by Ellery Adams
“You look different,” said Bobbie. “But I still see the old you.”
Nora stood up and pulled her sweater over her head. Stripped down to her white camisole, her scars were on full display. She pivoted, letting Bobbie see exactly how much she’d changed.
“My face was burned too,” she said. “See this scar on my neck? It looks like an octopus, right? Well, I had a smaller octopus on my cheek. It swam from my chin to my forehead. But, and this is so crazy, I was in another fire a few years ago. Though I wasn’t badly burned, I was given cutting-edge plastic surgery. I have scars along my hairline, but thanks to that doctor, I don’t look like the Phantom of the Opera anymore.”
“Too bad. Until Hamilton rolled around, the Phantom was the hottest guy on Broadway.” Bobbie took Nora’s hand. “On the bright side, you can’t stick your pinkie finger out while holding a teacup.”
“Will you ever let me live that down? I did it one time!” Nora protested.
Bobbie picked up her wineglass, ostensibly jutting out her pinkie finger as she did so. “But that one time was at the Russian Tea Room. With my parents. I thought my mother might faint.”
The former college roommates grinned at each other. They’d resumed their usual banter as if their last conversation had been days, not years ago.
“Do you want to know about your ex?” Bobbie asked.
Nora’s grin vanished. “No. Don’t talk about anyone from my old life. You never heard from me because the only way I could become a new person was to completely cut ties with my past. Those months in the burn unit were like being in a cocoon. When I was finally well enough to leave, I wasn’t a butterfly. More like a brown moth. But I’d changed. Irrevocably. There was no going back.”
Bobbie’s injured expression slowly transformed into one of guilt. “I should have visited you there, but I just couldn’t handle it. Me. The toughest woman you know. When you needed me most, I let you down. I’m so sorry.”
“Let’s not trade regrets. You were in New York. You had a career and a family. You could hardly take a leave of absence from your life to sit shiva at my bedside.”
“How many times do I have to tell you? You have to die for me to sit shiva. Almost dying doesn’t count.” Bobbie rolled her eyes. “Sheesh.”
Nora laughed. It was so surreal to see Bobbie in her kitchen. Bobbie, with her broad shoulders and dainty hands. Her dimpled chin and slate-blue eyes. Her brash, Brooklyn-accented voice. That mass of auburn hair. She looked good.
“You probably heard all kinds of stories about me, but I’ll tell you my version,” Nora said. “In a nutshell, my husband fell in love with another woman. She got pregnant, and he planned to leave me for her. When I found out about his secret life, I lost my mind. I really did. After guzzling all the booze in the house, I decided to drive to the other woman’s house and confront them both. I never made it. Instead, I plowed into another car, which caught fire. I pulled the mom and her little boy out of the car I hit, and luckily, none of their injuries were serious. But the me you knew died that night. Now, I’m Nora Pennington. I have burn scars and a bookstore.”
Bobbie whistled. “Wow. Just wow. Okay, so do you have friends? A man?”
“I had someone,” Nora said. “Until today.”
She told Bobbie about Jed. Afterward, she told her about Hester, June, and Estella.
“They’re not Bobbie replacements,” she added with a wry smile. “There’s no such thing.”
With a snort, Bobbie drained the last bit of wine from her glass. After refilling both of their glasses, she motioned at the sofa. “We might as well get comfy if I’m going to tell you just how replaceable I am.”
The wine was already getting to Nora. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so calm. The persistent buzz of her worries had quieted. She could focus on this moment and this moment alone.
“You’re wearing the wedding ring I saw Stan slip on your finger, so he doesn’t think you’re replaceable.”
Bobbie chortled. “Oh, Stan and I are still married. But only for birthdays, weddings, and the big Jewish holidays. The rest of the time, Stan and his boyfriend are shacked up in Soho. Javier’s the architect I hired to convert our garage into an apartment. Unfortunately, he also converted Stan.”
Nora didn’t realize that her mouth was hanging open until Bobbie told her to close it.
