All the Beautiful Lies

by Peter Swanson

  “Just hooligans, maybe,” John said, as though the hooligan problem in Kennewick was well documented. Then he said, “What’s Alice say?”

  “Nothing. She doesn’t really want to talk about it.”

  John tapped his fingers together, thinking. Harry looked at his large, strong hands and concluded, not for the first time, that John looked more like a retired farmhand than a retired financial advisor. He was almost completely bald, and his pate was speckled with sun damage. He was wearing a dark pin-striped suit and a pink tie, knotted tightly at his neck. He always wore suits, always a little too big for him, remnants from his years in business. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Harry,” he said at last. “She’s probably in shock, and not wanting to process it yet. Plus, she has to be wondering about the rest of her life. My sweetheart died quite young, and afterward I didn’t think I’d ever know a moment of happiness again. And then one day, I felt a little better, and then over time I became myself again. It always happens that way. Otherwise, no one would keep going. Sorry, Harry, didn’t mean to . . .” John rubbed at his white mustache, the tremor in his arm more noticeable than usual. Harry wondered if he had Parkinson’s, or if he was just old, his muscles weakening.

  “That’s okay, John.”

  “Police will find whoever had to do with it. They have ways. Back to work, I think.”

  Harry watched as John stood up, then lowered himself to one knee by one of many unopened packages, and slit the tape with a box cutter. Lew, the cat, sidled up and rubbed against John’s thigh. Harry, tired from that morning’s work, wanted to sit awhile longer and finish his coffee. How old was John? He had to be in his midseventies, at least, possibly closer to eighty.

  Harry remembered the story his father had told him, how John had shown up shortly after he’d opened the new store, asking if he could volunteer for a few hours per week, maybe straighten the shelves, or deal with customers. He was a retiree, with time on his hands, and Bill had reluctantly agreed to let him come in for a few hours each week. The next day, John had shown up at opening time, and stayed until Bill sent him home sometime in the afternoon. It continued like that, John learning every facet of the business, until Bill finally insisted on paying him. They haggled and settled on the minimum wage. After that, John was always at the store, always wearing a suit and tie; he’d made himself indispensable.

  Harry finished his coffee and went to help stack the new books on one of the two card tables in the store’s back room. There were about thirty of these unopened boxes, all containing books from one estate sale that Bill had purchased sight unseen, making an offer over the phone after hearing that the man who had died had collected hardcover Wodehouse novels. Harry’s father had started book scouting when he was still an undergraduate at Columbia, studying English literature and hoping to become a writer. One of his professors had gotten him into it, sending him upstate to garage and rummage sales the summer before his senior year. He taught him what to look for, and how to negotiate. One of the lessons was to never bicker over single volumes at estate sales. If there was something in the shelves that was worth money, then you would always make a fast offer to buy all the books. The children of the deceased were almost always thrilled and relieved, and you never knew what other gems might appear.

  Bill had fallen in love with book scouting—“treasure hunting for the unadventurous,” he called it—and for ten years after college made a meager living at it, sticking to the East Coast, and selling his finds at the then-myriad selection of used bookstores in the city. By the time he was thirty he could barely navigate his single-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment because of the stacks of books he’d accumulated. He got a loan at a bank and opened Ackerson’s Rare Books. His first employee was a shy Barnard College grad named Emily Vetchinsky. They married three months after he hired her, and nine months after that Harry was born.

  “Junk, mostly, so far,” John said, slitting open another box and peering at its contents.

  “How can you tell?” Harry asked.

  “You learn, over time.” He was holding an interesting-looking hardcover edition of Jaws, with a black cover, and the image of a white, stylized shark. He put that one to the side. “Although I double-check myself, take a look at prices on the Web. Your father didn’t need to do that.”

  The bell sounded, indicating that someone had entered the store. “Do you mind seeing if someone needs help?” John asked, and Harry went out front, stood behind the cash register. The customer was an elderly woman, dressed in a long winter coat and a wooly hat even though it was nearly seventy degrees outside.

