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me. A building this grand had nothing more than a wooden desk at its entryway? So I opened the metal door, looked outside, then let it swing shut.
    “You all realize this is a side entrance?” I said.
    The others looked around, stupefied.
    “It was the only door I saw,” the bookish woman said.
    Peach Tree pointed at the women. “I was just following them.”
    The hallway ran another twenty feet and ended in a sharp right turn. I looked down the way and back at my new companions. They stamped their feet or rubbed their arms, blew into their hands, anything to make it seem as if they weren’t just too scared to go forward.
    My childhood had trained caution out of me, for better and worse. My mother and father had been missionaries, and their labors had taken them across the country, into the littlest towns you never heard of, and the roughest cities that blighted the nightly news, and I learned to put my foot forward because of them.
    So I unzipped my jacket, slipped it on a hanger, and walked down the hall alone.
    A part of me really expected to turn that corner and find Lake holding a gun. Ready to shoot me for sport and claim I’d been menacing him. Would the police up these ways even take him in for questioning, or just toss my body in a bin? I thought of that lunatic from the Greyhound bus. I could disappear just as easily as him.
    My eyes were shut when I rounded the corner, but I could tell I’d entered a large space, because the echo of my boots sounded like bass drums. I reached for the wall with my right hand and shaded my eyes with the left. There, in the dim room, sat an enormous circular dining table with tall candles lit in its center. For a moment the table looked like a giant radio telescope, the kind scientists use to survey outer space, and the candles were its great antennae. I watched the flames flicker rhythmically as if messages were being received.
    I walked around the table, but didn’t touch. Wouldn’t even brush the tops of the chairs. There was a plush gray tablecloth that draped all the way to the floor. And nine red place mats.
    “Hey, Ricky!” I heard Peach Tree call from the hallway. “You dead in there, or what?”
    The room wasn’t lit by candles alone. There were recessed lamps in the ceiling, but they’d been turned low. There were framed pictures on the walls.
    More black people. Men and women. Standing together for posed black-and-white photos, all on a set of concrete steps much wider and steeper, more majestic, than the one we’d just used. Behind them a bank of doors, all made of frosted glass. The numbers varied. Sometimes nine, other times seven. Once there were only three in the shot. But all these pictures seemed very old, at least judging by the clothes. The men in sharp suits and women in fine dresses. Most of the guys wore hats, that was the real clue. 1950? 1920? How old was the Washburn Library?
    “Man,” Peach Tree muttered. “You didn’t hear me talking to you?”
    I saw Peach Tree’s bald head peeking around the wall. Five otherheads gathered behind his. They looked as nervous as birds. I waved them in slowly so they wouldn’t scatter.
    “Come on,” I said. “Look at all this.”
    So they entered, and I introduced myself to the women. Peach Tree walked away from these greetings because we’d already met. He looked at the framed photos, at the swanky clothes the figures wore, and said, “They look like a bunch of Black Muslims.”
    The bookish woman, whose name was Violet, said, “I guess they do.”
    This made Peach Tree unhappy. “They better not ask me to sell no bean pies!”
    Another woman, taller than all of us, who stooped with a tall woman’s shame, said, “They don’t look like Muslims. They look like church folk.”
    “How’s that better?” Peach Tree asked. “I didn’t come to Vermont to get saved.”
    Violet said, “Just because they’re well dressed doesn’t mean they’re religious. Can’t black folks get done up for