“What is all this?” Jim asked. “What are you doing?”
“I’m giving you what I can of your wife and daughter before they went,” Veronica said. “Now, if you’ll just…” She raised and lowered one hand, an almost dismissive gesture.
“Trix, I don’t like-”
“Jim!” Trix snapped from the backseat. If her voice had been angry or impatient, he might have argued. But Jim could see that she was crying.
“Jenny’s hungry. She’s got lunch on her mind. But Jonathan sees what Holly really wants. He knows even as they pass the bookshop, and Holly slips away from her mother, pressing her face to the window. There’s a display of fairy books there. She already has some-she has three of them-but there are two others she’s always wanted. I’ll get us a table, Jonathan says, and Jenny smiles at him and nods. I won’t be long. She follows Holly inside. The smell of new books, coffee from the Starbucks upstairs in the shop, the sound of gentle conversation at the counter. Pages flip, books thump closed. Holly is already past the counter and at the kids’ section, and she has a book in each hand, deciding which to read.”
Veronica fell silent and her expression slowly changed. Gone was the gentle smile as she relayed Holly’s supposed behavior earlier that day. In its place was something like resignation.
“What happened next?” Jim asked, because he did believe, really. It wasn’t that he knew the story, but the subtleties were accurate: Holly’s delight at the fairy books, Jenny’s eagerness to get her daughter fed before shopping, Jonathan’s surprising perceptiveness for a guy who’d never wanted kids. She couldn’t be making this up.
“A book falls from the shelves,” the old woman said. “Jenny reaches for it, wonders, Why the hell did that one tumble, there’s no one to push it, there’s no reason- And then…” Veronica looked up at him again, and for a second there was a smile in her eyes. “Jonathan is back at home. The falling book is on its shelf, and your wife has never touched it.”
Jim breathed heavily, trying to process what she had said, and what she was still saying. “I don’t understand.”
“We must go there,” Veronica said. “That’s not always essential, but it can help. You need to feel the place to know it.”
“Copley Place?” he asked. The old woman nodded, and in the backseat Trix was looking at him expectantly. Jim pushed the door closed and stood alone on the street for a moment, cold, getting damp again from the fine rain. It’s where they were headed when I last saw them, so why the hell not? he thought. But as he got in and started the car, he knew there was more to it than that. He would go because Veronica had suggested it. And she knew.
The old woman sat quietly beside him as he drove, hands still crossed in her lap, and he adjusted the rearview mirror so that he could see Trix.
“You all right?” he asked. Trix caught his eye and nodded. She even offered him a smile that said, Yes, fine now. He thought of standing on that traffic island pleading with the patterned cobbles for help, and the rain, and the long wait in the restaurant while Veronica dealt with some other city emergency.
“So what makes you the Oracle of Boston?” he asked. He heard an intake of breath from the backseat.
“Long story,” Veronica said.
“Well, it’ll take a few minutes to-”
“And private.”
“Right.” Jim pressed his lips together and flicked on the wipers. The rain was growing heavy again, and Boston’s evening streets demanded his attention. Dueling taxicabs jockeyed for position as they took couples and friends out for the evening. Other cars lined up at traffic signals, pedestrians dashed across the streets, and horns erupted here and there as impatience settled and tempers flared. You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have patience, he’d read somewhere once, and he leaned on the car horn for no reason.
Veronica turned to look directly at him. “Breathe, Mr. Banks,” she said. “I’ll do all I can.”
“Why Copley Square?” Jim asked. “Are Jenny and Holly still there?”
“Nowhere near. But you know that.”
“Then we should be going where they are!”
“You understand, Jim. You’re just trying hard not to.”
“Then fucking make me understand!”
“Jim!” Trix said from the backseat, but fear and anger had Jim now, and such emotions combined brought out the worst in people.
“Learn patience, Jim,” Veronica said, as if she’d known what he was just thinking. “I need to see where they were before they went, even if you do not. I need to… taste the air. It will help me pin down their location.”
Jim scoffed but said nothing. Tears pressed against his eyes and throat, and he did his best to swallow them down. They were as useless as drops in a rainstorm. “But you’ll help me find them?” he said finally.
“I have every intention of setting you on the right path.”
Jim nodded, and a tear streaked down his right cheek. Veronica saw it. He didn’t know how he knew that, but the air in the car seemed to soften. But perhaps that was just him. The trials of driving through a busy Boston possessed him for a while, and each time he looked in the mirror he saw Trix, light splaying across her bright hair, eyes sad, face shadowed with confusion and grief. We’ve both got to hold it together, he thought. And so far, she’s done more than I have to find Holly and Jenny.
“Thank you for helping,” he said softly, glancing across at the old woman. “And I’m sorry about…” He shrugged.
“Oh! A thank-you. Well, that’s an even better start.”
It took another ten minutes to wend their way toward Copley Square. They passed Boston Common, rolling along Beacon Street, then cut left along Clarendon, finding a parking space opposite the First Baptist Church.
“It’s Borders, on the corner,” Veronica said. She was breathing more heavily now, and Jim noticed that her skin had taken on a sickly pallor.
“Are you okay, Miss Braden?” Trix asked, leaning over from the backseat.
“I’m fine,” the old lady said. She took a few breaths, seeming to gather herself, and then offered Jim a small smile. “When there’s a trauma to the city, I suffer a little myself.”
“A trauma to the city?” he asked.
“I’ll explain when we’re there.”
Jim glanced at his watch. Almost ten p.m. “It’ll be closing in a minute.”
“Not tonight,” Veronica said. “Tonight it will remain open until almost ten-fifteen.” She checked the side mirror, then opened the door, standing up with an audible groan.
“Jim,” Trix said as soon as Veronica let the door swing shut, “you’ve got to give her a chance. You must! Believe me, this is the only thing-”
“We’re here now,” he said. “This is where they came. And the things she said about Holly, those fairy books…” He shook his head. “She couldn’t know that.”
“So you’ll give her a chance?”
“It’s what I’m doing, isn’t it?” It came out harsher than he’d intended, but when he and Trix got out of the car he smiled at her, and she nodded. She knew him so well, and even with everything that was happening, she’d know that Jim would struggle to hold on to reason. Though an artist, he was also a pragmatist, an atheist, and a skeptic when it came to the supernatural or anything associated with it.
“She’ll amaze you,” Trix said. “Come on. She’s going.”
They followed Veronica along the street, and Jim was surprised when Trix clasped his hand. He took great comfort from the contact, and as he realized it was because she was afraid, he acknowledged his own fear as well.
Entering the shop, breathing in warmth and the familiar smell of new books, he wondered what they would find.
It was almost as if he had walked this way before. He had, of course, many times in the past. He and Jenny were both big readers, though their tastes differed-she loved thrillers, historical novels, and real-life stories, while he preferred biographies and science fiction. When they came into town they often spent an hour in one bookstore or another, enjoying watching Holly browse the books, buying a couple here and there, maybe progressing to the cafe for coffee and a shortbread, and sitting to check out their purchases. But this time was different. Veronica had said only a few sentences about Holly and Jenny being here, but the picture conjured in his mind was complete. He was walking in his missing family’s footsteps.