The Cracked Spine

by Paige Shelton

  The only thing to do now was get through the auction and, afterward, try to get some answers from Edwin. Birk was very good, and sounded just like any auctioneer I’d ever heard, but with a Scottish accent, which made everything sound better. However, though his accent was light, when he started speaking quickly my American ears struggled to keep up.

  Genevieve Begbie won the auction, and Benny helped her carry her prize out to her car like it was just another item she’d picked up shopping that day, even though Edwin confirmed that I’d heard correctly—her winning bid had been fifty thousand pounds, close to eighty thousand American dollars. I didn’t witness a money transfer and Genevieve didn’t pull out her checkbook.

  “How will she pay?” I asked Edwin quietly as we followed behind everyone down the grand hallway and staircase.

  “It’s all electronic transfer. Rosie handles all the money from our end.”

  When we were outside and she reached her car, Genevieve’s eyes caught mine. I thought she might smile, but she didn’t. She nodded and then looked at Birk, who had his head down as he inspected something on his mobile phone. I thought Genevieve was trying to tell me something, but the silent communication could have been my imagination. Before I could shrug or raise my eyebrows, she slipped into her red sports car. She revved the engine before backing away from the curb. Monroe and Hamilton followed suit.

  Somehow, Benny had quickly gathered the cars from wherever he’d hidden them and lined them up outside the front doors. He handed each driver their keys and didn’t offer much in the way of a farewell.

  I told him it was nice to meet him, but he just huffed in my direction.

  For such an easy incorporation into the group, I certainly wasn’t left with a sense of comradery. It was too soon to judge, of course, and maybe too soon for the others to extend warmth my direction. Maybe I was expecting too much too quickly, but I hoped our next meetings would be less cryptic.

  SEVEN

  I didn’t get to ask all the questions of Edwin I wanted to, but I did get one in.

  “I’m concerned about my sister, Delaney. I’m going tae drop you at the shop and then I think I’ll go look in on her.”

  “Do you want me to go with you?”

  “No, I don’t think so, but I have an idea. Ask Rosie tae show you the warehouse. You need tae see what’s in there and then you’ll understand the auctions better.”

  “That sounds great, but Edwin, can I ask you something?”

  “Aye,” he said too abruptly.

  “Did you really buy a First Folio from Birk?”

  “I did.”

  That was all he had to say? Just “I did”?

  “How … I don’t understand … they aren’t…” I took a deep breath and let it out. “The First Folios are priceless, and most of the ones still in existence are accounted for, Edwin, and though there’s a chance there are more out there, they aren’t something that’s typically just found. Was this something that was in Birk’s possession? If so, how? Why wasn’t it locked up somewhere safe, a library, a museum, a maximum-security vault?”

  “Birk has a story of how he found the Folio. I don’t believe him, but it’s a better story than his cousin in London, I suppose. I’ll let him tell it tae you someday.”

  “If you don’t believe him, where do you think he got it? And do you think it’s real?”

  “I searched and found that none had been stolen or lost or damaged, so I don’t know where he got it, Delaney. I do think it’s real, but I was hoping tae have you help me know for certain.”

  “Is it in the warehouse?” I hoped beyond hope that the alleged Folio was locked up somewhere safe. If not a library or a museum or a bank vault somewhere, at least secure behind the red door at the shop.

  “No, I gave it tae my sister, Jenny, tae care for it.”

  “Did she lock it up?”

  “I don’t know what she did with it. That was our argument yesterday. Well, part of our argument. We argued about other things first, but then about where she hid the Folio.”

  “Oh, my.” Truth be told, I wanted to faint and cry. At least whimper a little.

  “I know what you’re thinking, Delaney, that I was stupid and careless, and you might be right, but perhaps if you understood my past with my sister, you’d know I was just trying tae rebuild something that broke a long time ago. Entrusting her with the manuscript was my way of telling her she was welcome into my life, that I believed that she’d moved on from her terrible past. I admit, it was probably a bad choice and one that I will regret forever, even if we find the Folio and are able tae mend our family anyway.”

