by Amy Meyerson
Charlie held our first book club meeting, Where’d You Go, Bernadette, which had recently come out in paperback. He sat with a handful of women in their early twenties, discussing the unique structure of the novel, the role of technology and email in contemporary literature. I counted at least three girls I’d never seen before. Their eyes darted to and from Charlie as they tried not to be too obvious about why they’d joined the book club. Whether it was for Charlie or Maria Semple, that was three books we otherwise wouldn’t have sold, three new customers who would come to the next book club meeting, if only to spend more time with its leader.
That Sheila didn’t have the next clue ready and waiting, gift-wrapped and addressed to me, didn’t mean I was going to squander what time I had left. I had a month until I had to be back for orientation. Every year, we went to a motel in the Poconos that my principal’s in-laws owned. We’d sit around a campfire, sharing stories from break. I could recite from memory the locations of the beachfront properties my colleagues rented every summer along the Jersey Shore. The sunburns, the Dippin’ Dots. Humid nights on the boardwalk. What would I tell them in turn about my summer in Los Angeles? How peaceful late afternoons were in Prospero Books? The ins and outs of the daily bookkeeping and inventory checks required to run a bookstore? Would I tell them about Dr. Howard and his savant ability to recite Erica Jong and Edgar Allan Poe? About befriending the legendary Sheila Crowley, the hikes we took each morning? I didn’t want the English teacher to ask me for book recommendations, the math teacher to say, That’s so interesting, the way he purported to find everything interesting, even his students’ wrong answers. I told myself I would feel differently once I returned, once Jay’s arm was around me as we sat by the campfire, once the life I had chosen was mine again, but as I thought about that motel in the mountains, Prospero Books didn’t sound like a summer job.
Since Sheila couldn’t tell me what happened to Evelyn, I tried the patrons of Prospero Books.
“Evelyn?” Ray the screenwriter asked. “Evelyn Ward?”
“No, Billy’s wife, Evelyn Weston.”
“Billy was married?” He shoved his glasses up the bridge of his nose, eager for a bit of gossip.
“A long time ago,” I said. “She opened Prospero Books. You’ve never heard anything about her?”
“I always thought Lee was the original owner.”
The other regulars weren’t any more helpful. The teenagers who savored their mochas each afternoon stared at me with the same skepticism I received from my students when I asked them if they remembered who Andrew Johnson was. “You mean the old guy who died?” the teenagers deigned to respond when I asked them about Prospero Books’ owner. The young mothers were too busy cleaning up milk their toddlers had knocked over to have noticed anything amiss in Prospero Books. The writers wore oversize headphones, blocking them off from the world outside. Even Lucia looked at me like I spent too much time with my nose in novels.
“An accident?” she said as she bussed a table. “Here, in Prospero Books?”
“I don’t know where. I just know she died in a terrible accident,” I explained.
Lucia shook her head emphatically. “If something like that happened, I’d know about it.” She grabbed a bus tub and brought it into the kitchen. I thought tragedy lived in a place like old smells, never fully faded, but no one in Prospero Books seemed to know anything about Evelyn. No one except Sheila, who had respected Billy’s privacy too much to ask him what had happened, and Malcolm, who knew more than he intimated.
I turned toward Malcolm. He was sitting with a circle of men, an open bottle of whiskey between them as they swapped tales of hunting and brushes with death, copies of Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa resting in their laps. I counted two plaid-shirted, brass-belt-buckled men I didn’t recognize. Charlie brought in the giggling girls. Malcolm brought in the brooding men. He pantomimed his hunting stance as he described his communion with a buck, how their eyes had locked before he pulled the trigger. His story was grandiose, flourished with details that couldn’t possibly be true, the buck’s snarl, his grinding teeth, a bead of sweat dripping from Malcolm’s brow onto the rifle below. He was a charlatan. A sweet talker. And he was good at it. He could bring these stoic men to the edge of their chairs. He could cajole me, too, feeding me tales of Billy’s uncanny ability to know what art books to buy, distracting me with whiskey and biographies of JFK.