  “Can I help you with anything?” Harry asked, and she looked up, startled.

  “Oh, I didn’t see you there. I’ve been here before, of course, but I’ve forgotten . . . Can you tell me where the mystery stories are?”

  Harry stepped out from behind the counter and brought the woman to the mystery section. It was, except for plain fiction, the largest in the store. Crime had been his father’s favorite genre, both to read and to collect. He’d had a sizable personal collection of first editions, plus what he claimed might be the only entire collection of “mapbacks”—midcentury paperbacks issued by Dell, almost all crime novels, each with an illustrated map on its back cover. It had been his pride and joy. “They’re not worth a lot of money,” he told Harry once, “but the day I got the final one in the series was one of my top, top days. Silly, I know.”

  “Oh, so many,” said the woman looking at the mystery shelves.

  “There are more in the back,” Harry said. “If you’re interested in collectibles and first editions.”

  “I don’t think so. What I like is a murder story but I don’t like violence.”

  Harry was about to go get John for a recommendation, but decided he could handle this himself. He was not a fanatic like his father had been, but Harry did read a lot. He found three books for the woman—two by Jacqueline Winspear based on their covers alone, and an M. C. Beaton that she thought she hadn’t read yet. He brought the books back to the register and rang up the sale himself, relieved that she was paying in cash so he wouldn’t have to use the credit card reader. Afterward, he told John he’d just managed his first customer interaction. John put one of his large hands on Harry’s shoulder. “Thank you, Harry. Honestly, I don’t know what I’d do right now without you.”

  The words made Harry feel wanted but were also discomfiting. How long would he be expected to help out? Was there a future plan for the store now that Bill had died? He assumed Alice now owned it, including all its stock. She’d occasionally worked in the store, although Harry didn’t know how much she actually knew, or cared, about the business.

  It was clear that John had learned an enormous amount from Bill, but he was just an employee—and how much longer could he expect to work at his age? Was Harry being groomed to take over forever? The thought knotted his stomach, briefly. This is my life now. Then Harry told himself to calm down. His father had died less than a week ago, and there was plenty of time to figure everything out. He found his own cutter and began opening boxes.

  Toward the end of the day, the bell sounded, the front door opening to a customer for just the fourth time that day. As John had explained, the store did 90 percent of its business online and very little from the actual physical store. Harry went to his post at the cash register. The customer was the woman from the funeral, with the short, dark hair. She was wearing the headband again. Harry felt his cheeks flush at the sight of her. She spotted him and walked right over, almost too purposefully.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hi.”

  “I was wondering if you’re hiring. I know there isn’t a sign out front, but I thought I’d check, anyway. I just moved here, and I love books, and so I thought . . .”

  Her cheeks were flushed, as well. She was nervous, and the words she’d just said sounded rushed and unnatural.

  “Didn’t I see you, on Sunday, at—”

  “Oh, that,” s
he said. “Yeah, I was at the funeral. I saw you, too. You must be—”

  “I’m his son.”

  “Right, his son. I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  “You knew my father?”

  She looked startled. “Oh, no. I didn’t. It’s going to sound strange, but I just arrived here, and I’d heard of him. I’ve actually been to the Ackerson’s in New York, and I was going to check and see if there was a potential job up here, and then, of course, I heard what had happened. So I went to the funeral. It was a weird thing to do, I know.”

  “No, no,” Harry said. “Funerals are public, right? They’re not just for people who knew the person who died.”

  “No, really, they kind of are.” She smiled, some of her nervousness dissipating.

  “I guess so,” Harry said, smiling back. “Don’t worry about it. What’s your name?”

  “It’s Grace. And you?”

  She reached a hand over the counter, and Harry took it, telling her his name. Her hand felt small in his, her fingertips cold. Harry knew she was lying to him, or misleading him, about her reasons for going to the funeral, about her reasons for coming to the store. Had she known his father? And if so, then why was she hiding it?

