The Knight of Pages

by Alexie Aaron

  At the break Wendell took roll. Both Kabir and Marc were missing. That meant he had lost an even dozen members.

  “Wendell, I didn’t realize that this would be such an intimate group. I feel my insights are wasted with the scant amount of readers here,” Elma said, brushing a crumb off her cardigan.

  “I am surprised not to see Kabir and Marc here tonight. They never miss a meeting,” Wendell responded, tucking his roll book away in his briefcase.

  “Maybe they moved their competition to the handball court,” Rex said, walking up.

  The three imagined the stout Kabir and the excessively prim Marc playing any sport and couldn’t reconcile with Rex’s statement. The two were competitive, but they doubted the competition extended beyond the dissection of the books the club read. Kabir and Marc backed up their observations with either information from their college days or by extra study of the authors involved.

  “Sorry,” Rex said, admitting he had stretched too far with his comment. “Wendell, maybe we need to bring in new blood.”

  “I’ll make up some flyers. It’s a shame. We had such a lively group here.”

  “Marc and Kabir are very competitive,” Elma drawled. “You should have heard the two argue over a book that Marianne had. Each was convinced it gave her an edge on the discussion.”

  “Where is Marianne this evening?” Rex asked.

  “She let me know last week she would be out of town,” Wendell said. “Marianne will be back, no doubt to continue her discussion comparing this book with A Little Princess and Little Lord Fauntleroy.”

  “It’s too easy to compare books of one author. The trick is to compare it to Burnett’s contemporaries,” Elma sniffed.

  Wendell didn’t say anything. By keeping his silence, he kept to his position of moderator. Later, he would relate her comments to his mother. His mother helped him to find a balance when he dealt with extreme personalities. It was one of the benefits of living with her. Catherine Baumbach had been sidelined physically by a recent stroke. Fortunately, her mind was still sharp, and her body, although weakened on her left side, was still able to perform the functions Wendell would have had to hire a nurse to help her with. He knew people snickered and called him a mommy’s boy. It used to bother him, but as he matured, he ceased to care what other people thought about his personal life. Page Turners, however, was another matter.

  ~

  Kabir rolled over and squinted at the clock. He reached for his glasses, fumbling around on the top of the nightstand. When he found them, he was disappointed that the lenses were too smudged to be of much use. He pushed the covers back and navigated the dark bedroom. He found his way to his bathroom and turned on the light. What he saw shocked him. Kabir had three days’ growth of beard. This was impossible! He ran the water in the sink, preparing to rectify the situation. He tested the water and stumbled backwards when the pooling water in the sink turned red, blood red.

  He focused on the eyeglasses he had set on the counter. The smudges on the lenses were rusty red. He pushed them under the faucet and wiped them on the towel, knowing he probably was scratching the lenses. Scratched lenses were the last problem he was thinking of. He put on his glasses and saw the nightmare man in the mirror. He was dressed in clean pajamas, but they were splotched with the same rusty red he found on his glasses. He unbuttoned his cotton shirt with shaking fingers.

  The copper smell hit him when he saw his exposed chest. Dried, smudged blood began to darken as the sweat of the increasing nightmare beaded up on his chest. He dropped his shirt and forced himself to return to his bedroom. He was calmed somewhat, after the flipping on of the overhead light hadn’t exposed a dead body in his bed. Aside from a tinge of red where his neck would have connected to his pillow, there was no blood. He felt a modicum of relief until his eyes saw the rusty smudges leading to his closet. He willed his frozen limbs to move towards the closet and then forced himself to open the doors. He ran his hands over the row of suitcoats and stopped at the wrinkled charcoal gray he last remembered wearing. He pulled it out, saw the condition it was in, and dropped it.

  He sunk to his knees which brought him eye level with his shoe rack. The Italian leather shoes he took such pride in had dried spatters of rusty red. He didn’t need to look in the hamper to know that it contained more horror. Terror started to turn his stomach. He pulled himself up and ran back into the bathroom where he lost whatever his last meal was just before his bowels rebelled.

  ~

  Nash walked home clutching the canvas bags of groceries he had procured from the small grocer near the bookshop. He turned onto his street and was surprised by the flashing lights from a few police cars. He walked slowly, relieved to see that it wasn’t his building that had the attention of the police. Nash crossed the street and kept to the opposite side until he was well past the building. He unlocked the foyer door of his building and looked back down the street. The lights of the police sedans were still on, causing quite a light show, and were beginning to attract the attention of the normally quiet residents of his neighborhood. He walked in, set his bags down, checked his mailbox, and jammed the bills into one of the grocery bags.

  Nash took one last look down the street from the safety of the foyer before he started up the stairs to his apartment. He stopped. Clara said she lived a few blocks away from the store. He pushed down the momentary rise of panic with the rationalization that within a few blocks of the restaurant were thousands of apartments, condos, duplexes, and townhomes. He continued up the stairs. One of the second-floor doors opened, and a flash of red shot out.

  “Butterball!” exclaimed the elderly resident.

