What I did early the next morning, dawn failing to slice through the dense overcast, was— Amanda, my saving grace—I drove over to my girlfriend’s and asked her if she could take the morning off work.
“You seem serious today, Liam. Are you all right?”
“I am serious, and I am all right. Better than all right, better than I’ve ever been.”
We strolled to a pretty little park, one we liked a lot, not far from Amanda’s apartment building. The sun hovered above us, white as a flag of surrender, trying like anything to break through the clouds. The bench we found was, like the rest of the park, empty and wet from last night’s rain. I took off my jacket and wiped dry a spot where we could sit, holding hands. Damned if Amanda didn’t look lovelier than ever, the shadows on her face softened in the pearl-gray light. Rotten as my juvenile thoughts about her over the years had been, I realized they’d brought me to this place, me sitting with her, not with some lewd made-up story about her but Amanda herself. When I asked her, “Manda, I love you so much, always have, and I wonder if you would marry me?” and she answered without hesitation, as if she’d pondered the possibility for a long time, “Nothing would make me happier, Liam,” I felt the sun break through and even though it didn’t it may as well have, given how full of warmth and light I felt. We kissed each other, held each other close, and as I walked her back so she could get ready for work, we agreed that we would tell my mom that evening and afterwards go out to dinner somewhere special and celebrate. Caviar and champagne, the works.
Back home, I got busy. The Bibles were already in a half a dozen weary boxes that had come from the church way back in the dark ages. A couple had maybe housed quart bottles of grape juice for all I knew, but their labels had all peeled off so the boxes were nondescript, old, and, I hoped, untraceable. I slipped contractors bags around them, to keep any rainwater off and to make them all the more anonymous. Like some criminal, which I suppose I was in fact, I made myself more anonymous too, by putting on my father’s very unhip clothes, including a plaid sports jacket that was so hideous even he had never worn it. Up and down our street there were, as almost always, zero signs of life, but I made quick work of it anyhow. My heart heavy as a cobblestone, my eyes welling and blurred, I loaded the boxes into the trunk of my car—my mother still used the old wagon to ship herself to and from her lousy job, so I used our other one, another junker I had bought with my socalled lottery winnings that was good for getting from here to nearby there and nothing more. Our pathetic village library was too close to my neighborhood for comfort—I had considered the town dump, but terrified as I was about getting caught I couldn’t bring myself to desert my precious trove there—so I drove a few hamlets over to a larger town, traveling through rolling terrain highlighted by ruined farmhouses and sad swayback horses standing in mucky fields.
At one point, seeing I was driving erratic as hell, I had to pull over to catch my breath and try to calm down. I sat there, muttering an apology to my father, and gazed out at one lone red horse that stood nearby, chewing away, his jaw zagging sideways, his big chocolate eyes trained warily on me. He looked like a mythic sage who had lost his train of thought. When I found myself starting to apologize to him, too, I snapped to, thinking, You have no choice here, Liam, no free will. Get this done already.
The library might as well have been a mortuary. Lights seemed to be on but there were no other signs of life. I parked in back of the building, a yellowish brick structure which, like my father’s old church, had seen better days. Underneath a rusting metal eave at the top of a short flight of cement steps, I stacked the boxes against the rear door, which looked to be a delivery entrance. Let me confess that I fought back tears as I looked at the black plastic-wrapped boxes piled there, feeling like a bereft parent who was deserting a newborn on the doorstep of a church or police station, abandoning the child, one whose care and upbringing were beyond the realm of possibility, to the mercies of strangers and fate.
Head downcast and hands in pockets, I walked away from my trove with more grief than could ever be written down and printed in some damned book. As I climbed into my car and turned on the ignition, I leaned my forehead against the steering wheel and felt a breach had opened in my heart that I knew would never mend, a wound that meant I was losing my father all over again. But I was a man now, soon to be a husband, maybe even a real father one day, a father who would never abandon his kids, and to be a man meant sometimes you had to leave certain things behind with the hope that better things lie ahead. That’s what I was telling myself, like some fool idiot saying a prayer, until I heard a knock on the car window that caused me to jolt upright in the car seat with the violent abruptness one experiences when waking from a nightmare.
I turned to see my father peering in at me, his face so very familiar with a look both furious and—how could this be?—friendly. My dead father viewed through the shimmering and unsteady lens of my tears, my father who I then recognized was in fact Reynolds staring in at me, his hoodie cowling his visage like a demonic monk. Stunned, speechless, I saw him flick his fingers toward his chest, that vintage gesture used by cops to indicate, Would you mind stepping out of your car, sir?
Defiant, or so I hastily tried to be, knowing my eyes must be ringed pink and wet, I rolled down the driver’s side window, saying nothing.
“So, Liam,” he said, after glancing to his left and right before he rested his forearm on the door. “What’s the word?” The playful frown on his unparted lips and the way he tilted his head with the cocky confidence of one in full Machiavellian control boded nothing but trouble. Once my friend, or so I had naïvely believed, Reynolds had developed a knack for asking questions that left me speechless.
I had no word for him, I realized. “I’m not sure what you mean,” I ventured.
“Well, let me try to help you out. What I mean to say is, I was wondering what’s in those boxes over there?” he asked, snapping his head back in the direction of the library while continuing to level his unblinking gaze at me.
