The Bookshop on Autumn Lane

by Cynthia Tennent

  “And this is Michigan,” said Flo proudly, holding her hand through the doorway. “A mitten.”

  Marva ignored us. “I remember being down here. But it didn’t look like this at all. I don’t understand it. Gertrude was never as messy as all this. Between the bookstore and the cellar, it’s like she lost her marbles in the last few years of her life.”

  “She never had any mar—”

  Kit clapped his hands together and bumped me out of the way. “So, ladies, what can we help you with?”

  “We just started working on the house of horrors next door and saw the cellar door open.” Marva lifted several sheets that were covering the clutter. “Oh, this would be perfect for the haunted house. Trudy, could we borrow this?”

  “Only if you keep it.”

  “And those jars too,” said Flo. “We can try to make something scary look like it’s living in them.”

  “Maybe there already is something living in them,” I commented.

  Marva pulled out an old picture of some long-lost ancestor from the early twentieth century. “Oh, look! This would be perfect over the mantel.”

  “We don’t have a mantel,” Flo said.

  “We can make one.” Marva handed her the picture and the sheets.

  “I keep hearing you say we’re gonna make stuff, but you have no idea what you’re doing and none of the men have time to help,” Flo explained. “Hunting season is right around the corner. Everyone’s getting their hunting blinds ready and scouting their trails for bucks.”

  Just thinking about it sent a shiver down my spine. Another reason to get out of town before the season ramped up. I remembered very clearly how the center of town looked in hunting season. Deer hung from truck roofs and poles placed in the center of town. From my bedroom window above the store, I could see the bodies swinging in the breeze at night. I had nightmares the entire month of November when I lived in Truhart. And I wasn’t even a vegan then. I used to wake up crying, dreaming that it was my mother swinging from the pole. Aunt Gertrude would hush my whimpers from the next room and tell me to go back to sleep. Leo, my big brother, sometimes came in and slept at the foot of my bed when it was bad. He tried to explain that the deer population was out of control and hunting was a form of conservation. But I never understood what he meant.

  “Are you all right, Trudy? You look sick.” Kit touched my hand.

  I took a deep breath, blocking out the images of Bambi swinging from trees. “I’m sorry, you were talking about a mantel?”

  “If we ever get around to it, yes. We have pieces of old mantels, but we need to put them together,” said Marva.

  “One of dozens of things we still have to do in the next week,” said Flo.

  Kit looked at me with a calculating gleam in his eye while the women named all the projects they still had to tackle before the haunted house opened. “Trudy is excellent with tools and building things, you know.”

  A silence descended on the cellar. Marva pushed her glasses higher up on her nose. “Well, this is rather complicated, my lord. It takes more than just someone who likes crafting—”

  He interrupted: “She works with stage crews that design sets and engineer lighting.”

  Two heads pivoted toward me. Flo and Marva stared at me as if they were reassessing my worth in the world. I climbed over an old chair and made my way to the ladder. Time to escape.

  “Trudy?” The question hung in the air. I turned. Marva stood behind me with a half-smile. “Would you be able to help us?”

  “Sorry. I have work to do in the bookstore.”

  I was met on the top step by Flo. She extended her hand to help me on the last step. “We would be so grateful if you could help us.” A wrinkle at the corner of her mouth deepened as she smiled. “Just a few days? And then we could come over and help you organize the rest of the store. We can help each other.”

  “It’s almost organized, thanks to Kit.” Why should I feel obligated to help? Most of the women in town didn’t even like me. They thought I was stupid.

  Kit helped Marva up the stairs with her load. She was amazingly nimble for such a large woman, but she took advantage of his gallantry and held his hand as if he were a flipping duke. Surprisingly, it didn’t irritate me as much as it had a few days ago. It was rather endearing to see her giggle at his touch.

  “Maybe you need a break from working in the store,” Kit said to me. The meaning behind his words was obvious. He was right. I needed to get away from all the books and do something I enjoyed.

