A Slepyng Hound to Wake

by Vincent McCaffrey

  “Because he told it in front of my mother.”

  “So? Would she have called him a liar?”

  “She would have winked.”

  “Did she wink?”

  “Not that time.”

  Della brushed the hair from her lips. “You’ve never told me a story before …”

  “I guess I didn’t have any to tell.”

  “Or is it you never gave the story a chance? Your dad has his story. What’s yours?”

  Henry could not help but think of Eddy Perry then. Eddy had found his story in the midst of everything.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Sure you do. You’re in the middle of it, aren’t you? It’s all around you, isn’t it? Isn’t it just a matter of whether or not you think it’s worth the telling? And whether you have someone to tell it to? Your dad told the stories he wanted to tell, and he told them to me because I listened.”

  Henry had no answer for that. It sounded true enough.

  Behind them now was a barely wavering chain of cars, as far as he could see, holding steady in the road as the world rushed away. It felt just like that. Such a familiar sensation, sitting there in the back of the truck looking at a world that passed away as he sat still and watched.

  Chapter Nineteen

  Her father owned a clothing store in White Plains. I guess he lost it to the discounters. I’m not sure. But I know they didn’t have any money.”

  Barbara consumed one end of a burrito. Henry sat back in his chair, his eyes looking over the line of people waiting to pick up their orders on the other side of the small room. The tables between were filled with students. The clatter of talk was mixed with the tinny sound of Spanish guitar from small speakers high in the corner and dampened by the metallic hum of the air conditioner. The standing line was mostly middle-aged men looking sullen and impatient, perhaps anxious to get back to a pre-season football game on the television, their eyes fixed on the people in the open kitchen behind the counter, as if staring would make them work faster.

  “You knew her at Boston University?” Henry asked.

  “No. I was graduated before she came. But Alcott & Poe was on a list of job possibilities at the university employment office. They’re always sending me people—or at least they were when I could afford to be hiring. I think she found me that way.”

  “She must have been pretty smart if she got some kind of scholarship. Boston University isn’t cheap.”

  Barbara shrugged. “She’s smart, but that’s not how she made it. Her husband paid for it.”

  “I thought they weren’t married.”

  Barbara shook her head. “Not Jim. Before Jim. She was married right out of high school. Some old guy I never met and she never talked about. It came up once. She didn’t discuss it. One of his kids showed up at the store to talk to her. He had passed away and he had grown kids from his previous marriage. She was upset afterward and told me a little more than I think she wanted. But they were long divorced at that point. I don’t think he left her anything. He did pay for her college, though. I know that.”

  “What was her married name?”

  “Weiss. And she called herself Sherry then. They called her Sherry when she was a kid. She had dropped the ‘Sherry’ by the time she first applied for work at the store. Sharon is her real name.”

  The burrito was gone. Barbara’s ability to inhale food had not changed. Henry worked again at his own meal as Barbara watched him.

  Her face changed with another thought. “She’s really a self-made woman, you know. I’ve seen a picture. She was cute in a girlish kind of way. A little chubby. Her hair was dark brown then, and she had braces all the way through college. I guess the old guy paid for that too.”

  “Do you think she married him for his money? Or does that seem too mercenary?”

  Barbara shrugged again. There was a flicker to her eyebrows. It was clear to Henry that such thoughts had long been buried in Barbara’s mind.

  “No. I think she made her way the best she could. It’s pretty hard to judge people at a distance. And everybody makes mistakes. But she’s always been square with me.”

  Henry was not satisfied.

  “People who do things like that don’t suddenly become dishonest. They have done things before.”

  Uncertainty came back to Barbara’s face. She was not ready to believe him.

  “It just never occurred to me. Why would she lie about something like that? Just for the money? What if she were caught? It’s so much effort for so little. If she wrote the book herself, why say Jim did it?”

  He had imagined a dozen reasons. But it mattered what the real reason might be. “It’s a guess. I don’t know. You say she has never stolen from you. But I know the way you deal with money. I’ll bet you don’t really know. … The money—hell! A typical author might get a ten- or twenty-thousand-dollar advance, if they’re lucky. If the book doesn’t make it, that’s it. Nine out of ten books don’t make it. Right? Jim Frankowski’s previous book is a good example. But Duggan is going to make millions on that one book alone. He could give her just ten percent—less than he gives his agent—and he would still be in the millions, and she would end up with at least a hundred thousand dollars. … Yes. The money.”

  The sound of Barbara’s protest weakened. “But if she has the talent to write, wouldn’t she want to write for herself?”

  Henry held his burrito in both hands to keep it together. “She might. But then again, she sees all of those other good writers who can barely make a living. Why struggle?”

  Barbara protested again. “Personal pride.”

  Henry had an idea about that. “She may have sacrificed that long ago.”

  “But she has it. I see it every day. Look at her. She’s worked hard. And why put so much into the store, if all she wants is money? There’s no money in selling books. It doesn’t make sense.”

