Chapter Twenty
CHAPTER
Twenty
ONLY A FEW hours later, Cassandra finds herself tucked into a corner of what must be the world’s frilliest and pinkest tea rooms, trying not to surreptitiously pick at the textured gingham wallpaper. Opposite her, Lowell is aggressively studying the menu, a frown puckering his forehead.
She leans back and catches a glimpse of his car parked on the kerb, Chiron’s rusty bicycle jammed into the back, along with the ledger—and the cat.
They hadn’t intended to bring the cat with them—for one, its instant dislike of Lowell was deterrent enough—but it had followed them out to the car, jumped into the back and promptly fallen asleep.
Does it count as stealing if the book insists on going with them? Cassandra had mused.
“You could have just dropped me off at the station,” she says.
Lowell shakes his head, still looking at the menu. “We need to talk.”
Cassandra eyes him suspiciously. Every “talk” they’ve had so far has narrowed down to her unsuitability as an owner. That Chiron’s bookshop should be in better hands. Lowell’s hands.
Maybe it’s not about the bookshop at all. Maybe he’d recognised Roth’s voice, the way she had.
Her lungs seize. Maybe he knows.
“Pick a tea,” he says, handing the menu to her. “I personally recommend the Earl Grey.”
She searches his face for signs of an ulterior motive. But for once, the frown on Lowell’s face isn’t targeted at her. And if he’d wanted to confront her, surely he wouldn’t have brought her here to demand answers?
Roth has made her paranoid, she decides.
“Fine,” she says, relenting.
Lowell orders the tea, and although Cassandra’s attention keeps wandering—she’s just so tired—it snaps back when she realises the waitress is flirting with him. Cassandra glances at Lowell, but either he doesn’t notice, or he’s working hard to feign disinterest.
For a while, they’re both quiet, but for once it feels peaceful rather than unsettling.
There are no whispering books here to fill the gap, no profound wrongness to spear Cassandra through the heart.
It’s been a while, she realises, since she sat down and let herself simply breathe.
Not since Roth brought her to his flat to read, and maybe even before then, when there was no target on her back.
The waitress sets down the teapots, and an array of scones. Lowell pushes the plate towards her.
“Eat,” he says.
Cassandra hesitates. Despite her efforts, the bookshop’s only just making enough money to cover costs. She can barely afford to pay Byron, never mind splash out on luxuries like scones.
“It’s on me,” he says, a little more irritably. “So eat, please. You look…” He waves his hand at her. “I don’t want you to faint.”
“I’m not going to faint,” she snaps.
But she really is famished, so she pulls one towards her, while Lowell pours tea for them both.
She allows herself a surreptitious glance, and Lowell’s eyes flick to hers.
She breaks away, biting the inside of her cheek hard.
But when he turns to set the teapot down, she finds herself looking at him again.
There’s something so study-able about him, like a puzzle she’s yet to find the edges on.
Every time she thinks she has the measure of him, something slips from her grasp.
After the reading at the Templetons, she’d believed him a selfish bastard.
After all, why go after someone else’s bookshop, and so aggressively?
Even if it was on the grounds of her incompetence, there’s little reason to care about what happens to another bookshop.
Then the auction had thrown her, and she’d had to concede that maybe he wasn’t a complete bastard all the time.
This Lowell—offering her scones, pouring tea for her, willing to let her steal from a fellow owner—is totally unknown to her. Another side of the dice, again.
After the clink of teapots and shooing of the overly helpful waitress, Cassandra waits for Lowell to broach the difficult subject of the “talk.” She doesn’t have to wait long.
“Do you know who those men were?” he asks.
Cassandra doesn’t hesitate. “No.”
If Lowell doesn’t know about Roth, then she’ll keep it that way.
Lowell’s no fool, and connecting herself to Roth leaves an opening for a lot of uncomfortable questions.
Her mind turns back to Roth’s insistence on the reading, and his fury when Cassandra had refused. Confronting her at the bookshop.
Somewhere between the first time she met him, and that night at his flat, something had changed. Now, to find him seeking out owners, breaking into a tributary bookshop when he’s not supposed to know about the river at all—
“Do you know who they were?” she asks, buying time to slather cream onto a scone.
Lowell hesitates just a fraction of a second. “No.”
“But?” she prompts.
