Memoirs of a Garroter (Nevermore Bookshop Mysteries Book 4)

by Steffanie Holmes

  “No thanks.” I covered my ears. “I’ve got a handle on that. Other things, not so much. Why is my father jaunting through time? If he’s still writing his poems, then how is it we’re reading them now? Isn’t that some kind of paradox?”

  “Pffft, paradox.” With a wave of her hand, Grimalkin dismissed two hundred years of theoretical physics. “My dear, we’re talking about literature. It works because your father needs it to work. For the story. How many men do you think they could really fit into the Trojan Horse? Don’t you think the Trojans would have been the least bit suspicious of a giant wooden construction that was clearly hollow? How did those men last all that time cramped up inside the wooden belly of the beast without one of them farting or coughing or breaking down into girlish giggles? It doesn’t matter how things actually work, as long as they make a good story.”

  Now my head really was pounding. A jolt of violent green light danced across my vision. “But… but… why are you a cat? You said you’d been stuck as a cat for centuries, but you don’t look a day over forty.”

  “Forty?” she glared at me. “Have some respect. I am merely twenty-five years of age.”

  “How can you be twenty-five, and also my grandmother, and also centuries old?”

  She arched a perfect eyebrow. “Cat years?”

  Panic rapidly spread across my chest. My heart hammered so hard I thought it was going to burst out of my skin. My fingers flew to my pocket to finger the corner of my father’s note. Quoth must’ve sensed my distress because he scrambled to kneel beside my chair and take my hands in his.

  “I can’t deal with this,” I said through gritted teeth as starbursts appeared in my vision. “I need answers, and she’s making fun of me.”

  “I think she’s been taking lessons from Morrie.” Heathcliff leaned over the desk, steepling his fingers.

  Quoth turned his eyes toward Grimalkin. His voice was gentle, but firm. “Please explain to us how all of this came to pass. Start at the beginning, while we ponder.”

  “Very well.” Grimalkin crossed her legs, arching back over the desk and tilting her chin toward the ceiling. She indicated her lithe body. “As I have spoken, my name is Critheïs. I am a water nymph, and my territory was the river Meles, which ran by the great city of Smyrna in Asia Minor. I’m reliably informed by a history book Morrie glanced through one day that this land does not exist any longer, and that my river has long since been diverted, broken, and dried up, thus draining away its tremendous power. Even if I could be reunited with Meles, I would never regain my full powers.”

  “How did you get separated from the river?” Quoth asked.

  “Meles was more than just my land. He was my lover. Of our union was born my son, Homer. From the day I first bathed him in the cool waters of my lover, I knew Homer would be special. I took him to the oracle at Delphi, and he was given a prophecy that one day he would write a story that would echo across millennia. The gods, of course, heard of this prophecy and courted Homer’s favor, for they each wished to be presented in the best possible light in his tale.”

  “This is bollocks—” Heathcliff started, but one glare from Grimalkin had him reeling. As a cat, she had mastered the glare.

  “Even though he was only a young boy at the time he started writing, my Homer tried to accommodate all the gods’ demands, but their needs were fickle and their loyalties changing. The god Poseidon in particular thought he should be the hero of the story, for the seed of Homer’s father flowed eventually into his waters. The gods in-fighting turned violent, as it always did. They visited all manner of plagues and misfortunes upon the land in order to force Homer’s hand. I knew that if I didn’t act, my beloved son would be torn to pieces by the gods. His story would not be made of words, but of his own blood.

  “Homer hid in a cave, but the gods found him. They are ever-watchful – there was nowhere in the world where Homer could hide. And so, to protect Homer from the wrath of the gods, I took him to the edge of Meles and bade him swim in the waters of his birth. As my son waded into the river, I worked a spell, asking Meles to carry him away to safety, to a place where the gods couldn’t reach him so he could write in peace. Meles sent him through time, to the age where the gods no longer existed save on the pages in storybooks. Wherever and whenever the waters of Meles flowed, my son would be able to use them to escape from his enemies.

