by Drea Damara
“What if he doesn’t want a boss, Mary?”
“Well, then we go with plan B.” Mary nodded to Franci, and they headed toward the door.
“What’s plan B?” She hurried after them, desperate to know the backup scheme she was sure she would need.
As she stood in the doorway, she watched Mary study her descent of the stairs. Mary was eyeballing the place where the pool of rainwater and Agatha’s blood was said to have collected. Did she have to do this every time? She had to be the most superstitious person on the street.
Mary gathered up her skirts, leapt over the front steps, and steadied herself as she landed on the sidewalk. Mary caught her breath and primped her curls. Franci walked down the steps like a normal person, bidding her good night over her shoulder, causing her to slam into Mary. Mary lost her balance and nearly toppled over into the spot she’d just avoided, uttering hushed curses. Sarah rubbed her temples, all reassurance gone.
“Good night, Sarah,” Mary called. She opened her eyes to see that the two had already started across the cobblestone street.
“Mary! Wait. What was plan B?”
Without turning back, Mary called, “We give him an acne outbreak and tell him that stuff is the only cure.”
“You can do that?”
Mary laughed. “It kept Valerie from dating in high school!”
“Mary Millville. You wicked woman,” she muttered.
She’d have to ask Mary sometime if she’d ever done anything to her without her knowledge. If you couldn’t trust your neighbors, whom could you trust?
She locked the door again and turned off the remaining lights. It was that much closer to tomorrow. She walked past the counter to where the showroom floor rose to a mezzanine and ascended the three stairs to the shop’s upper level.
She gave a cursory glance up the flight of stairs by the wall that led to her apartment and then back over the balcony railing to the darkened store. The front room was quiet and secure, so she continued onto the mezzanine, past the dividing wall that hid and separated this level from customers.
She allowed very few customers in the back and for a very good reason. The rows of ceiling-high shelves were filled with rare, antiquarian, and out-of-print books, as well as manuscripts. She kept a few of them on the main floor, those she could bear to part with, for people like Mr. Wexton. However, her collection had been amassed over the years by her family and was her pride and joy. Only trusted scholars and historians who knew she possessed them were granted entrance into her archival room—strictly for viewing purposes. Like her, these books never left Blinney Lane.
Sarah gave the bookshelves a motherly perusal, as though she was tucking them into bed, and she flipped the switch to the light that basked over them. Through the darkness, a dim glow from the very back of the room beckoned to her like a beacon. She didn’t need to check on it, but her feet moved forward, a nagging curiosity inside her.
She walked past the first five shelves until she reached a display cabinet against the back wall of the building. Its thick glass doors sat behind iron bars, padlocked shut. Five thick leather-bound books sat on pedestals inside. One was the story of Agatha Blinney’s life that Baldwin Allister had written. The other four had been penned by her great-grandfather, Durley Allister. The books sat ominously under heat lamps inside the case. The lamps were working, but she felt no heat. A damp coolness wafted against her face like a chilly night breeze and her insides ached to lunge forward. Gone were the affectionate motherly feelings as she stared at what her family had come to call the “weeping books.”
She watched as a bead of water fell from the bottom of one and ran down the metal base of the cabinet. A thin trickling sound tickled her ears as a thread of water dribbled down the angled channel to a small silver drain in the bottom of the case. A knot formed in her throat as she noticed the minuscule bits of dew, which clung to the book seams.
“You know he’s coming, don’t you?” she whispered to the glass.
Sarah listened to her breath and the trickle of the drain. The heat lamps usually dried the tears of the weeping books enough to prevent them from pouring into the drain. This wasn’t a good sign. The books wanted someone to read them—to give them life again.
“Please don’t hurt him. Don’t take him. You have me,” she said, pleading.
