Brought to Book

by Barbara Cornthwaite

  “Thanks! That will save some hassle.”

  I pottered around for a little while after she left. Reading was still hard for me, so I listened to a Bible app on my phone. Then I got dressed, searched Becky’s fridge, and made a plan for dinner: beef stew. Stew is better if it simmers all day, so I browned the chunks of beef right away with some onions and got out the potatoes and carrots to chop. I found a cutting board and potato peeler and set to work. As the pile of brown potato peels grew my mind wandered back to the subject I had set myself to ponder this week: Should I go to PNG? That was the first question to consider. If I got the answer to that one, the other questions would be easier. So, what about it?

  There was definitely a need at the mission school that I could fill. On the other hand there were lots of needs that I could fill all over the world. Just because I could be useful someplace didn’t mean I was necessarily supposed to go there. I would leave behind an awful lot if I were to go. I’d miss my church so much. And the Coles. And Becky, and a lot of other people that I saw every week. And Todd.

  Todd… Becky’s words yesterday came back to me: “it was the way he looked at you.” I felt myself blushing to think of it, even though no one else was there. If it was true that Todd wanted to see if we could make a life together, should I really go away before we could find out?

  I finished the potatoes and started in on the carrots. Becky and Kim both thought Todd was interested in me, but the fact remained that he hadn’t said anything. And can you blame him? said the voice in my head. You know how afraid you were to date again after Brian broke up with you all those years ago, and that was a very mild and brief sort of romance. Imagine if you had been married to him?

  “Very true,” I said aloud. I tried to remember anything else he had ever said about love or marriage, other than his revelation on that rock. It was difficult to recall much conversation about anything except the aspects of the cases we were involved in. And foster care. And the book club.

  “Number Fourteen!” I exclaimed. He had told me it was his favorite of the Elizabeth Barrett Browning poems he’d read for the book club meeting. I tossed the chopped carrots and potatoes into the stew pot with the meat, added some water and some beef broth, put the lid on, and set the pot on a low heat. Then I reached for my phone to look up Sonnet Fourteen.

  If thou must love me, let it be for nought

  Except for love’s sake only. Do not say

  “I love her for her smile—her look—her way

  Of speaking gently,—for a trick of thought

  That falls in well with mine, and certes brought

  A sense of pleasant ease on such a day”—

  For these things in themselves, Belovëd, may

  Be changed, or change for thee,—and love, so wrought,

  May be unwrought so. Neither love me for

  Thine own dear pity’s wiping my cheeks dry,—

  A creature might forget to weep, who bore

  Thy comfort long, and lose thy love thereby!

  But love me for love’s sake, that evermore

  Thou may’st love on, through love’s eternity.

  Yes, I could understand why he liked that one. It would be more accurate, I thought, if one could change it to say, “but love me for Love’s sake”—Love meaning God, because God is love. If one loves for God’s sake, the love will not change even if the object of the love does. I wondered if he had read it that way.

  And then there was Jason. I hadn’t even decided if I could like him as more than a friend. Oddly, that question hadn’t come up with Todd. In the words of Harriet Vane, “if I once gave way to Peter, I should go up like straw.” I’d been holding myself back from liking him, but I doubted that anyone, even Todd, had any misgivings about whether or not I could be in love with him. “That,” as Miss de Vine said drily to Harriet, “is moderately obvious.” It’s irritating to be so transparent.

  I looked at the clock. Time for a sandwich. I had thought I could make some homemade rolls to go with the stew, but I was getting exhausted and probably needed to take a nap. That’s another thing movies get wrong, I decided. They always seem to have the hero get knocked out and be unconscious for hours and then wake up and immediately fight his way out of a guarded building.

  I slept longer than I intended to, only waking when Becky came back with my laptop and my crate of stuff.

  “Mmm, that soup smells great!” she said. “Do you mind if we eat before we deal with your stuff? I’m starving.”

  “No problem. I’m hungry, too”

  When we’d finished eating and doing the dishes, we repaired to the living room.

  “Here’s the crate,” she said. “Do you mind if I look at those old books? I’ve been eying them for the past couple hours.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. I dug through the rest of the clutter in the crate to get to the Frisbees—the manual for a car I used to own, a ratty sweatshirt, two outdated college brochures, a rope used for tying something to the roof…

  “This is so cool,” said Becky. “The Collected Wit and Ballads of the Peasants of Many Lands. I can’t even find a date of publication on it.”

  I put down the old church bulletin I was looking at and peered over at the book that was sitting open on her lap. “Let’s see what I can tell you about it. For one thing, it’s quarto size.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well, paper was produced in giant sheets that were printed and folded into different sizes. If the big sheet of paper was folded in half and bound together, it was a folio; if it was folded and then cut into fours, it was a quarto; eight folds and it was an octavo. Most quarto books were about nine inches by twelve inches, like this one is.”

  “It has f’s instead of s’s sometimes. I’ve always wondered why they did that. I mean, there are actual s’s as well. Why didn’t they just use all regular s’s? Did they not have enough?”

