Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Bea arrived with pastries from the bakery two doors down, a tote bag that appeared to contain approximately one of everything she owned, and the expression she wore when she already knew something interesting had happened and was waiting to be told.
"You have a face," she said, by way of greeting.
"I have my usual face," Wren said.
"It's different from your usual face." Bea shrugged off her coat and hung it on the hook behind the door. "What happened?"
"Nothing happened."
"Wren."
"It's not — nothing happened in the way of events. Something happened in the way of—" Wren looked at the counter. Looked at Bea, who had arranged her face into the expression of a woman with infinite patience and absolutely no intention of going anywhere. "There's something I haven't told you."
The letters came out of the cedar box in chronological order, which was how Wren had stored them, because even in her more chaotic moments she was constitutionally incapable of mismanaging a filing system. She laid them on the counter in a row while Bea stood on the other side.
"The first one arrived with the Neruda collection that was delivered six weeks ago, and I thought it was a mistake — like someone had dropped it with a delivery. Then the second one arrived a week later, and I thought—"
"Wren." Bea picked up the first letter with both hands. "Stop talking."
The fairy lights along the poetry shelf did their amber work.
Heathcliff, from his position on the window seat, watched the street with the concentration of a professional.
Outside, a woman pushed a stroller past the teal-green frontage, and somewhere in the direction of the bakery a delivery van reversed with its intermittent beep.
None of it touched the bubble that had formed around the counter where Bea was reading.
She moved through the letters with the focused intensity of a woman sight-reading a score, occasionally going back, occasionally holding one slightly closer to the lamp.
"You have a secret admirer."
Wren watched her and tried not to vibrate. "It looks that way."
Bea nodded her head as she continued to read Letter Five.
"You don't seem surprised. Do things like this happen often in Valor?"
Bea lifted one brow. "This certainly isn't the first time. The men of Valor can be expressive when they find the woman they want to marry."
"Marry? Who said anything about marriage?"
"This one," Bea said, setting the fourth letter down with slightly more care than the others. She didn't elaborate.
In the fourth letter, her Secret Admirer had mentioned the Bride of Frankenstein.
Everyone remembers Cyrano's nose. The tragedy wasn't the face, but the distance he chose to keep behind it. Christian got the girl because he was willing to stand in the light. Cyrano wrote the letters and stayed in the dark.
I've been thinking about the Bride of Frankenstein, too.
You recommended that to the middle school English teacher, remember?
Frankenstein's Bride gets one scene, one choice, and it's rejection.
But I think it was the first honest moment in the whole story.
She looked at what she'd been handed and said: Not this.
I don't think it's because he was a monster.
I think it's because she knew her own mind — newly awakened though she was.
I wonder sometimes if you know yours as well as she did. I suspect you do. I suspect you would also refuse the obvious answer if it wasn't the right one.
Bea looked at Wren over the letters with an expression that Wren could not immediately categorize. "This man lurked around your shop, listened to you recommend a book to strangers, and then he went home and wrote you pages about what that says about the kind of person you are."
"I know." Wren picked up her tea, which had gone cold again, and held it anyway.
" That's why I haven't told anyone. If I said it out loud, it would become a thing that exists in the world, and then I'd have to…
" She made a gesture that was meant to communicate the full weight of emotional exposure and its attendant risks. "I'd have to reckon with it."
"And now you're reckoning with it."
Wren sipped her tea, only to find that the cup was empty. The teabag sloshed against her upper lip.
"Oliver Hartley."
Wren blinked. "What?"
"Oliver Hartley." Bea said it with the calm of settled certainty. "It's him."
"That's — you can't just—" Wren looked at the letters, then at Bea, then back at the letters. "You've been reading for twenty minutes."
"I've been reading for twenty minutes and thinking for forty-five seconds.
" Bea tapped the ninth letter. "He visits every week.
Regular as the tide, and he reads everything you recommend.
You've mentioned it yourself; he always comes back having done the reading.
He's local. He has access to the shop. He was here last Tuesday.
He's a veteran; which the first letter indicates if he was at little Eli's birthday party. "
Wren opened her mouth.
