Chapter 12
The fan over the register had been losing to the heat since the middle of the day, and Marty had stopped expecting it to win.
He'd propped the front door open for whatever breeze the harbor felt like sending, which so far was none.
The afternoon light had gone long and gold across the floorboards.
Closing time, more or less. He was thinking about the kettle and the quiet when Hal Gardner came in out of the glare.
"Marty." Hal had his hat off already, fanning himself with it. "Lord, it's hot enough to fry an egg on the sidewalk. Donna tried it once. Years ago. Made a mess and a point both."
"Hal." Marty set down the stack he'd been shelving. "I'd about given you up."
"I know it. I know it." Hal came to the counter looking sheepish, which was not his usual look. "I owe you an apology on that. You ordered me the Maxwell and I never came for it. We were up in the Carolinas the whole month. Donna's sister. You can't say no to Donna's sister."
"The book's been under the counter waiting on you." Marty bent and found it, the Maxwell book in its slick paper jacket, a rain-dark alley and a single lit window on the front. He set it down between them. "Number fifteen. The last one out, anyway."
"You're a saint." Hal patted the cover. "I told Donna, I said, Marty'll have held it. He holds things. It's about the one nice thing about him."
"It's the deposit, mostly. You paid half up front."
"See, there he is." Hal pointed at him, delighted. "There's the man I know."
"There he is, indeed." Hal picked the book up and turned it over with real tenderness. "Donna read the library copy already. Couldn't wait. But it's not the same as having your own. She likes them on the shelf. All in a row."
"Mm."
"Don't 'mm' me. You've rung up worse than this and you know it." Hal dug for his wallet, then stopped, like he'd remembered the better part of why he'd come. "Now. Hold on. I brought you something."
He reached into the canvas bag on his shoulder and came out with a paperback. Old. The spine creased white in a dozen places, the corners gone soft. He laid it on the counter the way a man lays down a winning card.
Marty looked at it. F. L. Maxwell. The first one. The very first Hank Carson.
"No," Marty said.
"Yes." Hal pushed it an inch toward him. "Here's the first Maxwell book. Read it. You'll love it. I promise."
"Hal."
"You've been turning your nose up at this man for as long as I've come in here.
" Hal had his finger on the cover now, pinning it to the counter.
"And I've decided I'm tired of it. This is my own copy.
Read it. If you hate it, you bring it back and I'll never say another word about it.
" He cocked his head. "But you won't hate it. "
Marty did not pick it up. "I have a stack by my bed I haven't gotten to. A new translation of a Hungarian novelist who—"
"I don't care about your Hungarian." Hal was grinning, but he meant it under the grin. "Forty-one years married, Marty. You learn a person can be wrong about a thing for a long time and still be a good person. I figure that's you and Maxwell. Take the book. You're a reader. Be a reader."
There wasn't a graceful way out of it. Marty picked the book up. It was warm from the bag, soft as a much-loved thing. "I'll look at it."
"You'll read it." Hal put his money on the counter and tucked the new one under his arm. "And then you'll order me whatever comes next, and you'll do it without that face. Tell me you can read this for what it is."
"I read everything for what it is."
"You read everything for what it isn't." Hal put his hat back on. "That's your whole trouble. Oh, and Donna says hello."
"Tell her hello back." Marty nodded. "Enjoy the book, Hal."
"You too." Hal pointed at the paperback in Marty's hand on his way out. "That one. I mean it."
Marty closed up slowly, the way he always did. He counted the drawer, though there wasn't much to count. He squared the chairs nobody had sat in. He left the paperback on the counter where he could keep an eye on it, as if it might do something.
Then he stepped out the front door and into the thick evening air. He pulled the door closed behind him.
"Closing up?"
Sally Morris stood on the walk with a bag of groceries on her hip and her store keys still in her hand. The Bayview was two doors down, and Sally had a way of being wherever a conversation might break out. She'd locked her own door for the night and clearly wasn't in a hurry to get home.
"That's the idea." Marty checked the handle out of habit. "You're out late."