  “Yeah, it’s a little confusing. The short answer is that the medieval scribes had a long s that was used in certain circumstances, like the first of two s’s that came together and at the beginning of words. When type was invented, they carried over that long s to print, but there was also an abbreviated long s that looked a lot like an f.”

  “It makes it really hard to read,” said Becky. “It looks like it says ‘for the pleafure of perfons in the prefent and times to come, so that none may be loft…’ It would take me ages to figure out what they were trying to say.”

  “You have to get used to it,” I said. “After a while you automatically see it as an s in your mind and it doesn’t bother you. Oh, and here’s another little thing that shows how old it is: see how whenever there’s a c and a t together or an s and a t together, there’s a little arc connecting them? That’s also leftover from medieval scribes. It got dropped somewhere in the seventeen hundreds. I’d say this book was printed somewhere between the late sixteen and early seventeen hundreds.”

  “Wow,” said Becky. I don’t think I’ve ever held anything that was quite this old before.”

  She studied the title page which sported a rather ugly woodcut of a peasant woman and tried to read the words underneath it. I looked at the page again. There was something familiar about it, even though I was pretty sure I hadn’t seen it before.

  “The water stains,” I said suddenly. “It has water stains like the Bradstreet manuscript. Let me see that.” I took the book into my own hands and looked at it more closely. Then I turned a page. The water stains were exactly in the same place and in the same pattern as those on the Bradstreet manuscript. Illumination was dawning in my mind. I turned to the flyleaf that should have been there—the blank page between the hard cover and frontispiece.

  “It’s gone,” I whispered. “Someone cut it out.” Part of the mystery was solved.

  Two hours later, Todd sat on Becky’s couch examining the book.

  “Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re telling me that the Bradstreet manuscript that was stolen was als
o a forgery?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And what happened to the original, then?”

  “There probably wasn’t one,” I said. “At least not since Anne Bradstreet sent hers off to the printer. The originals were all lost, just like everyone thought they were for several hundred years.”

  “And you’re saying that the manuscript the library had for years was manufactured relatively recently?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I think what happened was that someone who was very knowledgeable came across this book at some point. They knew that the paper would be the correct era, and they took out the flyleaf to use as the basis of a forged manuscript. Why they chose Anne Bradstreet to copy, I’m not sure, except that she was an easy poet to forge, since we have no examples of her penmanship. Interest in her work certainly revived in the twentieth century with the rise of feminism, so I doubt anyone forged her work earlier than that.”

  “So you think this book once belonged to the forger?”

  “Either that or he had access to it without a lot of supervision.”

  “And he cut out the empty page and created the manuscript which eventually ended up at that university.”

  “Right. It’s been done before—most notably by someone in the nineteenth century that tried to forge things from Robert Burns. He wasn’t very successful because he wasn’t good at copying Burns’s writing—we have lots of examples of it to compare fakes to—but the paper he used was fine.”

  “That makes sense. Now, where did this book come from?”

  “It was one of those that you found at Frank’s house and gave to me at the police station one day.”

  “And you don’t think Frank was the forger.” Todd said it as a statement rather than a question.

  “Not for a minute. I think he opened the book and saw the resemblance to the manuscript and knew something was fishy. I also think he wanted to be sure about it before he said anything. He knew what a blow it would be to the college to have it exposed as a fake. I think that’s why he was asking me about forgeries and emailed Professor Weatherill.”

  “The question is, where did he get this book, and when?”

  “I’m not sure, but the most recent shipment we got was from the estate of old Mr. Wilkes, who died recently.”

  “The book list that was out on the desk in your store when you found out someone had been in there—was that from the Wilkes estate?”

  “Yes! That’s right. What if someone was looking for this book?”

  “And when they couldn’t find it there, they went to your house to look for it.”

  “Ohhhh. And they couldn’t find it at either place because it was in my car the whole time.”

  Todd looked puzzled. “In your car?”

  “Yeah. I…uh…put it in there—put the whole stack in there—when you gave it to me at the station and then just kept forgetting to take them out.” There went any chance Todd might think me efficient and organized. He took this revelation without any noticeable shock.

  “I see. Well, I doubt whoever was looking for it would think to search your car.”

  “I wonder why they didn’t look at Frank’s house.”

  “They probably did. We can check for signs of that. But no one is living there right now, and chances are the would-be thief could take his time to search without ripping things apart. Probably no one would ever have known.”

  I sighed and leaned back on the sofa. “Then why steal the forged Bradstreet manuscript?”

  “My guess is that the forger, or maybe an associate of the forger, found out that Frank—or someone else—was wise to the fraud. They thought that if they could keep anyone from re-examining the manuscript, there would be no way to prove it was a fake.”

  “Do you think that’s who killed Frank?”

  “It’s the best motive we’ve come across yet.”

  “But if the manuscript was gone, why try to get the book as well?”

  “Either there’s something about the book that would lead us to the forger or else the forger was just trying to be doubly safe. It would be very hard to prove a fraud if both the manuscript and the book it came from vanished.”

