The Bookshop on Autumn Lane (7 page)

“Don't be silly. Every semiliterate person on this side of the pond knows him.” I looked down at the sandy hair that covered his arm and swallowed. My head was pounding and I felt the sting of frustration behind my eyelids. “We've been at this for ages. Maybe I should get started upstairs. The apartment is what really needs cleaning first.”

He studied my face. “That would be fine.”

I stepped around him and almost tripped on the children's pile, as if the books were reaching out their manacled hands on purpose.

I heard Kit behind me. “Uh, are you all right?”

“I'm getting a headache.”

“We could both use a break soon.” He followed me.

“I'm only working a bit longer, then I have to grocery-shop.”

“I'll help you get started in the living area,” he said as we reached the top of the stairs.

“Suit yourself. Maybe you should have gone into the cleaning business instead of teaching.” He ignored my grumpy comment.

Glad to have something besides words and titles to distract me, I moved aside a stack of paper grocery bags and opened a cabinet. Cleaning was not my favorite task. I was always grateful I didn't own a home to tidy. I would have to get used to the fact that I did now. At least temporarily.

Plastic cups, mugs, and glasses of all sizes lined the shelf. It was messy, but in the scheme of things it was the most normal-looking part of the apartment. Above the glasses a fine coat of dust covered the old Corelle dishes I remembered from years ago. I grabbed one of the five dish soaps under the sink and filled the basin with warm, soapy water. When I finished, I threw in the pots and pans and the utensils. Then I cleaned off the shelves. It was good to work with dishes. They had no pages or words.

Kit had cleared enough room on the couch to sit. I set the last dish in the wire rack and plopped down on the couch. “Let's take a break.” Kit sank down next to me and I raised my eyebrow. “No sneezes this time?”

“I went to the chemist and bought antihistamines before coming this morning.” Seeing the disapproval, he smiled and stretched out his long legs. “Don't get cheeky with me, now. I don't have time for homeopathic remedies. I happen to like instant relief like the rest of the world.”

“Do you know how many chemicals you put into your body with that pill?”

“Almost as many as you put on the doorknob.”

“Touché.”

“Don't speak French. It gives me indigestion.”

“Typical Brit.” Was I flirting?

He gazed at me from lowered lashes. “No need to be sarcastic now. I get the impression that you are not enjoying this.”

“Sorry, my aversion to cleaning is almost as strong as my aversion to this store.”

“What did you do for a living before you came here?”

“I worked for several touring bands and theater companies.”

“You're an actress?”

“Oh right.” I let the sarcasm drip off my words. “Do I look like an actress?”

His eyes wandered from the top of my head to my boots and I felt as if a spotlight were raking me. “Well, with your titian hair and dark eyes you do remind me a bit of that actress who starred in that movie about the, ahh—lady of the night. The one who lived in the hotel with the man and then she turned classy.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. But I loved the word
titian.

“There was that scene with her in the tub and headphones on.”

“You mean
Pretty Woman
?”

“That sounds like the one.”

“Ha! An old boyfriend used to say the same thing. But my hair is much redder and, well—my boobs don't even have cleavage half the time.”

“Yes they do. I mean, no!” He removed his glasses, trying not to look at my chest and I saw a hint of red creeping up his neck. “So . . . you aren't an actress. What exactly do you do in these theater companies?”

“I'm a techie. I run the light boards and help with the sound engineering. Sometimes I even help the carpenters with the set design.”

Surprise split his face into a smile. “Really?”

“You sound like you don't believe me. Girls can be mechanics and engineers these days, Professor.”

He dismissed my tone. “No. It's just that—pardon me if this sounds like I'm whinging, but aren't plays part of the arts, like books and literature? Your idea to toss these books in the trash is a bit like throwing your livelihood in the trash, isn't it?”