  “Why’d you move up here?” Harry asked.

  “I was sick of city life, and I’d been here before, the Maine coast, anyway, so I decided to be impulsive.”

  She laughed, more like a nervous punctuation mark. Her hair was auburn, bordering on black, and her eyes were blue with a little bit of green in them. She had a small nose that turned up a little at the end, and a narrow mouth with a thin top lip and a plump lower one. She had thick, dark eyebrows and faint freckles on her forehead, and Harry figured she could be anywhere from his age to somewhere in her early thirties.

  “You just up and moved here without having a job?” Harry said, and immediately regretted how the question sounded.

  “I did.”

  “Where are you living?”

  “Just up the hill past the inn. You know that large brick house with the weedy front yard? I’m in there. It’s from Airbnb, just a room, my own bedroom, but it’s actually bigger than the apartment I rented in New York. What about you? Are you working here now, in the store?”

  “I’m helping out. Probably for the summer, then I don’t know. Maybe move to New York City?”

  “Don’t do it.” She laughed.

  “Okay.”

  Grace’s cheeks darkened. She pulled at an unpierced earlobe. “No jobs here, then?”

  “Oh, right. I don’t know. It’s probably too soon to make decisions about what’s going to happen here, but I can find out and let you know.”

  “Okay. That would be good. Kennewick Inn’s looking for a hostess, but I thought I’d try here first.”

  “Should I call you?”

  “Sure,” she said, and Harry handed her a pen. She turned over an Ackerson’s bookmark and wrote her phone number. “Thank you. I knew it was a long shot, and I don’t expect anything, so—”

  “I’ll find out and let you know.”

  “Okay. I’m going to browse around a little.”

  “You should.”

  She wandered off into an aisle where Harry couldn’t see her. It was such a strange interaction that for a moment Harry stood, just going over the conversation in his mind. Something she had said had struck him as particularly odd. For a moment, he couldn’t place it but then it came to him. She’d asked, “Are you working here now, in the store?” How had she known he’d just started working there? Then Harry remembered the funeral, the minister saying something about how proud Bill was of his son, who had recently graduated from college. That must have been it.

  John came out from the back room. “Just cracked the last box,” he said. “Finally found the Wodehouse editions. There are some firsts. American ones, but still, not an entire loss.”

  Harry’s weariness must have shown on his face, because John said, “Go home. You’ve done more than enough here today.”

  The bell sounded as the door opened. It was Grace leaving.

  “Did you see the woman I was talking with?” Harry asked.

  “When? Just now?”

  “Yeah. She just left.”

  “No. Why?”

  Harry told John how she’d been looking for work. He found himself hoping John would say that an extra hire would be good for the store, but he just shook his head. “I don’t think so, do you? We can handle it, especially when Alice decides she wants to come back in and help.”

  Harry walked slowly home from the store. He wasn’t sure he was up for another intimate dinner with Alice, and was relieved to see an unfamiliar car—a dark blue Jetta—parked next to his Civic in the driveway. The license plate read, CSHORE7. He thought maybe it was Alice’s friend Chrissie, who almost certainly would have a vanity plate. Harry went up to the front door, which was decorated with stained glass, and was about to enter when he peered, instead, through the one unstained piece of glass in the design. He could see partially into the kitchen, where an older woman was standing, her back to the door, but Harry could see that she was still wearing a raincoat and had a bright red scarf wrapped around her head. She was in profile, her lips moving as though she was talking rapidly. She wasn’t immediately recognizable. Harry stood for a moment, frozen on the front stoop, trying to decide if it was possible to enter the house and go straight up to his room. Maybe if he opened the door as quietly as possible. But, no, the strange woman was only twenty feet away in the kitchen. Harry would have to be introduced.

