Burning Books

by Sharon Gerlach

  Molly blinked at his rudeness. She opened her mouth to respond. Cary’s fingers tightened on her wrist, and she bit back the words.

  “I apologize for our discourtesy. I assure you, it’s uncharacteristic. We just have limited time in which to see you.”

  Kevin Kincaid—presumably—grunted again and stuck the pipe stem back in his mouth.

  “It’s about your article in Conspiracy Theory, an online tabloid,” Molly put in, ignoring the increasing pressure of Cary’s fingers.

  “I knew I’d regret posting that,” Kincaid grumbled around the pipe. He puffed smoke out of the corner of his mouth. The cool breeze blew it back in his face. He squinted through it. “There’s not really a tabloid. Just a name I made up to post the article. Got one of those dot-coms for ten bucks a year.”

  Cary hadn’t told her it was the only article on the website. “You don’t remember writing it? So you don’t remember researching it at all, then?”

  At Molly’s visible disappointment, Kincaid removed the pipe from his mouth again, squinted suspiciously at them through the smoke, then reluctantly motioned to the cottage behind him. “Let’s take it inside, where I can at least keep the smoke out of my eyes.”

  He slammed the lid on the paint can and stalked toward the open door of the cottage. Molly glanced at the wooden sign as she passed. Kincaid Investigations. You Hide It, We Find It. Cary snorted softly.

  When they were inside, Kincaid shoved away the rock propping open the door and shut out the chilly day. Other than a small waiting area closed off from the rest of the cottage and dotted with comfortable chairs, and a walled-off corner with a door marked Restroom, the cottage was one room, dominated by a cast-iron hearth. A leather sofa and matching chairs were arranged around a coffee table, keeping the hearth the focal point. On the far side of the room, a kitchenette with polished limestone countertops and an aging coffee percolator hinted at refreshment. Across the room hulked a massive desk, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves soaring behind it, crammed with all manner of books and papers and filing crates.

  “It’s meant to be a guest house, but I made it my office. Though I kip here every now and then if the wife’s ticked at me. Have a seat.” Kincaid took a chair himself, leaving the sofa to his guests. Molly huddled into a corner. Cary settled next to her, too close to be construed as anything but her lover. She could almost see Kincaid file the information away in his head.

  “So you want to know about the article. Strangest damn thing. I was going through some filing, putting things to order . . . You can’t tell, but before the superstorm, this place was neat as a pin.” It still was, save for the disarray on the bookshelves behind the desk and the scattering of documents on the desktop. “The last thirteen months have been a whirlwind of searching for this or that. You can’t imagine.”

  Cary said wryly, “Oh, I think I can.”

  “Anyway, while I was searching for anything I could lay my hands on from the missing year, I found this article.”

  “Wait,” Molly interjected as he took a breath to continue. “You’ve been able to find information from the missing year?”

  “Did I say that? Nope. I said I was searching for stuff from the missing year. No one’s able to find anything. Why should I be any different? Everyone’s looking for something or someone. You’d be amazed at the clients I’ve gained in the last year.”

  Cary said, “You’ve been able to find missing people?”

  Kincaid bridged his fingers together in front of his face, looking at Cary over them. “I’ve been able to find dead people, Mr. . . .”

  “Cary Welch. I’m a professor at the University of Washington. This is Molly McKinley.”

  “Mr. Welch, the only people we will ever find are the dead. The electronic records may be gone. The written records may be gone. But the headstones are still there. Now the missing . . . they’re just gone. They will always be a mystery, unless we can unlock the electronic data. And even then—well, long before the superstorm, we couldn’t find everyone who vanished.”

  “Mr. Kincaid, you were telling us about the article.” Molly wanted nothing more than to skirt around the uncomfortable subject of Lee Welch.

  Kincaid didn’t acknowledge her. He held Cary’s gaze knowingly. “Who?”

  “My wife.”

  The investigator’s eyes twitched as though he wanted to glance at Molly but stopped himself. “When?”