Just then, she heard a clinking noise and felt something brush against the skin above her wrist. She looked down at her leather cuff bracelet. All of the charms attached to it dangled in their usual places, except for one that wasn’t really a charm but rather an old metal key. It flipped upward and shook, then stopped perpendicular to where her arm hung limply at her side like it was pointing at the case. It pivoted slowly to the right where it remained still in its unnatural position. She followed its point of aim to the last book in the case and saw the fading words across the cover: The Lands of Farwin Wood.
“No,” she protested and pushed the key back down with her other hand. “I told you. I’m never coming back.”
A large drop of water seeped out between the pages of The Lands of Farwin Wood and landed in the case’s gutter with an echoing plop. Sarah chided herself for feeling taunted by a damned book. The curse certainly knew something was coming. It sensed the impending presence of another village descendant. It had to feed something with this new burst of energy. Unfortunately for her, it appeared to be feeding the weeping books. She should have suspected this would happen. Why wouldn’t the book that had nearly killed Richard awaken with the arrival of his only child?
RICKY STARED at the headrest of the seat in front of him as the taxi bounced over potholes. His dad had said Aunt Sarah was doing him a favor by letting him stay with her for the summer. He didn’t like the sound of being someone’s favor. He was sick of feeling like a burden to others. The only time anyone noticed he was around was if he did something they didn’t like. He’d never done what Mom—forcing her stupid Ivy League etiquette and ass-kissing socialite scene on him—wanted him to do. He wouldn’t mind Dad hollering at him when he did the occasional stupid thing like hot-wiring that stupid hotshot prick Gerry Wrenley’s sweet-ass Camaro. Dad, however, was never around enough to do anything but scold him. Didn’t he know he couldn’t have love and respect if he didn’t take the time to say “good job” once in a while? Now he was sending him off to Colonial Days, USA, with the weirdo tourist theme-shop players to make caramel apples and sell postcards. What a bunch of bullshit.
“Just let me out here, man,” Ricky called over the seat to the driver who had already circled the block twice.
“Sorry, kid. I don’t see no Blinney Lane. You sure you know where you’re going?”
“Yeah. I think I remember now.”
The cabbie pulled over and got out to help him with his luggage. Ricky pulled out two twenties from the wad of bills in his wallet, courtesy of his absent father. The sight of all that cash made him even bitterer. Dad might as well have put a “son for sale” sign in there too.
From what he could remember, there wasn’t anywhere he’d even want to spend money in this part of Salem. The area where his eccentric aunt Sarah lived was full of historical Salem stuff he’d seen the last few times he’d been there with his parents. His last trip there, it had just been him and Dad. That had been right after Mom had bailed on them. He hadn’t enjoyed that trip as much as the others.
Dad had taken him out of the district to a ball game and a movie, clearly an attempt to take his mind off his mom leaving. The rest of that trip hadn’t seemed as fulfilling as when he’d visited as a younger child. Aunt Sarah was nice from what he remembered, but she’d been acting sympathetic then, and he hadn’t wanted sympathy. Sympathy had meant Mom was gone for good. There had been nothing about Blinney Lane to awe a pissed-off fourteen-year-old, and he doubted his opinion would change now that almost four years had passed.
The cabbie slung his suitcase up onto the curb and took his hat off to wipe the sweat from his balding head. Ricky handed him t
he forty bucks and tucked his wallet back into his pocket.
“That’s a lot of dough for a kid your age,” the guy said, smiling when Ricky waved off the need for change.
“Paternal guilt,” he said with a shrug and tugged his baggy pants up a little higher on his slender hips.
“Well, try to have a nice summer.” The cabbie tipped his hat and got back into his cab.
“I wouldn’t count on it,” Ricky muttered as the cab pulled away.
He looked up and down the street to familiarize himself with his surroundings. His aunt’s cul-de-sac was along this road somewhere. He was in no hurry to get there. It was one of those old narrow roads with the original cobblestone, so contrite and historical that it was blocked off to wheeled vehicle traffic by two black posts that were bolted into the ground just before the lane met the busy main drag.
