Burning Books

by Sharon Gerlach

  “I’m worried about you. What’s going on with you, Molly?”

  “I wish I knew, Magnus.” She propped her chin on her forearm and stared out the door into the hallway. “I think I should probably stop reading the books. I should just put the last two in a safe-deposit box and forget about them.”

  He was silent for a long time, his own gaze trained on the open bedroom door and the hallway beyond. At length, he drew in a deep breath and said, “I think you should read them. Get it done, whatever this is. Then we can deal with whatever happens.”

  She gaped at him in shock and began to laugh without humor. “Oh, this is rich. Cary’s now telling me to reconsider because of the potential risk to everyone, and you’re now telling me to read them and damn the consequences.”

  “He’s cautious because he’s a shrink. But shrinks don’t always have the right answers, Molly.”

  He scooted closer and put his arm around her. Molly froze at his touch. Other than his breakdown the day after the book-club fiasco, he had not initiated physical contact between them in years. He was equally stiff, but once she forced her limbs to relax, the tension drained from him as well and his arm became comforting rather than awkward.

  “We’ll get through this, Molly, just like we’ve gotten through everything else.” He hesitated, and his next words came with evident difficulty. “Although you do exasperate me sometimes.”

  She smiled. “Likewise.”

  His arm tightened. “I’m meeting Lynda for dinner in a couple of hours. Do you want to come with us?”

  She grimaced. “That would be awkward. No, thanks. I’ll do my laundry, clean out my closet, whatever. Busy work while I decide what to do.”

  “Don’t forget to eat.”

  “I’ll order Jimmy John’s or something,” she promised as he stood up.

  He paused by the door, running a hand over it. “There’s a blue door in the garage,” he said randomly.

  “Yeah, I noticed it the other day.”

  “I don’t remember the door breaking. Or how it broke.” He looked up at her, his expression haunted. “I think I would rather remember everything, even if the memories are bad, than always have this confusion and all these questions.”

  As she gathered her laundry, Molly pondered his admission. Was it easier to be shielded from the truth by a convenient amnesia, or better to know an ugly past? When the water stopped running in his bathroom, indicating he was out of the shower, she carried her basket down to the tiny laundry room off the kitchen and sorted clothes into it, wishing his past could be washed clean as easily as her clothes. A bit of warm water and some Tide and voilà! Mess gone. Heartache and trauma and frustration magically vanished. A brand-new Magnus, free of his mental anguish and humiliating past.

  But wasn’t that essentially what the magic had done, erased a portion of his past and gave the world a whole new, somewhat efficiently functioning Magnus? Would all of that be undone if she read the last of the books?

  She was munching a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and a handful of chips when he came into the kitchen, fastening the buttons on the cuff of a forest-green shirt. His black slacks, fastidiously divested of any trace of lint, indicated a fancier dinner than she’d assumed.

  “Big spender tonight?”

  “Anthony’s,” he confirmed. He paused. “She likes seafood, right?”

  “Yup.” She beamed a mock warning at him. “She’s my best friend.”

  He held up his hands, palms out. “I’m a gentleman if nothing else. I’ll be home late. Not sure what we’re doing after dinner, but we’ll find something.”

  “Have fun.”

  A quick text to Lynda confirmed that she and Magnus had arrived at Anthony’s. Lynda’s reply made her grimace: OMG, Molly, this place is a zoo for Monday night. Thank God we had reservations. He’s being a perfect gentleman. BTW, he does drink wine, right? Cuz I’d like to order a bottle and relax that man’s inhibitions. She assured her friend that Magnus did, indeed, like wine and then tried to banish from her mind the image of the red silk tied to Cecily’s bedframe and instead wondered what Cecily thought of his blooming relationship with Lynda. Perhaps he’d been telling the truth and Cecily was just a friend. Maybe he really wasn’t her gawky suitor, after all.