  “Within the missing year.”

  “Cemeteries?”

  “I’ve been through the most likely ones she’d be buried in if she were dead.”

  “What’s the last thing you remember about her?”

  “She was folding laundry. I was getting ready to leave for work. The kids were fighting over who got the last of the Froot Loops. Lee said to me . . .” He scrubbed a hand over his face. His voice roughened as he continued. “She said, ‘You were supposed to get more cereal on your way home last night. Since you didn’t, you can sort that out.’ And she went into the laundry room for another load. I was pissed. Pissed at her for being pissed at me, so I just left. Left the kids arguing over their favorite cereal. Left my wife there, folding my clothes, while I stormed off because she’d called me out on something I said I’d do and didn’t.”

  “You think she left you.” A statement, not a question.

  “Yes.” Another revelation he hadn’t confessed to Molly.

  “Perhaps she just has nothing to say to you.”

  “But she would have plenty to say to her parents and her children.”

  “Ah.” Kincaid’s speculative gaze finally moved to Molly, as if wondering how she fit into the Welches domestic strife. He dropped his hands. “I found an envelope containing the text of the article. On the front of the envelope were the words publish this. Everything was printed from a computer. No handwriting to trace. Plain white computer paper like you’d buy at Staples, so no special stationary to investigate. Just publish this. I read the article, and thought, why not? It was well written and made sense.”

  Cary leaned forward, bracing his forearms on his knees. “So you think the theory has merit.”

  Kincaid’s mouth twisted. “Every theory has merit. This one does address a lot of unanswered questions, such as why computer-operating systems were set back to presuperstorm settings and versions rather than being completely erased, why only a specific time period of data vanished, why only memories from a specific time period were affected in people. What the governments of the world told their citizens didn’t add up to the reality of the situation.”

  “And you’re sure there’s no way to trace who left this article with you?” Molly pressed.

  “No way whatsoever. How do you fit into this, Miss McKinley?”

  Because it was simpler than explaining about the books and their odd effect on both herself and her brother, Molly said, “I’m just helping Cary. He saw the article online.”

  “Hmm,” he murmured thoughtfully. “Let me show you something.”

  Kincaid hoisted himself out of his chair, rummaged at his desk across the room, and came back with a laptop computer. He opened it, tapped some keys, and turned it around, setting it on the coffee table.

  “Those are the stats for the article. It’s been up for two days. It’s had exactly two hits.” He tilted the laptop back toward him, pointed at something and turned it back, his finger marking the spot for them. “That right there tracks the ISP of visitors. Same ISP for both hits, both of them day before yesterday. I bet if I checked your ISP number, Mr. Welch, it would match.”

  Cary nodded. “I read the article once, then went back to print it out.”

  “An article like this has only two hits—yours—when Google’s most popular search term over the last year has been solar superstorm. Isn’t that something indeed?”

  Cary was silent for a long while once they were back on the road. He guided the car through traffic onto State Route 509 to avoid the congestion of I-5. Once he set the cruise control, he glanced over at
Molly.

  “You’re connected to Harvey Cohen. Harvey is connected to me. So how is Kevin Kincaid connected to all of this?”

  “You think he’s involved somehow?”

  “It’s too coincidental for me to think anything else. Why else would he have that article, and why else would I be the only one who’s found it? Maybe I hired him to find Lee.”

  Molly asked quietly, “Is that something you would have done if she’d left you?”

  Without a word, he pulled the car into a turnout across the road. The masts of sailboats moored at Tyee Marina were just visible through a stand of scraggly hedge maples struggling to survive in the sea spray and brackish groundwater. The wind rippled over the cold waters of Commencement Bay. She shivered despite the warmth in the car. Cary sat at length, watching a couple of harbor seals playing in the bay, his hands gripping the steering wheel so tightly, his knuckles turned white.

  “Are you asking if I stalked my wife after she left me?”