“Have you ever really shot a deer?” I asked Malcolm after the lumberjacks left.
“Of course not,” he said, capping the bottle of whiskey on the table.
“So you lied to those men?” The humor fell from his face. It wasn’t the most persuasive way of getting him to talk to me, but I was frustrated with Sheila for not having the next clue, with Jay for not calling or texting, with the regulars for not exploring the history of the place they supposedly loved, with Prospero Books for hiding secrets, with Malcolm for being so good at keeping those secrets, too. Billy was his best friend, and everything about Billy was because of Evelyn. Malcolm had to know about her. He simply had to.
“We were just bullshitting,” he said matter-of-factly. He returned the chairs, collected in a circle, to their respective tables. “What’s up with you? You’re acting weird. Weirder than usual.”
“You said you spent every day with Billy?” His lovely eyes widened as he waited for me to get to the point. “And there’s nothing he ever said to you that you want to share with me?”
He sighed. “What do you want me to say? I’m sorry if it’s hard for you to hear, but Billy never talked about you. I didn’t know you existed until you showed up here.”
“Until I showed up at the funeral.” I straightened one of the chairs he’d haphazardly pushed into the table. “You saw me at the funeral.”
“I don’t really remember much about the funeral.” He held on to the back of a chair, rocking it gently.
“Too much whiskey?” It came out crueler than I’d meant.
“No. Jesus, Miranda. I’d just lost my friend.” Malcolm threw the chair into the table. “Some things aren’t about you.” He grabbed the whiskey bottle and stormed behind the front desk. I watched him from across the room. His eyes glazed over as he retreated into himself. I felt like an asshole. Callous and selfish. Each day, Malcolm arrived at the store to me instead of Billy. Each day, he had to face anew that Billy was gone, that Prospero Books might soon be gone, too. I don’t know why it took me so long to understand. Malcolm wasn’t keeping secrets from me. He was mourning.
* * *
My failures in Billy’s quest seemed in direct proportion to the gains we were making with the gala. I’d interviewed every regular, scanned every local newspaper, torn apart every drawer upstairs and down, without finding any evidence of Evelyn, but we’d secured three additional readings for the big event. Malcolm contacted the publicist of a debut novel he’d loved. The writer lived in San Francisco and agreed to drive down to Prospero Books for the night. One of Lucia’s friends, a DJ of some renown, had offered to do short sets between the readings. Malcolm and I agreed that the EDM should be saved for after hours, once Sheila’s friends, the likes of Dr. Howard and whoever else had enough money to bid on the silent auction, had called it a night. It was just about the only thing we were agreeing upon. Malcolm’s sentences had quickly resumed their brevity, talking to me only when necessary. I missed our communion more than I’d expected, but Malcolm held on to his injury like it appreciated in value the longer he retained it. He was being petty with his one-word answers, his pretending not to hear me when I spoke to him. It didn’t encourage me to apologize to him, even if I knew I was wrong to doubt his grief, to make it about me.
With our Scotch sessions coming to an abrupt halt and the division of labor split neatly in half, Malcolm and I inhabited independent roles in the store. He stayed behind the front desk, ringing up customers and ordering books. I kept to the shel
ves and the café, filing books that came in, taking down others that didn’t sell. As I was packing up a box to return to the distributor, Sheila barreled into the store, emphatically waving an envelope in her right hand. I rested the book I was holding on the shelf and ran over to her.
“Look what turned up in the mail this morning!” She handed me a standard number-ten envelope, PB written in place of a return address. It had been postmarked and processed the day before, in the 90005 zip code of Los Angeles. Hancock Park, my phone told me, where Elijah worked. I wondered why he’d waited so long after her reading to send it to Sheila.
I tore open the envelope, and Sheila leaned over my shoulder as we read the riddle typed on the computer paper inside.
A master of charades, the names she gives are never just that. Although he’s no Fitzwilliam, when he’s gone away, his value is still intact.
Sheila frowned. “It’s grammatically incorrect.” She pointed to the comma before the names. “She is a master of charades, not the names. Billy knew better.”
