chapter EIGHTEEN
• SAM •
“This is where the magic happens,” Cole said. “Are you going to put on your leotard now?”
We were by the back entrance to the Crooked Shelf, the bookstore where I sometimes lived. I’d slept badly with the thunderstorm, and after last night’s news, I hadn’t wanted to come in to work, but there had been no way to get off my shift on such short notice. So in I went. I had to admit that the normalcy of it was assuaging my anxiety a little. Well, except for Cole. Every other day, I had left Cole behind when I went to work, and hadn’t thought much of it. But this morning, I’d looked over while I was packing up and had seen him silently watching me getting ready to go, and I’d asked him if he wanted to come along. I didn’t yet regret letting him come with me, but the morning was still young.
Cole squinted up at me from the base of the short stairs, arms braced on either stair rail, his hair a concerted mess. The uncomplicated morning light made him look disarming and at ease. Camouflage.
I echoed, “My leotard?”
“Yeah, your superhero shit,” Cole said. “Sam Roth, werewolf by night, book retail specialist by day. Don’t you need a cape for that?”
“Yes,” I replied, unlocking the door. “Literacy rate in this country’s appalling; you need a cape to even sell a cookbook. You’re going to stay in the back if someone comes in, right?”
“No one’s going to recognize me in a bookstore,” Cole said. “Is the front of the store as crappy looking as the back?”
All of the stores on Main shared the same back alley, cluttered with spray-painted Dumpsters, weeds that looked like half-grown saplings, and plastic bags that had escaped death to tangle around the bases of staircases. Nobody came this way but owners and staff; I liked the disrepair because it was so far gone I didn’t feel I had to try to clean it up.
“Nobody ever sees this part,” I said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s pretty.”
“So it’s like track six on an album,” Cole said. He smirked at some private joke. “So what’s the plan, Stan?”
I pushed open the back door. “Plan? I have to work until noon. Isabel is supposed to come by sometime before then to tell me what she’s found out since last night. Then, maybe, I’ll put a bag on your head and we’ll get lunch.”
The back room was a mess of papers and boxes waiting to be put out for the trash. I had no taste for tidiness, and Karyn, the owner, had an arcane system of filing that made sense to no one but her. The first time Grace had seen the disorder, she’d been visibly horrified. Cole, on the other hand, just thoughtfully examined a box cutter and a stack of rubber-banded bookmarks while I turned the lights on.
“Put those back where you found them,” I said.
As I did the business of opening up the store, Cole stalked around after me, his hands folded behind his back like a boy who’d been told not to break anything. He looked profoundly out of place here, a polished, aggressive predator moving amongst sunlit shelves that seemed folksy in comparison. I wondered if it was a conscious decision, his projected attitude, or if it was a by-product of the person within. And I wondered how someone like him, a furious sun, was going to survive in someplace like Mercy Falls.
With Cole’s intent eyes on me, I felt self-conscious as I unlocked the front door, set up the register, turned on the music overhead. I doubted that he really appreciated the aesthetics of the store, but I felt a small, fierce bit of pride as he looked around. There was so much of me here.
Cole’s attention was on the carpeted stairs near the back of the store. He asked, “What’s upstairs?”
“Poetry and some special editions.” Also, memories of me and Grace that were too piercing to relive at the moment.
Cole pulled a chick lit novel from an endcap, studied it vaguely, and put it back. He’d been here five minutes and he was already restless. I glanced at my watch, looking to see how long I had until Karyn arrived to relieve me. Four hours suddenly seemed like a very long time. I tried to remember the philanthropic impulse that had driven me to bring Cole.
Just then, as I turned toward the checkout counter, I caught an image out of the corner of my eye. It was one of those brief glances where you’re amazed, afterward, at how much you’ve managed to see during the brief second of eye contact. One of those glances that should’ve been just a forgotten blur but was instead a snapshot. And the snapshot was this: Amy Brisbane, Grace’s mother, walking past the big glass picture window of the bookstore toward her art studio. She held one arm across her chest, gripping the strap of her purse as if each jerky stride might pull it free from her shoulder. She wore a gauzy, pale scarf and that blank expression people put on when they want to become invisible. And I knew, right then, from that face, that she had heard about the dead girl in the woods, and she was wondering if it was Grace.
I should tell her it wasn’t.
Oh, but there were a multitude of small crimes the Brisbanes had committed. I could easily bring back the memory of Lewis Brisbane’s fist connecting with my face in a hospital room. Of being thrown out of their house in the middle of the night. Of going precious days without seeing Grace because they’d suddenly discovered parenting principles. I’d had so little, and they’d taken it from me.
But that face Amy Brisbane wore — I could still see it in my mind, even though her marionette strides had taken her past the storefront.
They had told Grace I was just a fling.
I bumped a fist into my palm again and again, torn. I was aware that Cole was watching me.