  “Homer circled through time, writing his poems and mingling with the great writers from every era. He came first to medieval England, led by a spring through which the waters of Meles flowed. The gods know why, but he found the oppressive cold of your drab country stimulating to his muse, and so here he stayed, building a small shop atop the Meles spring where he might craft stories and remain close to the written word even as his sight dwindled. As he finished chapters, he sent them back to me in bottles he floated down the river. I gave them to scribes to copy and spread throughout the ancient world.”

  “But that’s a parad—” I started. Quoth shook his head at me, and I clamped my mouth shut.

  Grimalkin gestured to the shop. “Here he stayed in relative bliss, frequently making trips through time in order to collect inspiration from the past and the future until his enemy caught up with him.”

  “What enemy?” I demanded.

  Grimalkin waved her hand as if that particular revelation was of no importance. “We’ll get to that. You and your mother have caused no end of trouble.”

  “What’s Mum got to do with this?”

  Grimalkin’s perfect nose twitched with disdain. “Helen. She was his muse. And his downfall.”

  I got the feeling that Grimalkin – sorry, Critheïs – thought she should be his muse.

  “My mum has nothing to do with any of this. He was the one who left us. He broke her heart—”

  I stopped as Quoth’s head turned up to me, his eyes wide. “Helen,” he whispered.

  “Yes. That’s her name, But I don’t see—”

  “‘Was this the face that launched a thousand ships / And burnt the topless tower of Ilium’,” Quoth quoted Marlowe in his rich, melodic voice. “Mina, your mother was Helen of Troy.”

  “No, she wasn’t. She just inspired the character.” Grimalkin tipped her chin forward. “I supplied the beauty portion of his imagining.”

  Helen of Troy – the woman whose beauty started the Trojan war, the figure depicted countless times in medieval and Renaissance art, the muse Salvador Dali believed his wife Gala physically embodied – was modeled on my mother?

  “Heathcliff,” I whispered. “I need a stiff drink. Now.”

  “Got you covered.” Heathcliff yanked a drawer open, pulled out a bottle of Scotch, and poured me a tall glass. I accepted it and took a large gulp, barely feeling the burn as the alcohol slid down my throat. All the while, Grimalkin was still going on about my mum.

  “—Homer first came to this modern age in his youth, full of idealism and erotic stirrings. He stayed longer than he should, scribbling illegal copies of documents from our time while your mother seduced him with promises of a life together.”

  The counterfeiting. Mum had told me last month that my father made knock-off ancient texts to sell to collectors. Little did any of his buyers know they were actually purchasing from Homer the Bard.

  “In his love, my son grew careless, desperate to produce more elaborate works in order to give Helen the riches she desired. Together, they contemplated life as parents, as owners of a vast criminal empire and a great fortune, even as the authorities closed in on him. And in his seed, you were given life, with the waters of Meles inside you. You have your father’s powers, Mina, and you also carry his curse.”

  “I’m so confused.” Green streaks of light arced across my vision. “What powers? What curse?”

  “I’m getting there!” Grimalkin flicked away my questions with her thin wrist. There was no rushing a cat. “As I was saying, you came into the world, and too late Homer saw that if he did not run, he would be locked away forever for
his copying, never to return to complete his poem. The world would have lost Helen of Troy and he would be behind bars, never again able to find the river Meles. And so he left you for the first time.”

  I knocked back the rest of the Scotch and thrust the glass into Heathcliff’s hand. While he refilled it, I drew the letter from my pocket, holding it in trembling fingers. “That’s not what my father said. He said he left us because he was in danger.”

  “That letter was not written when you were born, Mina, it was written a year ago, when your father – now an old, blind man – left Nevermore Bookshop in the hands of Heathcliff Earnshaw and went to do battle with his enemy.” She snapped her fingers at Heathcliff, who was busy refilling my glass in between taking swigs from the bottle. “I’ll need one of those, too.”

  “Steady on,” Heathcliff frowned. “Apparently, you’ve been a cat for several centuries. How do you know you can stomach this shite?”

