Chapter 26 #2
Daphne didn’t seem to hear him, so Celia thanked him but assured him they would be fine.
“Tomorrow,” Yannis said, tweaking Daphne’s cheek. “I’ll bring Ma over to help you set up the new card display. And now that
you’re rid of Comstock and that lot, you can work on it in peace. Put all your ideas into action.”
Not getting any response but a quivering lip and minuscule shrug, he took his leave.
“Well, good night then.”
Yannis cast a worried look toward Celia, and she walked him to the door.
“Will she . . . ?”
“Yes. She’ll bounce back tomorrow. Once you and your mother give her a little nudge, she’ll be right as rain.” She hoped. “Good night, Yannis. And thank you.”
Celia pushed him out the door, locking it behind him.
Leaving Daphne staring morosely at her demolished reading niche, Celia went to double-check the back door.
When she returned to the front, Daphne was staring mournfully at the ruins of her wrecked display of The Lost Prince. Someone had picked up the copies of books and stacked them on the table, but it only accentuated the mockery Comstock and
his thugs had made of Daphne’s work.
What those men had done was gratuitously violent. Books that had been brand new and unmarked only this morning now were marred
by crushed corners, bent pages, torn covers, broken spines. They would have to be sold as used.
But Daphne’s poster received the most damage. Bent and trod on, dusty shoe prints ground into the surface, they’d even managed
to tear the corner with a final malicious gesture.
Celia bent down to pick it up, looked back at Daphne, who still stood stricken, while tears rolled down her cheeks. And Celia
felt a pang of remorse for every time she’d brushed her sister off, treated her with lack of respect, kidded her about only
caring about finding herself a husband. And then when she’d finally taken initiative, she was slapped down by forces they
couldn’t control.
Celia stood and tried to press out the poster, but there wasn’t much she could do.
“I spent such a long time to make it right,” Daphne said in a small, defeated voice.
“Well, you’ll just have to make another one,” Celia said, too brightly. “Now, buck up. You want to be ready when Yannis brings
Mrs. Teller tomorrow to start setting up her cards.”
“It’s no use.”
“It is. Look at all the books you sold already. And the new customers who have come in.” And Celia realized for the first
time that, while she’d been worried about other things, the store had seen an uptick in customers and sales.
“You were absolutely right about using color and posters to attract buyers. In fact, we could probably use more of them for
different sections.”
“You think so?”
“Absolutely. You can start in the morning. I’ll open for you and watch the shop until you’re done.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now can we please go to bed? We’ll get up early and straighten everything before we open. And we’ll take the elevator.”
“And you know what really makes me mad?”
“What?”
“That guy with the glasses who kept hanging around?”
Celia stilled. “What about him?”
“He turned out to be one of Comstock’s spies, and after we were nice to him and he was—”
“He was here?”
“I tried to tell you. I saw him going upstairs with the other agents.”
“He’s not a Comstock agent, Daphne. He’s something much worse.”
Daphne grabbed Celia’s sleeve. “I saw him go up, but I didn’t see him come down when the officers threw everyone out.” Daphne’s
eyes grew wide. “I didn’t see him come down!”
“Then he must still be here.” Celia bit her lip. “Where is Olivia?”
They both looked around the empty shop.
Celia’s breath caught. “She must be upstairs.”
Daphne clutched at Celia’s hands. “What are we going to do? He’s up there with Olivia!”
Olivia sat in the dark of the workroom, cradling Jane Eyre close to her chest and stroking her raised fur. She was still trembling,
her little heart fluttering wildly. Olivia breathed a quiet, ironic laugh. Neither she nor Jane would ever be butterflies—a
calico with a torn ear, left to die on the street; Olivia severe and barely sighted.
Damn Comstock and his thugs.
“Shh, shh,” Olivia crooned softly. She’d found Jane hiding in the back recesses of a corner cabinet near the balcony. She’d
pressed herself as far back as she could. Olivia had had a time of it pulling her out and had received several scratches for
her effort.
Olivia didn’t begrudge the scratches. She would have liked to inflict a few of her own on the miserable self-proclaimed morality
man. He was nothing but a perverted old fool.
Maybe it really was over, but there was also a good chance that his replacement would be just as overzealous as Comstock.
“Oh, Jane, what are we going to do?”
Jane Eyre bumped Olivia’s chin with her nose.
“Because we do have to do something. I’m tired of fighting this. I just want to translate and restore books. That’s all I
ever wanted. I never cared about owning the shop. Our brother was supposed to do that. Only we never got a brother.” Of course,
if there had been, her father would have never taught her the trade, or sent her to Barnard to learn the classics.
“No use crying over spilled milk, is there, Jane? We’ve got the shop, old books that aren’t worth the space they take up, a room of locked cabinets of first editions and hard-to-find volumes hidden from the public, and a safe holding the most famous female poet known to man, which can’t help us in the least.”
“But it can help me,” said a voice out of the darkness.
Jane bristled and uttered a low growl, but Olivia didn’t even flinch; somehow she had known this moment would come, and she
was ridiculously calm about the whole affair.