“What’d she say?” Florence put down her fork, no longer interested in her chicken patty.

“Said they were subversive and anti-South—she’s a Daughter of the Confederacy—and ordered me to take them off the shelves. I told her that as long as I was librarian they would stay there. She said she was going to bring it before the board and if necessary take it up with Porky Logan. He’s on the investigating committee in Tallahassee.”

“Alice, you’re going to lose your job!” Kitty Offenhaus was the most influential person in Fort Repose, with the exception of Edgar Quisenberry, who owned and ran the bank.

“I don’t think so. I told her that if anything like that happened I’d call the St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune and Miami Herald and they’d send reporters and photographers. I said, `Kitty, can’t you see your picture on the front page, and the headline—Undertaker’s Wife Cremates Books?”‘

This was the most fascinating news Florence had heard in weeks. “What happened then?”

“Nothing at all. If I may borrow an expression from one of my younger readers, she left in an eight-cylinder huff.”

“You wouldn’t really call the papers, would you?”

Alice spoke carefully, understanding fully that everything would soon be repeated. “I certainly would! But I don’t think I’ll have to. You see, publicity would hurt Bubba’s business. One third of Bubba’s customers are Negroes, and another third Yankees who come down here to live on their pensions and stay to die.” She lifted her bright, fiercely blue eyes and added, as if repeating one of the Commandments: “Censorship and thought control can exist only in secrecy and darkness.”

“And that was all?”

“That was all.” Alice tried her salad. “What’ve you been doing, Florence?”

Florence could think of no adventure, or even any news culled from the wire, that could compete with telling off Kitty Offenhaus—except her experience with Randy Bragg.