  “I’ve been subsisting on live mice and crickets, and that muck you have the gall to call cat food. My constitution is above reproach.” Grimalkin wiggled her glass under his nose. Sighing, Heathcliff topped her up, then leaned back in his chair and skulled the rest of the bottle in one long gulp.

  I brought my drink to my lips as Grimalkin continued. “Now that my thirst has been sated, I can continue. News of Homer’s epic poems reached the gods, and as Poseidon read what had been written about him, he became incensed. In the Odyssey, Poseidon is the enemy – he delays Odysseus’ return home from Troy because Odysseus blinds the cyclops Polyphemus, who was Poseidon’s son. Incensed that Homer would have his son blinded in the poem and that he’d present the god in such an unflattering light, Poseidon poisoned the waters of Meles. He killed my beloved husband, and now, anyone borne of the waters is also cursed. Here in the future, Homer’s eyesight immediately began to fail. This curse, it would seem, he has passed on to you.”

  Oh, for Isis’ sake. She’s saying that my retinitis pigmentosa is the curse of a petty Greek god. I was too numb to demonstrate the full brunt of the anger I felt at that moment, at having this essential part of my personage, this part of me that I’d worked so hard to come to terms with, reduced to a line in an epic poem – a footnote in a fairy tale. I growled in my throat. Quoth’s fingers squeezed mine. Grimalkin continued, oblivious.

  “He continued his journeys through time, growing older as he established a business in this residence during every decade of history. He yearned for Helen, and for the daughter he couldn’t know. He could not return to your time as a youth, for he would be arrested and Helen would never forgive him for abandoning her. So he moved through time and waited out his years in the past, winding back and forth until his years drew long and his hair turned grey. He came back to you only as an old man, so that neither the authorities nor your mother would recognize him. He returned to his spring, and he watched over you from behind this very counter. As more and more book characters showed up at the shop, he explained things to them and sent them on their way as best he could. And he welcomed you with open arms, never telling you who he was but always making sure that you were steeped in the power of story. He hoped one day you might be able to take over his duties, but before he had the chance, his enemy arrived. The rest of the story you know. He left to track his enemy, to keep this creature of evil away from you. In his place, he left Heathcliff Earnshaw with instructions to watch over you when you returned to Nevermore.”

  “And how do you fit into this insane story?” Heathcliff demanded.

  “My purgatory is Poseidon’s idea of a joke.” Grimalkin rolled the ‘r’ in purgatory, which would have been hilarious if I wasn’t completely freaked out. “When he learned of the spell I wove on the waters of Meles to protect my son, he cursed me to live out my days as the one creature terrified of water, to ensure that I would never again find a lover like Meles and regain my powers. The only person who would be able to free me was one who read the words of my son aloud in my presence, in his original language.

  She gestured to her sensuous body. “As a nymph, I am already blessed with eternal beauty and long life. Poseidon granted me nine lives – the amount allotted to felines. I have guarded these lives carefully, expending only seven over the centuries I’ve lived in this form. All those years of waiting, all those dead mice, just waiting for my chance to hold my son in my arms again.” Grimalkin paused. “But he has gone, and all I have in his place is an ungrateful granddaughter, a lumbering brigand, a weasely intellectual, a raven I’m not allowed to eat, piles of dusty books, and a looming danger that could end us all.”

  “All right,” I yelled. “I get it. Now we’ve heard the whole sordid tale, can you finally tell me what is this danger my father is protecting me from?”

  “The enemy that you should think yourself lucky never to cross,” my grandmother folded her arms across her chest. “Count Dracula.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I burst out laughing. “Okay, now I know this is a fucking joke. Dracula is just a character in a book, inspired by Vlad the Impaler but not even historically accurate. He’s not real—”

  My laughter died in my throat. Because briefly, for a moment, I’d forgotten where I was standing. Nevermore Bookshop had brought my three boyfriends to life – Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s James Moriarty, and Edgar Allan Poe’s raven. All flesh and blood and bone, and all borne not from a womb but from the waters of Meles and the mind of a brilliant writer.