  She donned her dark sleuthing clothes and slipped out to the car. It was raining again; between the encroaching nightfall and the dark storm clouds overhead, she should easily blend into the shadows. On the way to Cecily’s cottage, she made some random turns just to see if anyone followed her. Reasonably sure Cary hadn’t been watching her to thwart any further breaking-and-entering attempts, she parked a block away—on a different block this time—and circled back around to Cecily’s front walk. Once inside the privacy hedge, she breathed a little easier.

  A lamp burned in the living-room window, muted by the closed drapes, but otherwise, the house was dark. Molly watched for a while; if Cecily were home, reading or watching television, she’d be able to see the flicker of the television, or lights would go on and off again as she used the bathroom or got snacks from the kitchen.

  When quarter of an hour passed with no sign of occupancy, she rang the bell and knocked, ready should Cecily answer the summons with an excuse that she was looking for Magnus. How she’d explain to Magnus later was a mystery, but she’d think of something. He was likely to be annoyed, but that was nothing new.

  How Cecily occupied herself in Magnus’s absence was anyone’s guess, but apparently, she didn’t sit around waiting for him to show up. The house was clearly unoccupied. She tried the front doorknob, just on the off chance that Cecily or Magnus had forgotten to lock it. No such luck. Keeping to the shadows even though the moon was obscured by dark clouds, Molly crept around to the back of the house, unable to stop herself from glancing repeatedly over her shoulder to make sure Cary wasn’t sneaking up on her in the dark again.

  She was alone. She also wasn’t getting in through the sliding door; it was locked. Even if she could jimmy the lock, Magnus had laid a metal bar in the track to keep the door from opening more than a couple of inches. In through a window then, if she could find one unlocked.

  The back bedroom window was secure, but the side window had a loose screen and a half-turned latch. A hose hideaway below it, made of heavy duty plastic, would be enough to hold her weight for the few seconds she needed it. Some judicious jiggling and the application of a little percussive maintenance disengaged it completely. Molly raised the sash, hoisted herself up onto the hose hideaway, and tipped herself headfirst through the window, landing in an ungainly heap on Cecily’s bed. The springs squealed a protest and bounced several times, and then all was quiet. She rolled off the mattress and checked the bedding for any mud from her shoes, then leaned over the bed and closed the window.

  The protesting springs hadn’t brought anyone running, but even so, Molly crept cautiously to the bedroom door, listening for movement, breathing, any sound to give away another human presence. Hearing none, she tapped on her cell-phone flashlight and tiptoed into the hallway.

  The tiny bathroom to her right was dark, the bathtub wrap a bright splotch of white in the gloom, the curtain shoved all the way to one end of the bar. No place to hide in there. Still, she swept the room with her light, revealing no secrets. Likewise, the kitchen lay in shadows, but it was small with no nooks in which to hide from her light.

  She turned left into the living room, heart pounding. The one lamp was enough to illuminate both tiny sections of the living room, confirming that she was alone in the cottage. The house was small, but it seemed a gargantuan task to search it for hidden keepsakes of murder. There were obvious places where nothing could be hidden, so she ignored those and concentrated her search on more likely areas, going so far as to remove and open the thickest books on the shelves to see if there were compartments carved out of the pages and poking through the canisters in the kitchen.

  When she’d looked through the living room, kitchen, and bathroom, Moll
y had begun to despair of finding her evidence. Perhaps Cecily had time to hand over the trophy box to her father, after all. Only the bedroom remained to search, but Molly hesitated on the threshold. Searching Cecily’s most private quarters seemed like more of an invasion than reading her diaries. Here was the bed where Cecily had lain with her shy, awkward lover—Molly’s own brother, if her suspicions were to be believed. The same bed where she’d awakened, tied to the frame with red silk presumably by her estranged husband. The sanctuary where Cecily had lain in the dark, praying for a safe future. Any future at all.

  She chanced turning on the bedside lamp and started her search with the skirted night table, working her way around the room, checking under, behind, and inside everything that held any potential of a hiding place. The closet held a neat stack of storage boxes, and thinking it likely she’d struck pay dirt, Molly dove into them one by one. And came up empty-handed. She rifled the pockets of all of Cecily’s clothes, searched all the extra linens and blankets on the shelf above the clothes bar, and even opened all the plastic storage cases holding Cecily’s shoes.