  “It’s for a good cause. All the proceeds go to our community-center fund. We want to build a place with activities for children and adults alike. There will be a gym and a craft center and a therapy room for some of our special-needs kids. We want to set up educational classes for our four-legged friends, like Moby. We’ll have puppy-training classes once we get going.”

  “A place for the community to come together,” added Marva.

  I brushed imaginary dust off my overalls. “That’s a great thing. But I have other problems to deal with.”

  Marva turned to me. “Don’t be in such a rush to sell to Reeba. Be careful, Trudy. She wants to lowball you and make a hefty profit selling the whole building to that Fribley guy.”

  Flo put a hand on Marva’s arm and shook her head. “That’s not Trudy’s problem.”

  Her words made me pause. “Is anyone else interested in the building?”

  Marva pulled her arm away from Flo. “That’s what we’re trying to tell you. We are trying to raise enough money to make this a community center.”

  “This building?”

  “Yes,” both women said at the same time.

  “To be honest, we have to start small. Just the grocery store for now. We are renting it for the month. And then we want to set up the Santa’s workshop in December. We think we can buy the grocery store by spring. The long-term plan is for us to purchase both stores. If we can keep Fribley from getting his hands on your store we might have a chance. He wants both properties together. That’s like selling out half of Main Street. We already have some donations. If we can raise just a little more we can start with the grocery store and then the bookshop. Turn this whole block into the kind of place Truhart needs. Don’t you see?” Marva pushed her glasses up her nose with a fierce jerk.

  Flo sighed. “If this place ends up like Reeba wants, all we will get is a bunch of pawnshops and adult stores and God knows what else. It would be another nail on the coffin of our town.”

  “And that’s scarier than a house of horrors!” Marva said.

  I did not care. I did not care. If I said it to myself it would be true. But still . . . “Just how much money have you raised?” I asked.

  Marva mumbled something.

  “What?” I couldn’t hear what she said.

  Flo started to speak and then shut her mouth. I looked at both of them. “That bad?”

  “We have almost twenty-five-hundred dollars! I know it isn’t much. But we’ll have so much more if we can get this haunted house going.”

  Kit put his hands in his pockets and shook his head. “It really would be a great project. I wish I could help you. But I have two left thumbs.”

  Moby tipped the scales. He had been lying down at the entrance to the cellar, lazily enjoying the cool morning air. But on cue, he nudged my hand and wagged his tail. I had been thinking about the fact that I didn’t have a home for him. I should put a flyer up at the Family Fare.

  A community with dog classes would be a good thing. Maybe they could hold classes in animal cruelty during hunting season too. And host an animal-adoption event.

  “I’ll tell you what,” I said. “I’m not going to budge on my selling price for the store. If someone is willing to pay it, then I sell. But I can help you with this haunted house.”

  Kit grinned. I could see the little gears moving in his academic mind. He was pleased.

  “Deal,” said Flo. She held out her hand again. I took it and realized that, f
or the first time, this crappy little town and I were going to be on the same side.

  Marva and Flo followed me into the bookstore, telling me all about their plans for the haunted house. When we entered the back of the store we skirted the piles Kit and I had categorized.

  I joked about the mess. “Maybe the ghosts want a few books.”

  Florence pulled something out of a book mountain. “Oh, it’s Ray Bradbury! I loved Something Wicked This Way Comes.”

  “I did too. Have you read The Martian Chronicles?” asked Kit.

  Flo’s eyes lit up. “Of course! But I thought you would be more into someone like Thomas Hardy or E. M. Forster.”

  “Way too stodgy.” He shook his head and bent down to explain. “Trudy here says no one will care about these books.”

  She clutched one to her chest. “Really?”

  I did not like his argument “Take what you want now. It will make for fewer books to throw in the trash.”

  “No. Don’t throw them away.” Flo’s eyes were wide in panic.

  Marva dug into a pile and pulled out her own favorites. They included several cookbooks from at least fifty years ago. Kit gave me an I-told-you-so look.

  A half hour later, with more women wandering in from next door, I knew I had lost my argument for trashing everything.