An obnoxious female voice came from behind him that said, “Harold, I tell you he said it was just up here past a barbershop. ‘Blinney Lane or something,’ the man said.”
Ricky turned around and saw a short chubby man and woman in their sixties, both wearing matching sun visors on their heads. The woman toted an oversize bag that read “Come see historic Salem!” on the side of it. The man, obviously Harold, followed unenthusiastically behind her, as though each step pained him. He looked weighed down by the shopping bags he held in the crook of each arm and a map held limply in one of his hands.
“Eileen, you don’t have to buy something from every damned shop in Salem!” Harold called as she scurried onward.
It made Ricky happy to see that at least someone else was as miserable as him. He looked beyond the woman and saw a spiral barbershop sign. He remembered it from his last trip and followed in step behind Harold with the same level of enthusiasm.
“Yes, but he said they’re supposed to have organic, handmade stuff over there. And they’ve got all kinds of things from the olden days and a bookstore. You like books. You can go sit in the bookstore while I just have a gander,” Eileen countered and squinted to read shop names across the street.
“I’m sitting my ass down on a bench is what I’m doing,” Harold muttered. “Eileen, I don’t even see any Bly-knee anything on this map. Come on, this is enough for one day!”
Ricky chuckled upon hearing the man mispronounce his aunt’s street, rather than rhyming it with whinny. When Eileen reached the barbershop, she stopped and turned to Harold.
“Ooh! See! Here it is!”
Harold stopped too, forcing Ricky to swerve to avoid running into him. “Great,” they said simultaneously.
“Hey, kid,” Harold said as Ricky went by him.
Ricky stopped by the two metal posts that sat just before the ivy-covered archway that marked the entrance to Blinney Lane and looked back at the stout little man. “Yeah?”
“Don’t ever get married.”
Ricky smirked and wheeled his suitcase under the archway. He heard the footsteps of the old tourist couple behind him as he pulled his suitcase up to the first tree planter that sat in the middle of the little street. It was encased by wooden timbers, as were several others that anchored Blinney Lane. He peered down the street at the shop fronts, knowing his three months of bookstore prison time would start as soon as he arrived at Aunt Sarah’s. He let out a breath and took in the surroundings. Most of the shops were either colonial in style with steep, saltbox roofs or Georgian, as his aunt had once told him, with lines of dormers.
“Oh, isn’t this just charming, Harold?” Eileen had stopped next to him. She looked down at his suitcase. “Excuse me, young man,” she said, too loud for her proximity, “but is there a B&B to stay at somewhere down here?”
“Um, no. I’m staying with my aunt. She owns a shop here.”
Eileen took in the information like it was a wonder. “Do they let rooms above any of the shops? Wouldn’t this just be the most darling place to stay, Harold?” Harold grunted behind her and adjusted the plastic shopping bags sticking to his arms.
Great. A chatterbox. He was going to have to talk to tourists like Eileen all summer. Dad, I hate you! Maybe walking and talking would be the quickest way to lose the old couple. He began to pull his suitcase down Blinney Lane with Eileen and Harold following at his side.
“There’s no place that rents rooms here that I remember. Most of the shop owners live above their stores here on Blinney Lane. Behind all the shops on this side,” he said, pointing to Scents and Suds, “there’s like a big courtyard the owners all sort of share as a community yard. Some of them have houses on the other side of that, sort of hidden behind the last couple of shops on the main drag out front. Then there’s just a washway on the other side of that wall at the end of the street.”
Ricky stopped in front of Allister’s Books, grateful to end his ad hoc tour guide session. He pointed behind him. “Well, this is me.”
“Oh!” Eileen shrieked and smacked Harold with one hand. “See, Harold. I told you they had a bookstore!”
“I’m going for an ice cream,” Harold said, his nose twitching at the scent coming from the bakery next to Allister’s.
“Well, you have a nice time with your aunt, young man.” Eileen smiled and continued down the street.
