Chapter 4
She'd been staring at Hank Carson for forty minutes. Hank was still in the alley. Still standing over the body. Still waiting for Fiona to tell him what came next.
Fiona didn't know what came next.
She closed the laptop and stood up before she could talk herself into another hour of pretending the blinking cursor counted as progress.
The cottage was too quiet. Too full of books she hadn't written, a manuscript she couldn't finish, and a silence that kept reminding her she was the only person in it.
She needed air. She needed to walk somewhere that wasn't the twelve steps between the desk and the kitchen.
She needed to stop thinking about Drake.
That was the real thing, wasn't it? She'd caught herself reaching for her phone to text him a photo of the harbor at sunrise, the way she used to.
She'd stood there with her thumb over the screen before she remembered there was nobody on the other end of that habit anymore.
Six months. A person would think six months was enough to break a reflex.
Well, a person would be wrong.
She pulled on her shoes and went out.
The walk into town took twenty minutes along the harbor road.
A generous name for a two-lane stretch of cracked asphalt with palmetto scrub on one side and the water on the other.
The air was warm, thick, and salty. She passed a bait shop.
A church with a marquee that read GOD'S WIFI IS ALWAYS ON.
A gas station that looked like it hadn't updated its signage since 1987.
Not Georgetown. Not the curated life she'd built with Drake in their brownstone. The good address, the dinner parties, and the shelves of first editions she'd earned and he'd displayed. This was rougher and less polished.
Nobody here was performing for anybody. She wasn't sure if that was a relief or a threat.
Four blocks of cheerful, pastel storefronts. She passed Grant's gallery, dark this early. Sally's general store was already open, and Sally herself was out front arranging a display of something in baskets.
"Morning, honey." Sally waved a hand without looking up. "You eat breakfast?"
"I had coffee."
"Coffee isn't breakfast. Come back on your way home and I'll fix you a biscuit. I brought a batch in with me and some of my strawberry jam."
"I'm fine, really."
"Nobody's ever fine on just coffee." Sally gave her a look that suggested this was a settled matter. "Go on, then. Biscuit'll be waiting."
Fiona kept walking. Past Harbor Brew, where two women sat on the patio arguing about somebody's nephew. Then she saw Tides & Tales.
The bookshop sat on the corner facing the water, its front windows tall and salt-hazed. A wooden sign hung from a bracket over the door, the letters carved deep and painted the blue-green of old copper. The door was propped open. She could see shelves from the sidewalk.
She went inside.
The smell hit her first. Paper and dust, faintly woody, like the shelves themselves had opinions.
High tin ceiling. Wide plank floors. Morning light coming through the front windows at an angle that made the whole place glow.
Shelves ran floor to ceiling on three walls.
Not arranged for show. These shelves were working.
Spines crammed and double-stacked, paperbacks wedged sideways on top of hardcovers.
The whole inventory looked handled and reshuffled. Lived with.
She liked it immediately, which surprised her. She hadn't liked much of anything immediately in a while.
A reading chair sat in one corner, leather worn to the color of honey. A stack of books on the floor beside it suggested somebody used it more than any customer did. The register was old, the mechanical kind, with a slip of paper clipped to the side of it in smudged ink she couldn't read from here.
She was halfway down the local history shelf when a voice came from somewhere behind the stacks.
"If you're looking for beach reads, you're in the wrong shop."
She turned. A man came around the end of the shelf carrying a cardboard box, which he set on the counter with the easy thud of someone who'd done this a thousand mornings.
Tall. Broad shoulders with a slight stoop to them.
Silver-threaded brown hair that needed cutting.
Wire-rimmed glasses pushed up on his forehead like he'd forgotten they were there.
His sleeves were rolled to the elbow, and his hands had ink on them.
"I wasn't looking for beach reads," she said.
"Good." He slid a box cutter along the tape. "Because I don't carry them. Fair warning."
"What do you carry?"
"Books worth reading." He said it without looking up, but the corner of his mouth moved. He knew how it sounded and he didn't mind. "Marty Fuller. This is my shop."
"Fiona." She didn't offer a last name. She'd gotten careful about that, though in this case there was no reason to be. Nobody here would connect Wells to Maxwell. Nobody ever did. "I'm staying out at the lighthouse cottages."