  If they could be real, then any character could also be real. And if Heathcliff and Morrie and Quoth and Lydia Bennett had walked out of the pages of his book and into the real world through Nevermore Bookshop, then…

  …then so too could beasts of myth and horror, like Dracula.

  Stoker’s words came back to me a flash, as if I’d read them only yesterday. “‘…he means to succeed, and a man who has centuries before him can afford to wait and to go slow… water sleeps, and the enemy is sleepless’.” If Dracula came to our world from Bram Stoker’s book, then he came with centuries of knowledge and power. No wonder my father – Homer – was worried about my safety. But then, if he was so worried, why did he up and leave? Why did he gift the shop to Heathcliff?

  “Where is Dracula now?” Heathcliff growled, obviously wondering the same thing.

  “Who knows?” Grimalkin rolled onto her side, stroking the edge of her breast. “Hanging upside down in a cellar somewhere? If my son has his way, he’ll be burning in Hades with a stake through his heart.”

  “What of my father?” I demanded. “Have you heard from him?”

  She gave a cat-like shrug. “He has no idea who I am. To him, I was just a stray cat who refused to leave the shop. As soon as he knew that beast was free in the world, he walked out of Nevermore and has never returned. He didn’t even have the decency to put out a saucer of cream.”

  The shop bell tinkled. Heathcliff leaped to his feet. “We’re closed!” he boomed. “Can’t you read the bloody—”

  “Is that any way to treat the person who comes bearing strange delicacies from far-off lands?” Morrie stepped into the room, carrying his laptop bag in one arm and balancing a large bakery box under the other. “I queued for hours to get these cronuts. They’re supposed to be the best in England and… oh, we have a visitor.”

  “Mr. Moriarty.” Grimalkin turned her head. Morrie’s eyes widened as he took in her… display. A wicked grin spread across his face.

  “And to whom do I owe the honor?”

  “That’s Grimalkin,” I said. “And she’s my grandmother, so maybe stop looking at her like you’re the cat the got the cream.”

  “There’s cream?” Grimalkin’s long neck extended. “Where?”

  For the first time since I’d known him, Morrie was utterly speechless. He stared from Grimalkin to me and back again. I could see the cogs in his mind turning over what I’d said, judging if I was pulling his leg, before accepting that once again, another weird thing had happened in Nevermore B
ookshop.

  As quickly as they could, Heathcliff, Quoth, and Grimalkin explained what had just transpired. Morrie glided through the room, planted a kiss on my lips that drew me back from the depths of my head, and offered around the box of cronuts. They were delicious. There was nothing like sugary baked goods to temper one’s anxiety about one’s Homeric father taking on Count Dracula and one’s cat grandmother being naked in the middle of one’s shop.

  “This is a fascinating new development,” Morrie said, biting into a cronut and dropping crumbs across the rug. Both Quoth and Grimalkin glanced down at the crumbs with forlorn expressions, perhaps intending to return to pick them from the rug later. “Here I was, all ready to tell you that I translated those words from Ancient Greek for you, all ready to dramatically re-enact the blinding of Polyphemus with Heathcliff playing the Cyclops, all ready to accept your everlasting praise and adoration, and you’ve bloody gone and solved the whole thing without me.” He smiled at me, trying to show he was joking, but there was the tiniest waver in his voice that told me something was up.

  Again, I wondered what could make the world’s foremost criminal mind nervous. Was it learning that Count Dracula was somewhere in the world? That sure as fuck made me want to curl up into a ball in the corner.

  “We haven’t solved anything,” I said. “We still need to find my father. And Dracula. Who knows how many people he could kill or… or vampires he could turn. Forget Danny, forget the shop, this is the most important case we’ll ever solve.”

  Morrie reached for another cronut. “Indeed. Luckily, I’m here to lend my expertise. I do have one important question for our former feline.”

  “Yes?” Grimalkin lifted a perfectly arched eyebrow in a manner that could only be described as cat-like.