  Edwin didn’t need to explain anything to me, to anyone really, but I appreciated the gesture. He was correct that I hadn’t walked a proverbial mile in his shoes, but I did think he’d made a terrible decision, no matter what the view from that walk might be. It wasn’t my place to point that out, though. Besides, he seemed to be beating himself up well enough without anyone else’s help.

  “Do Rosie and Hamlet know?”

  “They know I gave the Folio tae Jenny, but they don’t know she wouldn’t tell me where it was. I would appreciate if you didn’t tell them that part. I would like tae do it myself. Tomorrow.”

  “Of course. Let me know what I can do to help,” I said.

  “I will.”

  I couldn’t dwell on the Folio. Well, I could I supposed, but it wasn’t going to do anyone any good for me to continue to be astounded by its possible existence and now disappearance. If the auction was any indication, I had stepped into a world that would hold many awe-inspiring items. I’d have to get used to it.

  The rest of the short ride back to the shop was silent; both Edwin and I had fallen deep into our own thoughts. I didn’t know what I could do to help him, unless just getting to work on something at the shop, perhaps in the warehouse, might help everyone.

  He pulled the car up to the curb, and I hurried out before he could hop out too and open my door. I waved as he drove away, but he was probably too distracted to notice.

  The bell above the door jingled as I went back into the store.

  “Delaney! How did it go? What did ye think of yer first auction?” Rosie said, still in the chair behind the desk.

  “Fine. We didn’t bid on the item, but I got a good sense of how things are done.”

  “That’s wonderful! How was Jenny?” Her smile flipped into a frown.

  “She didn’t make it there,” I said as I moved to the corner of the desk and scratched behind Hector’s ears.

  “Oh. I’m sure Edwin was disappointed. However, it will help…”

  “What will help?”

  “Och, ’tis nothing.”

  I watched as her eyes squinted, unsquinted. She scratched above her ear and then her chin.

  “You okay, Rosie?”

  “Fine, lass. Just fine.”

  “Edwin said that you could go ahead and show me the warehouse, if you have time. I don’t want to disturb a project.”

  “Yer not! That sounds delightful.” She lifted Hector from the desk and tucked him under her arm.

  “Where’s Hamlet?”

  “Gone for the day. He’s here only part-time, the other times he’s an actor and a university student. I believe he had some classes today, but I have a difficult time keeping up with the lad.”

  “He sounds busy.”

  “I think so.”

  We retraced the path up the balcony steps, over to the other side (I tried very hard not to let the idea of “the dark side” solidify in my mind, but I didn’t think I was successful), and down to the middle dingier, darker hallway. Rosie didn’t even acknowledge the upstairs offices before she’d flipped the switch that lit the naked bulb.

  When she reached the red door I felt like the explorers who’d opened King Tut’s tomb must have felt. Anticipation mixed with concern that the other side would be a bust.

  With the drama I’d silently inspirited in my own mind, Rosie pulled a loaded key
ring out of her pocket and flipped it a couple of times in her hand to sift for the appropriate key: it was oversized, turquoise blue, and had an old-fashioned curlicue endpiece.

  Deftly, she inserted the key and turned it three times to the left before the lock loosened with a metallic slide and thunk; the noise was loud and attached to mechanisms that belonged on something more important than an ordinary old door. She pushed and reached around to a switch on the wall. A flip sounded and the room became illuminated.

  “From what I heard about yer résumé, lass, this place is going tae feel like a wee bit of home.”

  I followed her inside.

  I blinked a million or so times as I looked around and tried to digest all the things that were in the room. Or at least digest a few of them. There were so many.

  The warehouse was not big, but it was tall in that it took up the entire back corner of the building. There was no second floor over this part, and two very small, high-up windows gave the room a sliver of natural light. The rest of the light came from three brass chandelier-like fixtures on the ceiling, and though the light seemed somewhat dim, it somehow managed to illuminate the entire room. Or more precisely, illuminate all the things on the shelves in the room.