Any joy or sadness I had experienced that day, from proposing to Amanda to the necessary decision to abandon my trove, came to a quick terminus. I swear I could literally feel the blood drain from my face.
Reynolds was still speaking. “Don’t you want to get a receipt from the librarian if you’re going to make a contribution of books? It’s tax deductible, you know.”
With one last pathetic grab at saving the situation, I said, “I don’t make enough money to need a tax deduction. Was just thinking they could use some Bibles.”
“Well, that’s interesting, Liam. You know why?”
“No, why?”
“Because I was just thinking that I myself could do with reading the Bible more often. Working in my field, I encounter so many bad guys that sometimes I feel they have a negative influence on me. I worry now and then that I might turn into a bad guy myself if I don’t watch it. Some Bibles might be just the thing. Some remedial reading, isn’t that what it’s called?”
I waited. His frown rose into a half-smile now.
“Let me ask you a question, you mind?”
My engine was still idling. I thought if I just dropped into gear I could end this puzzling discussion here and now. But did I really want to go to jail on the same day that the love of my life had accepted my proposal of marriage?
“My strong impression, watching you from afar—or, well, maybe not from so afar as you might think—is that you like those Bibles, even need those Bibles, as much as I do. I also suspect that you know far better than I do about how to mine them, if I can make a little pun, for their true value. Being the son of a preacher, and all, I mean. You agree with that, in principle?”
I squinted and nodded.
“Which is not to say I haven’t been given alms now and then to keep prying eyes, so to speak, at bay. And I was happy to oblige, you know, even way back when, until I began to realize, not long before your father passed, what a pittance was being tossed my way.�
��
Was I hearing right? I wondered. Was I just witness to a confession?
“I don’t know about any of that,” I said.
“Well, that’s all right, you don’t really need to know more. But look here, meantime. What do you say we get those boxes out of the wet weather, throw half of them in the back of my car”—and he gestured across the street behind me toward the vintage white bathtub Porsche parked there; I suppose I should have been more horrified than I was—“and the other half in yours, and get out of here before whoever is supposed to be running this silly library comes back and claims your donation. We can work out any details about our Bible studies later. What say?”
“Do I have any choice?”
Reynolds paused just a fleeting moment before answering, “None that I can think of, offhand.”
Back home, after disposing of my pater’s eccentric clothes and burying my remaining half of the trove in the back of my helter-skelter closet, not even bothering to see if I ended up with the Voltaire or the Shelley, the Donne or the Pindar, I opened an account at Amanda’s bank with my so-called lottery winnings. Time had come for me to confess to my fiancée I’d been lucky scratching tickets over the years. She forgave me in the car, driving over to tell my mother the happy news of our betrothal, but also was practical enough to realize the money represented a nice nest egg with which to start our fledgling marriage. I swore—not on a stack of Bibles, no, but I meant it anyhow—that I would never gamble again. Both god and the devil, gamblers themselves, could verify I haven’t, if only they existed.
For a handful of months after that encounter with Reynolds, a blessed oasis of time, nobody named Claude called me, or Harrison, either. The Claudes I didn’t much miss, but one day, feeling a nostalgic longing to hear Harrison’s voice, see if he was all right, see if any more books might be coming my way—our way, if one counted Reynolds—I called him from the anonymity of a pay phone downtown. It rang a few times before a recorded message came on and a monotone disembodied voice told me this number was no longer in service. My fellow congregants in the religious order of literary rarities had disappeared as if they had never been more than a crazy figment of my imagination. This hiatus soon enough came to an end. One day, a colleague of Harrison contacted me to say he had something either I or Harvey— Claudes were now known as Harveys, to me an equally preposterous moniker—might find of interest. Were it up to me and me alone, I would have respectfully announced my retirement and bowed out. But I had other mouths to feed than my own and, in all honesty, my bibliophilic malady might have been driven by fear into remission, but I could not fairly claim to be cured of it.
Reynolds showed up periodically, asking me if I had read any good books lately and, out of habit or lunacy or simply to remind me he held the dangerous upper hand, inquired if I’d had any contact from anyone suspicious, anyone who might have been involved in the reverend’s death. Some days I told him I hadn’t and that seemed good enough for him. On other days, I let him know that indeed I’d had a visitor, a fellow book lover, and handed him an attaché case containing either money or, if he liked, a new acquisition—or should I say, rather, deacquistion. Amanda, who knew nothing about any of these activities, of course, thought it was kind of Reynolds to take time away from his demanding job to stay in touch with me, and even come to our wedding, which took place on a sunny Saturday afternoon in my father’s beloved old church. It was not her problem that I had become his minion, as it were, one who secretly chafed at the bit and bided his time.
And speaking of time, I had to wonder how many months or even years might pass before the good detective, my objectionable colleague, might make a fatal misstep on a staircase somewhere and plunge, a look of malign astonishment frozen on his face, to the unforgiving floor at the bottom. If and when it happens, will he even have time to curse my name, or my father’s? No, I think he will not. His end is foretold in the Bible, after all, in Leviticus and elsewhere, and just because I remain at heart an unbeliever, I recognize that it is a book that holds many valuable truths and worthy mandates.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Bradford Morrow
Cover design by Frances Lassor
978-1-5040-2744-1
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The Nature of My Inheritance Page 6