The Ghost and the Bogus Bestseller

by Cleo Coyle

  “According to the local constabulary, Dr. Ridgeway got out of his car on the highway close to midnight. At that point, they surmise a vehicle swerved into the shoulder and struck him down. Kevin died instantly, and the driver fled. There aren’t any witnesses—at least none they can find.”

  “How did they know the time was close to midnight?”

  “The impact shattered Kevin’s watch, stopping it.”

  “Did his car break down?”

  “No—and the circumstances are bewildering. Except for one broken taillight, the car had no mechanical problems or flat tires. Chief Ciders said Kevin’s vehicle was in perfect working condition. The engine was still idling when they found it. Why he left his car on a dark highway, no one can say.”

  I shivered. “Why didn’t the driver who hit him stop?”

  “Frightened, perhaps. Chief Ciders suggested the driver wasn’t aware they’d hit anything but a deer or raccoon. The lights are sparse on that stretch of highway, and there was fog.”

  Brainert pulled a slip of paper out of his lapel pocket. “In any case, Amy gave me a number for the resort in Sardinia where her mother can be reached, if you’d like to phone her. Or I will if that’s—”

  “I’ll do it. I’m going to have to call the school anyway. According to their rules, truancy is grounds for expulsion from the program, which means I’ll have to talk them into letting Spencer and Amy back in. And I swear the cost of the international call to Amy’s mother is coming out of his allowance.”

  Why not put him on bread and water, too?

  “Oh, shut up!”

  My friend blinked. “Excuse me?”

  “Sorry, Brainert, I wasn’t talking to you.”

  “It’s all right. I know you’re upset about your son. But, listen, I brought you something else besides Spencer and his little precocious friend.”

  “You did?”

  I waited for Brainert to reach into his pocket and reveal his surprise, but what he brought me was far too large for that.

  “It’s in the back,” he said, rising. “Follow me . . .”

  CHAPTER 14

  Pandora’s Box of Books

  A box without hinges, key, or lid, yet golden treasure inside is hid.

  —J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit

  BRAINERT LED ME across the Community Events space to the store’s office. Sadie and I kept a shared desk here, along with a second computer and promotional materials for our shop. A wall of metal filing cabinets, older than the pyramids, stood back here, too—and they contained much more than the store’s purchasing history.

  Not long ago, I agreed to take on a special project: the archiving and digitizing of papers once owned by a New York private investigator murdered on these premises. Jack Shepard’s files were an absolute mess, but I didn’t mind. I found reading his case notes, in his very own handwriting, downright thrilling.

  At the moment, however, Jack’s files were not our focus.

  Using the tip of his polished oxford, Brainert nudged a large, open cardboard box on the floor.

  “It’s Dr. Ridgeway’s reading library, or what’s left of it. His landlady handed it over to me this morning before the funeral.”

  “A single box? That’s not much of a library.”

  “A grad student from the Poli-Sci Department removed all pertinent papers and books in Kevin’s discipline. This is what’s left.”

  “What about his daughter? Will she want them?”

  “Not these. Kevin already left all his money and some personal items to Amy. His academic books he left to the university. The rest—his leisure reading—he willed to me. I’ll use any proceeds from the sale to support my restored theater. Kevin would have liked that.”

  “How did you even know Ridgeway? You mentioned Poli-Sci. That’s Political Science, and you’re in the English Department.”

  “We became friends through the Faculty Affairs Committee. Kevin supported my vision for expanding classrooms into the community. He even prepared a lecture for my new comparative film series: ‘Cold Truths about the Cold War’ with a double-feature screening of Fail-Safe and Dr. Strangelove.”

  Brainert sighed. “I’ll have to ask one of his grad students to give the lecture in his place. As for the books—” He nudged the box again. “I leave the estimate of value to you and Sadie.”

  “I’m surprised he never came to our store.”

