detective with the St. Paul Police Department. Is there someplace where we can talk?”

It is then that Hana notices the gun holstered on his hip. How had she not seen that when he first walked in?

Memories—of men carrying guns, of bodies covered in white sheets stained red with blood—flash through her mind. Hana opens her mouth, but no words form. She wants to know why this man has sought her out, but she doesn’t want to hear what he might say. She wants to ask if she’s done something wrong, but that is not the right question either. The better question is, Does he know?

The book she holds slips from her fingers and falls. “I’m sorry,” she mutters.

Before she can bend to pick it up, he squats, lifts the book, and puts it on the cart, his dark eyes meeting hers again; she sees kindness in them or maybe pity. “Can we talk?” he asks again.

“Yes,” she says, “in the conference room.”

She leads him to a small room reserved for book clubs and school projects, walking like a child being escorted to the principal’s office, passing by the circulation desk, where Barb watches them. At the conference room, Detective Claypool opens the door for Hana, and she passes within a few inches of him, his tweed jacket smelling old, but the scent mixed with something clean. Soap. Maybe bodywash.

Detective Claypool gestures Hana to one of the four chairs at a small table, his anemic smile gone now. He takes a seat next to her but turns his chair to face her. When he opens his notepad, Hana tries to read the hen scratching, certain that hidden within those pages are the secrets of her past, embers of a life that Hana has worked hard to escape. The words on the pad flash by too quickly for her to see.

He looks at his notes and asks, “Do you know a woman named Amina…”

He pauses as if he needs to practice before attempting her last name, and in that pause, Hana’s world folds in around her. No breath comes in. No breath goes out. Her tongue becomes bone-dry. It feels as though her body is being pricked with tiny needles.

Detective Claypool tries again. “Amina Jun…”

How could he not make the effort to learn Amina’s name before plodding forward so clumsily? His delay is torture, and when she can no longer endure it, Hana swallows the dust from her throat and whispers. “Amina Junuzović.”

“Yes,” he says, in a heavy tone. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Amina has passed away.”

At first his words float in the air like wisps of smoke, impalpable, formless, the gibberish of a foreign tongue. Hana repeats them in her head, trying to give them texture and edges. Amina… passed away.

“I’m sorry,” Claypool says. The kindness in his eyes makes Hana want to believe that he means it.

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

“She has a grandson—Dylan. He lives with her.”

“He’s safe.”

Hana breathes a small sigh of relief, but there is a terrible pain in her chest. Amina is dead. “What happened?”

Claypool slides the pencil from the spiral of the notepad. “Were the two of you close?”

“Close?” Hana ponders the ambiguity of the word for a moment before answering. “Amina is… the only friend I have in the world. I would like to think that I was her friend as well.”

“Where were you yesterday at about four p.m.?”

Hana stands and backs away from the table. “Why would you ask me such a question?”

“It’s routine,” Claypool says, and there is a hint of embarrassment in his eyes.

“I was here… at the library, working. You can ask Barb—the woman at the circulation desk.” Hana is about to say more when it hits her that Claypool had dodged her question. She asks again. “What happened to Amina?”

“You may want to sit down,” he says.

Sit down? Is he worried that she might faint—wilt like some delicate flower? He sees her as weak, but how could he know; she has hidden the truth well.

Hana is thin. Her clothes, a simple gray skirt that reaches to her feet, a white blouse, and of course the cardigan sweater, all hang loosely on her frame. Her hair, once as black as onyx, holds veins of silver that streak back from her temples, contrails that lead to the bun on the back of her head. It all works to age her beyond her forty-seven years. She has gone out of her way to look older than she is, duller, plainer, cultivating an appearance to make her invisible to the world. Of course he would see her as weak.

He asks, “Do you know of anyone who might want to do her harm?”

“Was she… killed?”

“I’m afraid she was,” Claypool says.

His answer does not cause Hana to faint. It is the one answer that makes sense of Claypool being there and asking the questions he is asking. Still, bile roils in Hana’s stomach. Her mouth turns wet with spit, nausea building with every shallow breath. She walks to the window that looks out over the old grain elevator by the railroad tracks. It’s raining, and she leans her forehead against the glass to cool the heat of her skin.