"And," Bea continued, with the energy of a woman reaching the good part, "three weeks ago — I was here, you weren't, I was covering the afternoon — he came in for a recommendation and when I said it looked like rain, he said—" She pointed at Wren with the authority of someone landing an argument.
"He said, and I am quoting directly: it's the kind of afternoon worth writing about. "
"That's—" Wren started.
"Circumstantial. Yes. And also exactly the kind of thing a man says when he's been writing letters. I'm not saying I'm certain. I'm saying Oliver Hartley is our prime suspect, and we proceed accordingly."
Wren looked at the nine letters laid out on her counter, and she thought about Oliver; kind, easy Oliver with his Land Rover and his genuine interest in every book she'd ever put in his hands and his complete willingness to stand at the counter for twenty minutes discussing whatever she'd recommended.
She thought about the kind of afternoon worth writing about.
She thought: It could be.
She also thought: I'm not convinced.
She said, because the argument was structurally sound even if her gut was withholding full ratification: "All right. Provisionally."
Bea's expression indicated that provisionally was a reasonable position for Wren to take and that she, Bea, was going to quietly proceed as though it meant definitely.
"We don't embarrass anyone," Wren said firmly. "No confronting. No hinting. No conspicuous behavior that could be traced back to—"
The bell above the door chimed.
Both of them looked up.
Freddie Gallagher stood in the doorway of Pages dark canvas trousers, a slate henley under the heavy apron that always covered his broad chest. His eyes moved across the shop with the quick, cataloguing quality she'd noticed in him before, that particular attentiveness that he otherwise went to considerable lengths to present as indifference.
It was, Wren realized, the first time he'd ever been inside the shop.
His gaze landed on Wren. Then it moved briefly to the counter.
Wren became aware that all nine letters were spread across the counter in plain view. She gathered them in one smooth motion and put them under the counter with the calm of a person who had not just done something that looked exactly like what it was.
"Can I help you, Mr. Gallagher?"
"Freddie."
"I beg your pardon?"
"No one calls me Mr. Gallagher. It's either Gallagher or Freddie."
That, Wren realized, was the most words this man had said to her since she'd met him the first time she'd gone out to get coffee from him the first week her shop was open.
Freddie came in two steps, which brought him to the edge of the front display table.
He looked around the shop with the expression of a man in an unfamiliar room who was not going to admit it was unfamiliar.
His attention snagged briefly on the fairy lights.
She watched him not comment on the fairy lights.
"I need a pen."
Wren stared at him. "A pen?"
"A pen." He held up a pen. "Ink ran out."
Wren reached under the counter and produced a pen. It was a blue ballpoint, perfectly ordinary. She held it out.
He crossed to the counter, took it from her hand without quite touching her fingers, and said: "Thanks."
"You're welcome."
He turned. Took two steps toward the door.
"Do you—" Wren began, without entirely knowing what she was going to add to that.
Freddie looked back.
She had approximately one second in which to produce a reasonable continuation of that sentence. "Did you want anything else? A book, perhaps?"
"I'm fine," he said. And then, as though he'd considered adding something and decided against it: "Thank you."
He left.
The bell above the door settled.
The shop was quiet.
Wren stood at the counter with the receipts for the cedar box sitting where the letters had been. She became aware that Bea had not moved or spoken for thirty seconds.
"What?" said Wren.
Bea said nothing.
"Bea. What?"
Bea picked up the nearest letter — the fourth one, the one she'd set down more carefully than the others — and looked at it.
Then she looked at the door. Then she looked back at the letter, and something crossed her face that lasted just long enough for Wren to register before it resolved, deliberately, into her normal expression.
"So, Oliver Hartley."
Wren looked at the door, which was closed, and the street beyond it, where the navy coffee cart sat in its usual spot with no one at the counter. The pen cup on the counter was one pen lighter.
"Oliver Hartley," she agreed.
She pulled her notebook from under the register. Opened it to the page with the underlined heading. Added the name to the list of people who'd been in the shop last Tuesday.