by ACF Bookens
Daniel patted my hand. “Are you choking because one of your favorite authors wants to see your store or because your mom is calling one of your favorite authors by his first name?”
Mom said, “Oh pish.”
I laughed. “Both, I think. Really – he wants to see my store?”
“Said he wouldn’t miss it,” Dad said.
I puffed up my cheeks and let out a sputter of breath. “Guess I’ll be doing a major cleaning tomorrow.”
“Already got that covered,” Mom said. “Elle, Cate, Lucas, and Woody are coming in the morning when you open. You tell them what needs doing, and they’ll do it.”
I sat back in my chair and looked at these four amazing people around me. “You guys really did think of everything, didn’t you?”
“Almost,” Mart said, “but we do need to find you an outfit for tomorrow.”
I sighed. Fashion was never my top priority, but even I knew that a proper outfit would allay my fears about looking frumpy for this momentous day. Mart wheeled up my scooter. “To the closet,” I said as I raised my hand in the air. “I will prevail.”
I could hear Mom, Dad, and Daniel chuckling as they began to clean up the dishes.
* * *
The next morning, I put on my black dress pants and the peasant blouse that Mart had said would look both artsy and professional and slipped into my red Mary Janes. My best friend had gone so far as to lay out my jewelry, so I slipped on my rings, taking a minute to admire the topaz engagement ring Daniel had picked because he knew I didn’t want a diamond, and then put on my necklace. Mart had wanted me to wear earrings, too, but since I had let my holes close up, I had to settle for the two topaz studs I wore in my left ear.
I clipped my curls down into place with the help of a little pomade and then looked in the mirror. I was surprised to see that I looked not only pulled together but also like myself. My decision to only buy and wear things I loved when I moved to St. Marin’s was paying off, and I felt a little spring in my scoot as I headed toward the store, Mayhem in the lead. She was becoming quite adept at being a “scooter dog,” and I contemplated having her pull me around town even when I could walk again.
The shop was already abuzz when I arrived. Rocky had recruited Elle to give the café a thorough cleaning. It was always spotless, but I knew Rocky wanted her space to shine for our special guest. And Woody was dusting, with an actual feather duster. I loved a man who wasn’t afraid to do work that was traditionally considered the work of women. Cate and Lucas were hauling out hand truck after hand truck of books and moving through the shelves filling gaps and resupplying the overstock shelves as Woody dusted them.
I thought briefly of the birds who made Cinderella’s dress in the Disney movie and giggled as I joined Marcus at the register. “You know, you could have come in later? You are going to be here late tonight,” I said.
He shrugged. “What can I say? I didn’t want to miss out on the excitement. Plus, despite the fact that we now have all hands on deck,” he smiled at Tiffany as she jogged past on her way to drop her bag off in the back room, “I suspect we’re going to be very busy.”
“Yeah, you think the event tomorrow is going to draw that much of a crowd?” I asked as I tucked my own purse into the cabinet beneath the register.
“No, I think this is.” Marcus held his phone in front of my face, and I saw John Green’s image from the top of his Facebook page. I scanned down and there, right at the top, was his announcement that he would be in St. Marin’s this weekend for an event tomorrow night, that he was doing an event for hospice and hoped people would donate, and that he’d be stopping by my shop this evening and would be happy to sign any books people bought.
I fell into my throne and put my hands over my eyes. “This can’t be happening, can it? Did John Green just plug my shop and tell people he’d sign books while he was here?”
“Yes. Yes he did. And don’t forget, he’s having dinner at your house beforehand.” Marcus patted me on the shoulder and then leaned down as he passed by. “Enjoy it, Harvey. You deserve it.”
I looked up at the ceiling and took a deep breath. Then, I let the smile that was aching to come out burst across my face. This was unbelievable.