“I suppose you could think about it that way. But plays and movies are alive. At least to me. Books and I don't get along, though. My aunt always forced these super-boring books down my throat. I was here less than two years, but it was awful. She never owned a television or let me go to the movies in Gaylord. It was always ‘sit and read.' ” I did a fairly good imitation of my aunt. She had been a large-boned woman with buggy eyes and a shrill voice that still popped into my dreams, turning them into nightmares.

He was quiet for a moment. “Maybe she wanted you to learn to love books. Lots of people do. I do.”

I slapped him on the knee. “I won't hold that against you.” Beneath my fingers, I felt surprisingly well-defined quadriceps. I lifted my hand, trying not to let him see how his nearness affected me.

“So, tell me about this aunt of yours. If you disliked her so much, how is it you came to inherit the store?”

I put my head on the back of the couch and stared at the ceiling. “It was revenge.”

“I don't quite follow.”

“When my mom died, my emotionally challenged father dumped my brother and me on my great-aunt Gertrude. He had to return to duty overseas. Never having raised kids herself, she was at a loss with teenagers. My brother was seventeen by then. Able to fend for himself. But me, I was thirteen. Almost fourteen. Awkward. Used to being among other girls who understood the perils of being uprooted by the military every year.” I was also disappointingly stupid. At least, that's what my aunt said. I now knew what my condition was called. But back then, I had never been in one school long enough for anyone to figure it out.

“Why didn't she give the store to someone else? Your brother or your dad?”

I didn't want to talk about Leo. “It would have made sense to give the store to my father. But Dad remarried and then retired back in the States. If there was one person Aunt Gertrude hated more than me, it was Dad's new wife.”

“That bad?”

“No. She's a sweetheart. But she isn't American. Aunt Gertrude thought she married Dad for a visa.”

“Blasted foreigners. So, I guess you were the only logical choice.”

“If she were nicer, Aunt Gertrude would have given it to the town. But revenge was more her style. Even in death she wants me to read.”

“So . . .” He frowned at the glasses in his hands. I probably sounded ungrateful. “Your aunt never married? I heard some rumor about a writer in town . . .”

“Oh, that. Yeah. It's crazy, but Aunt Gertrude had an affair with a famous writer when she was younger. Have you ever heard of Robin Hartchick?” It always freaked me out to imagine Aunt Gertrude having sex. To me, she was nothing but a prune with female parts. But she actually had a lover once. Good thing I had already finished my coffee, because picturing Aunt Gertrude in the same bed I slept in—doing stuff—well, it would have made me gag.

“What happened?”

I laughed. “She was dumped!”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I'm almost positive that he was the only lover she ever had.”

“That's very sad.”

“She was like twenty when the affair happened. I haven't thought about it for a long time. I guess she was younger than I am now.”

“A young, impressionable small-town woman and a worldly author. One could almost feel sorry for her.”

“If you knew Aunt Gertrude, you'd feel more sorry for
him
.”

Kit gazed at me with a strange intensity. “You don't mean that.”

I wanted to stick his glasses back on. Maybe it was easy to understand the power an attractive, worldly male could have on a young woman. The difference was that I was older and more experienced than Aunt Gertrude had been. If I wanted to—which I didn't—I could have a fling and move on without being wounded in the least. But I was in a long celibate phase of my life at the moment.

Kit studied his fingernails. “Robin Hartchick. Come to think of it, I did hear he spent his summers in Michigan.
Spring Solstice
is considered one of the greatest pieces of twentieth-century fiction. He wrote only one book . . . supposedly.” He paused. “She never heard from him again?”

“Well, duh. It was Aunt Gertrude. Nobody with half a brain would stick around. He's dead, of course. A one-hit wonder. A boring writer.”

He rubbed his chin. “His book was a rather important shift in American literature.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Why do you know so much about it?”

“Everyone has read Robin Hartchick.”

Except me. I stared at his profile. Without his glasses on, he was perfect. Aquiline nose, ridge at the forehead. Strong jaw. Kit bloody Bond!

