Excerpt from The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Chip's one of the residents?"

"For now she is. To be honest, she needs more from us than we can give her. We're lucky to have this house at our disposal but it's poorly suited to our needs when it comes to the complicated cases. We're understaffed and underfunded and all the rest of it. Chip needs more focused care in a secured environment. The ideal from our point of view and according to what we can offer is someone more like Brighty, here. How are you, Brighty?"

Bob found himself shaking hands, or found his hand being shaken by the woman, Brighty. She stared hard at Bob but spoke to Maria. "Who's this? A new face? New blood? What's his story?"

Maria said, "This is Bob, Brighty. He was good enough to bring Chip back to us, so I thought I'd show him around."

"Okay, that all makes sense, but where does he live?"

"I don't know. Where do you live, Bob?"

"I live in a house in northeast."

"Sounds plush," Brighty told Maria.

"It's all right," said Bob.

"He's modest. I'm sure it's very plush and classy. His wife must be pleased with her—fortunate situation."

Bob said, "I have no wife."

Now Brighty looked at Bob. "Why not?"

"I don't know. I just don't. I did have one, once."

"And one was enough?"

"It must have been."

"You're a widower?"

"Divorcé," said Bob.

"And when were you granted—your freedom?"

Bob did some quick addition. "Forty-five years ago."

Brighty made to whistle, but the whistle didn't catch and so was more a puffing noise.

Maria said, "Brighty has been married five times, Bob."

"What do you think about that?" Brighty asked Bob.

"I think that's a lot of times to be married," Bob answered.

"I like a big party, is what it is," said Brighty. "And I'll take a wedding over a funeral any day of any week, if it's all the same to you." She walked off to a bank of mismatched couches lining the long wall of the Great Room, sat down, leaned her head back, and shut her eyes. "Brighty," Maria told Bob. Bob noticed Chip was no longer in her chair but had taken up a standing position next to the front door, looking at it but not looking at it. He mentioned Chip's movements to Maria, who sighed and led him to the far corner of the Great Room where a scowling woman sitting at a fold-up card table was working on a thousand-piece puzzle. She had stringy, unclean gray hair, and she wore a pair of reading glasses on top of her regular glasses. "This is Jill," said Maria. "Jill's one of our nonresident visitors. Jill, will you say hello to our new friend Bob? I won't be a minute." She excused herself to fetch Chip away from the front door. Jill, meanwhile, was staring up at Bob, who told her, "Hi." She didn't respond. When Bob asked how she was doing she raised her hands up in the style of a doctor who has just scrubbed in ahead of surgery, each finger standing alone, with space between itself and its siblings. "I can't feel my thumbs," she said.

"Just now you can't?" asked Bob.

She shook her head. "I woke up in the middle of the night thinking there was someone in the room with me. 'Hello?' I said. 'Hello?' Then I realized, you know, about my thumbs."

"You couldn't feel them."

"I couldn't and still can't." She lowered her hands onto her lap. "What do you think it means?"

"I don't know," said Bob. "Who was the person in the room?"

"Oh, no one. Probably what that was was the presence of something new that's wrong with me?" She cocked her head, as if in recognition of her own queer phrasing. She told Bob, "Don't take this the wrong way, but you don't look like a doctor."

"I'm not a doctor."

Jill drew back in her chair. "Why are you asking me questions about my health if you're not a doctor?"

Bob wasn't sure what to say to this, so he decided to reroute the conversation in the direction of the puzzle: "What will it look like when you're done?" he asked, and she took the puzzle's box top and held it up beside her grave face. She asked Bob, "Do you know what this is?"

Excerpted from The Librarianist by Patrick deWitt. Copyright © 2023 by Patrick deWitt. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.