Rides a Stranger

by David Bell

  “I understand,” I said. “But you have a lot of friends. You’ve always been good at keeping busy.”

  “Sure.” She forced a smile. “Maybe I need to sell the house.”

  “You can think about that at some point.” I gestured toward the living room. “What do you figure he has in all those boxes?”

  “Knowing your dad, more books. Hell, who knows? They could be the collected love letters of some ex-girlfriend.”

  “Dad?”

  Mom waved her hand in the air, dismissing me. “Maybe I’ll self-publish them and create the next Fifty Shades of Gray. Except it would really be gray because of how old we are.”

  Like most children, I didn’t like to think of my parents’ sex lives. And I certainly didn’t think of them as sexual creatures who had relationships before they met and married each other. But, of course, they probably did. I knew Mom and Dad married when they were in their late twenties, and Mom had me within a year of their marriage. They met through mutual friends. Mom worked as a secretary in a law office, and Dad was a casual acquaintance of the lawyer. They sometimes golfed together. So they both must have dated others during high school and college and those first few years out in the real world.

  My mind flashed to the woman at the cemetery. Had she really been there to see Dad’s funeral? People spent time in cemeteries for any number of reasons. Why would I assume she was there because of Dad?

  “Let’s open up one of the boxes and take a look,” I said.

  “Be my guest. It’s all yours anyway. You’re the heir to this great fortune.”

  Mom cleared the plates while I went out to the living room. I took out my key to slit the tape on the box, but before I could do anything, the doorbell rang.

  “If that’s Mrs. Himmel from up the street, tell her I’m lying down,” Mom said.

  I went to the front window and slid the curtain aside.

  “It’s not Mrs. Himmel,” I said.

  “Who is it?”

  I opened the door to Detective Hyland.

  “Who is it, honey?” Mom said, coming into the room. “Oh, hello.”

  “Mom, this is Detective Hyland from the police department. It’s kind of a long story.”

  Mom listened while I explained the events of the previous night and the death of Lou Caledonia. Mom’s face remained composed, and she didn’t display much shock or dismay. She reserved her comments for the end of my story when she looked at me as only my mother could and said, “Why on earth didn’t you tell me this last night?”

  “I didn’t want to wake you up or worry you,” I said.

  “Sit down, Detective,” Mom said. “How can we help you with this?”

  Hyland came into the room. He eyed the boxes in the middle of the floor but deftly stepped around them without comment. He wore a different shirt and tie than the night before and still no jacket. His hair looked less windblown as he sat on the couch and crossed his legs, ankle on knee.

  “I’m sorry to intrude on you at such a difficult time,” he said. He really didn’t seem that bothered by his interruption and showed no sign that he might get up and leave. He looked settled in on the couch.

  Mom and I took the hint, and we each sat in matching chairs that were arranged on either side of a small table. The boxes filled the floor space between all of us.

  “Last night you told me that you didn’t know Mr. Caledonia,” Hyland said.

  “That’s right.”

  “And you don’t know the nature of their friendship?”

  “That’s what I was going to the store to find out,” I said. “Lou said they weren’t really friends. He said something like he wanted to know Dad, but Dad didn’t want to know him.”

  “Your father always was a bit of a loner,” Mom said.

  “Mr. Caledonia wrote a number of letters to your father. At least ten. They were in his office at the bookstore. All of them were returned unopened.”

  “My husband was bedridden for the last six months,” Mom said. “He wouldn’t have been able to open an envelope.”

  “But you would have seen the letters,” Hyland said. “Or opened them?”

  “I don’t remember any letters like that.”

  Hyland’s eyes narrowed. I thought he was going to press Mom further, but he didn’t.

  “These letters were all written over the past five years,” Hyland said. “They stopped about a year ago. I’m not sure why. Maybe Caledonia got tired of being rejected.”

  “What were the letters about?” I asked. “What could this man possibly want with Dad that he would keep writing him for so long – without a single response?”

  Hyland took his time answering. He seemed to be considering me. The clipping from Lou Caledonia’s desk, the one with Dad’s name and the word Stranger written on it, sat on my nightstand upstairs. My heart started to beat irrationally. If the detective decided to snoop around the house, he would find it. And he’d know I lied to him at the scene of the crime when I said there was nothing else to know.

  Hell, maybe he already knew about it and was just toying with me and making me sweat.

  Finally, he said, “Apparently, your father had a book Mr. Caledonia wanted.”

  “Which book?” I asked. “Hell, if he’d told me the title I would have brought it to him last night.”

  “If he’d have told me the title,” Mom said, “I’d have given him all the books.”

  Hyland was shaking his head. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “Caledonia didn’t want one of the books your father owned. He wanted a copy of the book your father wrote.”

  Mom laughed. I would have laughed, but the idea of my father writing a book was so bizarre that I couldn’t say anything.

  “No,” Mom said. “That’s not true.” She laughed again. “My husband never wrote a book. He couldn’t write a grocery list. He once went away fishing for the weekend, and he didn’t even bother to write me a note. He didn’t write anything.”