  Nash set his bags down and scooped up the miscreant. “Now, Butterball, what did I tell you about worrying Eleanor?” Nash scolded, holding the ginger cat at eye level. He walked back to the apartment and handed the cat back to the grateful woman in the floral housecoat.

  “I just opened the door to see who was coming up the stairs, and he made a break for it,” Eleanor explained.

  “Eleanor, what did I tell you about opening your door at night?” Nash cautioned.

  Eleanor blushed. “You said not to. But I can see the police lights from my bedroom window. I thought you or maybe Harlan would know what is going on.”

  “They are parked in front of that fancy condo complex,” Nash reported.

  “I’m not surprised,” Eleanor said. “You’d have to be a drug dealer to afford one of those condos.”

  Nash nodded. He was relieved, assuming that a chef working at a breakfast-only restaurant wouldn’t be able to afford a condo in that building either.

  “Would you like to come in for a snack?” Eleanor asked.

  “Can I have a raincheck? I’m running behind and have my groceries to put away.”

  Eleanor smiled. She looked up at the tall man who took the time to visit with her a few times a week and knew he wasn’t just brushing off the seventy-two-year-old widow. Just this week, he had spent a few hours Sunday evening playing gin rummy with her and, on Monday evening, helped her hunt down Butterball who had escaped the apartment. “Have a goodnight.”

  “Goodnight, Eleanor, Butterball,” Nash said.

  He picked up his bags, walked past Harlan’s apartment, and continued up to the third floor. He opened the door and set his bags in the kitchen. He put away the perishables, popped a Hungry-Man frozen meal into the microwave, and walked through his apartment flipping on lights. He didn’t normally donate this much money to Commonwealth Edison, but he felt the need of the warmth the lamps cast off. Whether it was the police action that unsettled him or the ghost story Clara told him, either way, he felt much better once all the rooms of the two-bedroom apartment were lit.

  Nash walked back through to his living space. He debated between switching on the television to eat his meal by or to dine in front of the computer where he would be checking on his website. The ding of the microwave summoned him. He flipped the brownie por
tion out and reset the appliance. He pulled a beer out of the refrigerator and walked straight over to the computer. It was an old HP he kept up to date, not for economy - it certainly was costing more for him to upgrade – but for the nostalgia. Rita bought him the original computer. He, however, had celebrated the divorce by adding a large flat-screen monitor.

  He sat down and watched as the monitor came on displaying a stock wallpaper image. This one was a seascape. He opened the browser. The microwave beeped, alerting him that his meal cycle had finished. Nash took the meal out, set it down, and stared at it, barely taking in the contents. “How pathetically sad this is,” he said and grabbed his beer. He emptied his beer as he leaned against the counter. He then scooped the hot contents of the meal into the wastebasket. Once again, his appetite was gone. He washed out the plastic and placed it in his recycling bin before he walked back and stood and stared at the screen. He sat down, and instead of visiting his website, he Googled Biscuit, Bagel and Buzz.

  There were a few offerings, including dozens of Yelp reviews. He found the restaurant’s website and clicked through until he found pictures of the staff. Clara stood like a red flower amongst the picket fence of the white-aproned men. He never thought about what an achievement it was for Clara to have risen to the head chef position. The owner, Johan, resembled a portrait of a prosperous Dutchman he had seen in a museum when Nash was young. He cruised through the menu and stopped at a few pictures of the kitchen in action. Nash pushed away from the desk when he caught himself staring at a set of female hands holding on to a plate of lox-covered bagels and wondering if they were Clara’s.

  He pushed his hand through his hair.

  “Get a grip, cowboy,” he warned himself.

  Nash closed the window and opened his website. He looked it over and spent time working on removing a few volumes he had recently sold and uploaded a few new offerings. He clicked over to the One More Time page. He looked through the antiquated photos of the shop displayed and vowed to take more recent pictures. He’d ask Clara what she thought. After all, she was a customer.

  “That’s if she ever returns to the shop,” he said and clicked out of his website. He then did something he vowed never to do again. Nash opened the local review site and looked up his shop. He didn’t expect to get a good review as the proprietor, but he hated when the customer took it out on the books. He carried quality secondhand merchandise. He was honest and kept just under the market price to attract new customers. There were a few comments from Bookhero101. His latest was titled “Pompous A$$”. He winced and would have normally passed over them, except someone named ThePlateStopsHere had responded.

  Bookhero101

  Pompous A$$

  Once again, I have regretted ever walking in the door of One More Time. The dictator of free thought has insulted me with my observations on Crime and Punishment.

  ThePlateStopsHere

  What were your observations?

  Bookhero101

  C & P is a superbly plotted, brilliant character study of a man who is….

  Nash skimmed the rest.

  ThePlateStopsHere

  I’m sorry, but are those your thoughts?

  Nash saw that a new commenter had entered the conversation.

  Unpaidscholar243

  It’s almost a direct quote from the TeacherVision website.

  ThePlateStopsHere

  Bookhero101, maybe next time, take the time to read the book and come up with your own ideas.