“I was mad at Stan but not surprised. When we first met, I knew that he liked men and women. I guess we both believed that he’d put this other interest behind him when he married me. Until this smart, sexy, talented architect came along. Stan was a goner.” Bobbie spread her hands. “The whole family fell in love with Javier. The kids know about Stan, by the way, but our parents don’t. It’s just my mom and his dad now, and they couldn’t handle the truth.”
“Isn’t the charade exhausting?”
Bobbie looked incredibly sad. “Of course. But when it’s over, Stan’ll be gone for good. I’ve got a kid in college and a kid in grad school. Pretty soon, it’ll just be me in the house.”
“Rent the garage apartment to a library intern. Or invite visiting professors to stay with you,” Nora suggested. “They’d love to break bread with the great and powerful Roberta Rabinowitz. At least Columbia’s smart enough to know what a gem they have in you.”
Bobbie scowled. “Oh, people have tried to get rid of me a dozen times over the years, but I wouldn’t have it. That library is my third child, and no one fights budget cuts like a mother protecting her child.” She laughed. “Not to brag, but the blue bloods on the board know better than to mess with me. I’ve helped too many scholars complete their research, secured hundreds of thousands of dollars in gifts, and doubled our holdings. I’ll be there until I draw my last breath. I want to meet God smelling of parchment, lampblack, and the vanilla mustiness of old books. God will smile when he smells the perfume of my library.”
A comfortable silence followed this pleasant image. The women looked at each other, grinned, and then laughed out loud.
“Man, I sure hit the roommate jackpot freshman year,” said Nora. “Only in my wildest dreams would I be matched with a book person, but I was. Not just a reader, but a book enthusiast. Someone who wanted to learn about their history and construction. How to preserve and restore them. How to archive, collect, promote, and immortalize them. Remember those crazy lists we used to make?”
“Which three Jazz Age authors we’d sleep with? Which Romantic poets? Shakespeare characters? Gothic villains were my personal fave.” Bobbie raised her glass. “Best six years of my life.” Deflating suddenly, she lowered her glass. “Six years. We haven’t talked for the same amount of time it took us to earn two degrees.”
The weight of those years hung between them. The air in the room changed. It felt like a thick thundercloud hovered over the women’s heads, smothering their merriment.
Back in college, Nora would have searched for a literary quote to express her current mood. It was how she and Bobbie dealt with bad grades, disappointing dates, or other woes.
To address her current feelings, Nora might repeat Lewis Carroll’s statement that he couldn’t return to yesterday because he was a different person then. Bobbie might respond with the CS Lewis quote, “You can’t go back to the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.”
But they weren’t college students anymore. They were middle-aged women with gray hairs and cellulite. They were battle-scarred and world wise. And this wasn’t the time for literary games.
“How did you figure out that it was me?” Nora finally asked.
Bobbie leaned back in her chair and sighed. “Seriously? A sheriff from a small, remote North Carolina town contacts me to see if I can identify a page from an old book. Puh-lease. Librarians know me. Historians know me. Collectors know me. Book people know me. But how would a small-town sheriff come to hear of me? That’s the first question I asked Sheriff McCabe.”
“Ah,” said Nora.
“If you
really wanted to hide, why use your maiden name? You were already borrowing from Ibsen, so why not be Nora Helmer?”
Nora shrugged. “I always liked my maiden name, and I regretted my decision to give it up when I got married. It made me happy to reclaim it. But let’s get back to you. After McCabe told you my name, you packed a bag and boarded a plane? Just like that?”
“I asked the sheriff to describe you first, but yeah, that’s what happened,” said Bobbie. A humorous glint reappeared in her eyes. “I think he has the hots for you. When I asked for a physical description, he gave me the standard cop answer. Mid-forties, five foot eight, brunette, et cetera. But he didn’t stop there. He also said that you’re smart and caring, and that your bookshop is the heart and soul of the town. I knew this brilliant book woman had to be you.”
“So you called in sick and drove to LaGuardia?”
“Newark, actually. And I didn’t need to call in sick. I have a billion vacation days saved because I don’t go anywhere.” Bobbie cast a mournful glance at her empty wineglass. “Family trips and romantic getaways are a thing of the past. I’ll do a girl’s weekend every now and then, but I never miss work.”
