We arrived late last night. Rush-hour traffic on I-75 in Detroit had been a mess, and by the time we got through it, Mickey was pointing both hands to the twelve. Almost exactly midnight. The night shadows had taken over the empty center of town and the streetlights weren’t working—or maybe there were no streetlights. I had stared out Lulu’s front windshield with the strange feeling that the dog and I weren’t alone. Something unearthly floated in front of the windshield. The hair on my arm shot straight up. Perhaps Aunt Gertrude’s ghost was coming to haunt me in new ways she hadn’t thought up when she was alive. On closer inspection, I realized it was a torn plastic bag floating across the hood of the car.
It was ridiculous for a woman of my age and experience to sit in a parked car at midnight like a coward. I had climbed Pico de Orizaba, the tallest mountain in Mexico, at twenty-three, bungee-jumped from the bridge to nowhere in southern California at twenty, streaked naked through the streets of San Francisco at nineteen, and run away from my guardian at sixteen. This one little thing, I could do.
At the front door, Pikachu caught the light from the sliver of moon that rose above Main Street and winked back, doing his best to encourage me. I placed the key in the lock, but it wouldn’t fit. I felt in my rucksack for my penlight and clicked it on. Rust and years of dust had worn away the hardware around the knob. But the cylinder where the key fit was new. Someone had replaced the lock.
Without warning, a black form jumped out from the top of the awning. A single raspy bark from the old dog was followed by a sharp feline screech. “Piewacket?” It couldn’t be. There was no way the cat could still be alive. Unless it hadn’t used up all its lives.
It jumped into the shadows and was gone.
A frosty ripple went up my spine, as if someone were trailing a block of ice along my vertebrae. A brisk breeze stirred the brittle leaves on the trees nearby. I refused to be scared of black cats and old curses.
I returned to Lulu and called Reeba Sweeney, the real-estate agent at Respect Realty. Her company had been given the job of maintaining the property by the administrator who handled Aunt Gertrude’s estate. It was late, but her letter said to call anytime. So I did. She sounded angry at first. But when I gave her my name she changed her tone and promised to meet me at the store in the morning. I was secretly relieved. Another night of cramped sleep in the front seat was better than a sleepless night in Aunt Gertrude’s upstairs apartment.
* * *
Now, squinting at the bright September sunshine, the morning didn’t improve my spirits. I shook off my craving for a cup of coffee and walked past the vacant grocery store that abutted Aunt Gertrude’s building. The bookstore was the last commercial structure in Truhart’s business district. Echo Lake’s public beach and dock rose up at the end of the street. Several acres of vacant land lay behind the store. I used to hide in those woods and smoke cigarettes when Aunt Gertrude went on what I called a “reading rampage.”
A small figure stood on the curb, a smile plastered to her face.
The dog paused, as if he thought the black cat might jump out again. If I didn’t have a small crowd of people following me, I would have told him to buck up and take it like a man. I kept my mouth shut. No need to embarrass him in front of his new admirers.
I hopped up the crumbling curb and marched toward the front door. When I was younger, two windows on the top floor and the larger storefront window on the first floor made me think the store was alive. The notion was stronger now. The paper on the large front window was ripped in a U, giving it a grotesque smile.
I looked up, expecting to see the blood-red shroud of the awning. Instead, I saw the sky through jagged holes. Years of rain and snow had taken their toll. I leaned to the side, wondering if I could still see the words scrawled across the front window of the two-story building. The ones that were supposed to make me proud because they were my own name. But all I could make out were Books from . . . H . . . owner Gertrude . . .
She had called this place Books from the Hart in a contrived reference to the town she had lived in her whole life.
I always called it Books from Hell.
The odd little dark-haired woman, wearing a coat that looked like a honeycomb, stepped forward and offered her hand. “You must be Gertrude Brown. I’m Reeba Sweeney.”
I had to bend low to reach her and wondered if this was what it felt like to meet a hobbit. “Sorry I woke you up last night. And please, call me Trudy.” Never, ever Gertrude.
