It was right there in the town of Good Advice, and it belonged to Avery Sharecross’ bookshop. Sharecross had established it, years before many of the residents were born, in a three-hundred-year-old mission that had been by turns a community theater, a Salvation Army shelter, a home for armadillos, and a place for juvenile delinquents to smoke cigarettes and listen to rock and roll. Its walls were adobe, three feet thick, its few windows just large enough to shoot Indians from inside without attracting too many arrows from outside. During its empty period, it had been as dark and mossy—feeling as a cave. Sharecross had managed to make it darker still by installing towering bookcases and stocking them with volumes, some the same vintage as the building, with narrow passages between the cases. Generations of children had dared one another to approach the place after dark, when the ghosts of William Shakespeare and Mark Twain prowled among the stacks (or during the day, when the proprietor did the haunting); none accepted.