“Your name was listed as a contact on some documents we found,” he says. “That’s why I came here. I was hoping you might be able to help.”

“What happened?”

Again he dodges the question. “Is there anyone you know who might have wanted to harm Amina?”

Hana returns to the table and sits in a chair across from Detective Claypool, holding his gaze for a second before saying, “I want you to tell me what happened to Amina.” She can see in his eyes that he is wavering, so she searches her memory for his first name and finds it. “David, if you want answers from me, you are going to have to tell me the truth. What happened to Amina?”

His eyes soften in surrender. “Yesterday,” he begins, “someone broke into her condo. The intruder… tied Amina up.”

“Was she—”

“No. We found no indication of that. We don’t know how long the intruder was there, but we think maybe a couple hours. The place was torn apart, like he was looking for something.”

“He?”

“A man was seen on her balcony just after…” Claypool seems to get twisted in what he wants to say.

“After what?”

Claypool takes another breath, a beat to collect his thoughts. “At four fifteen yesterday, Dylan’s bus dropped him off at the corner near Amina’s condo. He was walking with two other children, both older.”

Claypool pauses. He gives Hana a look as if to appraise her grit, assessing whether she might be able to handle the details he is about to tell her.

“Go ahead,” Hana says.

“There was a crash. The sound of breaking glass. The sliding door to her balcony. What happened isn’t clear. The kids saw her fall, but they didn’t see how she came to go over the railing. We believe she was pushed. She might have been trying to escape, or… maybe not. The children said that they saw a man on the balcony. He stepped back into the condo before they could get a good look. They weren’t able to give a description beyond believing it was a man.”

“I saw that story on the news last night. I had no idea…”

“We haven’t released her name to the press yet.”

Hana closes her eyes and sees her friend fall four stories to the ground. “And Dylan saw her fall?”

Claypool nods.

Hana folds her hands together on the table. “Did she die from the fall… I mean… was it instantaneous?”

There is a gentleness in Claypool’s voice that makes Hana forget about his badge and gun. “A couple of guys working across the street heard the commotion. They tried to help her. She died from internal injuries before the ambulance could get there.”

Claypool waits to let his words settle before continuing. “Do you know of anyone who would want to harm her?”

Hana shakes her head no. “Amina was a gentle, forgiving soul.”

Claypool flips through his notebook, landing on a scribbled page. Hana tries to read it but can’t. “Do you know a man by the name of Zaim?”

“Zaim? Amina dated a man named Zaim—not for very long though. She broke up with him about a week ago.”

“Do you know his last name?”

“I… I don’t remember if she ever told me. Like I said, it didn’t last long, maybe a couple months.”

“Did you ever meet Zaim?”

“No. They weren’t serious. Do you think—”

“Did she talk about him—say anything to make you think she was afraid of him?”

“What did he do?”

“Maybe nothing. It’s just a name we have.”

“How do you know about him… if you don’t know his last name?”

“Dylan told us. What did Amina tell you about Zaim?”

Hana tries to remember. “Amina said that he smiled too much—like a salesman… like he was putting on a show. She didn’t trust men who smiled too much.”

“Was he ever rough with her?”

“Not that she said.”

“And she never said his last name?”

“She may have, but I don’t think so.”

Claypool flips to a clean page of his notebook. “Before Zaim, had there been anyone else in her life? Another man maybe?”

“Not for a year or more. She wasn’t big on dating.”

Claypool taps his pencil on the empty page as silence builds between them. He is contemplating something. Then he leans in as if to study her reaction and says, “When those two workers got to Amina, she was conscious—barely. Amina grabbed her necklace… a pendant…”

A sudden dizziness sweeps over Hana. “A marble.” Her voice is shaky despite her effort to sound calm. “Blue like the waters of the Adriatic Sea.”

“Yes, blue. Does that necklace have some significance?”

“Significance?” Hana steadies herself, hoping to give away nothing.

