Chapter 8 Eleanors Literary Insight
The evening had settled over Meadowbrook with the kind of stillness that made the streetlamps seem brighter than they were, each one casting a tight pool of amber on the pavement and leaving the spaces between them to the dark.
I had turned the sign on the door of The Yarn & Needle to CLOSED at half past twelve that afternoon and had not turned it back, and the shop sat quiet around me now, the yarn in its cubbies reduced to muted shades by the single lamp I had left burning on the counter.
The ledger and the button lay where I had placed them after my telephone call to Eleanor, side by side on the wooden surface, and I had spent the intervening hours trying not to look at them too often and failing at the task with a regularity that would have embarrassed me if anyone had been there
to see it.
Eleanor arrived at seven, punctual as the chime of the village clock.
I heard her footsteps on the pavement before the bell above the door rang, a crisp and unhurried tread that belonged to a woman who had never in her life been compelled to rush.
She wore a tweed skirt in heather tones and a wool jacket against the evening chill, and she carried a leather satchel that had grown soft at the corners from decades of use.
Her gaze found the objects on the counter before she had finished removing her gloves.
"You said on the telephone that you had found something I would want to see," she said, setting the satchel down beside the cash register. "I have been wondering what it might be for the better part of three hours. You have a gift for understatement, Penny, but I suspect you know that."
I gestured toward the two stools I had pulled up to the counter. "I didn't want to say too much over the line. It's the sort of thing that needs to be seen in person."
Eleanor settled herself onto the nearer stool and drew the ledger toward her with both hands, the way a scholar might handle a manuscript that had survived centuries.
She did not open it immediately. She ran her fingertips over the dark green leather of the cover, tracing the worn edges and the faint impression of a title that had long since faded beyond legibility.
Her expression was one of quiet concentration, the same look I had seen on her face a hundred times at the knitting circle when she was working out a complicated pattern before she had picked up her needles.
"This is old," she said. "Not antique, not in the sense that Florence Albright would use the word, but older than either of us. The binding is hand-sewn. You can see the uneven spacing of the stitches if you look closely."
She tilted the ledger toward the lamplight, and I leaned in to follow her gaze.
The stitches were visible, small and irregular, the work of someone who had known what they were doing but had not been in a hurry to finish. "Where did you find it?"
I told her. I began with my visit to Albright Antiques and Curios that morning, the way the bell above the door had sounded and the way Florence had looked up from her desk with an expression that had shifted too quickly from surprise to welcome.
I described the scent of the shop, the same floral note I had detected in the Lavender Lane Bookshop on the day Silas died, and the way Florence's hands had trembled when I mentioned it.
I told her about the walnut writing bureau and the hidden compartment and the moment my fingers had closed around the ledger and the button together, as though they had been placed there by someone who had intended them to be found by anyone except the person who had hidden them.
"The button," Eleanor said when I had finished. She had not interrupted me once, and her attention had not wavered from my face. "You are certain it matches the one Alistair found beside the body."
I reached for the button and held it out to her in my open palm. She took it between her thumb and forefinger and examined it under the lamplight, turning it slowly. The carved circles caught the light and threw small shadows across her skin.
"It is identical," she said. "The same material, the same pattern. Horn, I think, though I am not an expert in such things. The workmanship is consistent."
She set the button down beside the ledger with the care of someone returning a borrowed book to its proper shelf.
"Florence Albright has some explaining to do."
"She was wearing a coat with a loose button on the cuff when she came to the pottery class," I said.
"I noticed it then, but I didn't think anything of it. I assumed it was the sort of thing that happens to old clothes. But now I wonder if the loose button was the replacement, and the original is the one Constable Finch has in his evidence box."
Eleanor's expression did not change, but her fingers stilled on the cover of the ledger.
"That is a serious accusation, Penny. Florence is many things, and I have never been especially fond of her, but a connection to a man's death is a different order of concern than a sharp tongue and a competitive streak."
"I know," I said. "That's why I asked you to come. I need someone to tell me whether I'm seeing patterns that aren't there, or whether the patterns are real and I simply don't know how to read them."
Eleanor opened the ledger. The spine crackled faintly, a dry sound that belonged to paper that had been stored in a place without much air.
She turned the pages slowly, pausing at each one, and I watched her eyes move across the lines of Silas Blackwood's handwriting, the neat columns of dates and titles and prices that filled the first half of the book.
When she reached the coded entries, the symbols and the seemingly random phrases that had stopped me cold that afternoon, her hand went still on the page.
"This is not nonsense," she said. Her voice had dropped, not in volume but in register, the way it did when she was working through a problem that interested her. "This is a cipher. A deliberate one, and not a simple substitution. Someone went to considerable trouble to conceal these entries."
"Can you read it?"
She did not answer immediately. She traced one of the symbols with her fingertip, a shape that looked like a stylized bird in flight, and then another that might have been a tree or a branching river.
Her lips moved silently, and I realized she was counting something, tallying the frequency of the marks as they appeared across the page.
"I have seen this before," she said at last.
"Not this exact cipher, but the system it is built on. It was used by a particular circle of antiquarian booksellers in the late nineteenth century, a small group of dealers who specialized in rare and valuable volumes and who did not wish their competitors to know what they were buying or what
they were paying. They called it the Bibliophile's Cipher, though that was a name they gave it among themselves. It never appeared in any published work on codes. I know of it only because the library at Oxford held a collection of letters from one of the dealers,
and I spent a rainy afternoon thirty years ago deciphering them for a professor who had given up on the task."