  Larger, flat plastic totes under the bed held Cecily’s spring and summer wardrobe. Molly cracked these open and searched between garments, in pockets. Nothing. Using the footboard as leverage, she hoisted herself up from the floor, knocking the afghan to the floor. She refolded it, draped it back in place, and paused.

  Nothing. If Magnus had kept trophies, he hadn’t hidden them here. She didn’t know if she was relieved or disappointed, for the knot of anxiety still held like a clenched fist in her abdomen. Now to see what Cecily looked like before Magnus came back.

  She hurried back into the living room and crossed the room in three strides, kneeling beside the two-tiered coffee table. Her heart stuttered, skipped two beats, and then raced frantically toward panic.

  The photo albums were gone.

  She tipped from her feet onto her knees, running her hand over the lower shelf, holding it up to the light. Clean. Not only had the photo albums been removed, someone had dusted. Maybe Cecily had packed them away or moved them to another location. Judging from her diaries, the past held some painful memories of her childhood sweetheart. Sometimes it was better to put the past out of immediate reach to cope better with the pain.

  A quick scan of the bookshelves assured her the albums weren’t in the living room. She checked the TV area just in case, but there were few places to stash things, and none of them held the missing albums. No one in their right mind would keep their photographs in the kitchen, but she checked the tiny table, anyway, as well as the cupboards.

  Surely not . . . for who would sleep with photo albums tucked between their mattresses? It would be lumpy and uncomfortable. But still . . . it was the only place she hadn’t searched. She lifted the wedding-ring quilt, slipped her fingers between the mattress and the box spring, and lifted.

  The suction caused a chaotic flurry, sweeping the photographs from their moorings and out of the gap between the mattress and box spring. She dropped the mattress, whooshing more photos into the air. As one fluttered toward her feet, she snagged it in midair and turned it over.

  Shock like a punch to her diaphragm robbed her breath, exploding stars in her eyes. Darkness crept at her peripheral vision. Still clutching the photograph, she dropped to her knees, snatching up the other glossy rectangles, flipping them over frantically, confronted time and again with the same damning image.

  A sucking sensation made her clutch at her chest, and she gasped in air, dispelling the encroaching faint as her oxygen-starved lungs feasted. Her hands trembled, fluttering the picture in her hand as though a high wind blew through the room. She laid it on the floor, smoothing its crumpled edges, hardly daring to believe what she was seeing.

  A woman smiling wide, a suggestion of dimples shadowing her cheeks, blonde hair lifted by a breeze, blue eyes laughing at the camera, arms circling two grade-school children.

  She’d seen this woman before. She went by Lee, Harvey Cohen had said, implying his daughter had been christened otherwise, a clue Molly had failed to recognize.

  The mysterious Cecily was Lee Welch.

  Cary’s wife.

  ∞3∞

  With monumental effort, Molly gathered the photographs, seeking out those that had fluttered under the bed and into the open closet door. Her legs shook so hard, she wasn’t sure she could walk, so she crawled around to the other side of the bed and scooped up the pictures that had blown out when she’d let the mattress fall.

  Trembling violently, hardly able to draw breath, she stared down at the topmost image, pain lancing through her heart. Cecily’s head was tilted to the side, face lifted to the sky, eyes closed. And the man embracing her from behind, his head bowed and cheek pressed to hers, wore a forest-green, cable-knit fisherman’s sweater Molly was intimately familiar with. She turned over the photograph. The date printed on the back by the developer read December 13, 2012.

  Was this before Cecily had discovered her husband’s trophy box? Her husband . . . Cary . . . Oh, Jesus. What was she going to do about Cary?

  Spots danced in her vision—hyperventilating. She drew in several deep, steady breaths to clear her vision and the telltale tingle of a faint that crept up the back of her scalp. This was not proof that Cecily was Idiot Woman who narrated the burning books. As Cary had said, some sea glass and photo albums weren’t positive proof.