  “My dad read a lot. But he was a salesman. He didn’t write any books.”

  Hyland shifted around on the couch. He reached into his back pants pocket and brought out a small notebook. He flipped through it to the page he wanted.

  “Well,” Hyland said, “you may not think your father wrote a book, but Lou Caledonia most certainly did.”

  “He did?” I asked. “Is that why he came to the viewing?”

  “That’s a good guess,” Hyland said.

  “Well, what book?” I asked. “Are we talking about a novel? Or what?”

  “There’s no book, Donnie,” Mom said.

  Hyland ignored her. “We’re talking about a novel,” he said. “According to the information in the letters and files in Mr. Caledonia’s office, he thinks your father wrote the novel, Rides a Stranger, under the pseudonym Herbert Henry.”

  “Henry,” I said. “That’s Dad’s middle name.”

  Hyland said, “Believe me, Lou Caledonia was aware of that.” He looked at the notebook. Apparently, he thought your father wrote this novel, which was published in 1972 by Woodworth Books as part of their Monarch Series.” Hyland looked over at us. “The Monarch Series was dedicated to novels about the American west. They published twenty books in the series, and Rides a Stranger is number nineteen.”

  Rides a Stranger? The obituary I took from Caledonia’s desk. Stranger.

  Hyland looked at his notebook again. “But even though the books were meant to be mass produced and widely distributed to be sold in grocery stores, drug stores, airports etc., something went wrong with number nineteen. There was a printer’s strike at the plant that manufactured the book. The first batch was printed by replacement workers.” Hyland looked over again. “Scabs for lack of a better word.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “They printing went horribly wrong. Blurred cov
er. Pages cut wrong. A disaster. So they had to pulp that whole batch. Throw them out. They were worthless. The strike ended a few weeks after that, and the regular workers came back. They did a test run of about one hundred books in order to make sure the problems from the last batch—the scab batch—were corrected. And the problems were fixed. But by that point book number nineteen was so far off-schedule that they went ahead and decided to print number twenty and then go back and do number nineteen later. And guess what?”

  “What?” Mom asked.

  “They never did,” Hyland said. “They printed number twenty, and then Woodworth Books folded their tents and went out of business. Number nineteen was never given a full print run.”

  “How many were printed?” I asked.

  “Lou Caledonia guesses they printed about fifty. Fifty cheap paperback books were printed about forty years ago. Understandably, not very many of those fifty are still around. Some went to libraries and got worn out. Some were sold in a few places. But mostly they’re gone. The book itself, your dad’s book, isn’t that valuable in and of itself. You see, it’s the set of all twenty Monarchs that would be the real prize. Lots of people have managed to collect the nineteen mass produced titles, but to find a set with all twenty … well, that’s a rare thing. And one of those sets is worth thousands of dollars on the collector’s market.”

  “He didn’t write the book,” Mom said.

  “Why is this set worth so much?” I asked. “I mean, who cares about twenty old western paperbacks? Aren’t they a dime a dozen?”

  Hyland flipped his notebook shut. “You would think that, wouldn’t you? Except there’s one catch with this Monarch Series. Number eight in the series is a book called The Midnight Guns. It was written by someone named T.J. Tucker.”

  Hyland looked at both of us as though the name should mean something to us. It didn’t.

  “What’s so special about a guy named T.J. Tucker?” I asked.

  “T.J. Tucker isn’t a guy,” Hyland said. “T.J. Tucker is a woman who wrote under a pseudonym. I guess they figured men were more likely to buy a western, and they wouldn’t buy a western if it was written by a woman. That was her first book, and she never published another western. Her real name is Tonya Jane Hood. You know who that is, right?”

  “It sounds familiar,” I said.

  “Are you shitting me?” Mom said.

  “I’m not,” Hyland said.

  I looked at Mom. “Who is this?”

  “Tonya Jane Hood,” Mom said. “She writes the Glitter Blood series. You know, the books, the movies, the TV show. Glitter Blood. I read all of them.”

  “That’s right,” Hyland said. “The Hood novel is very desirable, but they printed close to one hundred thousand copies of that one. And when you combine the desirability of Hood with the rarity of Henry you get a valuable series. Very valuable. Maybe even worth killing over.”

  “This is ridiculous,” Mom said. “My husband died. We buried him today. I don’t want to hear this crazy stuff about these books. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

  I held out my hand, hoping to calm down Mom a little bit. But I didn’t disagree with her.

  “Detective,” I said. “Lou Caledonia seemed like an odd guy. So he thought my dad wrote a book, a rare book. What’s his evidence for this? The whole thing seems kind of far-fetched.”

  “You may be right,” Hyland said. “Maybe Caledonia’s death was just a robbery gone wrong. Maybe he was dreaming when he thought your father wrote this book. But there is the middle name. There’s the fact that, according to the biography in the book Rides a Stranger, the author of the book lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

  I said, “Lots of people named Henry live in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a big city.”

  “True,” Hyland said. “Very true.”

