Chapter Four #2
“figured things out.” On day one, Huong, with her bobbed black hair, a fuzzy white sweater, and possibly ironic cargo pants,
told her this in a bored-teenager voice while they stood together in the stockroom. Merritt had said, “Me too,” and the two
women had formed an immediate if not quite warm connection.
It was the truth. Merritt was herself trying to figure things out, and, depressingly, she had also moved in with a parent.
She had tried something in Texas, and it hadn’t worked out, and now she was living with her mom in a small New England town.
The only thing that kept this whole situation from dipping into Hallmark Christmas movie territory was that Whelk Harbor was
not her hometown, but the place her parents had moved to from Virginia a decade ago to look after Merritt’s grandfather. But
her grandfather had died, and then her father, too, and well, Hallmark movies didn’t usually deliver such a ruthless one-two
punch.
“Morning,” Huong said without looking up from her phone as she sat on a stack of boxes. Today she was wearing wide-legged jeans and an oversized flannel, and Merritt hated, hated, that she felt uncool, that she could even care about being uncool at her age.
“Hi,” Merritt said lightly, smoothing the front of her chunky beige sweater and trying not to think about her own jeans. No, she thought, I like this sweater. I am not a wide-legged-pants person. I do not need to wear anything ironically ever again.
“Is it just us today?”
“Yes,” Merritt answered, and though Huong didn’t say it, they were both thinking the same thing: the training wheels were
off. The store’s owner was a woman named Diana, who shirked the normal uniform of New England women in Whelk Harbor—unflashy
but quality clothing that would protect them from surprise bad weather in a pinch—in favor of cashmere sweater sets and trench
coats and the occasional floral scarf over her nearly white shoulder-length hair. Merritt had replaced a former morning shift
manager, and Diana had been eager to relinquish the day-to-day duties to her new employee. She continually swatted away Merritt’s
hesitations like they were persistent bees. You’ll be fine. You’re a grown-up, aren’t you?
“Well,” Huong said, glancing up at last, “let’s see how this goes.”
“As long as we don’t set the building on fire, I think Diana will call it a success.”
“A high bar,” Huong said, standing up with a short laugh, “but I think we can manage.”
Whatever catastrophes the two women had been imagining did not come to pass. Huong handled the register, and Merritt walked
around tidying things, giving suggestions to the occasional patron, changing the soundtrack from jazz classics to coffee shop
acoustic and then back to jazz. The bell tinkled, and locals came in looking for gifts or a current bestseller called How to Kick Ass Like a Girl.
Had she read it? No, she had not, not really a fan of self-help, if you could believe it.
Four separate women came in looking for a novel about a pregnant and possibly mentally unwell ex-nurse on bedrest who is sure her rich neighbor has stabbed the gardener with a pair of pruning shears—a book club pick.
When the bell over the door rang out once again, Merritt almost didn’t turn around, determined to force the admirably indifferent Huong to do the greeting song-and-dance for once.
But then she did take a look, and it was him.
Whit Longacre, formerly the husband of Helen Albright Longacre.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said, and he looked at her like he recognized her and was surprised to be recognized back. Fair. It had
been several days, and she had been a little preoccupied with his gift the last time they met.
“It’s me,” he said, his smile not unkind but also not enthusiastic. He had trimmed his beard, she noticed, and he wore a beige
fisherman’s turtleneck and greenish pants. “Oh, gosh.”
She followed his eyes as they moved down her body, and something twisted up her spine. Was he checking her out?
“We match,” he said, laughing now. It was true, right down to the green pants.
“Oh God,” she laughed back. “I don’t know which of us should be more embarrassed.”
“Neither. We look great.”
His voice had a certain edge to it—a half-rasp, perhaps. Why did noting that make her face feel warm?
“We,” she said, holding out the e, “look like the kind of people who take color-coordinated family photos on the beach.”
“Oh, so you’ve met my mother.”
Merritt laughed. “You actually have met mine, and it won’t surprise you to learn that our family pictures are all a little
bit blurry, not a coordinated outfit in sight.”
“I’d actually like to see those.”
Her face was really warm now, but Merritt was smiling when she said, “How can I help you, Mr. Longacre?”
He held up a hand. “Whit. And I have a bit of a strange question.”
“Okay?”
