???
He was taking Mrs. Davis’s creative writing course that semester, and although he got As on his stories, he knew by February that he was never going to be a fiction-writer. Although he was good with words, a thing he didn’t need Mrs. Davis to tell him (although she often did), he just didn’t possess that kind of creative spark. His chief interest was in reading fiction, then trying to analyze what he had read, fitting it into a larger pattern. He had gotten a taste for this kind of detective work while writing his paper on Rothstein. At the Garner Street Library he hunted out one of the books Mr. Ricker had mentioned, Fiedler’s Love and Death in the American Novel, and liked it so much that he bought his own copy in order to highlight certain passages and write in the margins. He wanted to major in English more than ever, and teach like Mr. Ricker (except maybe at a university instead of in high school), and at some point write a book like Mr. Fiedler’s, getting into the faces of more traditional critics and questioning the established way those traditional critics looked at things.
And yet!
There had to be more money. Mr. Feldman, the guidance counselor, told him that getting a full-boat scholarship to an Ivy League school was “rather unlikely,” and Pete knew even that was an exaggeration. He was just another whitebread high school kid from a so-so Midwestern school, a kid with a part-time library job and a few unglamorous extracurriculars like newspaper and yearbook. Even if he did manage to catch a boat, there was Tina to think about. She was basically trudging through her days, getting mostly Bs and Cs, and seemed more interested in makeup and shoes and pop music than school these days. She needed a change, a clean break. He was wise enough, even at not quite seventeen, to know that Chapel Ridge might not fix his little sister . . . but then again, it might. Especially since she wasn’t broken. At least not yet.
I need a plan, he thought, only that wasn’t precisely what he needed. What he needed was a story, and although he was never going to be a great fiction-writer like Mr. Rothstein or Mr. Lawrence, he was able to plot. That was what he had to do now. Only every plot stood on an idea, and on that score he kept coming up empty.
???
He had begun to spend a lot of time at Water Street Books, where the coffee was cheap and even new paperbacks were thirty percent off. He went by one afternoon in March, on his way to his after-school job at the library, thinking he might pick up something by Joseph Conrad. In one of his few interviews, Rothstein had called Conrad “the first great writer of the twentieth century, even though his best work was written before 1900.”
Outside the bookstore, a long table had been set up beneath an awning. SPRING CLEANING, the sign said. EVERYTHING ON THIS TABLE 70% OFF! And below it: WHO KNOWS WHAT BURIED TREASURE YOU WILL FIND! This line was flanked by big yellow smiley-faces, to show it was a joke, but Pete didn’t think it was funny.
He finally had an idea.
A week later, he stayed after school to talk to Mr. Ricker.
???
“Great to see you, Pete.” Mr. Ricker was wearing a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves today, along with a psychedelic tie. Pete thought the combination said quite a lot about why the love-and-peace generation had collapsed. “Mrs. Davis says great things about you.”
“She’s cool,” Pete said. “I’m learning a lot.” Actually he wasn’t, and he didn’t think anyone else in her class was, either. She was nice enough, and quite often had interesting things to say, but Pete was coming to the conclusion that creative writing couldn’t really be taught, only learned.
“What can I do for you?”
“Remember when you were talking about how valuable a handwritten Shakespeare manuscript would be?”
Mr. Ricker grinned. “I always talk about that during a midweek class, when things get dozy. There’s nothing like a little avarice to perk kids up. Why? Have you found a folio, Malvolio?”
Pete smiled politely. “No, but when we were visiting my uncle Phil in Cleveland during February vacation, I went out to his garage and found a whole bunch of old books. Most of them were about Tom Swift. He was this kid inventor.”
“I remember Tom and his friend Ned Newton well,” Mr. Ricker said. “Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle, Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera . . . when I was a kid myself, we used to joke about Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother.”
Pete renewed his polite smile. “There were also a dozen or so about a girl detective named Trixie Belden, and another one named Nancy Drew.”
“I believe I see where you’re going with this, and I hate to disappoint you, but I must. Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden . . . all interesting relics of a bygone age, and a wonderful yardstick to judge how much what is called ‘YA fiction’ has changed in the last eighty years or so, but those books have little or no monetary value, even when found in excellent condition.”
“I know,” Pete said. “I checked it out later on Fine Books. That’s a blog. But while I was looking those books over, Uncle Phil came out to the garage and said he had something else that might interest me even more. Because I’d told him I was into John Rothstein. It was a signed hardback of The Runner. Not dedicated, just a flat signature. Uncle Phil said some guy named Al gave it to him because he owed my uncle ten dollars from a poker game. Uncle Phil said he’d had it for almost fifty years. I looked at the copyright page, and it’s a first edition.”
Mr. Ricker had been rocked back in his chair, but now he sat down with a bang. “Whoa! You probably know that Rothstein didn’t sign many autographs, right?”
“Yeah,” Pete said. “He called it ‘defacing a perfectly good book.’”
“Uh-huh, he was like Raymond Chandler that way. And you know signed volumes are worth more when it’s just the signature? Sans dedication?”
“Yes. It says so on Fine Books.”
“A signed first of Rothstein’s most famous book probably would be worth money.” Mr. Ricker considered. “On second thought, strike the probably. What kind of condition is it in?”
“Good,” Pete said promptly. “Some foxing on the inside cover and title page, is all.”
“You have been reading up on this stuff.”
“More since my uncle showed me the Rothstein.”
“I don’t suppose you’re in possession of this fabulous book, are you?”
I’ve got something a lot better, Pete thought. If you only knew.
Sometimes he felt the weight of that knowledge, and never more than today, telling these lies.
Necessary lies, he reminded himself.
“I don’t, but my uncle said he’d give it to me, if I wanted it. I said I needed to think about it, because he doesn’t . . . you know . . .”
“He doesn’t have any idea of how much it might really be worth?”
“Yeah. But then I started wondering . . .”