Chapter Eleven
Eleven
The Stacks is always quiet in the evenings.
It’s unlike the bookstores back home, which always filled up as the days drew on.
But Blackridge doesn’t operate like my hometown or any town I’ve been in.
Whereas most places are open later in the summer and close earlier in the fall and winter, the Stacks is the opposite.
Most of the business are. Their hours extend in the spring, fall, and winter, but the summer curfew—instated after Ingrid Halstead’s disappearance after a huge push from her family, according to Paige—cuts them back.
It’s backward to me, but I guess the suspicions run deep.
The missing kids all disappeared during the summer, and even if the belief in some elusive shadow creature isn’t widespread, the paranoia is.
The last few hours are mostly for checking stock or fixing any displays that curious children knocked over throughout the day. Despite the signs that urge no food or drinks, I’ve lost track of the time I’ve spent vacuuming Goldfish crumbs out of the carpet.
The store is empty when Paige drops me off.
The overhead lights are dimmed, but the store is lit by dozens upon dozens of fairy lights strung across the ceiling and up and down the shelves.
There are a handful of antique lamps, each more unique than the last, only matching in their individuality.
Nora is convinced one of the shades is made of human skin.
Paige swore if she hears Nora say that to a customer, she’ll make a lampshade out of her.
“Nora?” I call. The silence leaves an uneasy churn in my belly.
I’m about to hightail it out when Nora’s voice sounds from my right, past one of the long shelves.
I make my way toward the noise and find Nora squished into the lumpy purple love seat that sits between the young adult and thriller sections.
She has a novel spread open on her lap. She smiles when she sees me.
“Sorry,” she says. She gestures to the book. “I may have accidentally opened one of our new-release boxes. And accidentally started reading.”
“You know we get an employee discount,” I say.
“I’m a fast reader. I’ll be done with it in like a day. Without a dent in my wallet.”
I can’t help but smile at that.
Growing up, if I wasn’t on an instrument or penning music notes, I had a book in my hands.
There was a magic in escaping without ever walking out the door.
Like when I played music, reading didn’t leave any room in my brain for the sad, hard, real things.
Even after I closed the book, that fuzzy feeling lingered.
The accident, though, left me with a concussion that made focusing on anything excruciating, especially hundreds of teeny letters on a page. It left me frustrated, my head swimming and pulsing.
Then the concussion healed, and I tried to pick up an old favorite.
The first in a YA series I’d read so many times I could practically recite it from memory.
But the familiar tale, with its happy ending and victorious hero, left a sour taste on my tongue.
It hurt to read about hope and perseverance and survival.
I can count on one hand the number of books I’ve read in the last months. All horror or thriller stories, where the stone living in my gut has a reason to be there. No happy endings in sight, which is good because I’m not sure I believe in them anymore.
“It’s been dead since dinnertime,” Nora says, gesturing to the store. “I can’t wait for fall. At least there’ll be something to do.”
“Don’t tourists usually roll in during the summer?”
“They used to, I guess. But we get a decent winter crowd. Cheaper motels than the resorts, and it’s only an hour or two to the nearest ski slopes.”
Quiet evenings have been a given at the store since we moved here in the beginning of June. I’d assumed it was the norm year-round.
“I guess no one’s worried about getting their summer reading started.” The high school sent out the list a few weeks back. Paige snagged some copies for Margot and me, and I’m pretty sure they’re still sitting on the mantel in the living room, untouched.
“Yeah, they’re a little more concerned about their kids making it to the first day.” Nora’s tone is joking, but the words are barbed. At my twisted expression, she digs a receipt out of the bag at her feet and tucks it into the book, closing it.
“Sorry. Bad joke. There were some kids in here this afternoon asking if we had any books on the Blackridge Shadow Man.”
“I’m guessing we don’t?” There’s that name again. It sounds silly, like something out of a B-list horror movie.
