Seth still curled my toes with his good-bye kisses, though. Chester also made fun of my post-kiss twinkling eyes, adding that we were probably a long way off from truly taking each other for granted. Marion rolled her own eyes, and Adal pretended not to notice.
Post-kiss and nonspecific plans cemented, I stepped toward the landing to the shop and was surprised to see the metallic spool of a typewriter ribbon on the ground. The black ribbon was still attached, but unfurled and under the door leading into the shop. It was a trail of bread crumbs I thought appropriate to the store and I wondered if it was someone’s promotional idea.
I picked up the spool and started rolling as I went inside.
I was greeted by a number of chattering voices, the loudest of which at the moment was Baskerville, who was meowing unhappily.
He sat on the end of the middle shelf, perched as if he’d been hoping someone would come in and either rescue him or be a willing audience to his complaints. I couldn’t immediately figure out the reason for all the ruckus, but soon I realized I wanted to escape with him.
“I know, boy.” I looked for ink on my fingertips before I petted him. “They are certainly noisy. I’ll do what I can.”
Satisfied I understood his plea, he let me pet his head, angled just right so I’d get the spot behind his left ear, for a few seconds before he jumped up to the east shelves to catch some sun, though he did send me one more pleading look.
As I turned toward the crowd by the counter, Chester’s eyes caught mine. He barely restrained rolling them in front of our very vocal customers, a middle-aged couple I didn’t recognize but who looked to be ski tourists in expensive ski gear. I turned again and looked out the front window. I hadn’t noticed their Range Rover parked across the street before, but now I did. It was a newer model, but I couldn’t see the plates from this vantage point.
“I don’t understand,” said the woman loudly as the man hefted up an old typewriter. “This is your job. I would like this typewriter fixed.”
“Uh-oh,” I muttered quietly. Chester didn’t have much patience for demanding attitudes anymore. He’d admitted many times that he was long past thinking the customer was always right.
“Hi!” I said cheerily as I approached, still winding the ribbon along the way. I smiled. “Looks like you dropped something.”
From up high, Baskerville meowed disapprovingly at my friendly tone. I ignored him.
“Oh,” the man said as looked at the back of the machine he held. “I’ll be. It sure does.”
“An Olympia Spendid!” I said. “That’s . . . splendid!”
Chester smiled, but the couple didn’t.
“Is there something I can to do help?” I said.
“I hope so,” the man said. “You fix typewriters, right?”
“That’s correct.”
“This man says you can’t fix this one.”
I smiled at “this man” as he ran his finger over his mustache. A smile pulled at the corner of his mouth before he spoke. “That’s correct. But I’ve only started working here this week, so perhaps Clare can better assist you.”
Chester might often fabricate stories for the customers, but it was rare that he didn’t admit to being the owner and founder of The Rescued Word. These two must really have tested his patience.
“Good. Clare, then. We need this fixed. It’s very important,” the man said.
“Well,” I said. I took the typewriter and placed it on the back counter. I wondered where Marion and Adal were but didn’t ask. “This was a beauty once. I’m Clare Henry.” I extended my hand to the man, but I checked again for inky fingers first.
“Oh, we’re Janise and Evan Davenport,” Janise said, her words clipped.
I suddenly realized that the raised voices had definitely been Evan’s and Janise’s, but they hadn’t been raised toward Chester. Only Evan’s had. In hindsight I realized that Janise’s had been raised out of frustration, and her wide eyes and tight mouth told me the frustration had been at her husband, not at my grandfather. It was a worthwhile moment of clarification.
“Welcome. Your Olympia was a beautiful machine at one time.” It was like all the other Splendids: squat and compact, portable with a snap-on top cover that made the housing a handy-dandy case. Spendids had come in different colors. This one was beige with maroon keys, the shift key a contrasting beige to match the case. The last Splendid I’d seen had been pink with beige keys, the shift key a bright red. They were cute. One of the Spendids’ fiercest competitors and, frankly, one that was even more portable, was the Hermes Rocket. Those had smaller carriage return levers, though, which kept my recommendations toward the Spendids when someone asked about a good old portable.
“Right. Yes, it was my mother’s,” Evan said.
“Oh,” I said as I better understood. I sensed Chester’s change in attitude too. Emotional typewriters were special; we all knew that.
“So, what happened to it?” I asked.
“I dropped it!” Evan said.
“I see,” I said as I looked inside at the key bars. They were bent at unnatural angles. The casing looked like it had been in a head-on collision with something much bigger. “You know, not all damage to typewriters can be repaired.”
“But you fix them. It’s what you do,” Evan said.
I sent some tight eyebrows to Janise. She seemed to be a combination of flustered, embarrassed, and at a loss for words even though she’d said almost the exact thing he’d just said. The difference was she’d figured out how ridiculous the idea was that this typewriter could be repaired.