She wrinkled her short nose with a loud laugh. “No problem. Sorry I couldn’t get away to open up for you.”
“I was surprised the lock had been changed.”
“Uh . . . yes. Just recently. Someone broke in and got a little rowdy.”
“Really? Was anything missing?” If I was lucky, everything would be missing.
“No, but—well, you’ll see.”
She handed me the key and it took several attempts to turn the knob. A few people behind me snickered.
“Maybe someone should help her,” the larger woman whispered.
“Sshh!”
With a hearty jiggle of the wrist and a little muscle, I made the deadbolt give up its resistance. I turned the handle and pushed the door open. Stale air rushed out the building as if a tomb had been unsealed. A bell, strangely off tune, tinkled weakly on the door. Laughing at me . . . like always.
The dog stuck his nose in the air, alert to a scent that was new and foul. I took an uneven breath. The things here couldn’t touch me anymore. I reached out to the wall beside me and flipped the light on. And just like that, the room came to life.
Books. From ceiling to floor. From the doorway to the back hall and beyond. Piles of books. Mountains of them. No room to walk. No room to breathe. Everything that had haunted my childhood stared straight back at me.
“Whoa . . .” someone said, breaking the silence.
A man bumped into me from behind. The earlier assemblage had followed me. I wasn’t sorry they did. It helped to have company.
“Marva, stop pushing!” said navy-blue Joe to pink-glasses big lady.
I plastered myself against the wall, delaying my entrance into the store, as Marva shoved her large bulk to the forefront and halted on the threshold. “Lord almighty!”
“What is it?” someone said.
Marva turned around and faced the group on the sidewalk, stretching her hands across the doorway. “Don’t anyone step past me. You’re liable to get hurt.”
“I don’t know if it’s that bad—” I started.
“Yes it is. Joe, you remember those books Gertrude stacked straight up to the ceiling?”
“You could barely squeeze from the As to the Ps.” He stretched his neck, trying to see over her shoulder.
“I was fine with the Ps; it was you who had trouble, Joe,” she said.
“For God’s sake, would you stop talking about my prostate in front of the whole town,” said Joe.
“Get on with what you were saying, Marva,” said the mayor.
“Now George, I wasn’t talking about Joe. I was talking about the Ps. Like James Patterson or Susan Elizabeth Phillips.”
“Or Mario Puzo,” someone added.
Ugh, people who read! I was surrounded by them wherever I went.
“And what, Marva? Come on. I got a breakfast I need to be at in ten minutes,” said the mayor from the back of the mob. My stomach growled at the mere mention of breakfast.
This was ridiculous. I was boxed in between Marva and the doorway, and was feeling claustrophobic. Time to get over my fears. I ducked under her arm and took my chances on the mountain of books near the window. I sat on top and studied the room while the curiosity seekers kept talking in the doorway.
Marva waved her hand. “Do you all remember what this place used to be like? You remember, Regina? Little tiny aisles and towers of books that were several rows deep?”
“Yeah. Gertrude wouldn’t let us pull anything ourselves. We had to call her if we needed help,”
Joe said behind her.
“That’s right. If you needed a book, you had to tell her first. And then she’d give you all the reasons why you shouldn’t read that book. She was always pushing the highbrow stuff on me. Said I read too much trash.” I let my gaze pause on Marva and wondered where she bought her pants. They were cotton-candy pink and matched her glasses. I kind of liked them.
“Gertrude told me I was going to get nightmares from all the horror stories I read,” Joe said.
My stomach growled. I remembered that I had a half-eaten piece of fruit leather in an inside pocket. I pulled it out, peeled back the wrapper, and gnawed on it. My collie friend pushed through the crowd when he heard the wrapper open. I held it away from him. “You ate already.”
Someone in the back explained, “I started to go to the library. I mean, I hated to go to Harrisburg and all. And that one librarian was even meaner to me sometimes than Gertrude. The others are nice, mind you. But I couldn’t handle her lectures.”
“The librarian in Harrisburg?”