  In the center of it all was Kit. Smiling and making small talk about interesting books and magazines. It dawned on me again: He was just too damn nice. I was burning to know what a man like him was like when his barriers were down. I pictured him in bed . . . with me.

  I fanned my face.

  I knew he was tired of their silly questions. In fact, if I didn’t see the way a muscle in his jaw tightened whenever Marva asked him about the royal family, I would have thought he was having the time of his life. He let her talk on and on about absolutely nothing. I studied Kit. He wanted to avoid the ladies earlier and now he was sweetening them up. He was acting like a phony.

  I should be flattered. At least he wasn’t that way with me, I thought as the day clouded over.

  Chapter 10

  “You’re not killing her good enough.”

  “What?” It was Mary Conrad’s third attempted murder and she still couldn’t get it right.

  “Like this.” Flo took the knife, smeared more ketchup on it, and raised it over her head. “Get mad and let her have it.” She slashed the knife through the air and slammed it into the gut. Intestines spurted out of an open wound. “There!”

  The corpse screamed and sat up. “Hey!”

  “Sorry, Bridgette.” She had five inches of padding and another two of her own personal padding to cushion the blow. But Bridgette was not happy with the messy innards made of spaghetti.

  “Did that hurt?” Flo asked.

  “No, but it scared the bejesus out of me!”

  Flo shook her head. “You have to stop screaming, Bridgette. This haunted house is for the kids, not you! Every time we add another prop you run around screaming like you’ve never seen a haunted house before.”

  “I haven’t!”

  “Then what the blazes are you doing working this one?”

  “I want to help. And Marva promised I could be dead so I wouldn’t have to see anything. But being stabbed is scary.”

  Flo jammed the knife into her palm. “This is made of rubber. I can barely feel it.”

  June Krueger popped her head up over the partition. “Trudy! We need you over in the insane asylum.”

  I resisted the urge to point out that I was already in the insane asylum. Besides the zombie zone, where Flo, at the ripe age of eighty-three, led the undead, there was the bloodsucker’s bedroom, headed appropriately by Regina Bloodworth, who kept trying to change the theme to “sexy vampires” so she could wear her favorite costume. An eccentric older woman named Addie Adler created the terrifying clown corner. She kept missing the point of making the clowns scary. She refused to add sharp teeth and red eyes to the clown corp. Instead, she wanted the clowns to learn how to juggle. I had yet to meet the woman in charge of the witch’s wing, but everyone said she was the nicest woman in Truhart. She owned the Amble Inn.

  The insane asylum was run by who else? Marva O’Shea.

  I drew back the curtain and entered the land of the crazies.

  Marva pointed at a small armchair made of two-by-fours. “Joe hasn’t made this electric chair right.”

  Joe stood at the table saw, frowning at his wife. “I cut it exactly like you told me. So if you don’t like it, blame yourself. I followed your measurements.”

  “There’s no way you followed them. That chair looks like it was made for a pygmy.”

  Joe dropped a two-by-four on the floor. “I’ve had it. You wanted me to help and I helped. But all you’ve done is criticize me. I’ve got three dishwashers and an oven to look at this afternoon and I’m late already.”

  Marva waved him away. “Then go.”

  Joe looked at me and said, “Feel free to shove her behind in the chair if she keeps acting this way, Trudy. I’ll be happy to flip the lever!” He stomped away and ignored Marva’s angry huff.

  “He’s such a baby.”

  I picked the two-by-four off the ground and took my measuring tape out of my tool belt. “Do you want it the size of a regular chair?”

  “Bigger. Like a throne.”

  I pulled a pencil out of my pocket and pictured a chair the perfect size for our local royalty, Kit. While I measured and marked the wood, I imagined him sitting on the electric chair at my mercy. My imagination took a turn and once again I was overheating.

  Kit deserved punishment for getting me involved in this project. Everywhere I turned, flustered women told each other what to do. A few people left in tears. More than a dozen had done nothing more than stand in the corner and gossip.