  “I’m asking about your marital situation before the superstorm. Because maybe she hired Kevin Kincaid to investigate you.”

  His mouth fell open in surprise.

  “Did we have an affair during the missing year? Is that why we seem so familiar to each other, why you affect me the way you do? Could she have been gathering ammunition for a divorce?”

  “I don’t know, Molly.” His head swiveled back toward the bay, but the seals were gone.

  Molly watched the oncoming traffic, hating the dark territory into which her train of thought had traveled. “How old are you, Cary?”

  He answered without looking at her. “Forty-two.”

  Eleven years older than she. She bit back her next question—are you the kind of man who indulges in affairs with younger women?—because she didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to think she would allow herself to be nothing more than a dalliance.

  “We should go,” she said instead.

  He turned in his seat, reaching toward her, tangling his fingers into her hair. “I don’t know what kind of man I was during that missing year, Molly. But I know what kind of man I was before that, and what kind of man I am now. I may not have been the perfect husband—in fact, I’m quite positive I was frequently a complete asshole. This isn’t a game, you and me. I don’t play those kinds of games. If we had an affair, it was because Lee and I were finished, permanently. You’d have been more to me than a fling.”

  “But you don’t remember.”

  “I don’t remember you. But I remember Lee. If she left, she meant to stay gone.”

  “Without her kids?”

  “I wouldn’t have let her take them. She was not a very mentally strong woman.”

  “But she would have contacted them, tried to see them. And what about her parents?”

  He sighed, drawing away. “Which is why I checked the cemeteries when I discovered she was gone. Harvey . . . well, his first thought was she had committed suicide during the missing year.”

  Her stomach turned. “Do you think it’s possible?”

  “Possible, yes. Probable, no. Lee loved our children. She’d never have left them that way, despite her own emotional difficulties.” He pulled the gearshift into drive, checked traffic, and guided the car back onto the road.

  When they reached her house, he exited the car with her but only accompanied her as far as the front door, bracing his hands on the doorframe, bracketing her between them. Molly’s breath quickened at the intensity in his calico eyes.

  “I wish I could stay, Molly. But I need to pick up the children from Harvey and Dottie’s and actually try to get some sleep tonight so I’m worth something to my students tomorrow.” He lifted one hand and stroked her hair away from her temple. Her heart thundered in response to his touch. “Are we okay? You seem to be questioning becoming involved with me.”

  Molly caught his hand in hers and pressed it to her cheek. “It’s not the being involved. It’s how fast we became involved. It’s not like me to fall into bed with a man I just met.”

  His mouth curved in a half smile that was vaguely sardonic. “You said it yourself at my house the other night: but did we just meet?” He stole a glance at his watch, then leaned in closer, crowding her against the door. “I’ll call you later.”

  “Men always say that.”

  “This one means it.”

  “Thanks for not running away screaming from the crazy that is my life right now.”

  “I’d never run from you.” He rested his forehead against hers, kissed the tip of her nose, and whispered, “Molly. Breathe.”

  “Why do you always say that?”

  “Why do you always stop breathing around me?” He kissed her between the eyes. “It just seems to pop into my head when you’re around. A good thing, too, since you’d undoubtedly pass out if I didn’t.”

  A soft kiss on her lips, and another, then a deeper, longer one, and he pulled away, backing down the porch steps, his eyes holding her frozen in place. The world faded away. There was just Cary and his eyes and his billion-gigawatt smile.

  Then he broke eye contact, and the world rushed in, deafening and confusing and unwelcome. Unease gnawing at her insides, Molly went inside and spent the rest of the evening trying to remember life before Cary Welch.

  ∞3∞

  She busied herself in the attic, because reading the third book made her think of Cary, and she suspected she’d done enough of that for the time being. A man like him could easily become an obsession. Ninety boxes of emotional trauma should be enough to dispel any lingering effects of his overwhelming presence.

