Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Harriet
I’m setting up some automations for Alexandru’s minor holdings in Yugoslavia, but I’m not being very efficient. I just can’t stop thinking of Sam’s mother, Alma, possibly remembering something new about that day that James was taken.
Alma worked as a teacher at James’s school.
She told police she’d been walking home—she’d gotten just a block away from the school—when she passed a well-dressed man she didn’t recognize.
A tourist who didn’t belong. Her report was dismissed.
It was nearly full tourist season, and half the people in town didn’t belong.
Privately, I think it was also dismissed because she was sixty-five.
But I always thought Alma saw something real.
People think it’s strange that I’d cling to such a vague detail. But Alma grew up in Ashwood, same as me. When you grow up in a tourist town, you develop a sense for who fits and who doesn’t. It’s not something you can articulate; it’s something you know in your bones.
I had my own version of it: a black car I noticed that day that wasn’t a tourist’s car and wasn’t a townie’s car. I couldn’t have said why. It just wasn’t.
I grab a handful of Bugles.
It’s probably nothing. Alma Washington has had flashes of memory before that amounted to nothing. One time she thought he wore dark blue shoes. I asked her if she thought they were tennis shoes or blue boots or some kind of loafer, but she wasn’t sure.
Sometimes I think she just likes to connect with me about it. It was an intense time for both of us, me because it was my fault James was taken, and she saw that strange man, and nobody thought it was anything.
Was the man she spotted the culprit?
I told myself so many stories about what happened in the years after James disappeared.
He was always wandering off, of course. I would imagine he’d joined the circus or a cowboy ranch.
He could’ve wandered off and been picked up by somebody desperate for a child of their own to love.
He could’ve hit his head and gotten amnesia.
What could Alma have remembered now? Maybe I shouldn’t go, but I always do. And I always bring her an antique spoon for her collection when I visit, and she makes us cranberry tea.
I click into our antique store’s email account to see what’s been delivered lately in order to get a sense of what old spoons we might have on hand, and I note with some consternation that Mom and Granabelle aren’t doing a very good job with inventory.
Right then, Gregor comes in with a plate with three coils on it, like strange little Slinkys. He tremblingly sets the plate on my desk.
“What are these?”
“They are apple slices, milady.”
I pick up one of them and it expands. “How’d you do it?”
“It is a spiral fashioned of apple.”
“Really?” I look up. “That’s amazing. Is this a hobby of yours?”
“A hobby?!”
“Yeah, a hobby. Something that you enjoy doing?”
Gregor blinks. “It’s for you to eat.”
“This is so cool though. Are you sure it’s not your secret hobby?”
“It is not!” he protests, weirdly alarmed.
“No, it’s cool. It’s good to have a hobby.
Look, come here.” I lead him over to the table by the window, where my coin tower complex sits.
“This is my secret little hobby—stacking up quarters and making them into towers and buildings and things. It probably seems stupid, but it calms my mind so much, you have no idea.”
“What do you do with these…towers?” he asks.
“Nothing. It just calms me in a deep way to make them, and to look at them. It calms me and it centers me and it’s also pleasurable. I’m just showing you because a hobby can be as stupid as that. We should think of a hobby for you to do!”
He seems fixated on the little stacks that I’ve started. “What do you do when you run out of coins? Do you knock them down and start over?”
“No way! I would never knock these down. I don’t even like thinking about it. They’re like my anchor, you know?”
He nods.
I’m pleased he’s asking questions. Questions show interest. “A hobby doesn’t have to be really obvious, like Alexandru doesn’t even have to know. You could hunt for four-leaf clovers in the grass and when you find one, we could press it into a book. A hobby can be as simple as that.”
“It would not be for me to have a hobby.”
“Why not?”
“It is not for me.”
“How can it not be for you. Who says? Is that what Alexandru says?”
Gregor shakes his head vigorously. “It is simply not the way of things with me.”
I pick up a spiral. “But look how creative you are. This could be your hobby! Carving apples into cool shapes like this?”
