Another problem was that Derek left town fairly often. That was fine, of course, and usually he told me where he was going. But other times, he wouldn’t say. I knew the nature of his business was often confidential, but I hadn’t realized how much information he’d have to conceal from me. It didn’t leave me with a warm, fuzzy feeling.
Ah, well, who didn’t have faults?
More guffawing from the mean girls’ table brought me back down to earth. I didn’t want to believe those women were right about me and Derek, but doubts crept in anyway. Was this a pattern of his? Was I being used as a halfway house until he got his bearings and found his own comfort zone in the city?
I mentally arm-wrestled my neuroses into submission, tossed back my hair, and strolled across the room, smiling and nodding and greeting people.
Flavor of the damn month. Hell, as long as I was this month’s flavor, I was going to be Triple Caramel Chocolate Cherry Crunch.
When I reached Derek’s side, I tucked my arm through his.
“Hello, darling,” he murmured close to my ear. “I missed you. Were you enjoying the view?”
“I was.” I smiled at him and everyone else faded into the fog. “This is a lovely party.”
“It is now,” he whispered, gazing at me. Then he turned to the small group he’d been talking to. “Gentlemen, allow me to introduce you to my lovely friend Brooklyn Wainwright.”
See? I was his lovely friend. Hmm. Well, it beat the heck out of being introduced as his flavor of the damn month.
Chapter 14
The next day was Sunday. Derek and I walked to South Park for coffee and a breakfast wrap. We were both anxious to discover whether the flash drive might be hiding somewhere inside the Kama Sutra, so I spent the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon in my workshop, taking the book apart. Derek was there, too, watching, pacing, wishing I weren’t being so meticulous, praying I would pick the book up in both hands, rip off the covers, and cut into the leather with a carving knife.
He didn’t say any of that out loud, of course, but I knew he was thinking it. I could tell by the way he was breathing in and out. Restless. Impatient. Fidgety.
But he would just have to suck it up. That wasn’t the way I worked. I especially didn’t work well while being watched. I’d never developed that ability. I tackled each step carefully, deliberately. In solitude.
Derek knew that. I think he hovered nearby simply to drive me crazy. I tried to ignore him as I used my scalpel to pick away at the edges of the endpaper covering the leather overlay. I had to be fastidious in order not to tear the endpaper, because its design was irreplaceable. Frankly, the procedure I was doing presently went against all my personal rules of minimal intervention in book reconstruction. But it had to be done. We needed answers.
As I worked, I took photographs with my digital camera to memorialize the process.
When Derek finally slid his stool even closer to mine to get a better look at what I was doing, it was the last straw.
“You’re invading my personal space,” I said, with as sweet a smile as I could summon, what with my left eye beginning to twitch and all.
“I didn’t think you’d mind.” Closing his eyes, he sniffed. “You smell good.”
“Yeah, nice try,” I said with a laugh. “The dank smell of musty vellum is intoxicating, isn’t it?”
He gazed at me. “I’m finding it so.”
I shook my head. “Don’t you have some guns to clean?”
“They’re clean,” he said with a smirk. “Besides, I get such a kick out of watching you work.”
“You get a kick out of tormenting me.”
“An attractive side benefit.”
“You just want to be here in case I find the flash drive.”
“I do indeed.”
“Fine.” I waved my hand at him. “But just… back up a little. You’re making me nervous.”
“Intriguing thought.” From the corner of my eye, I could see him grinning as he scooted his stool a few millimeters away.
As long as I was distracted, I got up and found the bag of chocolate-caramel Kisses I’d bought, popped it open, and poured them into a bowl. I worked better with chocolate.
After munching two Kisses, I picked up my scalpel and tried my best to ignore him as I made a series of tiny picks along the edges of the endpapers.
“Be careful,” he muttered. “You’ll slice your hand off.”
I eyed him. “Will you relax? A scalpel is a girl’s best friend.”
“I’d heard it was diamonds,” he murmured, but was silent after that as he watched me pull back the thin, hand-painted paper that kept the leather turn-ins in place.
Endless minutes later, the leather edge was exposed from top to bottom. Now I began the systematic scraping back of the leather from the boards. Once I’d peeled the leather off the inside cover, I could see the layers of cotton batting the original binder had used to create the padding.
Padded book covers were a popular binding style in the nineteenth century, but they weren’t in favor much anymore, thank goodness. It was time-consuming and tricky to get the batting to lie smoothly and evenly between the leather and the boards. These days, when padding was called for, some bookbinders used sheets of synthetic foam rubber, the half-life of which was still undetermined.
I was careful to keep the batting in place as I peeled away the leather. Otherwise, this would be one hellish job of reconstruction.
Despite the anxiety of the search, I took a moment to revel in the lovely scents that arose as the book revealed itself to me. Aged leather, musty vellum, old secrets, beauty. Had it known treachery? Did it suffer pain? Did a book remember? Did it feel the knife? Did my work destroy or revive? Some of both, I supposed.
“Do you see anything?” Derek asked, stirring me from my deep thoughts. “Can you feel any sort of foreign object stuck in there?”
“Not yet. I have a ways to go.” I could feel his impatience again, and I couldn’t blame him. I was in a hurry to get answers, too, but I knew I had to take care and do it right. I continued peeling, but after a while, I knew it was useless. Nothing was hidden in the batting. I’d been fairly certain of it even before I started, because the seams of the endpapers looked undamaged and unaltered. But that wasn’t necessarily definitive. A reputable bookbinder could’ve done the job, opened up the book, hidden the item, rebound the book, and made it look pristine.
“What about the spine?” he asked. “They might’ve tucked it inside there.”
“That’s where I’m going next.”
To get to the spine, I used the scalpel to slice along the inner joint. It wasn’t quite as painstaking as the earlier task, and within minutes the inner spine was separated from the text block.
“Nothing.” He slid off the stool and walked back and forth with his arms folded across his chest. “Now what?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s not your fault, love. But it’s frustrating. I was hoping the book held the key.”
“I still have to check inside the back cover.”
“Right. Of course. Let’s do it.”
I repeated the process, but twenty minutes later, we’d arrived at the same outcome. There was nothing hidden inside the Kama Sutra covers that even vaguely resembled a flash drive of any size.
I stared at the sections of book laid out on my table. “Could it be affixed to one of the pages or is it too thick?”
“Too thick,” he muttered.
“That’s what I figured, but thought I’d better ask, just in case.”
Since the pieces of the book were spread out anyway, I tore off a sheet of butcher paper from the roll I kept on the counter and laid it on my worktable. I placed the book’s pieces on the paper to help establish the “map” that would be invaluable in putting the book back together. I drew boxes around the spine and bits of leather, boxes around the threads and text block, then wrote names, notes, and details inside the boxes so I wouldn’t forget or lose track of anything. Finally, I took more photos of individual items as well as one big picture of the entire tabletop.