"It's a compass, not a Ouija board," Calvin Foley said, but he had already leaned in, and his shadow crossed the brass face so that the needle wavered as if the world had shrugged under it.

James Whitmore cupped the little instrument the way his mother cupped a water-damaged novel at the library's annual salvage sale—with grief, with mild contempt, with the urgent hope that no one would see how much it mattered. "It points north," he said. "That's all it does. You'd be asleep inside a week."

"You've had it six years."

"Bored out of my mind," James said. "Every single night."

The Thaddeus A. Pemberton Memorial Library stood on the corner of Hollis Street and Mill Row like a brick ark marooned on a floodplain of asphalt and chain-link. Fifteen of his sixteen years James had lived in its belly—two rooms above the reading room, reached by a back stair that smelled of boiled potatoes and floor wax, where the transom let in the particular half-light of a place where everyone whispers. His mother, Eleanor Whitmore, had been head librarian, assistant librarian, clerk, and janitor for as long as the town had been deciding that she was too proud for the job. She filed the cards in a blue dress that she pressed on Sundays, and she set her teacup into its saucer with a click that certain women on certain porches had been imitating for a decade.

The town had opinions, and opinions are more durable than books in a place with eleven streets and one industry. That Philip Whitmore, the surveyor, had run off with the bookkeeper from the mill office and was living in a condominium in Florida. That he had stolen the town's survey maps and sold them to a developer from Pittsburgh. That Eleanor had driven him away with her airs, her education, her grave way of being right about everything. James had grown up inside these opinions the way he had grown up inside the library, and he had learned them by heart in the way you learn the ceiling above your bed at night: involuntarily, exhaustively, utterly. What he had been told, again and again, by the exact temperature of a silence at the post office, was that his father had left because there had been something insufficient in the family he was leaving.

He had turned that insufficiency into a kind of furnace. Over the years he had developed a spatial intelligence, the way a bat learns walls—he could map the reading room by its voices alone, could tell which patron was about to weep, which child was lying about a lost book, which man's laugh had a hollow at its center like a coin that had been filed down. He kept his findings in a composition book the color of a bruise, under a loose floorboard beneath his bed, and he called it the Index, in private, with the irony of a boy who would rather be funny than righteous. The Index held the town's contraband cargo: the widow Hartley's two a.m. visitor, the treasurer's arithmetic, the stain on the minister's name. He stored it all at the bottom of his ribs, and he told himself that knowledge was a curse, and that he was cursed, and that his father had left him this inheritance and no other, and that he would carry it until it finally pointed at something he wanted.

The library was closing. Not in a single blow—it was closing by degrees, the way a door closes when the house is breathing out. The town council had ruled the building obsolete, the roof a liability, the budget a luxury the county could no longer justify. All spring his mother had worn the blue dress to the hearings and come home with a face like a piece of paper that had been folded too many times. She was a woman who believed in processes, and the town believed in conclusions, and they had, at the start of summer, reached theirs. September was the end. The news arrived in the form of a letter with the borough seal, and Eleanor Whitmore read it at the circ desk in the presence of two librarians from the county who had come to estimate the value of the shelves, and she did not weep—she made tea, and she set the cup down, and the click was the loudest thing in the room.

On the third Tuesday of June, the council moved its hearing to the library itself, because the town hall was being painted, and that was the official story, and James knew the true story, which was that Edward Ashworth, the council chairman, wanted the vote taken in a room that already smelled of defeat. James sat in the dumbwaiter shaft, that square brick throat that ran from the old janitor's closet up to the apartment, his knees folded to his chin, his cheek laid against the cold mortar, because the shaft delivered the voices of the reading room with the fidelity of a shell held to the ear, and this was where he had learned the true history of every patron who had ever whispered in the stacks.

"It's a question of arithmetic," Edward Ashworth said. His voice arrived with a slight echo, as though it had been polished. "We all think very highly of Mrs. Whitmore."

"Then you know where the money went," Eleanor Whitmore said. "We had the same budget ten years ago and we were open six days a week. The books are here. The readers are here."

"We have fewer readers," said Mr. Marsh, the town solicitor, in a voice like a briefcase—expensive, closed. "We have fewer readers because the town has fewer readers in it. It's a changing world, Eleanor."

"Then the world is poorer," she said, "and you'll make it poorer still."

James's chest ached from not moving. He could hear Ashworth arranging his papers the way a man arranges his face. "Your husband, for example," Ashworth said, mildly. "A fine surveyor. A very fine surveyor. Pity about his maps."

There was a silence at the bottom of the shaft, something physical and warm, like a body rising.

"Leave my husband out of it," Eleanor said.

"Forgive me. But the finding of the last review was that he left you in a difficult position, and the council has all due sympathy for your circumstances, which is why we are bringing you the courtesy of a season. The closure will take effect on the first of October. There. We have given you the summer."

James heard his mother's chair scrape back. He heard Mr. Marsh clear his throat, and then, in a tone of charitable inquiry: "The boy. The one they say reads all day. He'll find something else