Rides a Stranger

by David Bell

  “But you didn’t need him to locate Dad.”

  “I know. I guess I’m a sucker for a hard luck case. I told him he could have as many copies as he wanted, as long as I got one. That’s it—I just wanted one to keep. I never got one way back then, you know.”

  “Did you go back to my parents’ house?” I asked.

  “I did. And I got the brush-off again. This time, your mom was less polite. I reported this to Lou, and then about a week later, your dad was gone. I went back to Lou to ask him if he was going to try to buy any part of the estate. He was evasive. He was giving me the brush-off as well. But I saw the obituary on his desk. I knew what he was thinking. He was going to go to the funeral and try to talk to someone, probably you. I walked out of there. I just walked out. I told myself it was all over, everything was over. Your dad was gone, that relationship was long in the past, and I really did need to just forget about it. That’s what I told myself.”

  “But?”

  “But I hated sitting home during the viewing. I wanted to see your dad one more time. I thought I should be there, but I didn’t go. Instead I went to Lou’s store that night. My ex-husband bought me a gun when we split up. I brought it with me. I just wanted to scare that little ogre of a man. I wanted him to know that I wanted a copy of that book. Just one.” Her voice started to rise. “Is that too much to ask? Just the one copy? It’s dedicated to me.” She paused and gathered herself. Her voice returned to its normal volume. “He denied me again. He said he had a line on the books, and those were going to fund his retirement to Florida. I don’t know what happened really. I’d been brushed off so many times … so many times in my life. Your mom. Lou.”

  “My dad?”

  She nodded. “I shot the little weasel. I went to the cemetery the next day, knowing I was guilty and knowing I would turn myself in. I saw the coffin, your dad’s coffin. That was as close as I could come.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “It was a crime of passion … committed forty years after the romance died and directed against the wrong man. That’s the story of my life.”

  Goodwill stores smell different from bookstores. In used bookstores—like Lou Caledonia’s—I could smell the pages and the dust jackets and the endpapers. It was a fresh, hopeful smell, despite the age and condition of the books. But a Goodwill store smelled like desperation. In a Goodwill store the accumulated detritus of thousands of unconnected lives merged together to create the odor of surrender, of loss. Of defeat. Goodwill provided a home for things that couldn’t be discarded anywhere else. Goodwill was for everything that couldn’t be sold in a consignment or an antique store. I hadn’t entered one since high school.

  This location sat about a mile from my parents’ house in a neighborhood that had once been nicer. As I kid, I remembered driving through and seeing middle-class homes with yards that were tended and clean. Not anymore. The houses around the store looked dingier and more rundown. The yards were full of toys, the grass worn and dying. It seemed appropriate somehow.

  I went into the store and walked past the musty racks of clothes and the ragged and cheap furniture. Near the back I found the books. Two tall shelves stood side by side. Near the top I saw hardcovers, mostly book club editions with missing or frayed dust jackets. I scanned down to the bottom where the paperbacks were. I ran my eyes over the spines. Lots of James Patterson, Nicholas Sparks, Mary Higgins Clark. Most of the spines were creased. I flipped through them like they were cards in a Rolodex, moving each one I touched to the left and going on to the next. I passed mysteries and romances and the occasional science fiction or fantasy title. Not many westerns. A few Louis L’Amours and one or two Max Brands. But no Herbert Henry.

  I went back through the shelves again, just in case I missed something. But I hadn’t. The books weren’t there.

  Did I think it would be easy?

  I went back to the front looking for an employee. I found a longhaired, wiry guy, wearing a store smock. I explained my problem, and he went to fetch his manager. She turned out to be a middle-aged woman with hair dyed the color of honey. She also wore a store smock with a nametag that said “Patti,” and her authority rested in the set of keys she wore attached to her wrist by a Day-Glo rubber cord. I thought her presence would work in my favor. I had prepared a story—which wasn’t really a lie—and I assumed she’d be more susceptible to it.

  “How can I help you?” she asked.

  I told her about Dad dying and Mom giving the books away. I told her about the box of books that my dad had written—and I left out the part about the books being really rare and potentially valuable. I also left out any mention of Lou Caledonia’s murder and Mary Ann Compton’s confession. I didn’t think she needed to know that.

  While I spoke, Patti’s face remained neutral. I felt like my words weren’t getting through, that they were like darts hitting a brick wall and bouncing away, leaving behind no discernible mark or impact. But I kept talking, hoping that the more I talked the more likely she would be to understand.

  When I finished, Patti remained silent for a few moments. Then she said, “I really can’t let anyone back to see the donations. It takes several days for us to sort them, and lots of people would like to get back there and see what we have before it goes on the floor.”

  “I understand,” I said, although I didn’t. Were people really in such a hurry to get their hands on Goodwill stuff?

  “It’s not unusual for this to happen,” Patti said. “Families donate things and then some other family member comes along and wants it back. It happens at least once a week.”