  “Most weekends he spent in Boston—to visit with Amy. He was actually born here in Quindicott, before his parents moved to Massachusetts. They’re both deceased now, and Kevin is buried right next to them in the family plot.”

  “If he liked Boston so much, and his daughter was there, why did he move back to Quindicott?”

  “It wasn’t his original plan. When he took the position at St. Francis, he thought he could commute, but the long drives proved too taxing, so he relocated last summer.”

  “Is that when he divorced Amy’s mother?”

  “She divorced him. Anyway, in answer to your question of why you never saw him, he had a favorite bookstore in Boston. Old habits die hard.”

  You said it, fella.

  Quiet, Jack.

  I placed the box on the desk. “You didn’t want to keep anything in here?”

  Brainert shrugged. “I only glanced at it. Kevin’s taste ran to military novels and political thrillers. Not my cup of cocoa . . .”

  A statement like that from a professor of American literature was no surprise to me. But I knew it wasn’t meant as a put-down, either, because my friend was far from a literary snob. In fact, Dr. J. Brainert Parker’s personal enthusiasms for such writers as Poe, Conan Doyle, Ambrose Bierce, even his distant relative H. P. Lovecraft were frowned upon by some members of his own department.

  Childhood affections die hard, too, however, and once upon a time, “the Brain” along with me and upperclassman Seymour Tarnish were complete genre geeks, devouring paperbacks when we should have been doing homework.

  We’d spend summer afternoons roaming Prescott Woods in search of hobbits and elves and phantoms. In the evenings, we’d tell one another spooky stories in the dark. Never once did we consider the dog-eared paperbacks that we pored over were “beneath” the assigned reading by our teachers.

  We loved books. We loved stories. Period.

  Then I grew up, went to college, and received my degree in correct opinions. For a time, I even played the “my taste is better than yours” game, an argument older than Dumas versus Balzac (or maybe Cain and Abel).

  Now that I was a bookseller, working alongside a woman with decades in the trade, I no longer dealt in theory but with the world of active readers. While some customers still loudly played the literary status game, the vast majority quietly prowled our stacks, making their selections and opening new books with the same innocent joy and excitement that I once did.

  I had come full circle. In our little shop, we loved books. We loved stories. And we loved our customers. As Sadie put it: “We’re here to serve them, not judge them.”

  Academia, on the other hand, was rooted in judgment. Despite our shared devotion to books, professors and booksellers would always inhabit different planes. Of course, we sometimes came together to achieve the same goal.

  That’s why Brainert’s sudden scowl surprised me. He directed it toward a stack of flyers advertising an appearance by Bentley Prize winner Dr. Roger Leeds.

  “I’m disappointed Leeds failed to attend Ridgeway’s funeral. We were all on the Faculty Affairs Committee, and he knew the man as well as I did.”

  Brainert tapped the flyers with his index finger. It wasn’t a gentle tap, more of an angry woodpecker assaulting a utility pole.

  “I suppose he’s too busy with his newfound fame. It’s not every day that one wins the Bentley Prize for Literary Criticism—as he’ll incessantly remind you ove
r cocktails at the faculty lounge.”

  I raised an eyebrow at that. Roger Leeds never struck me as a braggart. A long-toiling professor in Brainert’s English Department, Leeds became an overnight sensation when the Guardian, Paris Match, the Oxford Review of Books, and the New York Times collectively raved about his study of colonialism’s impact on Western literature.

  Soon after the Bentley Prize nomination, Buy the Book hosted Dr. Leeds for a talk and signing. The event was standing room only, and we sold every book in stock. Now that he’d been awarded the honor, we scheduled a second event—much to Brainert’s chagrin, apparently. His envy was barely disguised as he told me about the man’s appearances on NPR and 60 Minutes.

  Enough! Jack suddenly thundered. Will ya throw Puppy Dog Face a bone already?

  Excuse me?

  Change the subject!

  Oh. Yes. Good idea.

  I pointed to the box on the desk. “Brainert, why don’t we see what’s inside?”