But by ten a.m., when I flipped on the neon sign and unlocked the door, the effects of Green’s post – and all the shares and retweets and Instagram stories that had spread – was in evidence because we had a line at the door. I quickly asked Woody to help me move my throne and table to just inside the door and began answering questions about Green’s visit as needed. I didn’t give details because my shop couldn’t handle thousands of people at one time, and I figured if Green wanted people here at a certain time, he would have said so. I just said that he was expected later in the day, that people were welcome to buy their books now and come back to see him later, and that yes, of course, they could make a donation to hospice here.
About eleven, I began to panic about our stock of books, but I had to table my worry about that when Tuck came in. Tiffany slid into my seat at the front door as Tuck and I made our way to the café to talk. He’d texted to say he wanted my opinion on something, and I’d told him to come by. “So what’s up?” I asked as I swigged back my second latte of the day, anticipating that I’d need the caffeine to counteract the inevitable adrenaline crash that would come soon.
“Cynthia did come by. And her story makes sense and lines up with what Javier Petra told me.” He took a sip of his coffee.
“So you believe her?” I felt a wave of relief wash over me. I had been worried that my naive desire to always think the good of people might have deluded me. ‘
“I do. She has every reason to lie, of course, if she was assisting Bixley, but I just don’t think she was. These angels of mercy usually work alone, wanting to revel in their accomplishments solo. Plus, the means of death didn’t require an assistant. One syringe was all it took.”
I sighed. “I wish she had found something to incriminate Bixley.”
“Me, too. It’s so frustrating. All of these people suspected him, and yet he was too slick, too good to get caught.” Tuck leaned back and put his hands behind his head.
“Don’t they always say in movies that the killer always makes a mistake?” I grinned and squinted at my friend.
He laughed. “I’m taking away your Netflix subscription.”
I was just about to tell Tuck about Green’s big announcement when Woody ran over. “Sheriff, I think you need to see this.”
14
The sheriff followed Woody over to Santa’s Sleigh-Land (as Marcus and I had taken to calling it in a sad attempt at humor to stave off despair), and I scooted right behind. I couldn’t see what Woody pointed to next to one of the runners of the sleigh until Tuck took a latex glove from his back pocket and picked it up. It was a hypodermic syringe.
I stepped back and grimaced as my jaw clenched. “What is that doing here?” I had memories of the warnings hung around Ocean Beach in San Francisco that cautions visitors about going barefoot in the sand because of spent needles. It was something I was used to there, sadly perhaps, but here, in my store – I felt myself asking the question again: “Why is that here?”
Tuck shouted a request for a plastic bag to Rocky, and she came over with one and just stared at the needle. I expected she, like me, had seen needles before, but in this setting, the sight was really creepy; unsettling in a deep way.
“You cleaned in here since last week, right?” Tuck asked me.
I dropped my chin and looked at him. “Of course. I keep a clean store.” But then I sighed, “Given my injury, though, I haven’t moved the tables or the sleigh to clean around them.”
“So this could have been here since Bixley was killed?” Tuck’s voice was kind but firm.
I nodded. “It could have been.”
Woody gave me a compassionate glance. “You saw it, Sheriff. It was right up against the runner, and given that it’s mostly clear . . .”
; “Oh, I know. It was easy to miss, and I’m not making any judgments here. Just trying to establish a timeline.” The sheriff gestured toward the chair and a half nearby. “Sit down, Harvey, before you fall down.”
I did as I was told and felt a smidge better once my heartrate returned to normal. Then, it picked back up when the anger hit. “Wait, does that mean you think whoever killed Bixley actually injected him here?” I felt rage climbing up my spine. It was one thing to have someone die here. It was entirely another to have someone killed here.
“We don’t know anything, Harvey.” Tuck must have seen the lava of fury threatening to explode from my ears because his voice was soft and smooth. “That is one possibility, but it’s also possible that this needle is here for any number of reasons.”
“Like what?” I spat. Rocky put her arm around my shoulders.
“Like a drug user dropped it? Or someone who is actually diabetic?”
“Or the killer let it fall after injecting, Bixley,” I added, my voice lined with steel. “So help me, if I find out someone murdered him in my shop—”
Tuck winked at Marcus, who had joined us when I had started shouting, and said, “What? You’ll murder them?”
