Eight Perfect Murders(16)
“Good luck getting home,” I said.
We shook hands. I called her Agent Mulvey, and she asked me to call her Gwen. As I walked slowly away, through the shin-high snow, I decided it was a good sign, her asking me to call her by her first name.
Chapter 7
When I got to the store, twenty minutes later, Emily Barsamian was under the awning, looking at her phone.
“How long have you been here?” I asked.
“Twenty minutes. When I didn’t hear from you, I just figured we’d be open for regular hours.”
“Sorry. You should have sent me a text message.” I said this knowing that in four years she had never sent me a text message, and that she probably never would.
“I didn’t mind waiting,” she said, as I opened the door, then followed her in. “It was my fault for forgetting my keys.”
Nero came over to greet us, meowing, and Emily crouched down to scratch his chin. I went behind the checkout desk and turned on the lights. Emily stood and removed her long green coat. Underneath she wore what I had come to think of as her work uniform, a midlength dark skirt, chunky boots, a vintage sweater over a button-up shirt, or, occasionally a T-shirt. The Tshirts she wore provided rare clues as to Emily’s likes and dislikes. Some of the shirts were book related—she had one with a vintage cover of Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle with an illustration of a black cat in tall green grass—and several were Tshirts for a band called The Decemberists. The previous summer she wore a T-shirt that advertised summerisle may day 1973 and I spent all day with a nagging feeling that it sounded familiar. I finally asked her, and she told me it was referencing The Wicker Man, a horror film from the 1970s I hadn’t seen in many years. “You’re a horror fan?” I asked.
As usual when we spoke she was looking at either my forehead or my chin. “I guess,” she said.
“What are your top five?” I said, hoping to continue the conversation.
She frowned briefly, thinking, then said, “Rosemary’s Baby, The Exorcist, Black Christmas—the original one—Heavenly Creatures, and, um, The Cabin in the Woods, I guess.”
“I’ve seen two out of five. What about The Shining?”
“Uh-uh.” She shook her head rapidly, and I thought she might elaborate, but that was the end of the conversation. I didn’t mind that she was a private person. I was, as well. And being a private person is a rare trait these days. Still, I did wonder about her interior life. And I wondered if she had ambitions besides being a bookseller.
As she hung up her damp coat, I asked her if it had been hard getting to the store. “I took the bus. It was fine,” she said. She lived on the other side of the river, near Inman Square in Cambridge. All I knew about her living situation was that she shared a three-bedroom apartment with two other Winslow College graduates.
Emily went to the back, to the table where I stacked the new arrivals. Her primary job was updating and monitoring our online stores. We sold used books through eBay, and Amazon, and a site called Alibris, and a few more that I didn’t even know about. I used to do some of it myself, filling orders, but Emily had taken over completely. That was one of the reasons I was anxious about her future plans. If she ever left here, I’d be in big trouble.
I stayed behind the counter and checked the phone for messages—there were none—then logged on to the Old Devils blog, something I rarely did these days, but the visit from Gwen Mulvey made me interested in taking a look. There were 211 total blog entries, the last one entered two months ago. It was called “Staff Picks” and it was something I periodically forced Emily and Brandon to do: write two sentences on the last book they’d read and loved. Brandon had picked Lee Child’s last Jack Reacher novel, and Emily had written a quick blurb on Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place. My pick had been Started Early, Took My Dog by Kate Atkinson. I hadn’t read it, of course, but I’d read enough reviews and summaries to feel as though I had; also, I was fond of the title.
I spent the next hour or so scrolling backward through blog entries, and it was like living the past ten years of my life in reverse. There was John Haley’s first and last entry, posted on the week he left the store, leaving me in charge. He’d sold Old Devils, and all its stock, to Brian Murray and me in 2012. Brian had put up most of the capital, but given me 50 percent ownership share, since I’d be the one running it. So far, it had worked out. I thought at first that Brian would want to be more involved than he was, but that hadn’t been the case. He came to the store for our annual holiday party, along with attending almost all our readings, but, other than that, he has left me in charge, except for those two weeks a year when I take my annual trip to London. I did see Brian frequently, though. It took him about two months to write an entry in his Ellis Fitzgerald series. The rest of the year he called his “drinking vacation,” most of which he spent on a leather-padded stool at the small bar of the Beacon Hill Hotel. I stopped in often to have a drink with him, although I tried to do it early in the evening. If I arrived too late, Brian, a habitual storyteller, would play his greatest hits for me, stories I’d heard a hundred times already.
I scrolled farther back through the posts, noting the absence of any from five years ago, the year my wife died. The last entry before that event had been a list I’d written called “Mysteries for a Cold Winter Night,” posted on December 22, 2009. My wife died in the early morning hours of January 1, 2010; she’d been in a car accident, sliding off an overpass on Route 2 while inebriated. They’d shown me pictures for identification purposes, a white sheet covering her head from the eyebrows up. Her face looked unmarked even though I imagined her skull had completely collapsed from the impact.