“I’m sorry, but like a car that’s been in a bad accident, your typewriter is totaled,” I said. I’d never seen someone so adamant about their typewriter, even one they had an emotional attachment to. I swallowed and decided to just ask the question that came to mind. “Why is it so important to have this put back into good condition?”
Janise put her hand on her husband’s arm. “Honey, let me take care of this. Go on out to the car.”
Evan blinked at her and opened his mouth to say something.
“I got this,” Janise said. “Let me.”
Evan shook his head and then abruptly turned and walked out of the store.
“His mother passed recently?” Chester asked as Evan paced back and forth in front of the shop’s windows.
“Yes,” Janise said. “It was particularly traumatic. Evan was driving the car. She was in the backseat, having insisted upon sitting back there with this.” She tapped the typewriter. “She’d brought it over to our house, and Evan was taking her home. They were hit from behind. He didn’t have a scratch on him. His mother wasn’t so fortunate, and you can see what happened to the typewriter. We came up to Star City today for a book. The woman at the bookstore told us about this place. We’ve been carrying around the typewriter since the accident two months ago. He’s obsessed with it, and when he heard you repaired them . . . well, his obsession took on a whole new meaning. We were at the bookstore, and the second the woman there told us about you, we were off. I need to go back and apologize and pick up the book she graciously found for us. My husband is one of the most levelheaded people I know. Or at least he was until all this happened. I think he’ll be okay, eventually. I hope so.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I could possibly find another typewriter like this one, but I wouldn’t feel right about pretending it was this one that I’d fixed.”
“No, thank you, but that wouldn’t work,” Janise said. “So there’s absolutely nothing you can do for it?”
The three of us looked toward the mangled machine.
“No, of course there isn’t,” she said. “I’ll just take it. I’m sorry we disturbed you.”
“No problem. I’m sorry about everything you are both going through,” I said.
“Ms. Davenport, may I ask a question?” Chester
said.
“Of course,” she said as she hefted the typewriter.
“What’s the book you came to town for?”
She lifted her eyebrows a moment. “This won’t surprise you, but it’s titled Speeches from the Dead. A New Age thing that supposedly gives instructions on holding your own personal séances. I’m not a believer. Neither was Evan before the accident. We live in Boise and drove all the way down here mostly just to pick up the old, out-of-print book, and then we left the bookstore abruptly. I’m embarrassed.”
“Starry Night Books?” I asked, thinking about the name of the shop I was just talking to Jodie and Seth about. “That’s the used bookstore, right? The new one in town? I think it’s owned by someone I went to high school with.”
“I don’t know how new the shop is, but yes, it’s a used bookshop. The book is next to impossible to find, which I thought should tell Evan something about the validity of the information inside it, but it didn’t. He wouldn’t let her mail it. We had to drive down. I thought getting away from home might help, but it hasn’t. Anyway, this is much more than you wanted to know. Clearly, I need to get my husband some professional help. In the meantime I hope you accept my apology for his bizarre behavior.”
“No apology necessary,” I said.
She looked at Chester. “Why did you want to know the title of the book?”
“I’ve been through some of what your husband is going through. I wondered . . . Well, I’m afraid I wasn’t into anything metaphysical, but I do have some books I could . . . This is not my place, but would you like me to write down some titles of books I found helpful during my period of grieving?”
We glanced out the window at the still-pacing man. Chester ran his knuckle over his mustache. He’d known deep grief when my grandmother died. His current girlfriend, Ramona, had experienced it when her husband died. Chester’s and Ramona’s shared experiences had given their relationship an extra dimension, but I knew my grandfather had also done a lot of his own reading.
“That would be lovely,” Janise said.
Chester grabbed a small piece of lavender paper and wrote a brief note, handing it to Janise.
“May I walk you out?” he asked.
“No, thank you.” She smiled weakly. “It’s probably better if I just go. He’s really quite normal. When he isn’t, I suppose.”
“It’s always rough,” Chester said.
With one last nod, Janise turned and walked out of the shop.
“Clare,” Chester said when no one but Baskerville, who’d hopped down and made his way over the center shelves after Janise left the building, was left to hear us.
“Yes.”
“You know I don’t believe in censorship in any form, don’t you?”
“I do. If I may quote you, ‘it’s the slipperiest slope of all.’ I believe that’s what you’ve said.”
“So when I ask you these next questions, please know that I’m not in any way supporting censorship. I’m also not asking to sound critical, because a used bookshop’s gotta be a used bookshop after all, but tell me more about the woman who owns the shop. You went to high school with her?”
“We did. In fact, Jodie and I were just talking about her,” I said.
“Some synchronicity.”
“You have a problem with her selling a personal séance book?”
“No, not at all. Remember what I said about censorship. But I’ve heard . . . odd things about the owner. What’s her name?”
“Odd, really? Sarah McMasters Senot. Jodie confirmed that she’s still married to Donte Senot, who we also went to school with. They ran with the popular and pretty crowd, from what I remember. What have you heard?”