  Nash saw that Bookhero101 fell out of the conversation. Unpaidscholar243 and ThePlateStopsHere continued with positive observations and went off on a tangent about how teachers needed to be paid more.

  Nash opened up a new window and typed in ThePlateStopsHere. There were a few other reviews, mostly culinary, which went along with the screen name. There also was a website.

  “Gotcha!” Nash said and clicked over. He found a page of recipes shared not by a foodie but by a chef, a chef with long red hair. Clara had come to his defense. He looked back at the conversation with Bookhero101 and noticed the date and time stamp. It had been a few days ago.

  Nash pulled up a site he subscribed to for the purpose of vetting other booksellers and typed in the name Clara Tyler. “If I push this button, I have officially gone from pompous ass to pompous stalker.” Nash clicked out and shut down the computer to stop his need to know more about Clara from getting out of hand.

  His stomach growled. Nash went into the kitchen. He stopped himself from retrieving the chicken pieces from the garbage. Instead, he fried himself some eggs.

  ~

  Clara didn’t have to look at the wall clock to know it was time to head to bed. She had almost disjointed her jaw yawning. “How am I ever going to have a personal life keeping these hours?” she asked herself while she checked the locks on the door and the windows near the fire escape. You’d have to be a circus performer to reach her windows from the metal stairs, but if she could imagine it occurring, it could happen.

  “Sorry, I’d love to go out with you, but it’s past my bedtime.”

  Clara tried to visualize sleeping in on Sunday with a boyfriend. They would be drinking coffee while sharing the Sunday paper. Instead, she saw herself sneaking out in the early hours, like a one-night stand, to go to work. “Like I ever had a one-night stand,” she scolded her imagination. “You just can’t stick my head on whoever is doing the deed and call it a daydream.”

  She brushed her teeth and braided her hair to save sorting out the snarls in the morning. She had seen quite a few people sneak out of the apartments in her building on her way to work. She made a note not to catch the eye of whomever was living in 4B. He or she had quite a revolving door during the weekend. One didn’t have that active a sex life without catching something.

  “You’re just jealous,” she pointed out to the woman whose face was covered in moisturizer. Clara smoothed some aloe-based cream over a small burn on her arm. She held her arm up to the light and frowned. Too many little burns. That’ll teach her for rolling up her sleeves while attending to the frying. “I look like I’m self-harming.”

  Clara flipped off the light and crawled into bed. She ran her hand up her arm and remembered Nash’s fingers there. “Don’t start,” she warned her libido. “Think of chopping onions. Watch or you’ll chop your fingers off. That’s it…”

  Clara flipped over and punched her pillow a few times. When she was exhausted, she fell into a dreamless sleep.

  Chapter Four

  Kabir sat next to his lawyer in the interrogation room. The detective, who had been handed this mess late last night, was playing catch-up with the notes from the officers on the scene.

  “Forgive me if I go over old ground,” Detective Robert Jones prefaced and looked over at the shaken man trying to make eye contact. “Mr. Patel, according to the information I have here, that you voluntarily supplied to the officers at your condo, you woke up last night and found that you were dressed for bed as you normally would be, but underneath your clothing, you had a concerning amount of dried blood on your skin.”

  “Yes, sir,”

  Jones would have rather been addressed as detective or officer, but considering the condition of the man before him, he let it go. “Mr. Patel, it states here that your last memory was of being at brunch three days prior.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Can you elaborate on that day?”

  “I will try. Forgive me, my heart is racing, and my nerves are shot.”

  “It’s understandable. Please go on.”

  “I have extensive family here in Chicago. Once a month, the adults go to brunch to catch up. This month we chose Beatrix. I think I met someone at the restaurant on the way out, but who it was I couldn’t tell you.”

  “Male, female?”

  “I don’t know. I just remember thinking, oh, there is so and so…”

  “Close your eyes a moment, and try to recall the restaurant,” Detecti
ve Jones coaxed.

  “I was having a rousing conversation with my cousin Dev when something caught my attention, and I saw… It was a man. I think it was an associate from my book club.”

  Jones waited.

  “Marc, Marc Davis. I remembered he owed me something, and I was going to remind him when I finished my meal.”

  Jones wrote down the name. “Do you have his contact information?”

  “No, but Wendell Baumbach would. I have his information in my phone. Your people have my phone.”

  “Thank you. What do you think happened to you, Mr. Patel?”

  “When I saw all the blood, I thought perhaps I had been mugged. Maybe hit on the head and made it home… but I have no injuries. I don’t even know if the blood is human. All I know is, I was covered in it.”

  “We appreciate your not showering until our forensic people could collect evidence.”

  “I did wash my hands, but that was before I knew it was blood on my hands. I called my attorney for advice. We thought that maybe if someone was injured, my calling the police immediately could make a difference.”

  “Do you have any enemies?” Jones asked.

  “I’m a fiercely competitive man and may have ruffled a few feathers in debating groups and the Page Turners - it’s the book club I participate in - but I don’t think I have made an enemy,” Kabir answered honestly.