At last, she arrived at the bookshop. The bell on the door jingled cheerfully. The store was warm and smelled of old paper and wood. She was instantly comforted. The worn floorboards creaked under her feet. She wiggled her fingers, trying to get feeling back.
She passed the front tables of staff suggestions, bestsellers, and new releases, and made her way toward the counter, where a man with a beard and a green wool vest was typing on a computer. But she stopped when she spotted the poetry section. She and Gary used to read poetry out loud to each other in bed on lazy mornings: Rilke, Frank O’Hara, Baudelaire. All the great dead men, Gary called them. He loved poetry and had even written a short verse as part of their wedding vows:
I used to worry that I dreamed you to life,
then I’d wake with you beside me, and take your hand,
a pale starfish against the indigo sheets,
and press my lips to it,
tasting salt water, candy apples, freshly ripened plums.
If you are a dream, my love, then it is a dream
I want to live inside forever.
Katherine. Gary again, his voice just behind her now. She spun, thinking if she was quick enough she might catch a glimpse of him, but there was nothing. Not even a shadow.
There was an old photograph on the wall. She stepped closer and saw that it was a picture of the West Hall Inn, dated 1889 at the bottom, a large brick building with white shutters and an awning. It looked strangely familiar.
“This whole block was once the inn,” the bearded bookseller said when he noticed her looking at the picture. “Here, where the bookstore is, was the dining room and bar. The windows are all the originals”—he pointed to the front of the store—“though I’m afraid everything else has changed beyond recognition.” Katherine glanced from where he was pointing back to the photo, finding the same details there.
“If there’s anything I can help you with, just give a holler,” the man said.
“As a matter of fact, there is,” she said. She pulled her copy of Visitors from the Other Side out of her bag.
“Do you have anything else by her? Or about her?”
He shook his head. “Afraid that’s it. Though they say there are missing journal pages out there somewhere.” He had a little glimmer in his eye. “She’s kind of a local legend, and, like all good legends, you can’t believe half of what you hear.”
“So she lived here in West Hall?”
“She sure did.”
“Does she have family around still?”
He scratched his head, seeming slightly puzzled by the increasing intensity with which she spoke. She was wearing her good coat and boots, but her hands were covered in paint and, she realized now, she’d forgotten to brush her hair. If she wasn’t careful, word would spread fast through the small town of the madwoman who’d just moved in.
“No family. All the Harrisons and Sheas died off or moved away years ago.”
“So there are really no other books about her?”
He gave her a sympathetic shake of the head. “It’s surprising, I know. I mean, her story has all the makings of a blockbuster movie—heartbreak, mystery, the undead, gory murder—but the only folks who ever come around asking more are grad students, people who are into the occult, and the occasional oddball drawn to the case because of all the gruesome details.” He eyed her as if trying to decide which category she fell in.
“So what else can you tell me about her?” Sara asked.
“What exactly is it you’d like to know?” He had an odd expression, like he was asking her a trick question.
She thought a minute. What did she want to know? Why had she taken the trouble to come out in the cold to learn about a woman she’d never heard of until yesterday?
She had that feeling she got when she was doing her art and suddenly discovered the missing piece that ties everything together: a tingling in the back of her neck, a crazy buzzed-rush of a feeling that spread through her whole body. She didn’t understand the role that Sara Harrison Shea, the ring Gary had given her, or the book he had hidden would play, but she knew that this was important, and that she had to give herself over to it and see where it might lead.
“It says in the book there were lost pages, the ones she was working on just before her death. Were they ever found?”
He shook his head. “The truth is, they may not have existed. Sara’s niece, Amelia Larkin, contended there were diary pages missing, but she was never able to produce them. Supposedly, she tore Sara’s house apart looking for them.”
He took off his glasses and gave them a quick polish. “Of course, there are all sorts of rumors about those missing pages and what they contained. Some people claim they’ve seen the pages, that they were secretly auctioned off for over a million dollars back in the eighties.”
Katherine laughed. “Why on earth would anyone pay a million dollars for a few pages from a diary?”
The bookseller gave a sly smile. “You’ve read the book, haven’t you? All that about awakening sleepers? Some people think that Sara Harrison Shea left very specific instructions for bringing the dead back to life.”