If I was going to spend more time in Truhart, at least I had something better to look at than a bunch of books.

I
stood before a disappointing organic-produce section and tried to decide where to start. It had been a while since I had access to a full kitchen. In my cart were several cans of beans, whole-wheat tortillas, and a box of organic soy-grain bars. I threw a bag of carrots and celery in and wondered if the Family Fare had polenta or tofu.

“Do you think she needs help?” Two ladies huddled at the end of the aisle, heads together, trying to keep their voices low. I heard them anyway.

“Marva says Gertrude spent hours trying to teach her how to read. She didn't never get it right.”

“Maybe we should ask if she needs help.”

I gripped the handle of the grocery cart. Forget the tofu. Moby was waiting patiently in Lulu. I would grab whichever bag of dog food looked like it was healthy and get out of here.

“I heard she was sleeping in her car, of all places—”

I didn't stick around to hear the rest. My ears were ringing enough already. Fortunately, the dog food was on the opposite side of the store. I passed the dairy items, until I was at the pet aisle. Then I scanned the bags for the senior dog food. My budget was limited, but I couldn't bring myself to scrimp on Moby's food. He was somewhere around nine or ten years old. An octogenarian. I could eat cheaply and be fine. He needed better nutrition. Someday I would find him the perfect family. One with green fields and sheep and lots of money.

“Can I help you find anything?”

There she was again. Marva. The owner of the pink-rimmed glasses I had admired just yesterday, stood behind me. Had she been following me?

“Nope, I'm all set.” I grabbed a bag of dog chow with the words
all natural
in large block letters and I brushed past her in search of the checkout.

I made a circle around several customers who were milling in front of a Halloween display and pulled my cart up to the cash register. I was almost finished unloading the items in my cart when the checkout lady asked, “Do you have a super-saver shopping card?”

I weighed the advantage of getting a saver card against the benefit of getting out of the store unscathed. “How do I get one?”

Marva appeared beside the cashier. My eyes wandered to the toucan pictures printed on her pants. She adjusted her glasses and took a form from behind the register. In a slow voice that was even louder than when she had been in the dog-food aisle, she explained the process. “I can fill this out for you, honey. Just give me your information. Or better yet, your license. That has all the information we need.”

She was trying to be nice. But it felt condescending. An old breathless feeling rose in my chest. “It's all right. I can fill it out.”

She held the form closer to her chest. “No problem at all,” she said, nodding her head at two customers who appeared behind me. “You ladies don't mind if we take a little time here, do you?”

I turned to see two gray-haired sisters—they looked like twins—standing behind me. “Oh, we don't have anything going on today. Do we, Brenda?”

“Well, we are supposed to—”

“Like I said, nothing at all,” said her sister.

“Thanks, Barbara.” Marva nodded and straightened her purple smock.

“Yeah, thanks a lot, Barbara,” I said. She smiled, failing to hear the irony in my tone.

Marva pushed her glasses up on top of her head and leaned down, resting her elbows on the conveyor belt.

“Name. I got this part. Gertrude Brown, right?”

“How
did
you remember me?”

“Address? The bookstore, right?” Her glasses slipped off her head to her nose. She pushed them back to the top of the head. “You wouldn't happen to remember the address—no, never mind. I can look it up. I'll just leave this blank—.”

“Sixteen Main Street.”

She seemed to doubt my memory. “We'll see. And not to confuse you, but we're changing the name to Autumn Lane. Just for October. I wanted it to be called Haunted Avenue. But Annie Adler and Flo Jarvis thought the youngsters might be scared and well . . .” She caught my blank stare and cleared her throat. “And your e-mail address?”

“I don't have one.”

Her eyes popped. “
What
?”

“I don't have one.” What was the point in telling her I thought that the internet and e-mailing were a waste of time?

“Do you have a phone number?”