Whit looked embarrassed. He glanced at Huong, who was doing a sudoku on the register computer. He cast his eyes quickly over
the room, taking in the exposed beams above, the Persian rugs below, the high shelves, the mishmash of chairs and couches
(wingback, Louis XVI, a few fragile-looking wooden ones), the fairy lights. As Merritt stood at the top of a small slope in
the warped floor, their eyes were almost even. She saw that his gray-blue irises looked self-conscious today, and hesitant,
rather than sad.
“I need to see what Greenwood Castle books you have.”
“Don’t you have them all?” Merritt asked, before immediately wishing to take the words back.
Whit shrugged. “You would think so, and yet—I think we must be missing one of the stand-alones. You know, one of the ones
that’s not technically part of the main story, but . . .”
He trailed off.
“Yes. There are three novellas. I believe.”
Merritt added the “I believe” at the last moment, hoping to suggest that this was just casual knowledge for her, the sort
of thing a bookseller and ad hoc school librarian had bouncing around in her head. But the truth was that she knew everything
there was to know about the books of Helen Albright Longacre.
She walked toward the children’s section, Whit following behind at a polite distance. “So,” she said, as they reached the
shelves in the corner, a snug nook with extra fairy lights and cut-out letters that said, “Reading Is Magical.” “There are
the standard books in the series here. And here are the companion things. There’s the collection of fairy tales”—she pulled
it off the shelf—“and the villain origin story one”—she added it to her pile—“and the one about the missing unicorn that turns
out to be a dream sequence. People were mad about that one.”
Merritt stood straight and handed all three to Whit, who looked somewhere between guilty and confused. “We have all these,” he laughed.
“What?”
He shrugged. “We have these. Multiple copies. It’s silly, but I have this vague memory of another short story, even though
I’m certain these are the only ones.”
Merritt eyed him for a second. How could this man not know his own wife’s work better than this?
“I know she appears in two anthologies—”
Whit interrupted. “The Christmas one,” he said, nodding, “and the one about ‘magical’ summer nights. I checked those.”
“Oh,” she said, called up short. So he did know that.
Whit seemed to search his mind for a second before speaking again.
“But is there something somewhere about a giant baby, or a baby giant, or—”
“Oh!” A firework laced through her brain, and Whit’s confusion suddenly made sense. “Yes! I know exactly what you’re looking
for.”
His eyebrows rose, and a smile that was hardly a smile grew above the sand-stubbled chin on his square jaw.
But then, just as quickly, Merritt felt herself making her own guilty face.
“Okay, but there’s bad news.”
She watched as the man in front of her seemed to tire in place.
“There’s only one copy.”
He narrowed his eyes. “That sounds fake.”
“It’s real.”
“Can we steal it? Do the National Treasure of children’s books?”
She smiled. “It’s less exciting than that, sadly.
The book was a tiny little novella, and it was written,” she said, intentionally using the passive voice to avoid making his late wife into a subject, “for a charity thing. She, your wife . . .” Well, there went the passive voice.
The English language had its limits. “She wrote it to be auctioned off, and as far as I know, she hand-wrote it. The thing they bought, whoever bought it, was just, like, a Moleskine notebook.”
“Oh.” Whit looked out across the shelves, then nodded to himself. “I remember that. Or I remember the auction part. But that
would mean no one has read it, right? Other than whoever bought it.”
“Right.” Then, after a moment’s thought, Merritt added, “Should we find out who that was, and maybe what they did with it?”
Whit nodded, and again he followed her across the store, this time to the register.
“Sorry, Huong, can I use the computer?”
The young woman glanced up, then clocked that Merritt was not alone. She looked at Whit, then back at Merritt, and widened
her eyes just slightly. Merritt rolled hers.
At the computer, she started googling.
“How’s your mom?”
Merritt smiled at him, touched. “She’s all back to normal.”
“So no more double duty then.”
“No, thank God. If you haven’t noticed, it’s much quieter here.”
“No snotty kids shoving oversized books into the book drop.”
“No book drop at all. It’s bliss,” she said. “Oh, here it is . . . well, that’s depressing.”
Whit leaned onto the counter, and Merritt turned the screen so they could both see it. “A billionaire,” she said. “Some tech
person. He bought it for nearly a million dollars. And it says here he keeps it in a display case in his home office. Perfect
for a heist, if you’re in the mood for a little . . .”
“Where did the auction money go?” he asked rather than playing along.
“A children’s, uh, cancer thing.”
“Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “Well, that’s good. That’s good.”