I stopped mid-sentence, stunned, because I had been about to say that very thing. I sank back against the chair. “Well, no.” I felt tears gather in my throat. “But seriously, I’m terribly sad someone died here, but for this to be a crime scene, for someone to steal the innocence of Santa like this . . .” I couldn’t finish.
Marcus knelt down beside me. “It’s awful, Harvey. But at least we have some evidence now, right? That’s a lot more than we had this morning.” He looked up at Tuck who gave a knowing nod.
“He’s right, Harvey. My guess is that if – and that’s a big if – this is the murder weapon, the killer didn’t intend to leave it behind. And if they didn’t intend to leave it behind . . .” He let his voice trail off.
“They might not have been very careful about how they touched it.” I smiled tentatively.
“I guess all those crime dramas do pay off from time to time,” Tuck said. “I’m off. Harvey, I will let you know if we find anything here, just to ease your mind.”
“Thank you, Tuck. I really appreciate that.” I sighed and looked at my friends. Cate and Lucas were still tidying, but I could see Cate checking on things in our little huddle as she loaded the bookshelves. “Well, nothing more to do about that now, and we have a celebrity author coming to town.”
Marcus smiled and reconvened the cleaning and stocking efforts. I scooted to my throne and took out my computer. I’d made a mental note of the kind of needle, and I figured that at least I could confirm my suspicions that this was an insulin syringe. I knew it could be something else, but I didn’t think it was. It would be far too much of a coincidence to have someone die from a needle injection and find a random, unrelated needle in the same week.
Cate came over and leaned over the back of my chair. “A match?” she asked, catching on quickly to my query.
I looked carefully at an image of a needle on the screen, one labeled as an insulin syringe, and they sure looked the same to me. Thin tube with lots of measurement marks and a very thin needle. The one Woody found was missing the trademark orange cap, but I figured the killer had tucked that into a pocket to make the syringe subtler.
“That needle is so tiny. It reminds me of the acupuncture needles my aunt uses in her practice. She puts them into me, and I don’t even feel it,” Cate said. “These are a little bigger, but still. It’s possible Bixley was stuck and didn’t even know it.”
I sighed. “You’re right. If someone was distracted,” I thought back to the way Bixley was acting as he came in – like he was drunk, “or intoxicated, he might not have even noticed.”
Cate rubbed my shoulders. “I hate to say it, Harvey, but your store has had its first murder on the grounds.”
My head dropped into my hands, and I moaned. “Great. Just what I needed today.” I felt a sharp smack on the back of my head and looked up at Cate to see her scowling.
“Come on, Harvey. This isn’t great, but it’s not the end of the world. At least it wasn’t a gruesome death, right?”
I tried to smile. “I guess you’re right.” I knew Cate was bothered, at least as bothered as I was, but she was trying to help me, well, keep going, and I appreciated the effort, especially since I was having dinner with John Green in just seven hours.
So I took a deep breath, closed the browser tabs, and stood up. “Alright, I’m ready.” The customers had been steady since we opened, but I had been so distracted by everything that I hadn’t even noticed how steady, as in lined up to buy books steady. I looked at the Christmas Tree display of Green books and realized with a start that it was almost empty. Cate looked at my face, saw the panic rising there, and followed my gaze.
“We’re on it.” She put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. Lucas turned on the ladder where he was filling in the last of the open shelves with titles and caught Cate’s eye. She pointed to the tree and then the boxes behind the sleigh, and he nodded. Within seconds, they were refilling the shelves while I carefully counted our remaining titles. We’d put aside a couple hundred books for the event tomorrow, and I wasn’t about to break into those. But at this rate, we were going to be out of books for the store by noon.
“What are we going to do?” I asked Lucas as Cate filled in the remaining spaces on the tree.
He looked from me to the nearly empty boxes and back to me. “We’ll think of something. Don’t worry.”
