My store smelled of dust and acidifying paper, an oddly agreeable mixture reminiscent of potpourri and dry leaves. It was ten degrees cooler inside, and the sudden change made a chill ripple up my neck.
There was a nearly desolate sense of vacancy here, I thought, an emptiness in the despondent dark as I snapped on the lights. Again I realized just how much I'd taken my former assistant Debi Kiko Mashima for granted. She not only handled the nearly infinite number of small and irritating daily tasks about the store, but she added a genuine and often blithe liveliness to the place. I wondered if I gave her a twenty-buck raise she'd leave her new husband Bobby Li, the billionaire software writer.
I had less than five hours before the next flight upstate out of JFK. I checked my online orders and found a great deal more than I'd expected, enough to make up for whatever might have been lost by my closing down for the past few days. A part of me wanted to accept the idea that seventy-five percent of my business had nothing to do with face-to-face customer service, and another part of me didn't want to believe that so few people liked to peruse the stacks and smell the books anymore.
I thought about that photo of Teddy Harnes. Alice Conway could have lied. It might not have been him, but his amiable countenance, leaning into the camera, one arm around Alice and the other around Brian Frost's shoulders. Pulling his friends to him gave him a certain credence in my mind, as if he'd been born to make up for his father's lack of descriptive character. Alice had said, "He loved to read, and read everything he could get his hands on. He returned all the books for credit or gave them away."
I checked the art and philosophy shelves, spending a half hour glancing through books and finding nothing. Eventually I realized I had to tackle the storage room, and heartburn started edging through my chest. Dozens of sprawling stacks and a hundred boxes filled with thousands more books stood chest-high, all of it in disarray. My inventory constantly shifted and fluxed, moving in and out of storage with all the order of a lingerie fire sale. Just because some novel sat three feet at the bottom of a box didn't mean it hadn't been brought in only a week ago. Debi had kept on top of changing shelf life, but I'd let it slip into a hopeless snarl of tilting heaps.
I left the door open in case Nick Crummler had returned to the city after killing Freddy Shanks. He wouldn't abandon his brother, but he might've come back to Manhattan to regroup and figure his next step. I tried to beat him to it, but just kept seeing the vacant look on his face that somehow showed the irrepressible contempt he felt when he brought the blackjack down onto Sparky's forehead.
If he knew anything about the Grove at all, he'd know that Lowell would never stop searching for him.
I went to work.
Two and a half hours later I picked up a copy of E. A. Strehlneek's Chinese Pictorial Art, Commercial Press: Shanghai, 1914-a cloth copy I'd originally purchased at a bargain price from an auctioned lot the family of a bibliophile had let go too cheaply-light-blue silk binding over boards with gilt decoration with its original dust jacket and a seventy-three page supplement. In the same box was Raphael Petrucci's Chinese Painters: A Critical Study, 1920 cloth and boards with twenty-five illustrations in duotone. I'd priced each of the books at $200, and must've been dumbfounded to have discovered them returned for credit. It was something I shouldn't have forgotten, but I had.
Teddy had made further extensive handwritten notes in that tiny, clear print, and also drawn on the inside back covers. It amazed me he would write so much about painting and not keep the book to reread later. In the center of the Strehlneek book were several more ink drawings Teddy had done of the same woman.
I looked out at the city I'd tried to make my home despite the jealous and perpetual draw of Felicity Grove. Greenwich Village always had a vigorous disposition, the downtown culture and club kids, students, poets, insane crackheads and homeless crammed to within a few feet of each other. The museum owners, sculptors, and painters keep art in front of your face like soldiers performing a necessary but dangerous duty. Music shops kicked it out into the streets with band names I couldn't even pronounce, and the dogwalkers, Rollerbladers, and professional dominatrixes shopping at the Pink Pussycat kept you busy just making it down the sidewalks.
I sat at my desk inside a room empty except for ten billion words, and put my head back against the window and listened to the street humming as though everyone were reading aloud. Two kids in NYU sweatshirts walked in and hunted around the back stacks. I watched them grab and scarf comparative theology texts and science fiction, skimming and discussing content the way I usually did myself when I found somebody who cared. They spoke resolutely but with the absorbed manner of people in love. Enamored with each other, and with thought, and perhaps art. I could have spoken at length about C. S. Lewis and Henri Daniel-Rops, Spider Robinson, Alfred Bester, and Roger Zelazny. When they left I locked up and hailed a cab for the airport, carrying Teddy's books under my arm. I thought of the woman he kept sketching.
Who was she?
The hot breeze blowing across Lake Ontario felt like Santa Ana winds coming off a desert. In winter, the Lake Effect chill added a dozen feet of snow to the area, but in spring there were odd thermal drafts that swooped over the country and brought on stifling heat. I got off the plane already sweating, my mouth dry and thoughts full of Teddy's artwork, knowing I had to return to Panecraft.
Crummler had been trying to warn me and give up answers, and some of the slippery pieces seemed to be sliding together, if only I could hold on to them long enough.
I walked into the airport lobby to get a cab and spotted Theodore Harnes' white Mercedes limousine waiting at the curb.
Jocelyn stood on the sidewalk, facing me resolutely, holding the car door open. Sunlight caught her at just the right angle to make the slant of her hair, cheeks, and chin shimmer. She wore a silver top and black skirt slit up the side, and a businessman spun and marched into a SkyCap. Every guy within eyeshot was walking with a staggered step and looking back over his shoulder at her. She motioned for me to get into the car.
"Not even a please this time?" I asked.
The dead gaze didn't waver. "Please allow us to drive you home."
"No," I said. "I don't think so."
She simply continued staring, those lips flattened with just the right sheen laid on by her tongue, glowing and faultless as though they'd never been kissed or chewed or touched with makeup, not even once turned into a pout. That face like nothing so much as cloth or canvas, smooth and maddeningly beautiful. Her flesh so perfect. I kept searching for a solitary crease in her skin, a mark of violence or lust over the years. Had she fled Hong Kong and been a virgin on the streets of Bangkok or Rangoon or Hanoi, sold into prostitution to the highest bidder? Those hands had never been used to sew or stamp in any of Harms' factories. Did he plan for her to be the mother of more of his children? Had she been mistress of the erotic arts, used to teach Teddy the finest points of pleasure?
"Please," she repeated without inflection. "Allow us."
"No. Thanks, anyway." I got a step closer, and another, and one more until we were nearly nose-to-nose. Even her nostrils were alluring. She scratched her thigh lightly along the slit of her skirt, but didn't even leave one of those fine, chalky lines on her skin. The draft from the limo's air conditioning blasted against my legs. I could make out the silhouette of Theodore Harnes in the far corner of the back seat, sitting rigidly with his hands laid across his knees.