Jamie Brodie 01 - Cited to Death

my breakup with Ethan, my boyfriend through college and grad school. Ethan had broken my heart, and Dan wasn’t interested in that part of my anatomy. I’d liked him; he was smart and funny. We both enjoyed old monster movies and baseball. But he was secretive and had an unpredictable temper. We’d never gone on a date; we’d only hung out at his place, and always ended up in bed. He started experimenting with BDSM at the leather clubs, and wanted me to join in. I said no. He gave me an ultimatum, I said no again, and he broke up with me, right before Christmas break.
    Dan was working full time and moved through library school more slowly than I did. Somehow we never had another class together after that first semester. I heard through the grapevine that he started seeing another guy almost immediately after he broke up with me. That stung, even though I’d never thought that Dan was a good candidate for happily-ever-after with me…probably because Ethan had left me for someone else too. I’d see Dan around the research library occasionally, until he graduated and took the job at Cedars three years ago. I hadn’t seen him since.
    And now I never would again.
    Thoughts of Dan were dispelled as soon as I walked in the door of the library. I’d been out for two weeks after a bad asthma attack, complicated by bronchitis. I’d kept in touch via email, but everyone greeted me like I’d just returned from two months in the Himalayas. It took me nearly twenty minutes to pick up today’s mail and make it up the stairs to my office.
    When I got there, I found a mess. For two weeks, someone had been dumping my mail in my office, stacking it up wherever they could find a bare spot. My desk was covered in books and papers. The bulk of it was probably junk, but some of it was books and articles that I'd requested through interlibrary loan for our history faculty. It was all stacked haphazardly, covering my desk completely in a blizzard of paper, and drifting like snow over the sides onto the floor. I had a chair for visitors in front of my desk, and I could barely see it under the piles of stuff. There was even a slumping stack on my own desk chair. I couldn't sit down until I cleared it off.
    Damn. I had my work cut out for me today. I turned on my computer and cleared the seat of my chair, dumping that stack on the floor beside me.
    My computer was still booting up and I was gloomily surveying the mess when there was a knock on my door. It was Liz Nguyen, one of my fellow reference librarians and my closest friend on staff. Liz was 29. She was half Hawaiian, one quarter Vietnamese and one quarter French, and 100% gorgeous – even I could appreciate that. She’d graduated a year behind me from library school, and was my partner on the reference desk for our 1-3 pm shift. “Hey, how’re you feeling?”
    “Pretty good, what’s up?”
    She came in and looked around at the mess. “Good Lord. This disaster happened in just two weeks?”
    “Apparently. I was just starting to go through it.”
    Liz shook her head. “I bet a bunch of those catalogs are from Pacey Press. Harley Buhrman’s been calling every day, wanting to know when you’d be back. He scheduled an appointment for next Monday.”
    Harley Burhman was the LA-area sales rep for Pacey Press, a small publisher of reference books. The company was one of the slowest in adapting to the digital age; they had just released their first electronic database last year. They produced scholarly, beautiful, expensive sets of history encyclopedias that no one wanted to buy any more. He’d been calling me every day before I went out sick. “Great. Who scheduled that?”
    “Roberta. He came in and brought her a box of chocolates.”
    Roberta was the staff assistant to the senior administrative assistant to the director of the library. She had a sweet tooth and definitely could be bribed. She was also the most likely suspect in the case of my office mail dump. Roberta didn’t like me. I sighed. “Fine. I guess it was inevitable.”
    “Yeah, you weren’t going to be able to put him off forever. At least it’s not until next week.”
    “Thanks. It’ll probably take me until then to sort through all this and find one of his catalogs.”
    Liz laughed and left. I added the appointment to my calendar for next Monday and then checked my email; there was nothing important pending. Looked like I had a pretty clear day in front of me. The first thing I had to do was get