  “Of course. But …”

  I didn’t know what else to say. I had made my argument. I was at Patti’s mercy, and it looked like she was going to turn me away.

  “Did you say this book your dad wrote was a western?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm,” Patti said. “My grandpa read westerns all the time when I went to visit him. I can picture him in his chair reading Louis L’Amour or Zane Grey. Who was the other one? The one everyone used to read?”

  “Max Brand?” I said.

  “That’s it.” Patti looked lost in thought for a moment. I took that as a good sign. I wondered if she were back in her childhood somewhere, in her grandparents’ house, coloring on the floor or playing with dolls while her grandmother cooked in the kitchen and the old man sat in a chair lost on a cattle drive or a gunfight or a saloon brawl.

  “So what do you think?” I finally asked. “Can I take a peek?”

  She snapped out of her reverie. “Sure,” she said. “But don’t tell anyone I let you do this.”

  The back room was huge. The ceilings were high, the metal beams and girders exposed. The smell I noticed at the front of the store was even more intense back there, probably because the back room held things that weren’t good enough to be put out front. I didn’t want to think about what those things were.

  Patti led me through the racks of clothes, the shelves of toys, the clutter and refuse from who knew how many lives.

  “When were these items brought in?” she asked.

  “A couple of weeks, I guess.”

  “And you’re just looking for books?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I think we keep the books over here before we sort them.”

  We went to the far back corner of the storeroom. There were boxes and boxes of books, and then more books that weren’t in boxes. Hardcovers and paperbacks. Books for kids and books for adults.

  “It’s a lot,” I said.

  “Take your time,” she said. “We’re open until nine.”

  I found a plastic stool and pulled it over by the boxes of books. I sat down and felt my shoulders slump a little.

  Did I really want to do this?

  I thought back
over what I knew. A couple of people—one of them a murderer—believed my dad wrote a book. And published it. And it became the rarest book in the land.

  Did any of this make sense?

  I had already stayed an extra day. I thought of work and my life back at the university. I was already behind and overwhelmed. Did I need to spend more time on what very well may be a wild goose chase?

  But I couldn’t stop. I looked at those boxes of books … the potential that something belonging to and created by my father … I couldn’t turn away.

  I started opening boxes and looking. I looked until my back hurt, and I had to stand up and stretch. I discovered a few things: A lot of people acquired and then disposed of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. A lot of families apparently didn’t hold onto the potty training books they bought for their children. And a lot of people read mystery and romance novels. Loads and loads of them.

  Patti came by once to check on me. I told her I didn’t know how much longer I would keep looking, and she again told me that was just fine with her.

  “I wish I could get one of our employees to help you, but we’re short staffed.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “Our business is up with the economy being so bad. More and more people shop here for their clothes and furniture.”

  “I hope they buy some books, too,” I said.

  “They do. Books and CDs and DVDs. We sell it all. People like to be entertained when times are bad.”

  “That makes sense,” I said.

  “Well,” she said, “I’ll let you keep at it.”

  I did. For another hour after she left my side. When I first saw the box with my mother’s handwriting on the side, I almost went right past it. In a thick black marker, she had scrawled “Old Books.” My mother used a distinctive “d.” She always added a looping swirl to the end, her own personal version of a serif font.

  I pulled that box close to me and opened it. My father’s books. The big-dick books, mostly spy novels. Robert Ludlum. Ken Follett. Frederick Forsyth. Eric Ambler. I went on to the next box with my Mom’s writing on it. Same thing. Dad’s books, but not Dad’s book. I opened two more with the same results. I wanted to take them all. I wanted to tell Patti that they all belonged to me, and I was going to haul them away whether she wanted me to or not. I had no idea what I would do with them. I really didn’t want to read them. I just wanted to have them. I wanted them in my possession instead of someone else’s.

  And then I found the smaller box, also with Mom’s handwriting on it.

  The box was sealed with several layers of packing tape. The box looked old, worn, and a little beaten, like it had been shipped and moved around more than once without being opened. I couldn’t get the tape off of it. I had to use a key to dig into and slice open the thick tape. It required a lot of effort. I sliced and dug and pulled until the lid came open.

  The top of the box was stuffed with bubble wrap. I pulled that off. Then there was a layer of thin cardboard. I tossed that aside.

  And then I saw it. The cover showed a rugged cowboy on his horse. They stood on a ridge that overlooked a small western town. The cowboy packed a revolver on his hip, and the stock of a rifle protruded from a scabbard on his horse. The cowboy looked lean and tan and strong. He squinted into the distance, toward the town. He looked capable and alone.

  Across the top in thick, Western-style lettering, it said: Rides a Stranger a novel by Herbert Henry. I lifted up the copies on top. There were more below. Many more. I guessed the box held about twenty of them in clean, crackling new shape despite their age. They were well preserved and perfect. If what the book collectors and Detective Hyland told me was true, I was staring at a twenty thousand dollar box of books.

  I had found them.