"Inventory. Don't get me started on inventory." She shifted the bag. "I saw your light on and thought I'd say hello. How's business?"
"We're still here."
"You always say that."
"It's always true." He came down off the step. The harbor smelled of salt, diesel, and somebody's grill going somewhere down the wharf. "Long as I can say it, I figure I'm ahead."
Sally smiled at that, then tilted her head in a way he'd learned to be wary of. "Can I ask you something, and you don't bite my head off?"
"You're going to ask either way."
"That's true too." She hitched the bag higher. "Your writer. Fiona. From the lighthouse."
"She's not my writer. And what about her?"
"What do you make of her?" Sally said it light, but her eyes were doing the opposite of light.
"You've spent more hours with that woman than anybody in this town.
Jan says she carries two coffees over from the Brew most afternoons—one for her, one for you.
A person talks, over that much coffee. So. What's her story?"
"She reads." Marty shrugged. "It's a bookshop. Readers come to bookshops. That's the entire business model."
"That's not what I asked and you know it."
"She likes to argue about books. I happen to have a lot of books to argue about." He shrugged, and didn't much care for the little kick his pulse gave at more hours with that woman than anybody. "It's good for trade. She's the only person all week who'll fight me on Faulkner."
"I'm not asking what she reads, Marty. I'm asking who she is.
" Sally shifted the bag, though it wasn't really about the bag.
"Where she came from. Why a woman like that turns up alone at the end of the road in the off-season and won't give a straight answer about her own life. She tell you any of that?"
He went to answer and found he hadn't much to answer with. He thought for a moment, and the more he thought about it, the stranger it got. Georgetown, once. A career she circled and never quite explained. Not one thing past that.
"She doesn't talk about herself," he said finally. "She'll go ten rounds on a book and not tell you a single thing about her own life. I hadn't noticed until you asked."
"Mm." He could see her file it away. "Doesn't that strike you as odd?"
"People are entitled to their privacy. I'm the last man alive who'd begrudge anybody that."
"Privacy's one thing." Sally wasn't quite smiling now.
"A woman who answers every question with another question is something else.
I've fed about every stray that ever washed up at those cottages, and the ones who won't say where they've been are usually running from it.
" She studied him a moment. "I just like to know who I'm feeding. "
"Then ask her."
"I'm asking the man she brings the coffee to."
"Jan pours the second cup before Fiona can stop her." Which was true, and beside the point, and he knew it even as he said it. "There's nothing to know, Sally. She's a customer who likes a good argument."
"Uh-huh." Sally let it sit, the way the women in this town all seemed to know how to do. "Well. She's a nice woman. Lonely, I think, under all that polish." She hitched the bag one last time. "You'd tell me if you knew something, wouldn't you?"
"There's nothing to tell."
"No. Of course not." Sally smiled—not like she'd won, but like she'd gotten the one measurement she'd come out here for. She started off down the walk, then turned back. "Get out of this heat, Marty. Go put your feet up. You work too much for a man with nothing to show for it."
"Thank you, Sally. Truly. A real comfort."
Her laugh carried back to him as she went.
He didn't go straight home. Home was a few rooms over the shop, and he told himself it was the heat in the apartment. The rooms upstairs held the day's warmth, and a walk along the water would cool him some. That was part of it.
The waterfront had gone quiet and blue. Out past the breakwater the Gulf lay flat and burnished, holding the last of the light. He walked with his hands in his pockets. There was nobody around to catch him at it, so he let himself think about her.
Fiona Wells. She'd come into his shop like a woman braced for disappointment and stayed to take him apart over the merits of a locked-room mystery.
She was sharp in a way that didn't show off.
She knew more about books than she let on.
Far more. Every time she let a little of it slip, she'd pull back fast, like she'd shown a card she meant to keep.
He'd noticed. He noticed everything about her, which was its own kind of problem.
She argued the way Annette used to argue.
That was the thing he kept circling back to.
Not to win. Annette had never once cared about winning.