“That is for you to eat.”
“Alexandru didn’t tell you to carve them like this, did he?”
“This carving is of my own design.”
“Newsflash: you could go to the state fair with these. You’d probably win a prize.”
“These are for you to eat. Nothing more.”
“How am I supposed to eat it when it’s so beautiful?!”
Gregor seems alarmed at this point. “Perhaps a bit of cinnamon shaken onto them? Would that make them more pleasing?”
“I can’t eat them because they are so pleasing! They’re too beautiful! Wait—I have to take a picture!” I whip out my phone and take a few pictures.
This seems to upset Gregor even more. He walks out of the room, returning a minute later with some sort of a small mallet and smashes each of the spirals.
“What are you doing?”
He sets down a spoon. “A snack. Nothing more.” He turns on his heel and stalks from the room.
“I’m eating them right now!” I call after him, because obviously that’s important to him. “Delicious!”
I feel like a jerk. I want to help him, not upset him, but it seems like that’s all I do.
I take a spoonful of smashed apple spiral and update some spreadsheets.
The day is a whirlwind of little fires to put out. When I next look up, it’s three in the afternoon. I have a conference call with Tokyo scheduled for 4 p.m.; the perfect amount of time to zip down to the store.
I stroll behind the counter. “Somebody’s been neglecting inventory.”
“An antique store has no need for keeping inventory,” Granabelle says. “It’s not as if we can re-order a taxidermy weasel from the 1950s when Dawson sells.” She shifts her gaze to Dawson, who’s been collecting dust behind the counter since before I was born.
“But you could re-order more weird mid-century conversation items of a certain price point. That’s how I always did it.”
Mom strolls up, tapping her head. “The inventory is here. To what do we owe this honor? Don’t tell me you’re here just to lecture us.”
“Just out doing errands and things.”
Granabelle adjusts her cap, a 1970s newsboy number, very Annie Hall. “Any sleuthing updates?”
I catch them up on what we’ve learned. It turns out that they already know about Hardware Sam’s retail text chain. I mention the two families having booths near each other at a long-ago state fair.
Mom snorts. “That’s thin.”
“Maybe they sabotaged each other’s booths,” Granabelle suggests.
“I think she would’ve remembered that.” I pull out my phone. “Check out what Gregor did this morning. He carved an apple into little spirals.”
Mom takes the phone. “Wow. He did this by hand?”
“He does everything by hand. It’s a thing with Alexandru, which, it’s a bit excessive, honestly.”
Granabelle examines the photo over her shoulder. “Very impressive.”
“Sometimes he hand-churns butter.”
“Why the hell would he do that?” Mom barks.
“I know. I told Alexandru it’s so screwed up to have him do that when they can buy it at Gable’s, but…” I shake my head.
“That man really gets a lot done,” Mom says. “You know he was over the other day to clean the windows and repair the leaky shower.”
“Wait, what? He was?”
“Alexandru sent him. You didn’t know?”
“Not at all.”
“Did you know about the steps back there?”
I frown. “The death trap steps?”
“Not anymore.”
I follow Mom through the store toward the back. I live in fear of somebody falling on them—either Granabelle or Mom or a customer, who would definitely sue the store. Sure enough, there’s a beautiful new set of steps leading down to the alley—with a safety railing and everything.
“These must have cost a mint.”
“They had a mixer truck,” Granabelle puts in. “An entire mixer truck for our back steps.”
“You think Alexandru sent the truck?”
“I know he did. Gregor was overseeing the whole thing. I thought you were in on it.”
I’m thinking suddenly of the household repair list I made one night in the study after dinner.
Alexandru and I had been sitting by the fire, and he’d asked what was bedeviling me.
Those were the words he used. I told him it was antique store stuff.
Had he caught sight of the list with his hawk-like vision?
“Well…weird.” I don’t love the dissonance of Alexandru doing nice things.
“I think it’s thoughtful,” Mom says.
“I need to pay him back.”