  But she couldn’t deny that the coincidences kept building up. And when she had let slip the name of Magnus’s friend, the biggest coincidence of all, he hadn’t revealed that his wife’s full name was Cecily. No, she had to learn that through a collection of photographs kept clandestinely between the mattresses of Cecily’s own bed. Were they the photos from the missing albums? Cary had obviously beat her here; he must have come back to get the albums after he’d stopped her from breaking in. But why would he leave behind any evidence that could testify to his deception?

  No, the photos weren’t from the albums. It made no sense that he would leave them here for her to find. Either Cecily or Magnus had secreted them away. Magnus could have hidden the albums himself, but that also made no sense—she hadn’t told him her suspicion that Cecily was the narrator of her books. And, given his sneering remark about her losing one of the books, he hadn’t yet realized that she’d stolen it back from him. He’d have no reason to hide the albums from another of her B&E raids, because he was unaware of the first one. Unaware, too, that she knew who Cecily was.

  But Cary did. She’d stupidly let Cecily’s name slip, and even more idiotically told him of her suspicion that she’d narrated the books. There were photographs in his home of his wife; she’d have recognized her in the photographs in the albums. He was the only one with a vested interest in keeping her from connecting that Magnus’s friend Cecily was his wife, Lee.

  The tingle up the back of her scalp started again. Molly put her head between her knees and breathed, deeply and steadily, frantically pushing back the physical effects of her shock and heartbreak while steeling herself to accept, mentally and emotionally, that her lover might not be just a wife-killer but a serial killer.

  She shook her head frantically to dispel the thought. No. No, no, no. He’s kind and beautiful and mesmerizing and has the perfect cover, a wife and family and a master’s in psychology and a hidden niche in the wall of his study . . .

  “Stop it, Molly!” she said aloud, the sound of her voice in the quiet cottage shocking her out of her terrified fog.

  Cary could have a good reason for not revealing that his wife’s name was also Cecily, as well as one for breaking into the cottage to steal the photo albums—maybe he just needed to confirm it was she. And if Cecily was indeed Idiot Woman, there also could be an explanation for the box of trophies Cecily had found in his den. They could have been his father’s, or they could have been from an owner prior to any of the Welch family. He’d said she was not emotionally well, and Harvey Cohen had said the same thing, as well. Cecily could have
been jumping at shadows, seeing danger in her husband where there was none.

  When you’ve known someone since you were eight years old, you become familiar with the feel of things that belong to him.

  Was that women’s intuition—or mental instability?

  She selected a few significant photographs and shoved the rest between the mattresses, then clicked off the lamp and peered through the kitchen window to make sure no one was around to witness her letting herself out the front door.

  There were no answers in Cecily’s cottage, only more questions. Answers lay in the burning books—the books Cary no longer wanted her to read.

  He called while she was driving. Molly pulled into a Chevron station, heart racing, and answered the call.

  “Molly.” Her stomach rolled at his seductive purr. “I just wanted to see how you’re doing. How was the funeral? And lunch?”

  Her mind drew a blank for one paralyzing second, and then she remembered she’d texted him about what he’d ordered from Mayflower China.

  “The funeral was a typical funeral. Not as maudlin as some. And lunch is disagreeing with me. In fact, I think I’m going to throw it up.” She was. The queasiness had developed a full-fledged roll, and her flesh had chilled with cold sweat.

  “Nothing serious, I hope? Food poisoning?”

  Out of the blue, a memory bobbed to the surface of her mind. I’ve been doing nothing but poking through boxes in storage, looking for some odds and ends I haven’t seen since Lee vanished.

  He’d gone out for dinner and ended up grabbing takeout from the same restaurant where Genevieve had bought dinner. Both had bought beef chow yuk and sweet-and-sour chicken. And later, he’d been looking for “trinkets,” as he’d called them—a box of trophies, perhaps, taken from the necks of victims before the missing year? Had he gone to add another trophy to his collection, only to find his niche raided and his collection missing? That would mean he hadn’t killed in more than a year—and had suddenly started again.