"The writer." He glanced up then. Hazel eyes behind glasses he brought down from his forehead the way a man did when he'd already lost them twice before lunch. "Winnie mentioned you."
"Of course she did."
"She mentions everybody. It's how she runs the town without holding office." He set the box cutter down. "So what do you read?"
"Mysteries, mostly."
His face shifted. It wasn't quite a wince. It was more of a polite rearrangement, the kind a person made when they were trying not to say what they thought and failing at it.
"Mysteries," he said.
"You have feelings about that?"
"I have feelings about most things. It's an occupational hazard.
" He pulled a stack of books from the box and began sorting them on the counter.
Literary fiction, from the look of the covers.
Spare and serious. "Mysteries are fine. They're well-built machines.
Very efficient. You sit down, somebody dies, somebody figures out who did it, and then you buy the next one. " He looked up at her.
"That's a… um… generous summary."
"I'm being generous." He shelved a slim volume without looking at the spine, like he already knew where it belonged.
"The machinery's clever. I'll give it that.
But there's nothing underneath. No ambiguity.
No moral weight. The detective always solves it.
The world always makes sense at the end.
That's not literature. That's comfort food. "
A tightness caught inside her. Not anger, exactly. Sharper than that. More personal than she had any right to feel in a bookshop with a man she'd met forty-five seconds ago.
"Comfort food keeps people alive," she said.
"So does bread. I wouldn't call it cuisine."
"You might if you'd ever been hungry enough."
He stopped shelving and looked at her properly. She could feel him recalibrating, the way a man did when a conversation went somewhere he hadn't planned.
"Fair point," he said. And then, because he wasn't done, "But the best mysteries, the ones that actually last, they work because they're doing more than the puzzle.
Christie's doing class. Some mystery authors do psychology.
The ones that endure smuggle real literature inside the genre. The rest is just plot."
"The rest is just plot," she repeated. She should leave it alone. She knew she should leave it alone. She was a woman named Fiona who wrote small stuff nobody had heard of, and this was not her fight.
But she'd had this argument before, hadn't she?
Every cocktail party where a literary novelist looked at her sales numbers, then at her genre, and decided the two couldn't go together.
Every awards dinner where the mystery category got scheduled after dessert, when half the room had already gone home.
"You know what the mystery genre does that literary fiction won't?" she said. "It makes a promise. Beginning, middle, end. Justice, or at least understanding. A reader picks it up knowing the author is going to hold up their end of the deal. That's not a flaw. That's a reader promise."
"A promise." He said it slowly, as if he was tasting the word.
"Between the writer and the reader. You will be confused, and then you will understand.
I will not leave you stranded in ambiguity just because ambiguity is more respectable.
" She was talking too much. She could hear herself talking too much, the way she did when somebody pushed a button she'd welded shut years ago.
"Literary fiction gets to shrug at the ending and call it art.
Genre fiction has to earn the ending or the reader walks. I'd argue earning it is harder."
He leaned against the counter. His glasses were up on his forehead again. She noticed he did that. Up and down, up and down, like they couldn't decide where they lived.
"You know a lot about this for someone who just reads mysteries."
She pulled back. She'd said too much. A casual reader didn't use words like reader promise. A casual reader didn't have a rehearsed defense of genre fiction's structural contract with the audience.
"I read a lot," she said. Lightly. "And I had a professor in college who made us read Chandler alongside Faulkner. It stuck."
"Good professor." He was watching her the way he'd watched the book spines, assessing and categorizing, deciding where she fit on the shelf. "Chandler's the exception, though."
"Chandler's the example. The rest are the proof."
He almost smiled. Not quite, but the shape of it was there, pulling at the corners of his mouth.
"You should talk to Hal Gardner. He's in here every week asking me to order another F. L. Maxwell book. We have this argument regularly, though he makes it with less vocabulary."
Her breath caught in her throat. "Maxwell?"
"Mystery writer. Very popular. Very efficient." He said efficient the way some people said adequate. "Hal swears by the series. Fifteen books. His wife got him started."
"I've heard of them." She kept her voice level. "The Hank Carson books."
"That's the ones. You've read them?"