  I said throw him a bone, not more dusty tomes!

  Like it or not, Jack, this is the business I’m in—and unless you zip it, I’ll send you back to your dusty tomb!

  “Pen?” Brainert touched my shoulder.

  “Yes?”

  “The box?”

  “Oh, yes . . .” I pushed aside the layer of brown packaging paper and almost immediately struck gold!

  The second book down, in one of two neat stacks, was a rare autographed copy of The Hunt for Red October—a 1984 Naval Institute Press first edition. The holy grail of Tom Clancy collectables, copies of this hardcover have sold for over one thousand dollars. This one was in pristine condition.

  I pulled out the next book on the stack, a signed 1974 edition of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré, also highly prized by collectors. Under that was a copy of Ralph Peters’s Red Army.

  Another rarity turned up next: a first edition of Stephen Coonts’s debut novel, Flight of the Intruder. Though only in fair condition, it was also autographed, which upped the value. Underneath that was an out-of-print Daniel P. Maddox hardcover with a grim black cover, Arms and Armor of the Middle Ages, and a few more thrillers of much lesser resale value. However, at the very bottom of the first stack, I found a signed Donald I. Fine first printing of Dale Brown’s Flight of the Old Dog.

  I was flying myself, jazzed by this treasure trove of discoveries. Sadie would be even more thrilled. Her online customers included book collectors with editions like these on their wish lists.

  What I turned up in the second stack, however, gave me another kind of shock, one that pulled me right back to the carnage at 1919 Pine Tree Avenue.

  “Why in the world would Dr. Ridgeway have this?”

  Brainert tensed. “Excuse me?”

  I held up the red couch edition of Shades of Leather. “Dr. Ridgeway’s reading was more diverse than you led me to believe.”

  Diverse? Jack cracked. Yeah, that’s one word for it.

  CHAPTER 15

  A Shade Too Many

  No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

  —Ted Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss)

  UNLIKE MOST OF the collectibles in the box, Shades of Leather was unsigned. But its condition was pristine. Checking the copyright page, I gasped at the sight of the little 1.

  “Brainert, this is a first printing!”

  My friend shuffled uneasily. I assumed the discovery of the racy potboiler among his friend’s collection had surprised or embarrassed him.

  Well, he wouldn’t be embarrassed when he got the money for its resale. “Dr. Ridgeway must have bought this the week it was released.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because the book is presently in its seventh printing. There are at least a quarter million copies out there now. But the first print run was small. Maybe five thousand copies of this first edition exist in the world. Most people weren’t even aware of the book until it became a viral topic in social media and began climbing bestseller lists, weeks after its initial release.”

  From the way the hardcover handled, I could tell this copy had never been cracked. “I don’t understand it. Dr. Ridgeway didn’t even bother to read the book—”

  “Unless he read the other copy,” Brainert said.

  “What other copy?”

  “The one still in the box.”

  “What in the world?”

  I found a second copy of Shades of Leather, the black couch edition this time. At that point I was not at all surprised to find the blue suede edition under that. I quickly went through the rest of the box and found three more copies of Shades of Leather.

  What kind of a collector was Kevin Ridgeway? I wondered.

  The kind who collects books men read with only one hand.

  Behave, Jack.

  I stared down Brainert. “There are six copies of Shades of Leather here, and they’re all first printings. Do you have a clue why Ridgeway had these?”

  Brainert simultaneously shrugged and shook his head. “Perhaps he was speculating.”

  “But this book is way out of his taste range. And there was absolutely no hint it would become a bestseller, let alone a collectible. It’s a first novel published with a modest promotional campaign. Shades of Leather was just as likely to end up on a remaindered pile as on half the country’s nightstands.”

  “There’s no mystery here,” Brainert insisted. “They’re probably review copies. Keven wrote the occasional critique—”

  “Publishers are on tight budgets these days. A publicity department wouldn’t send six copies of the same book. A reviewer only needs one—”

  As I lifted one of the bestsellers, a slip of paper fluttered to the floor. Brainert and I nearly conked heads diving for it. I was quicker and snapped up the flimsy sheet.