  An old, large, wooden desk filled the center of the space. Next to the desk was a modern worktable with a light panel over its top, just like one I’d used back at the museum in Wichita. The worktable top was clear of clutter, but the desktop held a few messy piles of paper.

  The walls were lined with black-painted steel shelves. One wall of shelves was filled with books—so many books. They were stacked willy-nilly and off-kilter, even worse than the books out front.

  They cried out, begged to be straightened and organized, but I shut them out. For now. I’d get to them soon enough.

  The other shelves were jam-packed too, but not with books. At first glance, I noticed an antique tube radio, a golden Pharaoh head (just like Tut’s tomb—I realized the appropriateness of my earlier thought), an ornate mirror, a gilded and jeweled box, a whole shelf just for medieval weapons, bottles filled with liquid or powder or just empty … So many, many things. More things than I’d ever seen stored on the museum archive or storage shelves. Or perhaps it was that everything here was in total disarray. There was a preciseness to the shelves at a museum. There was the opposite of preciseness here.

  “I don’t understand,” I said. Between the auction for a portrait and the inventory in this room, had I misinterpreted the nonanswers to my non-asked questions? Had my mind created the “bookshop” part of the answers? No, wait, the sign out front had said, “Book Purveyors,” not museum or “Purveyors of Every Sort of Thing Under the Sun.”

  “This is Edwin’s collection. Books are his first passion, but he loves things: old, valuable things. This is where he keeps some of them and then sometimes sells them, sometimes uses them tae barter.”

  “I still don’t understand,” I said. “Will I be organizing or acquiring these sorts of things, or archiving and preserving them, or helping him sell them?”

  “Aye.” Rosie nodded.

  “Does he have someone he works with at a museum?” I asked.

  “No, this is all his, not for display, but he kens he has some museum-quality pieces. ’Tis why ye’re here.”

  As I looked around again, I thought about Edwin’s carelessness regarding the Folio. I couldn’t mention to Rosie that Jenny wasn’t telling where she’d put it, but a tiny bit of why he’d been so trusting with something so valuable crept into my consciousness, a minuscule slice of understanding. Despite appearances, I didn’t believe that Edwin didn’t care about these things; it must have been something else. The only conclusion I could come to in the span of a few seconds was that Edwin MacAlister was silly rich. He was the type of person who had so much money that he could replace anything he wanted just by pulling out his checkbook, or calling Rosie to make the electronic transfer.

  But not really. Folios weren’t easy to find. Neither were medieval weapons.

  “He loves these things?” I said.

  Rosie sighed. “Aye, he does. Truly. He’s a contradiction, Delaney. He’s a gatherer, but not someone who can organize. I think he’s become upset with himself and his care for his treasures, which is why he hired ye. He’s a good man with a heart o’ gold. He feeds and clothes many who canna afford it themselves, but he’ll never tell ye aboot that. He’s brilliant, but sometimes a wee taupie.”

  “Taupie?”

  “What’s the word? Scatterbrained? Does that sound right?”

  “An absentminded-professor type?”

  “Meebe, but good tae the core. His goodness gets him into trouble too, but I work tae keep him oot of it.”

  “How do you do that?”

  “Nothing you need to fret aboot.”

  Oddly, the next question that came to my mind was, “Has that desk seen the likes of kings and queens?”

  “Oh, aye! The advertisement. It has. It came from the court of William II.”

  “From the late sixteen hundreds? For real?”

  “Aye.”

  The desk had truly seen the likes of real kings and queens.

  From the seventeenth century.

  I felt the movement of my very soul as it teetered toward the brink.

  “I need to sit down,” I said as I beelined my way to the modern and clearly not overly valuable desk chair. I veered away from the ridiculously valuable desk that was obviously in need of at least a good dusting.