“Yes.” I gave her my non–smart cell phone number and declined to tell her it was a pay-as-you-go model. I always forgot to charge it.

“Birth date.”

“Look, how many questions are on that form?” If it weren't for the dog food I would have torn it in two and left.

“This is the last one, honey. Don't worry.” She tilted her head and sent an ‘I told you so' look to the women in back of me.

I gave her my birth date.

“A Halloween baby. How interesting!”

“And I'm twenty-seven years old!” I added. She nodded her head, glad that I could add.

She stepped away and I sighed, relieved to have that little pity party over with. “Here you go, Ginger.” She let the checkout lady scan the zebra code. “And there are coupons for that dog food too. So you will save seven dollars and thirty cents.”

“That was forty-five dollars and twenty cents. Now it's less seven dollars and thirty cents.” She could have hosted a children's TV show with that slow and deliberate voice she was using on me. She pointed at the final price on the screen in front of me. Numbers were sometimes as bad as letters. If she had just told me the final amount, I would have been fine.

I felt cold sweat at the back of my neck. It joined the invisible belt that was cinching my chest, making me breathless. I longed for my car and Moby and a long stretch of road.

I pulled out a flowered change purse. It had been my mother's. My hand shook. I lifted out several twenties and placed them on the belt. “I don't have any change,” I said at the same time that all my change decided to drop out of the purse, bounce onto the counter, and fall to the floor.

“Of course, that happened,” I said, reaching down to pick up the coins at my feet.

The lady behind me said, “Count it out for her, Ginger. Poor thing—”

When I straightened up, Ginger was holding up a few bills in her hand. “Don't worry, I'll make change for the twenties.”

“I can do it—” I started to say. But she was already handing me my two singles and a dime. “That is two dollars and ten cents change.” She smiled brightly and sent the ladies a dazzling grin, as if she had just managed to save an entire third-world country.

“Thanks,” I responded flatly. One of the twins behind me clucked at my rude tone.

Wheeling the cart and the dog food out the door, I hit a sharp downward slope by the curb. Rather than let the cart get away from me, I stepped on the back and took a joyride before it came to a stop near the handicapped spaces. The ladies watched me from the automatic double doors. I had just reinforced their views on my mental state.

When I was little, I combated those kind of looks by sticking out my tongue. I was tempted to do it now. But Moby whined from Lulu's open window and stuck his own tongue out for me.

I loaded my groceries onto the floor of the backseat. Moby sniffed the air above them and put his nose inside a bag.

“Don't get any ideas.”

His tongue orbited the outside of his mouth and he made no attempt to cover his thoughts. Thinking better of my grocery placement, I pulled a bag off the floor and put it in the front seat where I could keep an eye on it. It was then that I noticed the truck that sat in the parking-lot lane in front of me.

At first I couldn't believe what I was looking at: A garbage truck with what appeared to be teddy bears, plastered all over it. And they thought
I
was crazy? I stomped my foot at the ridiculous way the driver had parked. I had been so careful to position Lulu facing out, like I always did. But whoever owned this absurd-looking truck had parked right across Lulu's front bumper. Like everything else in my day, things were not going as planned.

There was no one in the driver's seat of the truck. I gazed back at the front of the Family Fare. No garbage men with stuffed animal fetishes were anywhere in sight. The spectators were still standing by the doors. They had no idea how much better this show was about to get.

I clutched Pikachu, wishing there was some way to make this look normal.

I shifted Lulu in neutral and unlocked the emergency break to release it. Then I jumped out of the car and began the sadly familiar routine of manually reversing my car. I moved to the front bumper, grimacing at the fact that it was dust-covered and bug-splattered. Lulu needed a bath.

The proximity of the cars parked behind me meant that there wasn't enough room to do it with one try. Once the front bumper was clear of the car next to me, I walked back and turned the steering wheel. “I don't suppose you could be useful and learn how to do this,” I said to the dog, who waited patiently for me to complete my reverse. Then I returned to hugging the front bumper and pushed the car again. Lulu moved into the aisle of the parking lot just as a sheriff's SUV pulled up behind me. Pretending it was perfectly normal to push a car out of a parking spot, I kept my head down and completed the job.