  Henry stated his case again. “It doesn’t make sense to me that Duggan stole another man’s story.”

  Barbara studied the distance between them rather than meet his eyes. “Sharon and I are so different. It would be so easy to be at odds over everything. Remember how you and I used to argue? But she makes the effort to get along—even more than I do. And I’ve let her know a dozen times how grateful I am that she decided to invest her money in the store. I told her then that it wasn’t her wisest move. I warned her of the risk. I made her think about it for two weeks before she did it.”

  Henry nodded. “Maybe that’s where her pride is, then? She’s worked at the store for almost fifteen years. Maybe she did it to save the store?”

  In the half hour since they had met for dinner, Barbara’s face had gone from happy—simply that he wanted to have dinner with her—to stunned, and wishing she did not believe what Henry had suggested.

  She said, “I’m not going to be able to sleep tonight. You’ve put something into my head that I’m going to have to deal with.”

  He had worried over this for two days before asking her to have dinner with him.

  “I had to tell you. What else could I do? I’m sorry. … But you can’t just confront her with all this. You have to have something more than my dark thoughts. If I’m wrong, you’ll be hurting someone you owe a great deal to. She’d quit. If she demanded that you liquidate stock to pay her back, it would be all over for Alcott & Poe. I think you should wait. I told you at the start that what I was going to say was just between us for now. I just want you to be aware … I want you to be careful.”

  Barbara turned her head and watched the men working in the open kitchen. “I think she loves the store. I think you’re right about that. She’s always spent extra time getting the entries right and straightening shelves and doing the little things. Maybe she’s not doing as well since she lost Jim, but that will pass, I think. She was awfully good before that. … But this thing with Jim’s book is too much to believe.”

  “I’m sorry. Should I have kept it to myself?”

  “No �
��” She reached a hand out over the table and put it on his. “Thank you.”

  He leaned back, looking for the safety of a little more distance over their small table.

  “What will you do?”

  She smiled, obviously unsure. “I’ll keep it to myself. And if it turns out you were wrong, I’ll still keep it to myself. I won’t remind you every now and again that you were wrong. Not often, anyway.”

  His own attempt to smile failed. “Some things pass. Some things work out. Some things go in cycles, and other things just flatten out and end. … You’ll work it out. You have enough to worry about just to save the store. But I’m not sure the book business is going to come back. Not the way we knew it, anyway.”

  Barbara shook her head, as if to clear it. “What’s next? What’s coming?”

  “A different world. It’s a new century. A new millennium. At least as different from the one we knew, as the twentieth century was from the nineteenth,” Henry leaned forward so that he could speak more softly. “You know, there were people around town, when I was growing up, who remembered horse trolleys in Brookline Village. My dad used to say I was blessed because I didn’t have to carry ice up three flights of stairs, and he still called the refrigerator an icebox.”

  Barbara huffed at the thought. “I suppose. But the future looks pretty bleak just now. I wish I could have the first ten years of the store back. I loved that time. I never seriously thought then that it would ever end.”

  Henry smiled. “It was pretty good,”

  Her eyes were on his now. “It never occurred to me then that you would leave.”

  How was he going to answer that? She knew why he had left. She was looking for support at a bad time and he was not the person who could give her what she needed. He nodded toward the young faces at the tables around them to avoid her eyes.

  “I don’t think any of them look very far into the future. We were younger then. You deal with things as they come at that age. Someday they’ll be standing in line to get the takeout.”

  She was still looking at him. Her hands were folded together on the edge of the table. “Do you remember the day you first took me to the Gardner Museum? You couldn’t find a parking space and it was raining so hard I didn’t want to get out of the van and walk. I asked you why you wanted to go to an old museum, anyway. You described how it looked inside, with all that medieval stuff, and then you said you loved it because it was a piece of the past that hadn’t changed. It was something permanent. … I thought my little store was something permanent.”

  “You didn’t have Isabella Stewart Gardner’s money. … But if you had, would you have spent it on a little old bookstore?” He saw her face go blank. He had stepped in the wrong direction, and tried to salvage the idle thought. “—Well, you might have. You are the type. Most people would have spent their money on a big piece of crap in the suburbs and snorted the rest away in technology stocks.”

  She smiled at that. “No. Don’t forget, when I opened the store, all we had were the new books. You were the one who started going to the library sales to find the out-of-print titles people kept asking for.”

  “You encouraged me.”

  “You were incorrigible. I learned that much from you.”

  “I was just learning as I went along.” He did not add that he still felt that way.

  She was pinning him to the wall with those eyes. She said, “It worked then. What happened?”

  He said, “The world changed.” His voice weakened with the thought.

  Her smile was gone again, with the sudden sadness darkening the lines of her face. He wished he could hold her just awhile, with no consequences. She clasped her own hands together for support.

  “I wish I could stop time, like in a book. I wish I lived in a museum.” The way she said it startled him. It was what he heard in the tone of her voice. He knew those words.

  “My mother used to say that. … You know, she was the one who used to walk me over to the Gardner on rainy days when I was a kid.”

