All the Beautiful Lies(27)
“Just hooligans, maybe,” John said, as though the hooligan problem in Kennewick was well documented. Then he said, “What’s Alice say?”
“Nothing. She doesn’t really want to talk about it.”
John tapped his fingers together, thinking. Harry looked at his large, strong hands and concluded, not for the first time, that John looked more like a retired farmhand than a retired financial advisor. He was almost completely bald, and his pate was speckled with sun damage. He was wearing a dark pin-striped suit and a pink tie, knotted tightly at his neck. He always wore suits, always a little too big for him, remnants from his years in business. “I wouldn’t worry about it, Harry,” he said at last. “She’s probably in shock, and not wanting to process it yet. Plus, she has to be wondering about the rest of her life. My sweetheart died quite young, and afterward I didn’t think I’d ever know a moment of happiness again. And then one day, I felt a little better, and then over time I became myself again. It always happens that way. Otherwise, no one would keep going. Sorry, Harry, didn’t mean to . . .” John rubbed at his white mustache, the tremor in his arm more noticeable than usual. Harry wondered if he had Parkinson’s, or if he was just old, his muscles weakening.
“That’s okay, John.”
“Police will find whoever had to do with it. They have ways. Back to work, I think.”
Harry watched as John stood up, then lowered himself to one knee by one of many unopened packages, and slit the tape with a box cutter. Lew, the cat, sidled up and rubbed against John’s thigh. Harry, tired from that morning’s work, wanted to sit awhile longer and finish his coffee. How old was John? He had to be in his midseventies, at least, possibly closer to eighty.
Harry remembered the story his father had told him, how John had shown up shortly after he’d opened the new store, asking if he could volunteer for a few hours per week, maybe straighten the shelves, or deal with customers. He was a retiree, with time on his hands, and Bill had reluctantly agreed to let him come in for a few hours each week. The next day, John had shown up at opening time, and stayed until Bill sent him home sometime in the afternoon. It continued like that, John learning every facet of the business, until Bill finally insisted on paying him. They haggled and settled on the minimum wage. After that, John was always at the store, always wearing a suit and tie; he’d made himself indispensable.
Harry finished his coffee and went to help stack the new books on one of the two card tables in the store’s back room. There were about thirty of these unopened boxes, all containing books from one estate sale that Bill had purchased sight unseen, making an offer over the phone after hearing that the man who had died had collected hardcover Wodehouse novels. Harry’s father had started book scouting when he was still an undergraduate at Columbia, studying English literature and hoping to become a writer. One of his professors had gotten him into it, sending him upstate to garage and rummage sales the summer before his senior year. He taught him what to look for, and how to negotiate. One of the lessons was to never bicker over single volumes at estate sales. If there was something in the shelves that was worth money, then you would always make a fast offer to buy all the books. The children of the deceased were almost always thrilled and relieved, and you never knew what other gems might appear.
Bill had fallen in love with book scouting—“treasure hunting for the unadventurous,” he called it—and for ten years after college made a meager living at it, sticking to the East Coast, and selling his finds at the then-myriad selection of used bookstores in the city. By the time he was thirty he could barely navigate his single-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment because of the stacks of books he’d accumulated. He got a loan at a bank and opened Ackerson’s Rare Books. His first employee was a shy Barnard College grad named Emily Vetchinsky. They married three months after he hired her, and nine months after that Harry was born.
“Junk, mostly, so far,” John said, slitting open another box and peering at its contents.
“How can you tell?” Harry asked.
“You learn, over time.” He was holding an interesting-looking hardcover edition of Jaws, with a black cover, and the image of a white, stylized shark. He put that one to the side. “Although I double-check myself, take a look at prices on the Web. Your father didn’t need to do that.”
The bell sounded, indicating that someone had entered the store. “Do you mind seeing if someone needs help?” John asked, and Harry went out front, stood behind the cash register. The customer was an elderly woman, dressed in a long winter coat and a wooly hat even though it was nearly seventy degrees outside.
“Can I help you with anything?” Harry asked, and she looked up, startled.
“Oh, I didn’t see you there. I’ve been here before, of course, but I’ve forgotten . . . Can you tell me where the mystery stories are?”
Harry stepped out from behind the counter and brought the woman to the mystery section. It was, except for plain fiction, the largest in the store. Crime had been his father’s favorite genre, both to read and to collect. He’d had a sizable personal collection of first editions, plus what he claimed might be the only entire collection of “mapbacks”—midcentury paperbacks issued by Dell, almost all crime novels, each with an illustrated map on its back cover. It had been his pride and joy. “They’re not worth a lot of money,” he told Harry once, “but the day I got the final one in the series was one of my top, top days. Silly, I know.”