“Just that she’s very into metaphysical stuff. That’s not a bad thing, but I’ve heard it now from a few people. I was just wondering. I meant to introduce myself to her, but I haven’t had the time.”
“Interesting,” I said. “I’ll ask around. I can introduce you to her.”
“We’ll see. I’m not one for either censorship or gossip, but in this case, be discreet. At least for now.”
“Okay,” I said. Baskerville punctuated my doubtful tone with an equally doubtful meow. “Is Marion coming in?”
“Yes, I believe she is—momentarily, in fact. Just for a couple hours to look at orders. She’s doing okay, our girl, isn’t she?”
“I think so,” I said.
As if on cue, Marion flew through the front door. She was fresh off the slopes, with red cheeks and a wide smile. She reported that she hadn’t found any body parts today, which had made her practice time much more enjoyable than yesterday’s. I gave her less-than-graphic details of what the police had discovered and then left the store to her care. Chester went to the back workshop to attend to some printing press repairs for Nathan and Adal, who were both scheduled to come in later to work on the poetry book.
I decided that since she’d come up twice in conversation in the last couple of hours, I’d been given a distinct sign that I was supposed to go talk to Sarah McMasters Senot. I hadn’t talked to her since high school. She and I didn’t really have much of a history at all, but it would not be weird to shop for a book, or just stop by and say hello.
I told Marion I’d be back shortly and ignored Baskerville’s odd warning-like meow as I went through the front door.
5
Though I hadn’t yet been inside Starry Nights Books, I’d walked past it many times. It was located right on Main, halfway between Bygone Alley and Little Blue. I’d peeked in through the front window a number of times, once finding a nicely done display of Phyllis A. Whitney books. My mom had been a big reader of Ms. Whitney’s novels. I’d found her collection in a box in our garage when I was a teenager and I’d read them too. The contents were slightly dated, but the stories were still compelling, and she’d become a shared favorite author for Mom and me. As I thought about the time I’d spent engrossed in the books, I missed my parents and hoped they were almost done with their sunbird adventures in Arizona.
The narrow brick building that housed the bookstore had last been home to a young man who taught guitar. Before the place was filled with books, I’d walk by and look in to see the music teacher and a student in the otherwise empty and stark space, with only their guitars, two folding chairs, and a music stand. The walls were all plain lath and plaster, and those in the know—Marion—told me that the acoustics were perfect and the teacher was “hot”; thus he had a steady stream of eager students who wanted to learn guitar, most of them female. His business was well suited to Star City, but he apparently decided to move down to Salt Lake City to find a bigger population to draw from. Marion had told me that he had the same success going on in his new digs and his student list had grown.
The guitar teacher’s story was unlike that of our resident Latin teacher, Anorkory Levkin, who’d found, miraculously in my opinion, that Salt Lake folks had no problem driving up the canyon to learn an old dead language. And though Anorkory was a wonderful and friendly man, I’d never heard him described as “hot.” It didn’t seem to matter.
Once inside the bookshop, I felt an immediate sense of good claustrophobia: the kind that comes with close and jam-packed bookshelves that leave only just enough walking room. I spied a counter and a cash register about halfway down the long building, but didn’t see anyone working.
“Hello?” I said.
“I’m in the back. Make yourself at home. Have a cup of whatever we’ve got. Shop or I’ll look at whatever you brought in in a second,” a woman’s voice said from somewhere in the walled-off back depths.
Any reason to peruse a bookshop was a good enough reason for me. A quick scan made me think that romance novels filled the front shelves, followed by mystery, and then science fiction toward the back. Though I could have found hours of reading enjoyment on those shelves, they weren’t what I was looking f
or today. I zoned in on the shelf closest to the cash register; it was the least crowded and though it held some books, it had other things too, shiny things—crystals and rocks, the names of which I was sure Seth would know on sight. The few books there were clearly metaphysical; a couple of titles I was able to immediately read were Living with the Dead and They Never Really Die.
“Hi. Oh, you’re . . . Clare! That’s right. Hello.” Sarah peered around a doorway to what must lead to a small room in the back corner. Her dark hair was pulled up and dusty and she wiped her hands on her dusty jeans as she came around and joined me out front. She didn’t look much different than she had looked in high school—still pretty. I’d forgotten about her posture, but I suddenly remembered my high-school-aged curiosity about how she always managed to stand so straight. How had she never slouched? It looked like she’d kept up the good work, and I straightened my own shoulders as she approached. I suddenly felt bad about not stopping by earlier to say hello.
“Hey, Sarah, it’s great to see you,” I said.
“You too, Clare Henry. You look the same.”
“You too. You and Donte moved back to Star City?”
“No, not really, just put the bookshop here. We still live in Salt Lake City. I love it here, but Donte’s company is in Salt Lake. His company makes more money—lots more—than mine does, so we’re down there until I outdo him.” She laughed. “Not a real possibility. He’s so darn successful, you know.”
Comic Sans Murder Page 4
