The Dead Romantics (45)

“Did you find what you were looking for at that bar?” he asked after a moment.

“Somehow, yes. Managed to book Elvis for the funeral.”

He gave a start. “Presley? Is he . . . a ghost?” he asked in an almost whisper.

Oh, why was that charming? Why was that so charming?

I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning, because I was still annoyed with him. “No”—I took out a poster from my back pocket and unfolded it to show him exactly which Elvis I was referring to—“but he’s the next best thing.”

He held a hand over his mouth to hide a laugh. “An impersonator? For a funeral?”

“You didn’t know Dad,” I replied, pocketing the poster again.

“He sounds like a riot.”

I smiled at the thought of Dad going to watch Bruno perform before his Thursday night poker games—and then my smile faded as I remembered that he never would again. I folded my arms over my chest and said curtly, “He was.”

“Right—yes. Sorry.”

We walked the next three blocks in silence, passing the bookstore with a poster of When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow, and I lingered only for a moment. Only long enough for Ben to glance back to see why I’d stopped, and then I made myself put one foot in front of the other, and ignore the poster, the release date. Only a few more months before the whole world read my story ruined by his words.

“Oh, look! Annie’s books.”

“What?”

I stared through the window at the stacks of romance novels, with Ann Nichols’s new books at the top. The ones I wrote—Midnight Matinee, A Rake’s Guide—all of them. Dad walked by this bookstore every day on his daily lunch breaks to Fudge’s. He must’ve seen this display, these books. I wondered if he ever ducked into the store and bought one. I wondered if Mom loved the dry humor in Nichols’s new ones. Mom and I never really talked about books after mine failed. I didn’t want to talk about books at all after that.

I turned to keep walking, when Ben backtracked and nodded his head toward the door. “Let’s go in.”

“Why?”

“Because I like bookstores,” he replied, and stepped backward through the closed door.

I had half a mind to not follow him, but a part of me wondered what section he gravitated toward. Literary? Horror? I couldn’t even imagine him in the romance aisle, towering and broody in his pristine button-down shirts and ironed trousers.

The bell above the door rang as I stepped into the cozy bookstore. The woman behind the counter, Mrs. Holly, had been there for twenty-odd years. She looked up from her book with a smile. “Well, I’ll be damned! Florence Day.”

Even my local booksellers back in Jersey didn’t know my name, but it seemed like a decade away couldn’t erase me from small-town memory. Everywhere I went it was “Holy smokes, Florence Day!” like I was Mairmont’s local celebrity. Well, I guess I was.

“Hi, Mrs. Holly,” I greeted.

“What’re you in for?”

Have you seen a ghost float through, by any chance? Six foot sexy, with just the slightest hint of nerd? I wanted to ask, but instead went with, “Just looking.”

“Could I help?”

“I don’t think so,” I began, before my eyes caught the pop-up on the counter for When the Dead Sing by Lee Marlow. PRE-ORDER TODAY! the cardboard stand-up announced, with the picture of the cover—a run-down Victorian mansion with a Wednesday Addams–looking girl standing in front of it, unsmiling. From one of the windows peered a ghoul of some sort, demonic eyes and sharp teeth.

Riveting.

“The author must’ve never visited a small town before in his life,” Mrs. Holly said when she noticed what had grabbed my attention. She shook her head. “One of my booksellers loved it, though. I don’t get why.”

“Noted,” I replied.

Of course he couldn’t write small towns. He’d never lived in one—he thought every small town was either Stars Hollow or Silent Hill. There was no in-between.

“You write better than he ever could,” she went on.

I stiffened.

“You know I still sell your book! Not as often these days, but I do. It’s a pity it went out of print already. Barely made it to paperback.”

“I didn’t like the paperback anyway,” I replied with a bit of bitter humor, because the paperback had been so ugly I couldn’t imagine anyone picking it up on their own. You knew a publisher had given up on a book when they let their design intern make a book cover.

I told Mrs. Holly I wanted to browse, and made my way back through the aisles of memoirs and self-help, past sci-fi and fantasy, to the back corner of the store where the paperback romances were. And there was Ben, looking through the used romances with cracked spines and dog-eared pages.

“Weren’t you a horror editor?” I asked as I slid up to him. “Why’d you come to romance?”

“My imprint shuttered.” He attempted to take a book off the shelf, but his hand fell right through it. He frowned, having forgot, and sighed.

“That can’t be the only reason.”

“I read a book once that changed me. And I realized I wanted to help writers write more books like that, and find more books like that, and give them the chance they wouldn’t have otherwise.”