  Instead of entering the house, Harry went around to the backyard, where there was an old, dilapidated barn on the property that had been one of the reasons Bill had originally been interested in the house. It was a small barn, unpainted, the wood weathered to the point where there were inch-wide cracks between the planks, but the roof was solid. Bill’s plan had been to restore it completely and eventually use it as storage for even more books. That had never happened, of course. Bill’s true passion had been the acquisition of books. Finding places to put them was a chore that he only got around to out of desperation.

  The barn’s wide front doors were open, and Harry walked across the muddy yard and stepped inside, letting his eyes adjust to the dark, cool interior. He could hear the flutter of starlings high up in the rafters. In one corner was an old lathe, left by the previous residents. Harry remembered his father taking a look at it, telling him that maybe he’d take up furniture making and that way he could make his own shelves. “Can you imagine this place filled with books?” he’d said.

  But except for the lathe, plus an assortment of lawn furniture and old dining room chairs, the barn was empty. Harry sneezed. The air in the barn, even with the wide doors flung open, was dusty and still, the floors pocked with bird shit. He wanted to get out of there, but instead of exiting the way he had come, he traversed the barn and stepped through the regular-sized back door.

  Not ready to go back to the house, Harry sat on the doorjamb. There was a view out over the marsh that abutted the property. Harry felt a sudden and revolting sense of pure grief. It swept through him like an attack of nausea, an absolute knowledge that he was all alone and life was meaningless and devoid of joy. His heart fluttered, and for a moment Harry wondered if he was dying, as though his sudden awareness was bringing on some kind of attack. But then he felt a prick on his arm, and rubbed at it. He looked down and saw that he’d killed a mosquito, leaving behind a smear of blood.

  His heart slowed, the terrible thoughts dissipating as rapidly as they had come. Still, he remembered a very stoned conversation he’d had in his dorm room a few months ago. He was with a junior named Tyler whom Harry had met through the cinema club. They’d been listening to a Sparklehorse album, and Tyler had suddenly started to talk about how short our time on the planet was, and how, in the blink of an eye, we would be dead, and everyone who ever knew us would be dead, and that was it. He’d spoken as though he was the first person ever to
have had, or voiced, those thoughts. Fortunately, Paul had dropped by, changed the music to a Henry Mancini compilation, and forced Tyler to drink a cocktail. Harry thought of that conversation now, thought of how the deaths of both of his parents had erased a whole portion of his own life that existed solely as their memories. He was half gone, already, more than half gone.

  The queasiness and fear returning, Harry made himself stand up. He walked back through the barn and to the front of the house. The car was still there, but the woman he’d seen in the kitchen was now standing on the front stoop, framed in the doorway, saying good-bye to Alice.

  “Harry, this is Viv. I don’t know if you two have met.”

  The woman turned to Harry, her dark eyes searching his face. She was very thin, her cheeks hollowed out, and suddenly the head scarf made sense. She must be sick with cancer, going through chemotherapy.

  “I’m sorry about your father, Harry,” she said, her voice an unsurprising rasp. “I’m afraid I missed the funeral; I’ve been away.”

  “That’s okay,” Harry said, then added, “Thank you.” His voice sounded shaky in his own head, probably because of the intense way she was looking at him. He willed himself to not look down at the ground.

  “Thank you for coming,” Alice said, gently putting a hand on the small of the woman’s back, and walking her to the car. The woman moved fast, as though to escape Alice’s touch, and got into the car without saying anything else.

  Harry stepped into the house and there was the smell of cooking. The table was set for two again.

  Chapter 13

  Then

  Alice didn’t see Gina again that summer, not after that time they went swimming. She had denied that she was sleeping with Jake, of course, but it was painfully clear that Gina didn’t believe her, especially when, after they’d come in from the water, Jake had acted so strange, insisting on wrapping Alice’s towel around her. He’d also stared a little too long at Gina, barely covered by Alice’s bikini bottoms and the T-shirt plastered to her chest.