“No. Gertrude’s.”
“I can’t say I blame you, June.” Marva still held her hands across the doorjamb. “But now you have no choice. You will have to keep going to Harrisburg until this place gets cleaned up.” She lowered her arms and stepped aside. I had taken a large bite of the fruit leather and my mouth was full. Everyone had a clear view of me sitting with my skirt spread out before me on a mound of mass-market paperbacks. I felt like Little Miss Muffet.
“This is worse than I could have ever imagined. It looks like she was a . . . a . . .”
“Hoarder,” someone finished.
I could have told them that years ago. My aunt loved her books as if they were her children. She adopted each one of them out to only worthy readers, and refused to let people take their chances on anything unless they had a serious interest in reading the books they bought. This meant that she scared most customers away.
She scared me too. But for different reasons.
“What are you going to do with all of this?” asked Marva.
I finished chewing, swallowed, and said, “I plan on selling it. You wouldn’t happen to know any interested buyers, would you?”
“Yes. I can help you with that!” The real-estate lady worked her way toward the front of the crowd. She was almost as wide as she was tall, so several people had to plaster themselves against the doorway to make room.
I thought I heard someone mumble “sell-out Sweeney” as she passed.
Marva squinted at me over the top of Reeba Sweeney’s head. “Don’t be in too much of a rush, now. You never know what you might decide to do once you spend a little time here.” She looked down her nose at Reeba Sweeney and then down at her watch. “Whoops, time for work. Well . . . Good luck.”
“I’ve got to get to a meeting with the city council,” said the mayor.
Reeba Sweeney grabbed his elbow. “I haven’t received your donation to the Harrisburg Festival of the Arts, George.”
He looked from her to me and then at the ground. “In the mail.”
The crowd was gone so quickly, I wondered if it was something I said. But one look at the room around me made me understand why. Who wanted to suffer from accidental mummification under thousands of dusty books?
I was left sitting on my tuffet, curious to hear what Reeba Sweeney thought about selling the place. I pulled the wrapper over the remaining portion of my fruit leather and tucked it back in my pocket. My four-legged friend found the only bare spot on the floor and lay down with an ooomph.
Reeba Sweeney cleared her throat and stepped around me, careful not to trip on the magazines at her feet. “I hope you understand. Clients won’t want to pay top dollar for this store. This place needs a lot of work.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” A lot of work was an understatement. I thought about the travel brochure tucked in my car’s visor and prepared to bargain. I was forming a loose plan in my head. I needed to do some homework to figure out if it would work out. There were plenty of refuse-collection companies in business these days.
“You’ll be happy to hear that I have a potential buyer who may be willing to give you cash.”
I was taller sitting than she was standing, even in her heels. “Cash?”
“Cash. But first you’ll need to clean the place out. He will want to know the floor and walls are structurally sound. The way it is now, no one would know if there were a hole straight through to the cellar. After that, you can be on your merry way to—wherever you came from?”
That wasn’t going to happen. I rarely returned to the same place twice. Except Truhart, unfortunately.
“How much is this buyer willing to pay?”
She named a disappointing price. “I can barely get to Ohio with that amount. I was hoping to get more.”
She blinked. “You’re surprised?”
“I’m hoping for at least double.”
“Maybe it’s been too long since you were in this town, Trudy. This place isn’t worth that kind of money. Look at the vacant grocery next door and all the buildings that are empty on Main Street. You can’t be too picky about prices in this market. Even when it is cleaned up, no one will pay double. The paint is peeling, the shutters are hanging off. And you haven’t even seen the upstairs apartment yet. You think this is bad, just wait!”
I thought about the plans I had made. Plans I had nurtured ever since Aunt Gertrude’s lawyers had caught up to me. I needed that money. My dreams weren’t going to change in a few short weeks. I had time to clean up and get a good price.
“I’ll let you know when and if I decide to list the property with you. In the meantime, I appreciate your meeting me with the key.”
“If you’ll list with me?”
