What the Librarian Did Read Free Page B

and started hurling again.
    Rachel stiffened. “I’m glad one of us finds this funny.”
    “Your mouth doesn’t fit your profession,” he explained. “It’s like seeing something X-rated on the cartoon network.”
    He didn’t think to censor himself because he’d been a rock star for seventeen years and never had to. And got a sharp reminder he was no longer in that world when she shut the door in his face.
    “Lucky the librarian fantasy never made my top ten,” he told the door.
     
    D EVIN WANTED TO BE treated as normal, and yet once his amusement wore off, Rachel’s reaction gave him a profound sense of dislocation.
    She’d looked at him without his fame in the way and hadn’t liked what she’d seen. It was a scary thought, because whoever she saw was someone he was going to have to live with for the next forty plus years.
    He strode across the road from the library into Albert Park, then stopped in a stand of tall palms that reminded him of L.A.—his home before his life depended on leaving it. For a full five minutes he looked up through the fronds to the blue, blue sky, homesick. Then he started walking again, around the quaint Victorian fountain, past oaks and a lot of trees he didn’t recognize.
    This must be how refugees felt in a new land…displaced, wary. And yet he’d been born here, was still acitizen, though he’d left for his father’s country when he was two. He breathed in the smell of fresh-mown grass, only to regret it wasn’t L.A.’s smog.
    “Your pancreas is shot to hell. Any alcohol and you’re dead.” The doctor had been blunt, and left him sitting in a private hospital room full of flowers from fans. The band had imploded at the same time as his health…. What the hell he was going to do with the rest of his life?
    His car keys fell out of his hand; someone bent to pick them up. Another teenager—shit, this place made him feel like a dinosaur.
    “Are you okay?” Gray eyes, intense in a pale face. Lank blond hair.
    “Of course I am.” The kid stepped back and Devin took a deep breath. “I’m fine…thanks.” He couldn’t rush the ascent, but had to stop and acclimatize, then kick up a bit more. He reminded himself that the surface was there—even when he couldn’t see it.
    “You’re Devin Freedman, aren’t you?” Nervously, the kid hitched up his baggy jeans. “I heard you’d be studying here this year.”
    Living on a remote part of Waiheke Island since his arrival in New Zealand two months earlier, Devin had got used to being left in peace. Something else to give up . “Yeah,” he said grudgingly, “I’m him.”
    In his drive to take control of his life, Devin had started taking online accounting courses to decipher his financial statements. A tutor had suggested university. When Devin stopped laughing he’d thought, why not?
    And already his growing fiscal knowledge had paid off. He’d appointed a new financial advisor who’d found disturbing anomalies in some of Devin’s statements. It lookedlike someone had been ripping him off; unfortunately Devin suspected his brother. But he needed to be very sure before he acted.
    “I’m a huge fan. Darkness Fell was a work of genius.”
    “Not The Fallen or Crack the Whip? ” Rage’s final albums.
    The kid looked at his feet and shuffled. “I really liked the early stuff. I know the others sold well…I mean, not that’s there’s anything wrong with commercial albums….”
    Devin put him out of his misery. “You’re right, they were crap.” By that point the band had barely been speaking.
    “But you still had some phenomenal guitar riffs and—”
    “You play?” Devin asked, cutting short the hero-worship. He gestured to the expensive guitar case slung over the kid’s shoulder.
    “Bass mainly, but also some electric and acoustic—like you.” The next words came in a rush. “Would you sign my guitar for me?” At Devin’s nod, he unpacked a Gibson and scrambled in his bag for a