8. Margot
MARGOT
Iinherited a haunted house. I just didn't know the ghosts kept ledgers.
The first kind of haunting was never a mystery to me.
You cannot run a dead woman's bookshop for a year and a half and not feel her in it, in the way the third stair still complains at the exact hour she used to lock up, in the smell of her cigarettes that no amount of airing has ever fully evicted.
That ghost I made my peace with a long time ago.
I talk to her most mornings. She does not answer, which is the one part of our relationship that has genuinely improved.
What I did not know, until I started pulling the back room apart before it was properly light, armed with a thermos and the glittering focus of a woman who has finally found her next book, is that Josie kept records everywhere, tucked into everything she owned.
The odd stock in the locked cabinet turns out to be the least of it.
The real trove is the margins. I pull down an old atlas, and every border has a number penciled beside it.
I open a book of sermons and find initials stacked in the gutter like a guest list. A gardening manual has a column of sums marching down the endpaper, tidy as a bank statement, adding up to figures no rosebush on earth ever cost. It is nonsense.
It is gorgeous nonsense, and it is exactly the kind a novelist would sell a kidney to invent.
"Don't move," Birdie says from the doorway, phone already up. "The light on you right now is completely unhinged. Very tortured genius in an attic. Give me haunted."
"I am being haunted for free over here," I tell her. "Go make coffee."
"I am making content. It is like coffee, except it pays worse and my mother respects it less.
" She pans the phone slowly along the shelves, dropping into the hushed voice she saves for the channel.
"So this little bookshop is, allegedly, deeply haunted.
Our heroine inherited it from her mysterious grandmother, who, and I cannot stress this enough, knew everyone, and by everyone I mean the kind of people whose names you do not say with the lights on… "
"None of that is confirmed," I say.
"It is confirmed by the vibes, Margot, which is the highest court in the land." She lowers the phone and looks at what is in my hands. "What is that? Why are you holding it like it might go off?"
The key I find the way I find everything, which is by accident and slightly too late.
I knock a fat first edition off the shelf, a novel so respectable nobody has cracked it since the moon landing, and it hits the floor wrong, with a flat little clunk where a thud should be.
When I pick it up the middle is gone. Someone has cut a clean rectangle out of three hundred pages, and taped into the hollow, cold and heavy and entirely serious, is a small brass key, with the number forty-seven stamped into its head.
I would love to report that I meet this discovery with the poise of a grown woman.
Instead I do the whole montage. I hold the key up to the light.
I smell it, for reasons I could not defend in a court of law.
I say, aloud, to a cat, "It's a locker key," in the low and knowing voice of a detective who has just broken the case, and then I lose a genuinely humiliating stretch of my morning deciding which of us in this scene is supposed to be the femme fatale.
Hemingway declines the part. Hemingway, in fact, wants no part of any of it, and that is the first thing that snags at me, though I am working hard this morning not to let anything snag.
He has been wrong all day. He will not settle.
He sits in the front window with his tail ticking like a metronome, glaring at the street, at nothing, at one particular square of far sidewalk he has privately declared the enemy.
Twice he has hissed at the door. This is a cat who slept through the break-in at the nail salon next door and did not so much as change position.
Whatever he is watching, it is not nothing.
Mateo comes through the door around noon with two coffees I did not order and the face of a man carrying news he cannot hold much longer. He runs the espresso cart two doors down and treats my shop as his second office, his confessional, and his stage.
"Your cat has been screaming at my customers all morning," he says, setting a cup by my elbow. "One star. He is frightening the tourists. What is his problem?"
"He has decided the sidewalk is out to get him," I say. "It is a whole thing."
"Speaking of." Mateo leans on the counter and lowers his voice, which for him is a form of theater.
"A guy came by the cart before the rush.
Good coat, no small talk, not from around here.
He wanted to know if the shop on the corner still had the old lady's private collection, or whether it all got sold off when she passed.
" He shrugs, but his eyes do not leave my face.
"I told him I sell espresso, not information.
He left forty dollars on a two-dollar cup and didn't wait for the change.
Who does that, Margot? Nobody with a clean conscience. "
"Or someone generous," I say, with a confidence I do not feel by half.
"Generous people look you in the eye." He straightens, satisfied he has delivered the goods, and helps himself to a shortbread from the tin by the register. "I am only saying. Lock up your good things. And feed that animal something, because he knows a thing we do not."
The photograph is taped to the back of a drawer that fights me the whole way out.
When I finally free it, Josie is inside it, and she is young, and she is so beautiful it stops my hand halfway to my mouth.