I wanted to believe him, but it felt like all I had was worry inside. “Okay,” I said and tried to mean it.
I was headed toward the desk to strategize about the shortage with Marcus when the bell above the door rang, and I glanced over to see a fleet of delivery people coming through with a dozen hand trucks. The woman in the lead headed straight for the desk and caught my eye, “Are you Harvey Beckett?”
“I am,” I said, “What’s this?” I nodded toward the stacks of boxes the men and women were unloading near Santa’s Sleigh-Land.
She took a notecard out of her back pocket and handed it to me with a smile before heading back to unload her own stack of boxes.
I stared at Marcus for a minute and then opened the card. “Dear Ms. Beckett, Mr. Green told us about the event he is doing there tomorrow, and as his publisher, we wanted to be sure you had plenty of stock for the weekend. Consider these our donation to the hospice in the area. Many of us have been served by hospice in the hardest of times, and so take these gifts as our donation to your good work for that important organization. Happy Holidays.” The card was signed by fifteen or twenty people, all staff at the publishing house, I presumed.
I stared at the fifty or more boxes of books at the front of the store and started to cry with joy. There it was, even in the midst of all this awfulness, the spirit of the holidays – generosity and love all in one.
Lucas walked over, dropped an arm on my shoulders and said, “See, I told you we’d figure it out.”
15
The rest of the day went by in a blur. We sold almost half of the stock that the publisher donated, and Tiffany, Marcus, and I ran ourselves ragged keeping up with requests for other titles, ringing up customers, and answering questions about Green’s visit later in the day. Thankfully, Cate and Lucas stayed on for the day and let their staffs handle their own businesses, and Rocky’s mom came by to help her in the café, or our shelves would have been bare and the latte cold.
I was elated and exhausted by the time four thirty rolled around and Mom and Dad came to pick me up for dinner. Daniel had stopped in on his way to the airport to meet Mr. Green and made me love him even more when he said he’d stayed up half the night reading Looking for Alaska so he’d have something to talk about with our guest on the ride.
As Mom helped me to their car waiting at the curb, I got a text from Daniel saying, “I have the package,” and I laughed. This could
be fun, I thought for the first time before my stomach flip-flopped again.
By the time we got to my house, Lu had the kitchen smelling like Mexican heaven, and I couldn’t help but dip my finger in her mole sauce before going back to freshen my make-up and try to tame my curls. When I got back to the kitchen, I noticed that there was an extra chair at the table. “I thought there were going to be nine of us,” I said to Mart as she chowed down on chips and salsa.
“Oh, right. I forgot to tell you. Galen is coming. I thought that might be nice given how much publicity he’s given for this event.” Then she turned and looked at me with a twisted mouth. “That’s okay, right?”
I smiled. “Totally okay. Something about Green being the only one without a conversation partner was making me a little jumpy,” I said. But then I had a moment of concern. “But the dogs – three of them. Does John Green like dogs?”
She looked over to where Mayhem and Taco were sprawled by the fire and let out a long breath. “Seriously? Who wouldn’t love those two? And Mack? Come on – he looks like someone squished him and attached toy legs to his body. That alone is endearing.” She shoved a chip in her mouth. “Besides, do you really think someone as sensitive to the world as John Green would be a dog hater?”
I laughed. “Let’s hope not because if it turns out he doesn’t like animals, he might just drop a little in my esteem.”
As if on cue, Aslan leaped up onto the back of the couch and preened. Mart laughed. “I suppose he might like cats.”
I rolled my eyes. “Someone wouldn’t mind that, I think.” I petted the chubby black and white feline and let out one little squeal as I saw Daniel step out of his truck. They were here.
* * *
Dinner was delightful. Green was witty and fun, and he listened to our stories about how we loved his books as if we were the first people on earth to say such things. Also, he’s totally a dog guy. His beloved Willie had died a couple of years earlier, and when he talked about him, I could see the sadness. But that didn’t slow him down from totally getting into the dog puddle by the fire for a few minutes before we headed to the shop.