Claypool says, “Her last act in life was to hand that necklace to those men. Given how badly she was injured, that last act took strength… I can’t help thinking that she was trying to say something.”

“It was her favorite necklace.”

“It might be important.”

Hana wants to look him in the eye but she cannot do it. “I’m not aware of any special significance.” Lying to Claypool isn’t easy. She’s out of practice.

“You have an accent,” Claypool says. “Are you from Bosnia as well?”

Claypool’s question is a dangerous one. Too much digging and he may discover that Hana Babić—the real Hana Babić—died thirty years ago on a mountain in Bosnia. A strange suffocation tightens in Hana’s throat. She needs to get out of that room and away from Claypool. She needs time to think.

She stands. “I’m not feeling well.”

Claypool stands as well. Politeness, or does he plan to block the door? “I have a couple more—”

“I’m sorry.” Hana puts her hand to her lips to feign illness. “I can’t talk right now. I need air.”

Claypool opens the door for Hana. “I understand.”

As she passes, he pulls a card from his pocket and hands it to her. “When you’re feeling up to it, I’d like to talk. Please call me.”

Hana takes the card, but does not answer. She walks to the women’s restroom without glancing back.

In the restroom she holds on to the sink as visions of Amina pass before her. They had been through so much together, yet Hana has no tears, nor the power to conjure them, having cried her last so many years ago. Instead Hana breathes slowly, intentionally, calm on the outside but spinning on the inside. She wets her face with cold water, the swell of emotion making her angry. She’s stronger than this—or she had once been so.

She dries her face with a paper towel. When she finally peeks out of the restroom, Claypool is gone.

Nura Divjak drew her first breath on a cold night in 1977, in the upstairs bedroom of a small farmhouse northwest of Tuzla, Yugoslavia. Her father—her babo—had been the one to deliver her because there wasn’t time to get a midwife. Babo had hands of granite, but was a loving, gentle man, his hard eyes softening to tears as he first held his daughter—or at least that is the story that Mama told Nura.

The three of them lived on a weathered mountaintop surrounded by forests of spruce, and oak, and beech trees that stretched for several kilometers in every direction. Babo’s older brother, Reuf, lived across a small gravel courtyard from them; beyond that, they were alone.

Babo and Reuf had inherited the mountain from their father, dividing it between them with a handshake after he passed away, Reuf taking the tillable land on the northern slope and Babo the southern woods. Reuf, a man who wore thick glasses and fancied himself something of an intellectual, sometimes bragged that he had outmaneuvered his younger brother to get the cropland.

In truth, neither man had a heart for farming. Reuf preferred reading and spending time in Tuzla, where he drank coffee and discussed world affairs with other men. Babo had wanted nothing of the farm other than a barn to stable a handful of cows and some woods in which to hunt. His true passion lay not in corn, but in stone and mortar, taking up masonry as a trade.

Nura’s earliest memories of Mama were of sitting on her lap on their front porch, looking out over the mountains, the autumn beech trees catching the sun to paint the horizon a vibrant orange. Mama would tell her stories of the woodland faeries who walked through the trees at night, beautiful creatures with long hair and mellifluous voices who protected children from bad men. She remembers looking up at her mama and wondering if she had once been a faery with her round apple face, a slender nose, and long black hair that caught the sun.

As a little girl, Nura dreamed of being like her mama, of taking control of a house, raising children, and sitting at the side of a man she loved. More than that, she dreamed that one day she would be beautiful like her mother, but with every passing year, Nura’s mirror revealed more of her father’s features than her mother’s: the angular face, the hard cheekbones, and a nose just a touch too big for a young girl. She whispered her disappointment to her reflection but to no one else.

The nearest village of any size, Petrovo, lay three valleys away, and when Nura was old enough, that was where she went to school. Nura knew that a great big world lay beyond her woods, beyond Petrovo and Tuzla, beyond the mountains and the sea, a magical world that seemed to her as make-believe as the faeries of Mama’s stories. But in 1984, when Nura was six years old, the great and magical world beyond the sea came to her little mountain. That was the year that Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics.