“Who?” I asked Sheila.
“Jane Austen. She was known for her charades. In Emma particularly. But this isn’t referring to Emma.” She pointed to Fitzwilliam. “You know who that is?”
“Should I?”
Sheila frowned. “You’re going to have to forfeit your Jane Austen card if you don’t.”
“I don’t think I have a Jane Austen card.”
Sheila rolled her eyes. “No one is too good for Jane Austen.” Her finger pressed into Fitzwilliam on the paper. “And no one is too proud for Mr. Darcy, either, Mr. Fitzwilliam Darcy.”
Sheila and I studied the clue.
“You see the end here?” I ran my finger beneath the last line. “‘When he’s gone away, his value is still intact.’ That’s the name we’re looking for.”
We leaned closer to the paper, as if distance was what kept us from solving the rest of the riddle.
“His value.” I typed “value” into the thesaurus and read to Sheila. “Amount. Cost. Expense. Worth. Profit.”
Sheila snapped her fingers. “Worth,” she said authoritatively. “And what’s another way of saying gone away, perhaps in the simple past tense?”
“What are you, the grammar Nazi?”
“I never joke about grammar. So, what’s the correct answer?” She would have made a good teacher.
Go. Gone. “Went,” I marveled, like I’d solved one of the great mysteries of the world.
Sheila nodded approvingly. “Captain Frederick Wentworth.” I shot her a puzzled look. “You’re hopeless.”
Sheila guided me to the classics, where she scanned the A’s until she located a Penguin Classics edition of Persuasion. The paperback bulged awkwardly where an empty matchbook marked an early page in the novel. Austen’s descriptions of the Elliot patriarch were highlighted.
Vanity was the beginning and end of Sir Walter Elliot’s character: vanity of person and of situation.
And a sentence later:
Few women could think more of their personal appearance than he did, nor could the valet of any new-made lord be more delighted with the place he held in society.
The matchbook was from a steakhouse in Orange County. Yelp reported that it had been sold and renamed in 2002, trading hands a half dozen times before it finally closed in 2011. The reviews from the most recent iteration pined for the original restaurant. Burt Weston may have been a greedy a-hole, one reviewer wrote. At least he knew how to hire a line staff that could cook an f-ing steak. I angled my phone toward Sheila. She shrugged, not seeing the key detail in that review, and now it was my turn to play the expert.
“Weston,” I told Sheila. “As in Evelyn Weston. Burt Weston must have been her father.” And he must have been vain and self-important. I already knew that Billy didn’t like him.
The information online about Burt Weston was overwhelming. Sole proprietor of Weston Family Farms, the largest fruit distributors in the San Joaquin Valley. He’d been on the cover of several magazines, including Forbes. In the ’70s and ’80s, periodicals praised his rags-to-riches story. By the ’90s, exposés detailed harsh work environments, political bribery and massive layoffs. He’d been sued by former employees and unions, by ex-wives. By the late ’90s, when he was in his midsixties, he’d sold his farm to a conglomerate and retired. I wondered how much money each of the wives had gotten. I wondered which wife was Evelyn’s mother.
People as rich and controversial as Burt Weston didn’t publicly list their addresses. But through Sir Walter, Billy had announced Burt Weston’s key characteristic: his vanity. He must have wanted people to be able to locate him. Even after he’d sold his business and retired, even as he insisted he was no longer giving interviews, he must have wanted to be found. His address was listed in a gated community in Orange County, about an hour outside Los Angeles.
* * *
Orange County was a straight line down the 5, but my car made a detour, driving itself west before I realized where I was going. I found Mom in the garden, mulching her roses. She wore a wide-brimmed hat to block the sun. I couldn’t make out her expression, cast in all that shadow.
“Miranda.” Mom stood and called to me from across the yard. “What are you doing here?”
I wanted to run to her like I was a child again, to wrap my arms around her waist in that too-tight way, but I kept my distance. I missed the carefree way I used to embrace Mom. I hadn’t thought I could lose that with her.
“Well, hello to you, too,” I said.