She is laughing at whoever holds the camera.
On either side of her stands a man in a good dark coat, and both of them carry the exact stillness I have spent a month failing to get onto the page, the look of men who have taught themselves to take up no more room than a blade.
One of them has a hand resting at the small of her back.
Not one of the three looks like they are at a party, though the champagne in their glasses insists that they are.
On the back, in Josie's slanting hand, are three words and a year.
"Us, before everything." No names. My grandmother named everyone.
She could give you the full provenance of a chipped teaspoon and the life story of the man who sold it to her.
But the two who are holding her up in the loveliest picture I have ever seen of her do not get names, and that silence is louder than anything she ever said to me across the counter.
The shop phone rings at half past four, the landline nobody calls, and a voice I have never heard asks for the owner using my grandmother's name.
"Josie passed some time ago," I say. "This is Margot. What can I do for you?"
"Ah. My condolences." A pause the length of a held breath. "I represent a private collector. He has developed an interest in your late grandmother's stock. The unlisted material, in particular. The contents of the cabinet."
The warmth goes out of the room, or out of me, and I cannot tell which. "The cabinet is not for sale. It is mostly foreign poetry. Honestly, it is not worth…"
"Two hundred thousand," the caller says. "For the collection entire. Sight unseen, exactly as it stands, boxed and ready by the end of the week. My client is not a patient man, and he does not negotiate, which you will come to see is a kindness."
Two hundred thousand dollars for a shelf of books nobody on this street could pronounce.
I have a boiler in the basement actively drafting my obituary, and a stranger on the phone has just offered me the boiler, the building, and a very soft decade in exchange for walking away from some poetry.
And every instinct I own, the ones I got straight from the woman who would not name the men in her own photographs, stand up at the same moment and say no.
"Let me think about it," I say, which is a lie, and I am fairly sure he hears the lie in it, because the warmth drains out of his voice like a light clicked off.
"Do think," he says. "Collections such as this have a way of turning fragile.
Books burn. Shops flood. It would be a shame, after all your grandmother built, for it to end over a question of shelving.
" He is gone before I can decide whether I have just been threatened by a man who did all of it in the tone you would use to read out a weather report.
Birdie finds me still holding the dead receiver against my ear.
"Okay, you need to see this," she says, thumbing back through her footage, delighted and oblivious.
"I got the creepiest B-roll a second ago, the light did this whole thing, there…
" She turns the phone to me. On the screen the shop glows warm and gold, and out beyond the front glass, across the street, half swallowed in the dark between two lamps, a man stands with his hands in his coat.
He is not walking. He is not waiting for a ride.
His face is turned straight at the window, straight at me.
"Isn't it perfect?" Birdie says. "Some guy just posted up like a Victorian ghost. I didn't even clock him while I was filming. "
"When did you take this?" My voice comes out flatter than I mean it to.
"Ten minutes ago, maybe." She catches something in my face and stops smiling.
"Why? He's gone now, see? I panned back and he was just…
not there anymore. Amazing for the edit, honestly.
Very cold case." She laughs. I cannot. Because I am looking at the man in the footage, and he is not the quiet one who reads me poetry near closing, the one whose calm I have been robbing for a book.
This is a different animal altogether. This one is not gentle about the door.
This one is taking the measure of my shop.
After she leaves I go to lock the cabinet, and the key will not seat itself the way it should, and when I crouch to look I find the brass around the keyhole raked with bright fresh scratches, the kind a tool leaves behind, the kind that were not there a week ago.
Someone without a key has had their hands on this cabinet.
I stand alone in the shop with the scored brass under my thumb and the locker key heavy in my pocket and my grandmother's nameless men watching me out of a photograph, and the haunting quietly stops being a charming idea for a first chapter and becomes a plain fact about my evening.
I try the sensible thoughts on for size.
Locks wear out. Collectors are strange by trade.
Cats lose their minds in November. Birdie films half the strangers on this avenue and calls it an aesthetic.
I recite all of it while I count the register with hands that will not go quite steady, while I kill the lamps one at a time until only the desk light survives, while the shop ticks and settles into its evening and Hemingway refuses, flatly and on principle, to come down out of the window.
I lock the front. I check it twice, which I never do. I stand there a second in the dark and tell myself I am a grown woman who does not need to try a door twice, and then, because the day has more than earned it, I try it a third time.
Alone after close, I hear the back door open when it should be locked. Footsteps in the stacks. This time I am absolutely not imagining it.