That blank face — I knew it was the same one I was wearing these days.
They’d made her last days as a human, as Grace, miserable. Because of me.
I hated this. I hated knowing what I wanted and knowing what was right and knowing that they weren’t the same thing.
“Cole,” I said, “watch the store.”
Cole turned, an eyebrow raised.
God, I didn’t want to do this. Part of me wanted Cole to refuse and thus make my decision for me. “No one will come in. I’ll only be a second. I promise.”
Cole shrugged. “Knock yourself out.”
I hesitated one more second, wishing that I could just pretend it was someone else I’d seen walking on the sidewalk. After all, it had only been a face, half-hidden by a scarf, glimpsed for a second. But I knew what I’d seen.
“Don’t burn anything down!” I pushed out the front door onto the sidewalk. I had to look away from the sudden brightness; the sun had only been able to peek in the front windows of the store, but outside, it came long and brilliant down the street. Squinting, I saw that Grace’s mother had already made it most of the way down the block.
I hurried over the uneven sidewalk after her, pulled up short by two middle-aged ladies cackling over steaming coffee cups and then by a leathery old woman smoking in front of the thrift store and finally by a woman pushing a sidewalk-eating double stroller.
I had to run then, overly aware of Cole minding the store during my absence. Grace’s mother hadn’t even paused before crossing the street. I paused, breathless, on the corner, to let a pickup truck go by, before catching up with her in the shady alcove in front of her purple studio. Up close, she was a molting parrot; her hair was frizzily escaping from a band, one side of her blouse was tucked unevenly into her skirt, and the scarf I’d seen earlier had pulled free so that it was far longer on one side than the other.
“Mrs. Brisbane,” I said, my voice catching as my lungs sucked in a breath. “Wait.”
I wasn’t sure what expression I was expecting her to wear when she saw that it was me. I’d braced myself for disgust or anger. But she just looked at me like I was — nothing. An annoyance, maybe.
“Sam?” she said after a pause, like she had to think to recall my name. “I’m busy.” She was fumbling with the key in the lock, and not managing it. After a moment, she abandoned the key she’d been using and began digging in her purse for another. The bag was a massive, gaudy patchwork creation, full of clutter; if I needed any evidence that Grace was not her mother, that bag would have sufficed. Mrs. Brisbane didn’t look at me as she dug through it. Her total dismissal — like I was not even worth fury or suspicion now — made me sorry that I’d come out of the store.
I took a step back. “I just thought you might not know. It’s not Grace.”
She jerked up to look at me so sharply that her scarf slid the rest of the way from her neck.
“I heard from Isabel,” I said. “Culpeper. It’s not Grace, the girl they found.”
My little mercy felt less like a good idea as I realized that a suspicious mind could pull apart my story in a moment.
“Sam,” Mrs. Brisbane said, in a very level voice, like she was addressing a young boy given to fibbing. Her hand hovered over her bag, fingers spread and motionless, like a mannequin. “Are you sure that’s true?”
“Isabel will tell you the same thing,” I said.
She closed her eyes. I felt a stab of satisfaction at the obvious pain she’d been feeling at Grace’s absence, and then felt terrible for it. Grace’s parents always managed that — making me feel like a worse version of myself. I ducked swiftly to pick up her scarf, awkward.
I handed the scarf to her. “I have to get back to the store.”
“Wait,” she said. “Come inside for a few moments. You have a few minutes, don’t you?”
I hesitated.
She answered for me, “Oh, you’re working. Of course you are. You — came out after me?”
I looked at my feet. “You looked like you didn’t know.”
“I didn’t,” she said. She paused; when I looked at her, her eyes were closed and she was rubbing the edge of the scarf on her chin. “The terrible thing, Sam, is that some other mother’s daughter is dead out there and I can only be glad.”
“Me, too,” I said, very quietly. “If you’re terrible, I am too, because I’m very, very glad.”
Mrs. Brisbane looked at me then — really looked at me, lowering her hands and staring right at my face. “I guess you think I’m a bad mother.”
I didn’t say anything, because she was right. I softened it with a shrug. It was as close to lying as I could manage.
She watched a car go by. “Of course you know that we had a big fight with Grace before she — before she got sick. About you.” She glanced up at me to see if this was true. When I didn’t reply, she took it as a yes. “I had a lot of stupid boyfriends before I got married. I liked being with boys. I didn’t like being alone. I guess I thought Grace was like me, but she’s not really like me at all, is she? Because you two are serious, aren’t you?”
I was still. “Very, Mrs. Brisbane.”
“Are you sure you won’t come in? It’s hard to have a pity party out here where everyone can see me.”
I thought, uneasily, about Cole in the store. I thought about the people I’d passed on the sidewalk. Two ladies with coffee. One smoking merchant. One lady with babies. The odds of Cole being able to get into trouble seemed fairly minimal.
“Just for a moment,” I said.