  A silence settled between us. No one said anything. Hyland looked lost in thought for a moment, as though contemplating whether or not he wanted to say anything else. Finally, he just stood up. “Perhaps I’m just fishing.”

  Mom and I stood up as well, and Hyland nodded to us. He shook my hand.

  “Do accept my sympathies,” he said. “If you think of anything else that’s relevant, just give me a call.”

  He let himself out.

  When Hyland was gone, Mom started puttering around in the kitchen. She scrubbed the countertops and rattled dishes into the dishwasher. I stood in the doorway and watched for a few moments. I knew she knew I was there, but she didn’t look up from her work.

  “Mom?” I said.

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you think of all that?” I asked.

  I didn’t think she was going to answer me. She kept cleaning. But then she stopped what she was doing and said, “I don’t put much stock in it.”

  “Did you ever know Dad wanted to write something?” I asked.

  “Your father wanted to do a lot of things,” she said. “He had a lot of dreams. He wanted to run his own business, and he wanted to retire to Florida, and he wanted us to take a trip to Europe. He did none of it. Your father was a dreamer but not a doer. There’s a big difference there.”

  “That sounds depressing.”

  “Be glad you didn’t get those qualities from him,” she said. “You got an advanced degree. You have a good career.”

  “Dad had a career,” I said.

  “Dad had a job. That’s it. He hated it, and it made him miserable.”

  “So maybe he really wanted to be a writer. Maybe he tried it …”

  I stopped in mid-sentence as something occurred to me.

  Mom didn’t notice. She dried her hands on a red towel and turned off the light over the sink. When she turned around, she said, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “What year did Hyland say that book was published?” I asked. “The one Lou Caledonia thinks Dad wrote? Do you remember?”

  Mom’s forehead creased, but I knew she remembered.

  “What’s the year?” I asked.

  “1972,” she said.

  “1972. That’s the year I was born,” I said. “He quit writing because I was born.”

  After Mom went to sleep, I tore into the boxes. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I hoped to find something related to all the things I had been talking about with Detective Hyland and Lou Caledonia. What did the used book dealer really want with Dad? Had the old man written a book—a novel—and a rare one at that? Could the book be so rare and valuable that someone would kill for it?

  But then I had to ask myself something else: Did I really care about the book stuff at all? What was I really trying to understand? It was pretty simple, really. If I could get my hands on a copy of that book, then I assumed I would understand something about my dad. Up until that point, I really didn’t understand anything about him. How did he marry my mom? What made him choose the life he chose?

  And his death and the death/murder of Lou Caledonia only raised more questions. Did he really write a novel? And if he did, why did he stop? Was it just because he had a wife and a child and had to make a better, more stable living than writing could provide?

  The boxes provided no answers in terms of the books. I hoped to find manuscripts and rejection letters, book contracts or correspondence with editors and agents. But there was nothing like that in the boxes. In fact, looking at the contents of those boxes, one would think my father didn’t have any literary aspirations at all. I found nothing about books or writing. Nothing like that.

  So what did I find? Pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. And all of these pictures were taken before I was born. Before Dad met and married Mom, I guessed. They revealed that Dad did, indeed, have a life before he was married. My father had few friends when I was growing up—and maintained little in the way of friendships even after I was an adult and he was retired from work. My mother had friends. My father
had his books and sports on the television.

  But the pictures in the boxes told a different story. In the pictures Dad lived in a swirl of friends, men and women. He went to parties, to bars, to nightclubs. He spent time at the beach and in the big city. He drank from beer cans and champagne bottles. He wore suits and swim trunks. He had a life, one that I never imagined. He apparently had more of a life than I ever had.

  One woman showed up in more of the pictures than anyone else. She was pretty, very pretty. Slender. Her hair was blonde, her smile bright. And she stood by my father’s side a lot, her head resting on his shoulder, her lips parted to laugh. Dad smiled in all of these pictures, too. He looked happy. And young.

  I turned one of the photos over and found a name. “Mary Ann.” On another, the same woman appeared with the nickname “Peanuts” written on the back. Mary Ann? Peanuts? My father appeared to have had a serious girlfriend before he met Mom, one he appeared to love—or at least felt an immense amount of affection for.

  Who knew the old man had done so much better than me?

  I must have dozed off in the chair. When the phone rang, I opened my eyes and saw my father’s photographs spread out on my lap like a blanket. As I moved, the photos shifted and slid, some of them falling to the floor and others dropping into the cracks between the cushion and the bulk of the chair itself.

  I checked the time on the ringing phone. 11:35. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was local. I answered.

  “Mr. Kurtwood?”

  “Yes.”

  “This is Detective Hyland again. Sorry to bother you.”

  “It’s okay. I was just …”

  “I was hoping we could speak tomorrow, before you leave town. There are some other aspects to your father’s case I was hoping to go over with you, and I’m not sure your mother would want to hear them. At least not yet.”

  “Is this about the book?” I asked.

  “Among other things.”

  “I can be there at nine.”

  “Excellent,” Hyland said. “See you then.”