Nora scoffs. “I directed them to the totally un-fact-checked conspiracy blogs. We’ve got stuff on everything from sasquatches to the Lady of the Lake, but no creepy shadow creature that snags kids.”
I lean against the edge of the thriller shelf, folding my arms. I almost press her. But, oddly, as little as I buy the scary story floating around the town, talking about it makes it feel like a possibility. Like there really is some supernatural entity responsible for the faces on the corkboard.
“You can head out if you want. It’ll be an easy close,” I say. Nora seems settled in her spot, book on her lap and bag at her feet.
“It cool if I hang here?” she asks. Her easy expression hardens. “I told my mom I was closing tonight. The less time in that house this week, the better.”
I frown. I know I should inquire; questions and answers, and all that. But the words get stuck, all deformed and stiff in my mouth.
As if she can tell, Nora gives me a thin-lipped smile. “Mom gets squirrely when we hit mid-July,” she says.
“Why?”
“Finn’s disappearance,” she says, all humor gone from her. She’s slipped off the mask, and lurking behind it is a cavern, deep and dark and full of grief. “July seventeenth. Three years now.”
I’ve seen his photo on the wall, but I’m not altogether convinced he isn’t some hallucination. Leftover damage from the accident making me see things. All my scans and checkups were clear, the concussion fully healed, but it’s impossible not to wonder.
“What was he like? Finn?”
I may have crossed a line. There are a dozen ways to handle grief. Some people wave it like a flag, keeping the space that person occupied filled by their memory. Others keep it tucked away, pretending the gap doesn’t exist at all.
“He was…” Nora pauses. “He always saw the good in everybody. I’m always looking for agendas, but Finn thought everyone was genuinely good, deep down.
And he was sarcastic. Like, to the point it made it hard to talk with him about the hard stuff, but he was the one you wanted to be around when everything went bad.
He never shut up, but it was a nice distraction from everything.
For a long time, he was the only person who could make me smile.
After he disappeared, I don’t think I laughed for a year. ”
My stomach lurches. I match up her words with my own brief observations. Hoping to prove I didn’t fabricate him.
For a moment, I almost tell her about Finn. But she wouldn’t believe me. She’d probably go straight to my mom or Paige with concerns for my sanity.
I have enough of those on my own.
“There was a big hole when he left. Things got better when my mom met Shane, my stepdad, and we moved to the new house, but that hole is still there, you know?”
Nora clears her throat and blinks the glaze out of her eyes. She smiles, but it seems more reflex than genuine.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to get all sad on you.” She leans back into the love seat. “It’s hard to be home this time of year. That hole gets a little bigger. If I’m bugging you, I’ll go.”
“I won’t say no to the company” is what I settle for. I can’t give her assurances, nor am I all that good at sympathies. But I can understand.
Nora nods. Smiles. Reopens her book. “I’m not doing any cleaning, though,” she says. “I’m solely a customer now. Off the clock.”
“Customers pay,” I remark.
“Touché,” she says, and returns her attention to the novel.
A few minutes later, the bell dings above the door, and a familiar face steps inside, a stack of posters tucked under one arm. Before I can place the girl’s face, Nora peeks around the shelves, and says, “Hey, Cecily.”
Cecily. Holden’s daughter. She’s wearing a T-shirt with the name of a college across the chest; Holden mentioned she was starting her second year.
Her smile is kind when she sees Nora, but the exhaustion I noted the first time we met is written under her eyes in the sickly pallor of her skin and the way it stretches taut over her joints.
“Hi,” she says, and nods at me as she approaches Nora where she’s curled on the love seat. She glances between us and pulls out her posters. “You mind if I put one of these up?”
Nora peels herself off the cushion. “Of course. What are they this time?”
“Kittens,” Cecily says. “Someone left a box of them outside the clinic. I’ve been up every few hours bottle-feeding for the last four days.”
“Cecily fosters anything with fur,” Nora explains. She catches sight of me lingering at the end of one of the shelves, drawing me into the conversation. “Though there was that turtle once.”