Nora walked into the kitchen and rummaged around in the pantry. When she pulled out a wine bottle, Bobbie cried, “That a girl!”
“This is a cheap Argentinian Malbec,” Nora said. “If you wake up with a dry mouth and a nasty headache tomorrow, don’t say that I didn’t warn you.”
“Pull the plug on that bad boy,” ordered Bobbie. “I’m going to tell you about that book page now, and for that, we’ll both need liquid courage.”
Nora opened the bottle and decanted the wine into a glass vessel. She then picked up the vessel by the neck and swirled the wine around and around, hoping an infusion of oxygen would improve its taste and finish. She told Bobbie to pour while she washed a pint of strawberries and transferred them to a bowl.
Bobbie carried their glasses to the kitchen table and sat down.
“It’s your turn to toast.”
Nora put the bowl of strawberries on the table and said, “ ‘High and fine literature is wine.’”
Bobbie nodded in approval. “Mark Twain. Nice. I’ll pair your Twain with Virginia Woolf. ‘Language is wine upon the lips.’”
After touching rims, they each took a sip of the Malbec. Because Nora was already feeling buzzed, she barely moistened her lips with her initial taste. Bobbie’s was more of a gulp—a telltale sign that she was nervous.
“Do you remember that lecture we attended at NYU when we were in grad school?” she asked. “On the history of religious texts?”
“I remember that our professor hadn’t expected the lecturer to include books on mysticism.” Nora leaned forward eagerly. “Is the book page from an old mystical text?”
Bobbie took two strawberries from the bowl. She dropped one in Nora’s hand and popped the other into her mouth. “Here’s how this is going to go. I’m going to tell you things, and you’re going to tell me things. We’ll start with you. What’s your connection to that page?”
“I can’t answer that in a single sentence.”
“Do I look like I’m in a rush? I’m staying at the Inn of Mist and Roses, and I already love the place. If my library didn’t need me, I might never leave.”
Nora ate her strawberry, took a deep breath, and told Bobbie about Celeste and Bren. She left nothing out, even though McCabe would probably disapprove of her sharing details of an open investigation with a stranger.
Except that Bobbie wasn’t a stranger. She’d appeared like a Dickensian Christmas Carol spirit. The very sight of her had driven Nora to drink. She was on her third glass of wine. If she didn’t put the brakes on, she’d soon cross the line from tipsy to flat-out drunkenness.
When she finished her story, Nora expected an immediate reaction from Bobbie. Her verbose librarian friend had never been at a loss for words, but she had nothing to say now. In fact, she seemed miles away.
Nora waved her hands. “Hello? Ground control to Major Bobbie. Your turn.”
“Saint Juliana,” Bobbie murmured in a trance-like state. She shook her head and gestured at Nora’s laptop. “Fire that thing up, would you? It’s time for a historical show-and-tell.”
Nora pushed the laptop closer to Bobbie.
Her hands hovered over the keyboard as she said, “The robed figures on that book page are similar to others I’ve seen in thirteenth-century herbals, prayer books, and Bibles. But I’ve never seen that writing. I would have expected Latin or Greek. What are those symbols? A cipher? Maybe. But without the key, decoding the message would be like translating the Rosetta Stone blindfolded.”
“Going back to the question I asked twenty strawberries ago—is the page from a mystical text?”
Bobbie started typing. “I told the sheriff that all I could give him from an emailed image was an educated guess. Without physically seeing the page—without testing the ink and looking at the paper under a microscope—all I could tell him was that it reminded me of an unusual old text. Unusual and very rare.”
Nora was losing patience. “Stop stalling, Bobbie.”
“Grimoires.” Bobbie practically spat out the word. “The robed figures and the undecipherable language remind me of a book of spells. Years ago, I was in London for a conference, and there was an exhibit on magic and folklore at the British Library. I saw two fourteenth-century grimoires with drawings, incantations, astronomical charts, and more. I’m not a superstitious woman, and I’ve never met a book, manuscript, codex, or folio I didn’t like, but I didn’t like those grimoires. They smelled like rotten meat, and the air around their case was ice cold, even though the rest of the area was toasty warm. I couldn’t wait to get away from them.”