  I picked up one of them, gently, like I was handling a bird’s egg. I paged to the back and looked for an author bio. There was a small one. It simply said, “Herbert Henry is an author who lives in the Midwest. This is his first novel.”

  I went back to the front and found the dedication, the one that had caused so much trouble. It was there, just as Hyland said. “For M.A. with love.”

  And that was it. No author photo. No acknowledgements. Just that little bio that could have been about anyone.

  None of this told me Dad wrote the book.

  I turned to the back and read the copy there:

  Brick Logan rides alone. He travels the western trail accompanied only by his horse and his Colt revolver. He rides to forget his past and the tragic loss of the woman he loved.

  But now he enters another western trail town, one more in a long line of stops he makes. And this time Brick finds himself drawn into the life of Chastity Haines, a beautiful widow and the mother of a young son. Brick helps save the town from the merciless influence of a ruthless cattle baron. But when the fight is done, will Brick choose the life of a family man and give up his fiddlefooting, trail-haunted days. Or will he forever remain alone … and a stranger.

  “Jesus,” I said. “Dad.”

  “Did you find what you wanted?”

  I nearly jumped. It was Patti. She stood over me, her smile hopeful.

  “I think so,” I said. I gently put the copy of Rides a Stranger back into the box, and then I thought better of it. “I’ll take all of these.” I indicated the boxes that had belonged to my dad. I took my wallet out and grabbed all the cash I had. It amounted to about seventy-seven dollars. “Here. Just take this.”

  “We’d probably sell these for a dollar apiece. Fifty cents for the paperbacks.”

  “Just take it all,” I said. “For your time and trouble.”

  “Can we help you put them in your car?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said. But I picked up the box of Rides a Stranger to carry on my own. Before I left with it, I reached into the top of the box and took one copy out. “Here,” I said. “It’s a book my dad wrote.”

  “Really?” she said. “Wow. I’m glad you found it.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Don’t put it out with the other books. Just take it. If you have the chance, look it up on the internet.”

  “Why?” she asked.

  “Consider it a donation as well. From my family.”

  Patti looked puzzled. “Okay,” she said. “If my grandpa were still alive, I’d give it to him. It looks like the kind of book he’d like.”

  I nodded. “You’re probably right.”

  I pulled up to the door of the Goodwill store, and the same bearded guy who had directed me to Patti lifted the five boxes of books that once belonged to my dad—and now belonged to me—into the trunk of my car. I had placed the other box, the valuable one, on the passenger seat, so I could keep a close eye on it.

  The Goodwill employee took being outside as an opportunity to light a cigarette. He leaned back against the side of the building while I finished situating the boxes in the trunk. I had one stop to make. I was going to go back to the police station and give a copy of the book to Mary Ann Compton. I didn’t know if they’d let her have it, but I would trust Hyland to let me know. If they wouldn’t take it or guarantee its safety, I intended to find her lawyer and pass the book along there. But I wanted Mary Ann to have one.

  “You live around here?” he asked.

  “I used to,” I said. “My parents do … well, my mom does.”

  My mom’s house. Mom lives around here. I had to get used to saying that.

  “Neighborhood’s changed a lot,” he said.

  “Sure.” I closed the trunk.

  “Houses are rundown now. People don’t take care of things.”

  “Well, thanks for your help,” I said.

  “My family used to shop here all the time when I was growing up.”

  I looked at him. “You mean at Goodwill?”

  “No,” he said. “I thought you grew up ar
ound here. Don’t you remember the old IGA grocery store that used to be here?”

  I looked at the building. It started to come back to me. There was a grocery store there when I was a kid, one we went to from time-to-time. To be accurate, I should say that my dad and I shopped there. Mom didn’t like it. She felt it was too small, too narrow in its selection. It was possible the store closed and became a Goodwill all those years ago because a lot of people shared my mom’s feelings. But Dad liked to go there. If Mom sent him out on some errand—buy a gallon of milk, buy a loaf of bread—or if he needed something for himself—shaving cream or a newspaper or—

  He always looked at the books when we went into IGA. They had a long rack of paperback books and magazines near the front of the store, and we always stopped there before we checked out. And Dad always bought a book. A spy novel, a mystery, and, yes, a western. Did he think about his own writing when he stood in front of that rack? Did he think about what might have been if he hadn’t given the whole thing up for Mom and me? He never showed anything. He always seemed perfectly content, but who knew what was really going on inside of him as he looked at all of those books?

  “There’s a parking lot behind here as well, right?” I asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “And it looks over the lot next door? There’s a fence, and you can see down into the next lot? Right?”

  The guy nodded. “That’s right.”

  “You used to come here when you were a kid. I used to come with my dad. And you know what? He used to show me the horses back there.”

  “Horses?”

  “Yes. There was an old, abandoned house next door. Apparently, the neighborhood wasn’t always great. And out back of that house, someone kept a couple of horses. They just wandered around in the yard over there, cropping grass or whatever. Do you remember that?”