  “You told me that, the first time we went. That’s how I knew you were serious. You told me it was your mother’s favorite place.”

  “I guess I did.”

  “It’s a beguiling thought. But if we did live in a museum like your Mrs. Jack Gardner did, it would mean someone else would have to take care of us. There has to be a Mr. Jack. There’s always a dark side to it.”

  He tried to shrug the idea off. “It’s just a daydream. We can’t preserve the past.” He knew he was lying. He did not believe his own words. And she knew it too. She forgave him for it.

  “Is that all we’re doing then? Should I give it up? Should I let the store go?”

  He had always liked her eyes. He did not avoid them now. He had always liked to look into her eyes before.

  “No. The past isn’t finished with us yet. Not yet. I think it’s the past that preserves us.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Henry parked the truck in the shade of a tree cut short to make way for electric lines and grown thick with smaller branches. Dover, New Hampshire, seemed like that kind of town to him, cut oddly by road and river, but thick with houses in the spaces between.

  The house he wanted was a small white box opened at the top by the flaps of dormers, wedged beside an overgrown cedar never trimmed and now twice the height of the roof.

  A little girl, perhaps four or five, dressed only in OshKosh overalls, dug with a spoon at the dirt beside the short walk. Beside her was a plastic cup with a cut flower from a hydrangea bush bursting from the top.

  Henry watched her work for a moment, holding his brown paper package with both hands in front of him, until she took the time to look up.

  “Is this where Janet Fowler lives?”

  The girl ignored him to dig a moment more, before finally speaking. “Do you think the ants will eat it?”

  Henry considered this before answering.

  “It looks so much like a pile of ice cream. They might make a mistake. But I don’t think so … I think they will know.”

  She nodded. “My mother is in the kitchen.” Her diction was precise.

  Henry rang the doorbell. The door was open to the screen and he saw her in the half-light walk forward from the back of the house. She did not open the screen door.

  She had the look of someone he already knew. This was the woman at the beach from the picture in the plastic frame. She was about the same height as Eddy Perry had been. Not as thin. Her hair was cut too short. She was wrapped in an oversize apron which hung oddly like a dress, with her legs exposed below and her feet in cheap rubber sandals. She seemed tired.

  She nodded when he said her name.

  “I’m sorry to trouble you. I wondered if you had a moment to talk. … I knew Eddy Perry.”

  She still had said nothing, but looked at him from head to foot, her eyes stopping at the package in his hands, then at the little girl, and then across the street at his truck.

  She spoke up for the girl to hear. “My daddy had a truck like that. See that, Honey? That truck looks just like the one your grandfather had once when I was your age.”

  The girl stood and looked at it, resting the back of one hand on her hip with the spoon dangling from the other.

  Henry said, “I’m not sure I can say what I wanted to in front of your daughter.”

  The woman nodded, and pushed the door open.

  “Come sit in the kitchen. … Honey, you stay in the yard.”

  The girl sat down to her work, and Henry followed the mother to the narrow room at the back where a table, folded down to half its size, was covered with cut vegetables.

  Glass jars were lined up on the counter. Two pots steamed on the stove. The kitchen heat was only slightly relieved by a fan in the window over the sink.

  She spoke to him without looking, and adjusted the heat on the stove. “Just bought some fresh tomatoes and green beans. I like to put them up for winter.” She waved him to a chair away from the stove, by the
back door.

  Henry had never seen home canning before, and he watched as they spoke.

  “You know Eddy has died?” He felt awkward beginning like that. The thought had only just occurred to him she might not know.

  She did not look at him to answer. She ladled loose lumps of tomato from one of the pots into mason jars set in a tight cluster on the counter.

  “You mean killed. … Someone killed him. That much I know. I read it in the paper. My mother brought it to me one day. … She had held it aside for a week before showing it to me.”

  Henry wiped the sweat from his face with his hand and then wiped his hand on his pants.

  “Yes. Well, it’s not a long story, but it’s difficult to explain. … In any case, I knew him, and I came by some of the contents of his apartment.”

  “He didn’t have much. I know that.”

  “Not a lot, by most standards, but he did have this.”

  Henry handed her the package.

  She wiped her hands on her apron and ripped it open from one end until the top half was exposed, then put it down on top of a stool.

  “Is that the thing he always talked about writing?”

  “Yes.”

  She turned the flame down on another pot and shook her head.

  “I guess he did that much. He made a lot of promises he couldn’t keep. I guess that’s one he made good on.”

  There was a matter-of-factness to what she said that made it sound bitter.

  Henry answered, “Better than made good. It’s a fine book. He wrote something extraordinary.”

  This made her turn to look at him again. She studied his face until he was uncomfortable, and then tapped the manuscript with a long spoon.

  “He couldn’t have written this if he was doing dope.”

  “No. He was off drugs … for quite a while, evidently.”

  She studied Henry for another uncomfortable moment before she spoke again.

  “You came up here to give this to me? Is that all?”