Bobbie’s wineglass was empty, so she grabbed Nora’s and took a fortifying swallow. She then hit a key on the laptop and the screen filled with black-and-white images of plants, robed figures, geometric shapes, frightening beasts, and strange symbols.
“These spell books don’t give off I Dream of Jeannie vibes,” Bobbie said in a hushed voice. “Grimoires exude something dark and dangerous. Their strangeness makes them seductive, and they’re some of the most highly collectible texts in the world. If that page came from a genuine grimoire, then someone’s sitting on a gold mine.”
Nora thought of the symbols tattooed on Bren’s neck, and the young woman’s penchant for black clothing. But there’d been no signs of spellcasting in her house. No burned candles or painted mirrors. It was just those symbols. On her neck. On the arm of the man from the park. On the book page.
Cult.
At least two residents of Pine Hollow had used that word to describe Still Waters.
“Is there more?” Nora asked.
“When you were talking about Celeste, you said that her statue was called Juliana.” Bobbie was typing again. The grimoire images disappeared. “Here she is. Saint Juliana of Nicomedia.”
Nora met the guileless stare of a serious young woman with dark eyes, a pinched nose, and thin lips. Unlike Celeste’s statue, the Juliana in this oil painting lowered her head in a humble or penitent pose. A narrow halo encircled her head. Her long brown hair was partially covered. Her robe fell in loose folds. She was devoid of personality.
“I like Celeste’s version better,” Nora told Bobbie. “Her Juliana is confident. Almost fierce. She wears a chain around her waist. Celeste said that a devil was attached to the other end of that chain. She also said that there are many different versions of Juliana’s story.”
“True. The Juliana in this portrait is the patron saint of sickness. Her unwavering faith allowed her to subdue the devil. A lesser-known legend speaks of a beautiful, young Turkish woman with the gift of healing. This woman’s desire to convert her new husband to Christianity was seen as a betrayal by her non-Christian family, so she was first tortured and then put to death. According to this story, the devil offered to end her suffering, but she refused. Her husband fled to Europe whe
re he remarried and tried to honor his first wife by becoming a healer.”
Though Nora was captivated by the Juliana tales, she didn’t see how they led to an identification of the book page. She said as much to Bobbie.
Bobbie shrugged. “When you mentioned Juliana’s name, I just got this feeling that she and the book page share some common thread. I’d have to do more research on Juliana legends to figure out what it is. And I’m not going to bother unless that sheriff lets me have that page.”
“Did you ask him?”
“When I got to town yesterday, I marched right down to the station. The sheriff and I had barely finished shaking hands before I asked him to introduce me to you. We walked to your darling bookstore and, well, you know how that went.”
Heat rushed to Nora’s cheeks. “I couldn’t face you. I’d just gotten off the phone with Jed and I was shell-shocked. Then I saw you. It was too much.”
Bobbie squeezed Nora’s hand. “Looks like neither of us got our Mr. Darcy. Good thing we can have as many book boyfriends as we want. We can have a whole harem.”
“In the romance genre, that’s called a reverse harem.”
“Really?” An expression of wonderment crossed Bobbie’s face. “If I live to be a hundred, it won’t be long enough. There will still be too many new things to learn about books. Too many books I’ll still want to read. I’ll have to be buried in one of those big mausoleums so I can take all the unread books with me. Just in case I can read in the afterlife.”
Bobbie’s comment sparked a memory in Nora. “Back to the grimoires. Weren’t they burned after their owners’ deaths? Or is that something I read in a novel?”
“If the grimoires belonged to a witch, then yes. They’re meant to be used by one person, and one person only. Anyone else is immediately cursed. We’ve seen examples of these curses in nineteenth- and twentieth-century grimoires. If you open the cover, the warning is right there. The wording changes, but the message is always the same. Mess with this book and you die.”