“It’s extremely difficult to become the owner of a tributary bookshop. Under normal circumstances, I mean,” he adds, and she knows they’re both thinking of Chiron’s letter, and how easy it had been to fill his place. “But there are other ways to… expedite someone’s departure.”
Now it’s Cassandra’s turn to raise her eyebrows. “Murder?”
Lowell doesn’t look at her. “Maybe.”
Chiron.
For a second, she almost tells him about it all: the invitation, Roth, Maud’s warning. The awful suggestion of Chiron’s murder. Just to share the weight on her shoulders, if only for a second.
Then she remembers: do you ever consider that sometimes you’re wrong? About a person?
Lowell might think he already has the measure of her, but she’s still finding her way around him, she realises. She has no idea who he really is. What he’s capable of.
All she knows is that he wants Chiron’s bookshop, maybe badly enough to cross a line. To do something terrible.
“You never said how you knew Chiron,” she says, a little more sharply than she intended.
Lowell studies the table in front of him. “I was wondering when you would ask.”
His sombre tone takes her aback. Maybe he really is about to confess to murder.
“I knew of him, but I’d never met him. Not until—well—” He levels his gaze at her. “No one else knows about this. And… it would be better if it stayed that way.”
Cassandra tilts her head in acknowledgement. He doesn’t have to know that she’s not promising anything.
“It was a few weeks before he died. I was up later than normal, working in the back office, and I—oh, I don’t know how else to put this.” He sighs. “He tried to steal from the bookshop.”
Cassandra snorts. “Be serious.”
Chiron, a thief? She’d sooner see Roth offer a sincere apology. To even attempt to steal from another bookshop is sacrilege. And picturing Chiron capable of theft is like trying to capture the entirety of the river. Incomprehensible.
“Maybe you got the wrong impression,” she says. “Or there was a miscommunication. He’s no thief.”
Lowell isn’t smiling. “I wouldn’t have believed it either, but I caught him.”
“So what did he try to steal?”
If he was stealing at all. She can’t believe she’s even entertaining this discussion.
“A couple of books—”
“Well, obviously.”
“—on rare inks,” Lowell continues. “I have no idea how he knew we had them; we hadn’t even catalogued them yet. But he knew, and he wanted them.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t someone else?” Cassandra insists. “Or—”
“Christ, Cassandra,” Lowell snaps, raising his voice. “It was him, okay?”
The waitress looks up at them hopefully, but seeing Lowell’s glare, backs away.
With obvious effort, Lowell lowers his voice. “It was him. I wish it wasn’t.”
Chiron, a thief. Cassandra tries to swallow her misgivings, her insistence that Lowell has to be wrong, and this is just one of his tests that she’s failing.
If Chiron was compelled to steal, then perhaps he was bowing to a pressure greater than himself.
Though she can’t imagine that happening, either.
“Do you still have the books?” she asks, not quite conceding.
“No.” He shrugs. “Someone bought them a couple of weeks later. Chiron was a clumsy thief. I don’t think he was habitually breaking into other bookshops,” he adds, as though that would make it better. “Then his letter arrived. You know the rest.”
No, Cassandra thinks. She thought she’d known the rest, or most of it. Now, she has no idea.
Lowell’s studying the menu again, as though it could solve all their problems. Maybe it’s his bowed shoulders, or the ink-black crown of his head, but Cassandra is violently transported to the Templetons’ estate, Lowell leaning over to break the spell.
Of course, he was merely dissolving the story’s hold over them all, but in the moment, his head bent, his hands pressed on either side of the young woman’s pillow, it hadn’t looked like that at all.
For a second, he’d been every inch the handsome knight to the slumbering princess—while Cassandra stood outside the fairy tale’s circle, watching.
Just as Lowell raises his head, she realises her fingers are pressed against her lips, as if remembering his kiss on the Templeton daughter’s behalf. Hastily, she stows her hands in her pockets. She’s thought entirely too much about the physicality of Lowell Sharpe today.
“He talked a lot about the river,” he says, interrupting Cassandra’s thoughts. “The book had something to do with it. That’s all I could get out of him.”
Which means the bookshop below. Cassandra suppresses a shudder. Her dreams have been full of that haunted place, the shadows clutching at her while she cries out for help that never comes. She’d rather take on Roth, if the choice was there. But it’s Chiron.