She looked up from the ledger, and there was something in her expression that I had not seen before, a kind of bright and focused energy that made her seem younger than her seventy years.
"This is not the work of an amateur, Penny. Silas Blackwood was communicating with someone who understood a cipher that has been out of use for more than a century. That is not the sort of knowledge one acquires by accident."
The weight of her words settled into the quiet of the shop. Outside, the street was empty, and the only sound was the faint hum of the electric kettle on its stand in the back room, which I had switched on when Eleanor arrived and then forgotten in the urgency of the conversation.
"So the coded entries," I said, "they were records of transactions. Books he was buying and selling in secret."
"Almost certainly. And the note you found, the one about the buyer collecting on the first of October, that would be the transaction that mattered most. The one he was killed for."
She said the last words without drama, as though she were stating a fact about the weather or the price of wool, and the flatness of her tone made them land harder than any emphasis could have done.
I thought about Silas Blackwood, stooped and spectacled, sweeping his floors every morning and keeping his records for thirty years, and I tried to reconcile that image with the idea of a man who had been mixed up in something dangerous enough to get him killed.
The two pictures refused to sit together in my mind, and the gap between them felt like the space where the truth was hiding.
"The button ties Florence to the scene," I said. "The ledger ties her to Silas's secret dealings. But I don't understand what she wanted from him. She owns an antique shop, not a bookshop. What use would she have for a rare book?"
Eleanor closed the ledger and rested both hands on its cover.
"Florence Albright has been struggling financially for some time. That is not gossip, it is observation. Her shop has been open for nearly as long as yours, but the stock never seems to change, and the customers are few. A rare book of sufficient value could solve a great many problems,
if one knew how to sell it quietly and without attracting attention."
"And Silas would have known if the book was stolen. He knew every book in his collection."
"He would have known, and he would not have kept quiet about it. Silas was a meticulous man, but he was not a forgiving one. If Florence took something from him, or tried to, he would have made it his business to see that she answered for it."
The kettle clicked off in the back room, and the sudden silence was louder than the hum had been. I did not move to make the tea. My hands were resting on the counter, and I noticed that my fingers had curled inward, the nails pressing lightly into my palms.
"We need to decipher the rest of the entries," Eleanor said.
"The note about the October sale is suggestive, but it is only one piece of a larger picture. If we can read the full record of Silas's transactions, we may find something that tells us what the book was, who the buyer was, and why someone was willing to kill for it."
She opened her satchel and withdrew a notepad and a pen, and she began to copy the symbols from the ledger onto the first page, her handwriting small and precise.
She worked with the steady rhythm of someone who had spent a lifetime transcribing information, and I watched her for a moment before I went to the back room to pour the tea.
When I returned with two mugs of Earl Grey, she had filled half a page with her notations and was already beginning to group the symbols into categories, drawing lines between them and annotating the margins with question marks and tentative translations.
She accepted the mug without looking up from her work.
"The cipher uses a combination of pictographic symbols and abbreviated Latin phrases," she said.
"The symbols represent the titles of the books, or perhaps the authors. The Latin phrases are financial terms. 'Pretium solutum' means 'price paid.' 'Emptor ignotus' means 'buyer unknown.
' Whoever designed this system wanted to keep a complete record while ensuring that no one outside their circle could interpret it."
"And Silas was part of that circle."
"He was, or he learned the cipher from someone who was. Either way, he was dealing in books that were valuable enough to justify this level of secrecy."
She took a sip of her tea and set the mug down on the counter.
"There is something else. The entry for the fourteenth of September, the one you mentioned. The acquisition date. It is followed by a symbol I have not yet identified, but the Latin notation beside it reads 'exemplar unicum.' That means 'unique copy.' A book that exists in only one known edition.
If Silas had acquired something of that description, its value would be considerable."
I sat down on the stool beside her and looked at the page of her notepad, at the neat rows of symbols and the careful annotations.
The cipher had seemed impenetrable to me when I had first opened the ledger that afternoon, a jumble of marks that meant nothing and led nowhere.
Under Eleanor's hands, it was becoming legible, and the story it was telling was darker than I had expected.
"Florence came to the pottery class," I said. "She sat at my worktable and shaped clay with the rest of us, and all the while she knew that Silas was dead and that a button from her own coat had been found beside his body. She must have been terrified."
"Terrified, or calculating. The two are not mutually exclusive." Eleanor set down her pen and turned to face me. "You are worried about what this will do to the village."
I did not deny it. Meadowbrook was the kind of place where people left their doors unlocked and their secrets harmless, or so I had always believed.
The thought that one of our own had been involved in something that ended with a man dead on the floor of his bookshop was the sort of thing that belonged to the city I had left behind, not to the quiet lanes and familiar faces I had built my life around.
"If Florence is responsible," I said, "then the village will have to reckon with that. And if she is not, then someone else is, and that is almost worse. At least Florence is a known quantity. We know her faults. We know her history with Silas. But if it is someone we have not even considered…"
"Then we will consider them," Eleanor said. "One step at a time. The cipher first. The button second. The identity of the buyer third. We have a great deal of work to do, and speculation will not make it go faster."
She returned her attention to the notepad, and I sat beside her in the lamplight and drank my tea and watched her work.
The symbols on the page began to resolve into words under her pen, and the words began to form a pattern, and the pattern was leading somewhere I could not yet see but could feel, the way you feel a storm coming before the clouds appear on the horizon.
Outside, the streetlamps burned on in the darkness, and the village of Meadowbrook slept, and the ledger on the counter between us kept its secrets a little longer before Eleanor's patient hands teased them open, one by one.