Before I left California, I had asked my friends how things were done. “Reeba, I hope you understand. I’m not going to make any decisions until I talk to a few other Realtors and get a feel for the market.”
Reeba Sweeney’s face no longer displayed a sales-pitch smile. In fact, her expression reminded me a lot of Aunt Gertrude’s when she first found out I didn’t like to read. She pulled a card out of her purse and handed it to me. “Office hours are from nine to five. Leave a message if you don’t reach me,” she said pointedly. I guess I was no longer a valued customer who could call her in the middle of the night.
“Where are you located?” I flipped the card over.
“Harrisburg!” she said. And she brushed a speck of dust off her coat and walked away.
Chapter 2
I sat on my nest of books. Echoes of Aunt Gertrude’s voice drifted around me the same way tiny dust motes caught the light and floated around the room.
The last afternoon I had been here, Aunt Gertrude pointed her bony finger at me and called me lazy. If she’d stopped there, I would have made my usual escape to the woods or the shore of the lake. But she kept going. The words stupid and lying exploded from her lips. In a way, I don’t blame her. All her frustration at being saddled with an ungrateful teenager broke to the surface. But she made me so angry that I marched upstairs and stuffed my things in my mother’s old Samsonite suitcase.
I never thought I would be back.
Something dark moved in the doorway. Probably the cat I had seen last night. The old collie made a halfhearted attempt at a bark. Then he wagged his tail and looked at me, as if that counted as the kind of thing a fine watchdog would do.
“That was pathetic,” I told him. I scanned the spot where the form disappeared.
That was when I noticed a tall form leaning against a tree on the other side of the street. His face was shadowed, but his arms were crossed in front of him in a pose that should have looked casual, but was more . . . intense. I was getting tired of being a spectacle. I rose from my literary chair, losing my balance and dislodging dozens of books. Once I was sure I wasn’t going to do a nosedive into The Great Gatsby or—Huck Sawyer or whatever that book was. I looked up again. He was gone. Strange. But then again, this whol
e town was a bit strange.
On the bright side of things, we might be able to find the bed. Running water and a mattress would be heaven, even in this place.
I scaled the shifting paperbacks and hardcovers in an effort to get to the back room where the stairs to the apartment were. But it was almost impossible. No way could the old dog do it. “Come on, buddy, back to Lulu we go.” The back door would be a straighter shot.
I pulled around to the alley that was nestled between a large field sprinkled with jack pines and the back of several empty buildings. Next to the field was a tennis court that was missing a net. Beyond it was an ice cream store and the faint blue streak of a lake through a stand of trees. I recalled that there was another lake nearby. The two had matching names. Echo and Reply. I don’t know how they got those names. I used to scream from the shores of Echo all the time. No one ever replied.
I parked between a telephone pole and a pile of old wooden pallets, making sure that I could move forward if needed. Lulu wasn’t at her best these days. She hiccupped every time I shifted gear. I grabbed my cooler and my old green Samsonite suitcase that contained my meager belongings. The collie perched on the seat and lowered his head. I sighed and reached down to help him.
“Aren’t you guys supposed to leap tall fences and chase sheep across the glen?” He sent me a baleful look and I shook my head. I guess we were all typecast to some extent.
At the back door, the old aluminum storm door came loose in my hands. The dog skittered away as it clattered back against the doorjamb.
“This is just flippin’ awesome.”
I’d be lucky if anything worked properly. I removed the door and placed it against the aluminum siding. The key fit the new lock and the knob turned easily. Grateful for small favors, I pushed on the door. Nothing happened. I pushed with all my weight. It budged a few inches. I stuck my face through the opening.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. Whoever had broken into the place had brought a tornado with them. Books were heaped everywhere. I had a fleeting moment of panic. Would anyone know or even care if I was lost forever? Other than Reeba Sweeney, not a soul in this town would miss me. No one would worry until Thanksgiving when I failed to make my biannual call to my father in New Jersey. Even then, he would probably make some comment about how unpredictable I was and assume I had decided to walk the Appalachian Trail.
The Bookshop on Autumn Lane Page 2