  “I can see that,” I said. “So what is the next step?”

  “We need to find out if old Mr. Wilkes told anyone about this book. We’ll try to trace where he got the book from in the first place, although that might be difficult. We’ll have to look into his death, too. He might have been killed to keep him quiet and everyone assumed he died of natural causes. And we’ll need to see if Frank told anyone, too.”

  “In that email he wrote to Professor Weatherill he said he hadn’t told anyone.”

  “So he said, but we can’t be sure. And he might have told someone after he wrote the email. He mentioned it to you, after all. We also need to see if whoever donated the manuscript to the college knew it was a forgery or collected it in good faith. And find out where he got it from.”

  “You mean checking auction house records?”

  “Probably. Is that how collectors get their books?”

  “Sometimes. But there are also book dealers that keep an eye out for items that they know their clients would like.”

  Todd looked at his watch. “I’d better get going. We have a lot of new leads to pursue. I’m going to have to keep the book at the police station as evidence.”

  “Sure. Any luck with the security camera footage?”

  “Some. Facial recognition matched a couple different people who had police records, so we’re following up on that.”

  “It wasn’t Matt Wilkes, then?”

  “No. He was actually at work at the time. We can’t rule him out for some other things, but he isn’t the person that attacked you.”

  “Good.”

  Todd was at the front door, but he turned around to face me. “And Katrina—”

  “Oh, are you leaving, Todd?” said Becky, coming into the room. “I was about to offer you coffee, but I guess it’s too late now.”

  He smiled at her. “Yes, sorry. I need to get going. Next time.” He opened the door to leave.

  “Were you going to tell me something?” I said.

  “Yes. Yes, I was going to tell you something.” He swung the door almost closed again. “I wanted to tell you to be careful. Don’t tell anyone about finding the book or what you suspect about the manuscript being a forgery. We don’t know who it is that is so desperate that the facts not be known, so just don’t talk to anyone about it.”

  “That will be easy,” I said. “I’m not talking to anyone anyway.”

  “You’re getting better all the time, and it won’t be long until you’re interacting with people from the college and talking to people about the bookstore. Just don’t say any more about anything that isn’t already public knowledge. Ok?”

  “Ok.”

  “Thanks.” He patted me briefly on the shoulder and went out the door. I stood there absentmindedly and watched him get into his car and drive away.

  Nothing exciting happened for another week, unless you consider canceling things to be exciting. The May meeting of the book club, my involvement with Sunday School, and my reservation for the English Department end-of-the-year party were all abandoned. I felt that I had new appreciation for a whole host of characters who were incarcerated, and I toyed with the idea of changing my username for online banking to LittleDorrit. After a few more days with Becky I put my foot down, and the Coles picked me and my suitcase up and took us back to my apartment.

  “Are you sure you’re going to be ok now?” Kim asked for the fourth time.

  “Yes, I’m sure. It’s been two weeks, and though I’m not totally back to normal, as long as I get plenty of rest and don’t overdo things, I’m good.”

  “Well, we stocked your fridge and cleaned up your apartment as much as we could. I’m sure some things got put in the wrong places, though.”

  “You stocked my fridge?” I remembered what had happened the last time some
one did that. They’d forgotten that a single person doesn’t eat nearly as much as a family and I had to give away half of the perishable items before they went bad.

  “Don’t worry,” said Ed. “Most of it is in cans or jars or else frozen. It should last until whenever you need it. Plus, we thought convenience foods would be easier for you to fix while you’re recovering.”

  “That’s a relief. Thanks. Can you stay for a little while? I could make lemonade or something.”

  “Wish we could,” said Kim, “But we’d better get back. Mia’s not doing great right now.”

  “Oh? What’s up?”

  “Her birthmother got out of prison last month and the judge has ordered supervised visits once a month. The first one is in a couple days.”

  “Oh, gosh. That must be traumatic.”

  “Yeah. She remembers being locked in the trunk of a car for hours while her mom was getting high and doing who-knows-what to get more money for drugs.”

  I just shook my head. “You’d better go home. Give Mia a big hug from Aunt Katrina.”

  “Maybe in another week you’ll be well enough to stand all our noise.”

  “You’d better believe it,” I said. “And if you don’t invite me soon, I’ll just show up on your doorstep demanding food and hugs.”

  When they were gone, I made an exploratory trip around the neighborhood in my car. I wanted to make sure I felt safe driving before I made a longer trip. I felt a little shaky and uncertain, but I thought that if I drove a little every day, I’d soon get used to it again.

  Chapter 15

  Three days later I determined that I really needed to do something about the bookstore. I’d decided not to sell the building; at least not yet. After a lot of prayer, I was sure that God wasn’t asking me to go to PNG this fall, so after sending an email to Carrie and breaking the news, the next step was to get rid of all the books in the store. I wasn’t sure if I would save the money I made from the books or invest it or use it to fund a ministry (like Kim’s ministry coffeehouse idea), but I could settle that later. The first step was to actually sell the books.