I work in a public library in a small town in New Jersey, which has the distinction of having on its border the worst toxic waste dump in the country. Cleanup has been going on since the mid-1980's, and obviously there are a ton of records of all the activity, created by everyone from the local borough council to the EPA. Our library is the depository for all these records, the idea being that anyone in town who wanted to see them should be able to. And there is the beginning of my story.

Last week, a woman came into the library at about 7:30 p.m. (we close at 9) and started rummaging through the card catalog. Obviously dissatisfied, she came over to the desk and asked for "everything" we had on the landfill. Well, the records are not catalogued, because there are just too many of them and they really aren't our property--I think the EPA or someone will collect them at the end of the cleanup, I'm not really sure. I explained to her that there was an index to the documents, and that we would be glad to retrieve them for her.

No, she didn't want the index. She saw a pile of the files waiting to be returned to the basement storage room, and asked to look at them. I should explain that ordinarily, we have a sign-in sheet for people who are using the documents. I didn't even think about it, because we were busy and I was in the middle of training a new employee--I just handed them over. Well, then she started xeroxing. And xeroxing. And xeroxing. Then she wanted to see anything else we had. So I gave her the vertical file folder of newspaper clippings. (She still didn't want the index.) And she xeroxed some more. By this time, it was 8:45.

She paid for the xeroxing and asked for a receipt, but she didn't want her name or her organization's name to appear on the receipt. And then she left.

We closed up the library and I went out to my car, where what should I see but the same woman *coming out of the police station* across the street. So...I reported all this to the director, and told him to be on the lookout for her. She came back again a couple of days later and went through the same process. She wouldn't sign the sheet for the day staff--she just used the vertical file materials. We have no idea who she was. Oh yes, I asked her if she had been in touch with our borough council, since they are working closely with the cleanup crew, and she got very evasive.

So, after all that, I don't know if this is the kind of story that you could repeat; I don't even know if it makes sense, but this is the kind of library mystery that *we* will still be talking about six months from now. I don't know if it would make it better or worse if we found out what she was doing. What if she only was in the police station because she got a parking ticket while she was in the library? I mean, how prosaic.