“Tilly the tortoise,” Cecily says. “An older couple from the next town over adopted her. Which was a relief. I couldn’t buy enough lettuce to keep up with the thing.”
“Our very own bleeding heart,” Nora says. She takes one of the posters from Cecily and heads for the corkboard.
For a moment, it’s Cecily and me, staring at each other, the air getting thicker by the second. I know I should say something, ask her about college or how her dad is doing, but I’m too out of practice.
“How are you settling in?” Cecily asks eventually. Her gaze keeps flicking away, to Nora attempting to find space on the full corkboard, to the new displays, to the darkness outside the front window.
“We’re pretty much unpacked,” I say, a nonanswer. But Cecily doesn’t push on it.
“My dad said Paige and your mom are having a cookout this weekend.”
It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but admitting how little attention I pay in my own house makes my skin tight. So I nod.
“I guess I’ll see you on Saturday, then,” Cecily says.
“See you on Saturday.”
—
By the time closing rolls around, I’ve restocked the front tables, showing off the new releases and popular titles, as well as made decent progress on a few endcaps.
Nora, of course, pipes in with suggestions, though I’m pretty sure it’s all her personal preference.
She has a thing for romance novels, I gather.
She and Margot would get along swimmingly.
I may have fallen out of the reading habit, but there’s a comfort to being surrounded by stories. A quiet, calm peace. It’s hard to feel alone in a bookstore.
Once I’ve finished at the cash register, Nora sidles up to the counter, bag slung over her shoulder. She shakes her key chain at me. Hanging off it is a little cartoon avocado with a face. “Want a ride?”
I wouldn’t put it past my aunt to bribe Nora to keep me from walking home alone. Book bribes are easy to do when you own a bookstore—and effective.
“Don’t tell me Paige got to you,” I say.
She frowns. “Paige?”
“She and my mom flipped about me walking home alone the other night.”
While I almost expect her to agree about their overprotectiveness, she shrugs. “Can’t say I blame ’em. It’s dangerous after dark.”
I groan. “You can’t honestly tell me you believe in this Shadow Man nonsense.”
“No,” she says. Pauses. “I don’t know. But even if I didn’t, it’s dangerous out there. Finn wasn’t exactly a bodybuilder, but he was taller than me. Stronger. And he never made it home.”
I deflate. Shame snakes up through my limbs, burning up to my skin. “I—”
“I don’t have to buy the ghost stories to be careful,” she says, and she’s trying at teasing, but it falls flat. One side of her mouth twitches up. It’s the same smirk I saw on Finn but sadder. A bit more serious. “So,” she says. “Ride?”
I want to say no. Already, the idea of climbing into her car makes my skin crawl. “Fine,” I say.
“There’s the spirit.”
Nora’s car, a cute little vintage Volkswagen Beetle, complete with a yellow daisy attached to the top of the antenna, may have the aesthetic going for it, but to me it feels like a death trap.
If my sturdy car couldn’t survive an accident, I doubt this tin can will do much to protect us.
Fortunately, most of town is a twenty-five miles per hour zone, and Nora doesn’t push above it.
She flicks glances at me every minute or so, noting my death grip on the door, but she doesn’t comment.
She is making an effort to be as safe as possible.
A few minutes later, we pull up in front of the house. I thank Nora for the ride and climb out, bag slung over my shoulders. The second my feet hit the curb, some of my anxiety subsides.
Nora doesn’t pull away until I reach the door. Her quiet engine fades away.
I stop at the threshold, not sure why. The hairs rise on the back of my neck, and I whirl around, sure I’ll find one of the house ghosts lurking at my back.
But Finn, Aisha, and Sloane are nowhere to be seen.
My attention drifts to the trees. In the twilight, the shadows stretch, tree branches resembling long arms and spindly legs. I stare into the dark long enough that the image blurs, and my eyes play tricks on me.
But even when I tear my gaze away, that feeling lingers. The eyes within the trees follow me all the way inside until the door swings shut behind me.