“Don’t get too comfortable, Coop,” Mike said. “What’s the process, Jill? Say Tina wanted to get this book, this particular edition of Alice in Wonderland. What would she have had to do?”

Jill walked to the center of the long room, which was divided by the catalog area.

“She would have come here, as she’d done many times before,” Jill said, placing her hand on the top of the counter. “Tina-or any researcher-hands in the call slip to the clerk and is given a delivery number. The clerk figures out where the book is, whether in a collection upstairs or below us in the stacks, and sends for it using a pneumatic tube system.”

“Pneumatic tubes?” Mike asked. “I thought they went out with covered wagons.”

“Old systems die hard in the library business. We’re trying to convert to something a little more current-electronic-but that will still take years to effect.”

“Did she need a letter of introduction?”

“Tina’s credentials are well established here, Detective. As newcomers, each of you would have to start out with references, but not someone with whom we’re familiar. The letters in support of her application would still be on file.”

“Makes an inside job even easier to pull off,” Mike said. “Your staff develops a comfort level with the researcher when they see her here regularly.”

“Quite true.”

Mike took the papers out of his pocket again and smoothed them on the countertop.

“So how does the clerk know which copy of Alice in Wonderland to fetch?”

Jill had her back against the wooden partition and was talking to all of us. “She would have asked Tina to specify that. They’d have looked in the card catalog to see where the different volumes are.”

“Let’s do that,” Mike said. “Where’s the catalog?”

“Not in little wooden boxes anymore, Detective, if that’s what you’re thinking. Those books against the wall-eight hundred of them-reproduce the original catalogs. Everything else is online now. It’s a program called CATNYP-Catalog of the New York Public Library. One can access it here, of course, but also from anywhere in the world.”

“So Tina, or anyone she was working with for that matter, might have looked for the existence of a book from a computer in her own apartment?”

“Quite easily.”

“Why don’t you show us how?” Mike said.

Jill didn’t seem eager to comply. She looked at her watch, but it was still too early to be expecting anyone on staff to appear.

“C’mon. I’d like to see the way it works.”

Jill walked behind the counter and logged on to one of the computers. We watched as she typed in the request. Mike stepped in to look over her shoulder.

“We’ve got several early copies in the Central Children’s Room, but that collection isn’t housed in this building anymore. Tina knew that, so she wouldn’t have been looking for any of those by putting a slip in here,” Jill said, moving her finger down the screen. “Okay, in the Special Collections section, we have one in Arents. An 1866 edition.”

“What’s Arents?”

“George Arents was an executive at P. Lorillard in the early part of the last century. You know, one of the big tobacco companies. He bequeathed us his library in 1944-it’s called the Tobacco Collection, because every book and artifact in it is related to that subject.”

“So why would Alice in Wonderland be shelved there?” Mike asked.

“The caterpillar with the hookah,” I said. “Smoking opium on his mushroom.”

“Exactly. Then I see another 1866 edition in the Berg Collection,” Jill said. “Quite the rare piece. Very valuable. It’s the author’s presentation copy to Alice Liddell, inscribed by Carroll to her. The first approved edition, bound in blue morocco. You can certainly have a look at that one.”

“Alice Liddell’s father was the dean of Christ Church in Oxford,” I explained to Mike and Mercer. “Charles Dodgson-he used the pen name Lewis Carroll-was a math tutor at the college, and friendly with the Liddells. He first told his stories of a girl’s adventures after falling in a rabbit hole to Alice, who was believed to be his inspiration for them, and later published the book.”

Jill Gibson was scanning the catalog. “That’s all I find for 1866.”

“How about in the Hunt Collection?” Mercer asked, leaning his elbows on the counter.

“Let me see,” she said, scrolling down to that field. “There’s an 1865 edition, but that one was never approved. The author and illustrator didn’t like the quality of the drawings. And there are letters of Carroll’s, some of his correspondence. There are also originals of some of the pictures he took of Alice. You may not know, but Carroll’s hobby was photography.”

“I’ve seen some of the images-ten-year-old Alice posed half naked,” I said. “Guess that’s what started the speculation that Lewis Carroll was a pedophile.”

“We’ll never know, will we?” Jill said.

“Coop would have gotten to the bottom of it. Load the old boy’s hookah with something to suppress the urge and pack him off to prison,” Mike said, pushing the copy of the call slip in front of the keyboard. “You know, Jill, I kind of got the feeling you’ve seen this handwriting before.”

She kept her eyes on the screen in front of her. “I never said that. Maybe I spoke too quickly. It’s quite possible Tina printed the words herself. I shouldn’t have jumped to another conclusion. Here’s the original of Lewis Carroll’s diary covering the period he wrote the book. That’s in the Hunt Collection.”

“Pat McKinney thinks Tina was a forger, Jill. Do you?”

“She was an artist, Detective. Very skilled at her work.”

“I’d like you to look at this slip of paper again, Jill. Why won’t you do that?”

She clasped her hands and rested them on the countertop, looking down at the copy.

“You were so emphatic a short time ago that the words on here weren’t written by Tina Barr. Isn’t that because you recognized the penmanship as someone else’s?” Mike asked. He was standing so close to her that he seemed to have her pinned in place, pressuring her to answer. “You shook like a leaf when I handed you this paper outside the library. Why, Jill?”

She pushed Mike’s arm away from her and turned to face him. “There are people in the library-employees as well as board members-who didn’t trust Tina. Alex knows that. Mr. McKinney was talking to many of them for his investigation, and all the while I’ve been defending the girl. Then you show me this,” Jill said, picking up the paper from the countertop. “I’d hoped never to see this writing in one of my libraries again.”

“Who do you think it is?”

“A man named Eddy Forbes. I don’t suppose you know about him.”

“A map thief,” Mike said. Alger Herrick had talked about Forbes yesterday. Herrick said he’d been released from jail and was involved in some kind of deal with Minerva Hunt.

“The most prolific map thief we’ve ever come up against. And a lot of what he stole was from the Beinecke Library in New Haven, during my tenure there,” Jill said, bowing her head.

“You were blamed for the lax security?” Mercer asked.

“By some. There were others who thought worse.”

“That you partnered with him on proceeds of what he stole from your library?”

“Yes, Alex. I fought that battle once and won. I was lucky I had friends among the trustees here who believed in me. They let me come back to work. That won’t be the case a second time, if it turns out Eddy Forbes had a plan to use Tina-and perhaps someone else on the inside.”

“I thought his specialty was maps,” I said. “That doesn’t seem at all connected to Alice and her adventures underground.”

“If Forbes is involved, count on the fact that there’s a map in the mix.”

“Was Tina capable of imitating someone’s signature?”

“Probably so. In this digital age, the ability to copy or even to forge has been made so much easier by all the technology available. Almost anyone could do it, let alone someone as artistically gifted as Tina.”