She'd cared whether the idea was the truth.
She'd push and push about something because she loved it.
People only fought that hard about something they couldn't stand to see gotten wrong.
He stopped at the rail and looked out at the water for a while.
"You're a foolish old man," he said, to the harbor.
The harbor, like the boxes in his shop, declined to argue.
He hadn't felt this in sixteen years. He'd been careful not to.
A man learned, after a thing like Annette, exactly how much it cost to want somebody in the room with him.
He'd let a person matter once. Then the world did what it did, and he'd ended up at a kitchen table for one, learning the size of the empty house all over again.
He'd made his peace with that. He'd built a whole quiet life on the peace he'd made.
And now here was a woman who fought about Faulkner. Who brought him coffee. Who looked at his rare collection like it meant something.
"It scares me," he said to the water, because there was nobody to hear it. "There. I said it."
He walked on.
The path curved out toward the point. The lighthouse stood pale against the darkening sky, the way it had stood since 1885, the way it would stand long after he'd stopped walking past it.
The cottages sat in their half circle below, light spilling out of the windows.
He knew the order now without meaning to learn it.
Sea Glass Cottage had its light on.
He could see it from the path, a warm square of yellow with the shape of her bookshelves behind the glass. He stopped without planning to. She was in there. Probably reading. Probably not writing, from the little she'd said about whatever she was supposed to be working on and wasn't.
He stood at the top of the path and looked at her lit window like a boy outside a dance.
"Go home, Marty," he said.
He made himself turn around.
Whatever this was, a man didn't go knocking on a woman's door after dark because he'd gotten sentimental over the water.
He had her in his shop most afternoons. That was enough.
That was, in fact, already more than he'd meant to allow.
He set off back toward town with the light behind him.
He didn't look over his shoulder to see if her window was still lit.
He wanted to, though, and the wanting told him plenty.
The apartment over the shop was as warm as he'd known it would be.
He cracked the windows and ran the tap till it went cool.
He drank a glass of water standing at the sink, which was a thing Winnie would have scolded him for.
He thought about the Hungarian novelist on the nightstand.
He'd been meaning to start it for a week.
He got into bed with it and read the first page three times and couldn't have told a soul what it said.
His mind kept wandering off down the waterfront to a yellow window.
He set the Hungarian down on his chest and stared at the ceiling and called himself several unkind names, none of which helped.
He sighed and went down into the shop and grabbed the book Hal had left for him.
He went back upstairs and climbed into bed.
"All right," he said to the empty room. "All right, Hal."
He picked it up. He'd read it for ammunition. He'd find the cheap tricks and the lazy sentences. The next time Fiona defended the genre, he'd have chapter and verse. That was a perfectly good reason to open a book he'd sworn for years he'd never bother with.
He opened it to the first page.
A man named Hank Carson stood in the rain over a body nobody in town would admit to knowing. The voice came up off the page plain and dry and certain. The rain was wet. The dead man wore the wrong shoes for the part of town he'd died in, and Hank noticed that before anything else.
Marty read the first chapter telling himself he wasn't impressed.
He read the second one without telling himself anything at all.
The writer knew how to do it. That was the trouble.
The thing moved. Every scene paid for the next one.
There wasn't a wasted line. Once or twice there was a line so good he stopped and read it again out of professional jealousy.
The detective was lonely in a way the book never once announced.
He just was, in the gaps between what he said.
Marty knew that loneliness from the inside.
He resented being made to feel it by a paperback Hal had pushed across his counter.
He looked at the author's name on the spine. F. L. Maxwell. Fifteen of these. Sixteen, soon, when the man got around to it.
"Well," he said.
He turned the page.
The window beside the bed went from blue to black. A boat came in somewhere out on the water, its engine a low murmur and then nothing. Marty read on, the harbor quiet below him, Hal's soft old book held up to the lamp, Hank Carson three steps ahead of him in the rain and pulling farther away.
When he finally looked at the clock, it was far later than a working man had any business staying up to.
He read one more chapter anyway.