  But truthfully, I was having fun.

  Besides creating weird props and working with my hands, something I absolutely loved, the ladies were treating me differently. When they saw how easy it was for me to construct scary scenery and heard my ideas for enhancing the haunted house, they began to treat me with respect. I didn’t let it go to my head, of course. I was still an oddity they hadn’t figured out. But I was useful now. Every now and then I caught Marva and Flo looking at me as if I had grown a new head. They were curious. They had me pegged when I was on my side of the wall. But here I was, in the loony bin right with them.

  “And don’t forget to add straps and ties at the hands and feet.” Marva was still talking. “We want this to be the scariest feature in the whole haunted house.”

  “This is for people over sixteen, right?” I asked.

  “Mature viewers only!” Marva said. “We’re going to have a tent outside for the little tykes.”

  “Good idea!” Everyone was getting into the theme so much that I was beginning to understand how serial killers got started.

  I pulled out a scrap of paper and began to trace a chair.

  I drew Marva a rough sketch. I had worked on almost every haunted room in the store, but something about the asylum fascinated me.

  Marva looked over my shoulder. “Is his lordship coming by today?” Kit’s request to lose the title had caught on with everybody except Marva.

  “He says he’s busy in the bookshop.”

  “Why doesn’t he ever come and see our masterpiece?”

  “I don’t know. Don’t ask me . . .” My voice trailed off.

  The ladies asked him over each day but, for the past week, he kept making excuses. It suddenly occurred to me that I may not be the only haunted soul in Truhart.

  * * *

  I popped my head in the bookshop. “Time to eat, Professor.” His head was buried in one of the boxes of papers he had pulled down from the attic yesterday.

  He started to say something and I put my hand up. “You owe me lunch after getting me involved in the nuthouse next door.”

  “In a little—”

  “Even Shakespeare ate!”

  It was a n
ice day and I made Kit take the long way to Cookee’s. We passed by Doc’s and I shooed a black cat off Lulu’s hood. “Must be Doc’s cat.”

  Kit patiently listened to me explain all the ways I had nurtured her over the past few years. I left her with a fond caress and a silent promise to return soon.

  When we finally sat down in a booth, Mac announced he had a surprise for me. “Wait till you see what I found on the internet.”

  Twenty minutes later he placed a mushroom risotto with squash in front of me. “Locally harvested,” he said proudly.

  I was majorly impressed with his expertise. It was delicious. I tackled the dish with gusto. Meanwhile, Kit picked at his fries and stared across the street at the bakery.

  “Something bothering you?” I angled around to see what he was looking at. Hay barrels. A few skeletons swinging from a post. A stuffed dummy wearing a monster mask.

  “Does that bother you?” He was confirming my suspicions.

  “Huh, what?” he said, bringing his eyes back to me.

  “The Halloween decorations. Do they creep you out?”

  “Yes . . . I mean, no!” A guilty expression passed over his face and he put the bun back on his burger. “It’s a bit odd to me how people get into this gruesome holiday.”

  “Uh, if I remember correctly, the tradition started in England. So don’t blame us.”

  “Scotland and Ireland, to be exact. We had almost obliterated the holiday with Guy Fawkes Night, but thanks to the Scots and Irish, it’s back in vogue now.”

  “I don’t know about the history behind it, but it’s fun to be scared, don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  I remembered Marva’s complaint that Kit wouldn’t visit and thought about his reaction to the decorations. I should have realized it sooner.

  Kit was afraid.

  He watched Truhart transform from sleepy-town to haunted-town with an obvious lack of appreciation. Well, well. He gave me a hard time about my aversion to books. Hypocrite. He had his own issue.

  If he expected me to accept the idea of selling books, he was going to have to accept Halloween. Come to think of it, Kit was as nervous around Halloween as he was around me. Every time I teased him about kissing me he adjusted his glasses and changed the subject. I knew he wasn’t immune to me. He watched me when he thought I wasn’t looking. He had responded to me by the lake. There was no way it was my imagination. But there was one way to prove it.