“I’ll try,” Ricky muttered as he faced the shop window. He lugged his suitcase up the stone steps and dragged it through the doorway. As soon as he entered, his eyes were drawn to the sight of his aunt. She was hard to miss with her hourglass figure and the way her chestnut hair with its hints of auburn looked so vibrant against her light complexion.
She was wearing gray-checkered pants with a pair of black suspenders, which her slim figure probably didn’t need, to hold them in place. Her long-sleeved blouse puffed out around the suspender straps against her back. Her collar outstretched in a casual manner from the top where two of her shirt buttons sat opened. At least she didn’t dress as goofy as the rest of the freaks who lived around there. Franci and Mary, he remembered from his prior visits, used to look like they were decked out for a colonial parade. Just then Sarah turned away from the customer she was helping and saw him.
She stared at him for a moment and then let out a surprised, “Ricky.”
Great. She didn’t look happy about this either. From what he remembered, Aunt Sarah had been loving and was always happy to see him, but that had only been during short visits when he was younger. Was three months too long for her too?
“Look how big you are!” She eyed him up and down as she walked over, arms extended for a hug. “I hardly recognized you.”
He patted her on the back, trying to remember the last time he had hugged someone or been hugged.
“You look…the same,” he said with a smile. It was the first time, however, that he noticed she was actually quite a beautiful woman. How come she never got married?
“Well, nothing changes around here. Come on, let’s get you settled in.”
He followed her up the stairs to her apartment, where she showed him to his father’s childhood bedroom. It was antiquated with his dad’s old trophies from high school and out-of-date posters hung on the wall. At least it had its own bathroom.
Sarah left him alone to get situated. He washed the scuzzy feeling of plane-ride-passenger-breath off his face and changed into a clean shirt. He walked out into the living room where he could see his aunt putting dishes away in the kitchen. She must have been waiting for him. Was she going to put him to work right away?
The hardwood floor creaked as he walked, and Sarah turned around, giving him a polite smile. He stuffed his hands into his jean pockets, and they both stood in silence. He felt like an intruder and she had the look of being intruded upon.
Finally, she spoke: “So I get the feeling you probably don’t want to be here.”
Her tone was one of understanding, which made him grimace. Had he made it that obvious?
“No. I don’t mind. I mean, thank you for everything and letting me stay with you.” He didn’t want to be there, but he had to be somewh
ere with an adult family member. It was probably better to be with Aunt Sarah than arguing with his dad all summer in hotel rooms. Hopefully, she was still as cool as he remembered her being.
“Look, I don’t know how we’re supposed to do this. I know what your dad wants—for you to slave away in my shop all summer.” She let out a sigh and threw her hand towel on the counter. “Ricky, I haven’t seen you in four years. I don’t expect you’re still the little kid who used to get excited by the ambiance of Blinney Lane or the fairy tales I used to tell you.”
At that, he grinned. It was nice to hear something kind about himself, even nicer that someone remembered him.
“I’ve got a business to run, and I’d love the help if you’ll put a little enthusiasm into it. I don’t expect you to work for free, so I’ll pay you honest wages. And it’s your last summer before college starts in the fall, so I don’t want to make you a prisoner here. I don’t have time to get out much, but you’re welcome to go out in town for lunch. However, I will need to know when you’re leaving and when you’ll be back. I’m too old and too busy to have to worry about where you are. Just be where you say you’re going to be and be back when you should be, and the summer should fly by for you. I can live with that if you can.”
Ricky chewed the inside of his lower lip. She wasn’t scolding him, just covering her ass with the initial ground rules. She looked scared to have to keep track of him. Did she think he was going to go out at night and tag the sides of buildings? He looked up at her and nodded. “I won’t be a pain in the ass. I promise.”
“Ha! I never said that, Ricky,” she said and headed toward the door that opened to the staircase down to the shop. “I’ve got to get back downstairs, but you go ahead and make yourself at home.”