  “Twenty-four copies of Shades of Leather, sent directly from the publisher’s warehouse in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Brainert, this is a packing slip!”

  “Whose name is on it?”

  “There is no name, and no address, either. But it says there were twenty-four copies. Where are the other eighteen copies? Do you have a guess?”

  Brainert’s response was a blank stare, so I filled in the blanks for him.

  “Since your friend made a hobby of collecting signed first editions, it appears he intended to have the author sign these, perhaps to resell the autographed copies—but again, it’s a puzzle. At the first printing, he could not have known the book would be a hit, so why buy an entire case? He must have had some personal connection with the author. Is that it? Did he know Jessica Swindell?”

  “Not that I’m aware of—”

  “How about a woman named Emma Hudson? Did Ridgeway know her? Did he have any friends on Pine Tree Avenue?”

  “Pine Tree Avenue? That area is rather on the wrong side of the tracks. I doubt Kevin knew anyone there. Why do you ask?”

  I related the ugly details of our elegant customer’s final hours. Brainert was appalled by the story, but he insisted the woman must have been unbalanced, and Kevin’s death—and possession of six copies of Jessica Swindell’s first printing—was merely a happenstance.

  Nix to that! Jack cried in my head. Happenstance doesn’t just happen when it comes to two bizarre deaths in one small town, both with unexplainable links to the same potboiler. Show your friend the mug shot.

  I handed Brainert a copy of Shades of Leather. “Look at the author portrait, and tell me if you recognize that woman.”

  Brainert barely glanced at the photo before dropping the book on the desk. “I don’t recognize her.”

  “You hardly looked at it.” I forced the hardcover back into his hands. “Come on, apply your memory. Did you ever see anyone like her with Kevin Ridgeway? Could she be a grad student at St. Francis? Maybe a junior member of the faculty? The wife
or daughter of a faculty member?”

  “No, no, and no! You’re making something out of nothing, Pen!”

  “How can you say that? Emma Hudson’s death is not nothing!”

  “That’s not what I meant—”

  “Listen to me, even before Emma’s death, I had questions about this book.”

  “What do you mean? What sort of questions?”

  I tapped the publisher’s logo, emblazoned on the spine. “I’ve dealt with Salient House many times, for signings, sales campaigns, publicity events.”

  “And?”

  “I formally asked if Jessica Swindell would consider a signing with us. I promised we’d advertise in Newport, Providence, and Boston, that we’d move hundreds of copies. The reply was one sentence: ‘Thank you for your inquiry, but Ms. Swindell does not do signings or public appearances.’”

  “So? Historically, plenty of authors have shunned the spotlight. You’ve never heard of J. D. Salinger?”

  “Salinger may have been a famous recluse, but we knew plenty about him—he was born in Manhattan; served in the army during the Second World War; published short stories in Collier’s and the New Yorker, one of which he drew on to create Holden Caulfield.” I turned to the dust jacket’s back flap. “Read it—”

  Jessica Swindell is an American author.

  This is her first novel.

  “So?” Brainert shrugged. “Ms. Swindell wishes to remain mysterious. I never thought I’d say this, but—” The academic in him shuddered. “Have you checked with Wikipedia?”

  “I did—”

  You did? Jack interrupted. I never noticed you grilling some shady character named Wicked Pete.

  Ignoring the ghost, I told Brainert what I found in the online encyclopedia (got that, Jack?). Under Jessica Swindell, there was no more than a stub, repeating the same book jacket bio.

  “Then Jessica Swindell is obviously a pseudonym.” Brainert practically rolled his eyes. “You know very well all sorts of authors write under pen names, for all sorts of reasons, including privacy.”

  “Privacy? Are you kidding? This author published a seminude photo of herself on her book’s back cover!”