held down a second job as a night janitor

The center of the ceiling featured a stained-glass dome thirty-two [18] feet in diameter. The deep colors of the glass—crimson, emerald, burnt yellow, sapphire—so completely filtered natural light even on a bright day that the books were at no risk of sustaining sun damage. Ethan’s Uncle Joe—who’d served as a surrogate dad when Ethan’s real father had been too drunk to handle the job—had been a truck driver for a regional bakery. He’d delivered breads and pastries to supermarkets and restaurants, six days a week, eight hours a day. Most of the time, Joe had held down a second job as a night janitor, three days a week. In his best five years put together, Uncle Joe hadn’t made enough to equal the cost of this stained-glass dome. When he’d first begun to earn a policeman’s pay, Ethan had felt rich. Compared to Joe, he had been raking in big dough. His total income from sixteen years with the LAPD wouldn’t have paid the cost of this one room. “Should’ve been a movie star,” he said as he entered the library to return Lord Jim to the shelf from which he’d gotten it. Every volume in the collection had been arranged in alphabetical order, by author. A third were bound in leather; the rest were regular editions. A significant number were rare, and valuable. The Face had read none of them. More than two-thirds of the collection had come with the house. At her employer’s instructions, once each month, Mrs. McBee purchased the most talked-about and critically acclaimed current novels and volumes of nonfiction, which were at once catalogued and added to the library. These new books were acquired for the sole purpose of display. They impressed houseguests, dinner guests, and other visitors with the breadth of Channing Manheim’s intellectual interests.