Babo bought a television set that year, erecting an antenna up the side of their cow barn, the metal spire grabbing colors from the sky and casting them into Nura’s living room. She and Mama watched as ice skaters from England named Torvill and Dean danced so beautifully that it made Nura want to cry. Babo, however, preferred to watch hockey. And, because he loved to hunt, Babo became captivated by a strange sport called the biathlon, in which men skied through the snow and shot at tiny targets.

Her country—her Yugoslavia—had offered this beauty to the world. She and her people were the epicenter of all things wonderful. Nura was sure that nothing more amazing than the Olympics could ever happen in her lifetime.

But then, almost three years later, something more amazing did happen.

On her ninth birthday, after a meal of beef stew capped with a chocolate cake, Babo and Mama gave her a new coat—brand-new, not secondhand. Nura had been wanting a coat because her old one no longer fit and had stains at the cuffs from wearing it when she did her chores. She promised herself that she would never wear this new coat out to the barn.

But when they finished the cake, Mama sat beside Nura at the table, put her arm around her, and said, “There is something else.” Mama and Babo shared a look.

Babo said, “It is a present, but it is one for all of us.”

Nura tried to read the secret in their eyes, but couldn’t. Then Mama said, “In the spring, you are going to become a big sister.”

The words didn’t sink in right away, but then Mama placed her hand on her belly—on her womb—and Nura leapt into her mama’s arms and cried with happiness.

Danis came to them on the third Sunday of April, 1987, his face plump and red, his tiny hands perfect as he wrapped his fingers around Nura’s pinky. It was as though she could see entire galaxies shining in his eyes. And when she held him for the first time, he looked up at her as if he were studying her face, memorizing it. She was so happy she wanted to cry. Instead, she leaned in and gave him a gentle kiss on the cheek and whispered a promise.

“I am Nura, your big sister,” she said. “I will always love you and take care of you.”

True to her word, she had been the one who taught him to dance when he was barely old enough to stand. It was more of a silly little bounce than a dance, but he would do it whenever she sang to him. She taught him to say Nura, which started out as “Nono” but grew into a proper name by the time he reached his second birthday.

In the summer when he was two, she took him to the pond for the first time. The land behind the barn sloped gently to a creek, where Nura’s great-grandfather had dammed up the water to make a pond for watering cows. Not much bigger than the footprint of their house, the pond was Nura’s favorite place on the mountain. Danis dipped his toes into the cool water and squeezed mud through his fingers. She showed him how to make ripples on the water by throwing small stones. And though he was easily distracted—as most toddlers are—something about the way the light danced on the surface of the pond held his attention and calmed him.

Those years had been the happiest of Nura’s life. In the winters, she pulled Danis on her sled. In the springs, she taught him how to find mushrooms and wild blackberries. In the summers, she took him to the pond, and read him books, and told him stories about the woodland faeries. They picked apples and pears in the fall and rolled down hills full of leaves. And even though Danis grew fast, he always seemed the perfect size to fit on Nura’s lap.

The first time that Nura saw an image of war on her television, it had been in the summer before her fourteenth birthday: tanks in the streets of Slovenia and Croatia, bloody sheets draped over bodies, and burning houses. She held her breath as she watched soldiers battle in villages that were part of what had once been her country. When Danis, who was four, wandered into the room, she turned the television off and with a smile on her face, asked him if he wanted to go to the pond.

They returned that evening, hungry for dinner, their pant legs wet from walking in the shallows. As they approached the house, Nura heard Babo and Uncle Reuf inside, engaged in a heated discussion. She held Danis’s hand tightly in hers and snuck onto the porch to listen, the men’s voices hitting hard against the window above her.

Reuf said, “If we declare independence, Bosnia will no longer have a communist fist beating us into submission.”

“Do you think a piece of paper means anything to Milošević?” Babo said. “Do you think a referendum will end our problems? You see what the Serbs are doing in Croatia. Declaring independence will bring violence to our door.”

“We are in. . .