“From where I’m sitting, you’ve made him a pretty penny compared to what your train-jumping freak of a father managed for him,” Mom says.
Mom is very un-sentimental about my father, who she met exactly once on a train speeding through the Carpathian Mountains in Eastern Europe.
She was twenty-two and backpacking through Europe, and he was.
..well she claims that he was hot. They played cards, drank whiskey, and banged, and then he jumped out of the train. The speeding train.
“I updated the systems. Anybody would’ve done it.
” We talk some more store business. On the way out, I grab a cute linen tablecloth for my side table, and I rummage through the spoon box and find a 1910 spoon commemorating the statehood of Tennessee to give to Hardware Sam’s mom, Alma, when I visit.
I stuff them both in my bag and make a note of it in the borrows and barters area of our sales book.
“What’s the spoon for?” Mom asks.
I cringe; I was hoping she wouldn’t notice. “Just some stuff I’m grabbing.” I pull out the tablecloth. “This is for my little table on the wall opposite the fireplace.”
“And the spoon? You’re not going over to Alma’s again, are you?”
I straighten. “I can’t visit an old friend?”
“She’s not your old friend; she’s a lonely old woman who’s discovered that having ‘information’ gets people to visit. Don’t let her do this to you, Harriet.”
“She’s not doing anything to me.”
“She’s saying she remembers something more, isn’t she? Maybe there’s a freckle on his hand now. Maybe there was a plane in the sky at the time she passed him on the sidewalk.”
“All data is worth having,” I say.
“Not if it’s hogwash.”
Mom blames Alma for “getting my head all spun around” on James, as though Alma’s the one who made me think what happened to him is something other than the Cuyahoga Killer taking him.
As though Alma’s responsible for my unshakeable belief that James is still alive.
The Cuyahoga Killer confessed to burying his victims “in the wild” before he himself died. Mom and Granabelle and pretty much everybody else thinks James is one of those victims dead in the wild.
I won’t believe that. I can’t.
I don’t fault her for feeling upset that I won’t accept his being dead. I can’t pretend to know anything about the torment she’s been through with it all.
But I know he’s alive. I know it with everything in me.
I get out of there, but not before Mom invites Alexandru and Gregor and me to dinner on Thursday. I make a mental note to figure out how to never have that happen, because I can’t think of a worse dinner party.
I leave a message on the way back to Kingston Manor for Alma to call me. I tell her I have a little something for her.
As I drive up to Kingston Manor, I catch myself thinking how having all those things fixed at the shop was almost...decent of him. Which is a dangerous thought to have about someone like Alexandru.
Realistically, I should be looking for ways to kill him—he sees people as livestock, after all.
Then again, is being mad at a vampire for killing the same as being mad at a cat for catching a mouse? And when you look at it logically, the only-murderers-drained policy is making people safer.
Though he did force me to be his assistant and to work for him—and to live in his mansion.
And he does seem to make a cottage industry out of mistreating Renfields, but he has become better in other ways, like he isn’t making Gregor call him master anymore.
And I’m pretty sure he heard me when I told him how I don’t like it when Gregor labors over these elaborate dinners.
If I charted his behavior over the past few months, there’d be an actual upwards trendline. A small one. Barely visible to the naked eye. But it would be there.
I asked more of him and he came through.
And now I keep circling back to the thing I haven’t told him—James. It is a central feature of my life, losing my brother the way I did. I think about it all the time, even obsess about it.
My fingers find the key around my neck.
I wouldn’t exactly say that he deserves to know but letting him in about that is a gesture of trust, I’m telling him that I believe he’s capable of some humanity.
A little voice in my head reminds me that he’s not human.
I stop in front of the mansion and stare at the steps, remembering how it felt to stand there with him, how much fun we were having, and my heart suddenly swooping with the strange, giddy sense that we fit in some weird way.
The way he went still, eyes dark, fixed on me like I was something he wanted to devour.
And how badly I wanted to let him.
My face goes hot. I grip the wheel. Get ahold of myself.