The Night Country (The Hazel Wood #2)(13)

Nothing to worry about, she said finally. Really. Talk later

The sounds of the city crashed in on me. Birdsong and morning traffic and children screaming for the sheer joy of having lungs. I wanted to scream, too. For about half a minute all was bright, and the sun on my face felt like a benediction. Then the wicked math came back.

Three murders. Two hands. One foot.

Under the industrious light of seven a.m. I felt suddenly exposed. I imagined how I must look from behind: the flapper tangle of my grown-out hair, my sparrow-weight bones, everything about me crushable or ripe to be sliced. I was awash in adrenaline and relief and a jittery fear, and I didn’t want to go home. But I was too edgy to stay out here. I figured there was one place I could hide.



* * *



Months ago, when we first moved back to New York, I made a pilgrimage to the coffee shop where I’d worked before leaving town. It was gone, a children’s shoe store sprung up in its wake. More remnants of my old life absorbed into the whirlpool of the city. For a while I’d worked at a co-op, but I wasn’t really the cooperative kind.

I stumbled into my new job by chance, or luck, or fate. On a wandering evening last winter, I hid out from a snowstorm in a bookshop on Sullivan Street, narrow as a corridor and lit the color of coffee milk by old bulbs. The guy behind the counter had a chin-strap beard and little wire-rims, and was yelling into an ancient flip phone.

I’d pretended to look at books as I listened to him dress down some guy named Alan.

“It’s not about their quality, Alan,” he kept saying. “It’s about coming through with what you promised.”

I pulled an old hardback off the shelf, tea-brown pages and a cover illustration the colors of a heraldic flag. Creatures of the Earth and Air: A Compendium. I flipped gently through it as the man behind the counter became sarcastic.

“God forbid you waste your time coming to me,” he said. “I’m sure it’s a full-time job burning through your trust fund.”

I was trying not to laugh when the book I held fell open to a place where something was stuck between its pages.

My breath caught. I didn’t take lightly things found in the pages of a book. But this was just a playing card. A jack of spades, its back the classic red Maiden design. I flipped it over and back, not noticing the bookseller had hung up till he was standing next to me.

“Found that in a book?” he asked, taking the card.

“This one.” I held up Creatures.

“Huh.” He bent over the playing card, then made a triumphant sound. “There. Look at that.”

I looked close. The Maiden held up her flowers, and fork-tailed women chilled in the card’s four corners.

“Her.” He pointed at the mermaid in the upper left. Where the others’ hands reached toward flowers, hers extended toward a spinning wheel. Stylized, but unmistakable. You wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking.

“What does it mean?”

He looked gratified by my curiosity. “It means it’s from a marked deck.”

“Like, marked by a gambler?”

“Or a magician. It’s an odd marking, though, doesn’t really correspond to the suit or number. I tell you, I find the strangest things in books.”

I’d followed him to the front of the shop, where he brought a cigar box out from under the counter and slipped the card inside. “Like what? What else have you found in a book?”

“Well…” He looked around, like the walls might have ears, and reopened the cigar box, faced toward him so I couldn’t see its contents. “Things like this.”

He showed me a pressed blue flower as big as my fist, its stamens flattened in all directions like a fireworks spray. A cookie fortune that read, simply, “Woe betide you.” A neatly clipped page of personal ads dated September 1, 1970, from a paper called the East Village Chronicler.

“Funny stuff, right?”

It was. I liked it, the thought that you could find harmless, interesting things tucked inside books. A reminder that the world contained mysteries that didn’t have to write over the entire narrative of your life.

“Once I found a Polaroid in an old book,” I said, watching his face for a reaction. “A collection of fairy tales. The weird thing was, it was a Polaroid of me.”

“Holy crap,” he said, his eyes bright with respect. It didn’t seem to occur to him that I might be lying. I wasn’t, but I could’ve been.

“Are you guys hiring?” I asked him.

He’d run a palm over his beard, in a way that made it clear he was proud of it. “We might be. If you like odd hours, I think we are.”

That’s how I started working at a cramped used and antiquarian bookstore, where the odd hours warning was for real. Beard guy’s name was Edgar, he owned the place, and he never sent my schedule more than a week in advance. My shifts ranged from two hours to ten, and sometimes when I got there the shop was closed without warning. It was the buyers who bought rare books by mail that kept the lights on, not the random college kids popping in to browse and walking away with a five-dollar used copy of Howl.

The oppressive heat had picked back up after yesterday’s rainstorm, and I was sweating through my T-shirt by the time I hit the shop. It wouldn’t open for a couple of hours yet, but luckily Edgar was a terrible judge of character: I had keys.