  Her mother’s boxes were clearly marked ELOISE in black, block letters. How melancholy to have lived so vibrantly, only to be reduced to a stack of cardboard crates collecting dust in your own attic. Molly selected one and breached the seal, brutally forging forward despite her mind shrinking away from the task. Each item she removed hit her heart like a bludgeon. Ever so slowly, though, she amassed a small collection of items to retain as keepsakes, stowing the rest back in the box to give away.

  By the third box, a river of tears soaked her face, blurring her vision to the point she could barely see. By the sixth, her heart bled. The ninth box held Eloise’s silk blouses. A puff of sandalwood and ginger and orange blossom enveloped her as she folded back the flaps, engulfing her in a wave of longing so acute, she couldn’t draw breath. Longing to feel her mother’s arms around her; to breathe in that Armani Code for Women, warmed and rendered potent by her mother’s skin; to press her face to that silk-draped bosom and weep for all the things she suspected she’d lost in the missing year. Things like her moral values and her respectability.

  She curled up on the dusty floor on her side, clutching silk to her breast. Tears flowed over the bridge of her nose, pooling with those from her other eye and dripping onto the floor. Eloise hadn’t had an easy motherhood, parenting a child with Magnus’s challenges. Magnus’s quirks caused a few in Molly herself, such as Molly turning to her mother for the bond so lacking between her twin and herself. Clingy and insecure until she’d been old enough to understand her brother’s challenges, and then pining and bereft because he couldn’t be what she desired, and then motherly and patronizing when Eloise could no longer be there. Suffocating sister. Mollycoddling Molly. How many mistakes had she made with Magnus since Eloise and Kenneth died? Many. So very many.

  A loud bang somewhere on the lower floors brought her out of her semidoze. The sun had progressed past the window, leaving behind the cool blue of twilight. Molly raised herself from the floor and brushed dust from her clothes. Thick mats of it fell to the floor where she’d lain. Really, she’d have to offer Annis a bonus to come up here and suck the neglect into the vacuum.

  Halfway down the attic stairs, she paused, one hand on the railing, the other still clutching her mother’s pale-blue silk blouse. Her head cocked as she listened for movement. Her tongue clung to the roof of her mouth, reluctant to call out. It could just be Magnus or Annis. Then again,
it could be an intruder, unaware of her presence or methodically searching out inhabitants, a silent home invasion for nefarious purposes. She shuddered.

  The house was still and silent but for the rising wind outside that scraped the branches of trees and shrubs against windows and brick. At last, she came down to the second-floor landing and peered down the murky hallway. No movement. No sound. Darkness spilled under Magnus’s bedroom door. Her own room was dimly lit by a lamp with a light sensor. She hated coming up to a completely dark bedroom, and her distaste had come close to a phobia until Magnus had gone to the hardware store and found the light sensor.

  She inched into her room. Her heart thudded in her ears, masking any sound an intruder might make. A quick scan of her bedroom proper confirmed it was uninhabited. Molly crept toward the bathroom, her footfalls muffled by the carpet. The bathroom light was on a motion sensor—again, the phobia of darkness at work—and it flooded the small room with light as she breached the doorway. Empty.

  Sagging against the doorjamb and feeling rather silly, she drew in several deep breaths to steady her nerves. More like silly sister. Mad Molly. Seeing phantoms, hearing ghosts. It hadn’t been a door she’d heard closing, but the wind knocking something against the house.

  The clock read seven. She’d been in the attic for three hours. Her appetite had been largely ruined by the discoveries of the last two days, so she skipped dinner and changed into casual clothes, drew a glass of water from the bathroom sink, and settled on her bed to read. Her hand blindly searched her purse for the silk-wrapped book Cary had returned to her yesterday and came out wanting.

  Not the first time she’d lost something in the capacious depths of the oversize purses she favored. She pulled it onto her lap and began transferring the contents from the purse onto her bed. Then the leather bag was empty, and no book had been unearthed. Molly stared at the odds and ends strewn over her coverlet. Her heart raced. Cold sweat popped from her pores, chilling her skin.