  “Delaney, are ye awright?” Rosie said as she stepped toward the desk. Hector whined, a brief and high-pitched squeak.

  I had an unreasonable urge to stop her, to tell her that no one should be so close to the desk until I had a chance to take care of it properly, or at least straighten the stacks of stuff atop it.

  Then, as suddenly as it had gone away, reason came back and took over, and it hit me—I was overreacting. Perhaps it was the combination of everything that had happened, the travel, all the big life changes (in the hierarchy of stressful events, wasn’t moving the number one? Moving to a different country surely pushed that even higher), but there truly was no need to feel panicked or out of control. I chuckled to myself. It wasn’t my job to care for and preserve the entire world. I hadn’t taken a “do no harm to old valuable things and report those who don’t” vow. These items belonged to someone else. Even though I’d worked in a museum, inside Edwin’s warehouse I’d probably never been around so many amazing things in my life. In fact, perhaps no one in Wichita had. I could ignore the distressed characters in the books, at least for the time being. They’d be there when I could get to them. Until this moment—or at least until the moment that I’d accepted the job—these things hadn’t been my responsibility. And I still wasn’t completely clear regarding the responsibilities anyway. I’d wanted an adventure, and just when one was standing right before me, exposing itself like it had been cloaked in a suspicious raincoat, I’d panicked.

  “I’m fine,” I finally said. “I think all the travel might have made me a little woozy for a second.” I scooted a little closer to the desk so I could put my elbows on it just to prove to myself that I could do it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t quite there yet, and I retracted my elbows before they touched. I smiled confidently at Rosie and gently patted the edge of the desk with two fingers.

  “Good,” she said doubtfully. “Now, I’m not clear on exactly everything ye will be doing, but this will be yer office. Ye get both the desk and the worktable. Ye should feel honored; ye’re the first one other than Edwin, and long-dead Scottish royalty of course, that will get tae work from that desk.”

  “Great,” I said, freezing the smile in place.

  “Now”—Rosie looked around and laughed—“I have no idea what tae tell ye tae do, so ye may stay here and figure something oot on yer own, or ye can come up…”

  The front bell over the door jingled distantly.

  “Unless you need me, I think I’ll stay in here awhil
e,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine.” Rosie and Hector hurried away, but she turned back a second later and brought me her key. “Never, ever, leave this room unlocked, even if ye just have tae go tae the toilet. Lock the door behind ye every time.”

  “Of course.” I took the turquoise key. It was heavy and warm from Rosie’s pocket.

  “Come over tae the shop side when ye want tae,” Rosie said before she turned to leave again.

  I heard her footfalls up this side’s stairs and then down the other side’s, and the rumble of voices.

  I spun the chair and looked at the shelves again.

  “One bite at a time.” I sighed.

  Then I turned toward the wall of books, steadied myself, and said to their anxious bookish voices, “Bring it on.”

  EIGHT

  I straightened one shelf of books. It wasn’t easy to inspect the books, listen to their characters, and put them in some sort of order that wouldn’t be too difficult to understand and use as a system for the entire shop. I came upon familiar authors like Defoe and Brontë, their characters’ words talking in my head when I allowed them in, but there were others I’d never heard of. I spent way too much time reading and acquiring new voices.

  I’d heard once about a Scottish writer named David Lyndsay, which was a pseudonym for a female writer, Mary Dods, a friend of Mary Shelley’s. When I found a book The Haunted Women by David Lindsay on the shelf I grabbed it without noticing the difference in the spelling of the last name. I opened the book to a random page and read without context. Though I’m not sure when I’ll go back and read the whole book, I did catch one character’s words.

  “Why should a married woman be a parasite?” she said.

  I closed the book immediately, but the words would be in my head forever and they’d find their perfect moments to speak to me. Once it had been read, there was no going back.

  It was just a weird mind trick, some sort of photographic memory of printed words, mostly dialogue. I didn’t have a photographic memory with anything else. I had a difficult time remembering birthdays. Numbers weren’t my thing at all.