As I moved back to the driver's door, expecting to get arrested any second now, I heard a deep voice ask, “Everything okay, ma'am?”

I was surprised by the sympathetic eyes of the young officer leaning out the window of his SUV. Next to him sat a curly-headed blonde. She said something to the officer and he exited the SUV.

“Can I help?” he asked. “I can call for a tow.”

“No. I'm fine now.”

“Did you stall? Need a jump?” His eyes traveled from the front bumper to the back and the lopsided grin on his face showed an appreciation for my vintage yellow Beetle.

“No. She's just a little quirky, that's all.”

His eyes strayed to the blonde in the passenger's seat. “Quirky, huh? I know how that goes.”

The blonde waved. She was about my age. The officer could barely take his eyes off her. I patted Lulu. “Worth the inconvenience, though.”

He started to say something, then he caught himself and was back to business. “I'm Deputy Sheriff Hardy. You must be Trudy Brown.”

Instead of letting his assumption offend me, I smiled. “I guess word of my unconventional arrival has already spread through town.”

“Some of our most highly respected residents have made unconventional arrivals.” Judging by the glint in his eyes, I wondered if he was referring to someone close to him.

“J. D. . . .” the blonde warned from the SUV.

He put his hands in his pockets and pretended he didn't hear her. “If you ever need to get her checked out, you'll find the doc on M-33, a quarter-mile down from Main Street.”

“The doc?”

“The name on the front window is Auto Doctor. But we just call it Doc's. His garage doesn't look like much, but he can work wonders.”

“I'll make sure to remember that. Thanks.”

A single high-pitched bark came from the car.

“Nice dog.” He moved back to his SUV.

“You want him? He's looking for a home,” I offered.

“I've got my hands full already.” The blonde said something and he laughed.

As I left the parking lot, I glanced at the front door of the Family Fare. Several faces still watched me. I stuck out my tongue after all.

I drove away, triumphant. Ten minutes later, Lulu hit a rut and began to putter out.

* * *

“Aww, I hate to see a dead bug.” A familiar-looking white-haired man said, coming out of the garage holding a bag of candy corn.

“What are you talking about? You make a game out of killing flies with the Shop-Vac,” said a stocky young man who followed him.

“Jesus, Richard, what year were you born again?”

“That's a little detail I thought you would remember, Dad,” the young man bit back.

While the two argued, I put Lulu in neutral and grasped the emergency brake. My brave car had struggled in gasping fits on the two-lane state highway until we finally made it to the Auto Doctor. She still had life in her, but she was like an old lady. The miles she had traveled since California had forced her into the slow lane.

Moby jumped to the front seat and wagged his tail at the sight of two new friends. I stuck my head out the open window. “Remember me?”

“Hey, it's the vegan.”

“Murdock, right?”

“Actually, that's just what my big sister, Corinne, calls me. Most people call me Doc.”

With his receding white hair, height, and large nose that might have been broken a time or three, the name fit him better. “Doc it is. I'll steer if you don't mind pushing her.”

He helped me move Lulu into the empty bay in the garage. I secured the brake. When I stepped out of the car, the young man gawked at my boots and vintage jacket. But Doc never took his eyes off Lulu.

“Is that a super-Beetle?”

“What?” A third mechanic rolled out from underneath a Chevy. I remembered him too. The man who wore the matching gray coveralls at the diner. Vance. At the sight of Lulu, Vance's eyes lit up and he dropped his tools. “Joe O'Shea told me he saw one in town yesterday. Seventy-four?”

“Seventy-three,” I said.

Still on his back, he rolled the creeper toward the bug and looked under the chassis. “Original floor pan and suspension?”