She took off her hat, and I saw her face clearly, layered in makeup even though she was gardening. “Honey, is everything okay?”
“Of course everything’s not okay. How could it be?”
“I don’t know.” She took off her gloves, wedging them under her arm. “I’m glad you came home, though.”
“I’m not home,” I said curtly. “I’m just letting you know that I’m on my way to see Burt.”
“Burt?” she asked innocently enough.
“Burt Weston.”
Mom dropped her hat to the ground. The gloves dislodged from under her arm, trailing her as she raced toward me. She grabbed my arm. “You can’t do that.”
“You aren’t even going to ask how I know who he is?” I tried to shake her hand off me.
“Miranda, please. You can’t talk to Burt.” She gripped my forearm, pulling me gently, then harder when I wouldn’t budge. I was stronger than Mom was. Younger. More stubborn. “We’ll go inside. We’ll talk.”
“We’ll talk? You’re serious? I’ve been here almost two months. At any point in the last two months, you could have talked to me. I don’t want to talk to you anymore. I don’t need to.” Mom let go of my arm and hugged herself. Her body trembled as she tried to contain her emotions.
“Burt Weston is a cruel and selfish man.” She looked so small hugging herself, staring over at me. I clenched my hands into fists so they didn’t reach out to comfort her.
“At least he’ll tell me the truth.”
“No,” she said calmly. “He won’t. He only ever saw the worst in your uncle.”
“As opposed to you? Since you’ve been so generous with Billy?”
Mom’s face hardened. She unfurled her arms and rested her hands on her hips. “I always saw the best in him. It was him—it was Billy who always blamed me.”
“Maybe you deserved it.” Mom recoiled like I’d slapped her. Tears welled in her eyes. I’d wanted to hurt Mom, and I’d succeeded. It didn’t make me feel any better.
“Please don’t see Burt,” she said so quietly I almost didn’t hear her.
“You do realize that the more you tell me not to see him, the more obvious it is he’ll tell me something you don’t want me to know.” I started pacing back and forth. “And the funny part is I can’t even figure out why you won’t talk to me. I thought we told
each other everything, but maybe we’ve never been as close as I thought we were.”
“Please, honey, you can’t go see him.” She stepped closer to me, reaching for my shoulder. She smelled of sweat and manure. A pungent, acrid scent that made me nauseous.
“You aren’t even listening to me. I’m telling you there’s something wrong with us, and all you can talk about is Burt.”
She shook her head frantically and rubbed at her face, lost from me and our conversation, from any chance of connecting. I stormed toward the car. “Miranda, please come back,” she called, but I was already gone.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The I-5 was clear, and I drove faster than normal, watching the speedometer inch toward eighty, eighty-five, ninety. Hot air gushed in through the open windows, sending my hair into a tornado that partially obscured my view of the road ahead. My phone buzzed in the console. When I saw it was Mom, I hit Ignore. I tuned the radio to something loud and angry. I wanted to be reckless. I wanted to be angsty. I wanted to be someone else, but when I hit ninety-five, something seized in my chest and I let up on the gas. The car slowed down until it leveled off at seventy. I turned down the radio and rolled up the windows. I wasn’t someone else, I was me, Miranda Brooks. Even if I didn’t answer Mom’s calls, I still listened to her voice mails.
“Miranda, it’s your mother,” she said, as if I otherwise wouldn’t have known who it was. “Please call me back. I shouldn’t have let you walk away. Please come home.”
Her next two voice mails grew more urgent.
“Please, honey. I’m sorry if I haven’t been more open with you. This is all tremendously difficult for me. Please call me,” and, “Sweetheart, this has all gotten out of hand. We’re family. We can’t lose each other. I can’t lose you. Please, let’s just talk about this.”
I had to press Delete as soon as I listened to them, so I wouldn’t replay them and feel guilty enough to call her back. By her fourth message, the plea was gone. “This is the last time I’ll call. I’m not saying I’m perfect or I’ve done everything right, but I’m trying to protect you. You have to trust me.” How was I supposed to trust her now?