فصل سی و پنجم

chapter-35

Mrs. Chiltington, Charles’s mother, did not like Mr. Lemoncello.

In fact, it would be safe to say she hated, loathed, detested, abhorred, and despised him, which were all the words her son, Charles, would’ve used to describe how she felt about Kyle’s hero.

“Just about all the other players from the Fabulous Fact-Finding Frenzy are here with me,” Miguel whispered, panning his lPad around the room. Kyle saw the other contestants ringed around the rotunda looking quite glum: Diane, Pranav, Elliott, Andrew, Sierra, and Jamal.

The only one missing was Katherine Kelly.

“Can you guys hear what Mrs. Chiltington is saying?” asked Andrew, sticking his face in front of the lPad’s camera lens.

“Um, not when you’re talking and blocking the shot,” answered Akimi.

“Oh, right. I’ll be quiet. Because here she goes again.”

The video image swished to the left to find Mrs. Chiltington, a clump of properly dressed ladies, one properly dressed man in a bow tie, and Mayor O’Brady, who had very puffy hair. The mayor was flanked by a dozen police officers. The Rotunda Reading Room was crammed with curious onlookers and TV camera crews.

On Mr. Lemoncello’s corporate jet, everybody (except the pilots, who were sort of busy) gathered around the big TV screen spanning the bulkhead wall, which was displaying the computer feed.

“Those of us in the League of Concerned Library Lovers,” warbled Mrs. Chiltington in her operatic voice, “are, frankly, quite concerned. We have heard these accusations made by Irma Hirschman from her cozy retirement home in Missouri.” “Now she lives someplace cozy?” cracked Akimi. “This lady gets around.” Mrs. Chiltington crinkled her nose. “Mr. Lemoncello is a cheap pirate, plagiarizing and pilfering other people’s patented, proprietary property.” Her lips exploded with salvos of saliva every time she popped one of those “P” words.

“He’s also egregiously malevolent!” shouted Charles, who was sort of stuck behind the blockade of properly dressed ladies.

“To have such a cheat and charlatan affiliated with a library,” said Mrs. Chiltington, “let alone running it, is, as my son would say, egregiously improper, intolerable, and offensive.” “It’s patently preposterous!” shouted Charles. He spat on people when he popped his “P”s, too.

“Hear, hear,” chanted all the properly dressed ladies and the one gentleman in the bow tie.

“We, friends and neighbors, are the laughingstock of the entire state of Ohio, nay, the world!” Mrs. Chiltington said to the crowd. “Oh, how those wags over in Bowling Green are laughing at us now.” “We can’t have that,” said Mayor O’Brady. “We can’t have the whole world laughing at us like that. Not those people in Bowling Green. Not on my watch!” “Wait a second!” shouted Miguel from the back of the room, because he was brave that way. “Does anybody even know if what this Irma Hirschman is saying is true?” “Or doesn’t the truth matter to you people anymore?” demanded Jamal.

“Yeah!” added Diane Capriola.

“Oh, you poor, poor misguided children,” said Mrs. Chiltington, batting her eyelashes and smiling at the seven library trustees in the room as if they were orphans abandoned in baskets on the church steps during a Christmas Eve blizzard. “Mr. Lemoncello has you under his sugarcoated spell. This is the truth.” Charles Chiltington pushed his way through the wall of scowling women and the pouting man in the bow tie.

He thrust up his cell phone.

“Take a look, people. Irma Hirschman did indeed invent a game called Family Frolic five years before Mr. Lemoncello theoretically invented Family Frenzy. I have seen the proof. Two very agreeable elderly gentlemen—brothers, I think—showed it to me one day after they finished using a computer in the Rotunda Reading Room!” The crowd gasped.

“I photographed the evidence!” cried Charles. “Mr. Lemoncello kept a copy of Ms. Hirschman’s board game hidden in his ludicrous Lemoncello-abilia Room—tucked between two big cardboard cartons. Why? Who knows? The man is barmy and batty. Maybe he wanted a souvenir to remind himself how deviously cunning and clever he was in his youth. Maybe he forgot it was up there. Doesn’t matter! I took a picture of the game box. A selfie with it, too!” He wiggle-waggled his camera phone in the air.

“Let’s go upstairs and see it!” shouted someone in the crowd.

A mob of people rushed for the steps.

“You can’t!” cried Charles. “It’s been checked out.”

“Huh?” mumbled the mob.

“One of Mr. Lemoncello’s favorites, a member of his so-called board of trustees, Kyle Keeley, the loser and cheater Mr. Lemoncello helped beat me in the escape game, conveniently removed the board game so he could ‘do research’ with it. The robo-research lady told me!” “That’s true,” said the holographic research librarian, Ms. Waintraub, who materialized behind the reference desk. “However, it is also true that archival information can, with proper approval, be removed from the Lemoncello-abilia Room for research purposes.” “Or for tossing into the trash!” shouted Charles.

“No,” said Ms. Waintraub matter-of-factly. “Tossing into the trash is not an approved use of research materials.” “Enough,” said the mayor, raising both of his arms. “We need to get to the bottom of this Irma Hirschman matter. The Lemoncello Library is hereby forthwith closed.” “What?” gasped Sierra Russell. “You can’t do that!”

“Oh, yes I can. I am the mayor. I can do all sorts of things. And I will not have anyone in Bowling Green laughing at me. Not again! No, sir!” The camera whipped around and landed on Miguel’s face.

“Yo, did you guys catch all that?”

“Yeah,” said Kyle.

“Everybody out of the library!” he heard Mrs. Chil-tington bellow in the background. “Now!” “Hang in there, Miguel,” said Kyle. “We’re coming home just as soon as we confront Irma Hirschman.” “Hurry!”