Eight Perfect Murders(17)
I read the list of mysteries I’d selected, all ones that took place in wintertime or during a storm. At this point in my blog-writing career I was happy to just list books, and not describe them. This was my post:
The Sittaford Mystery (1931) by Agatha Christie
The Nine Tailors (1934) by Dorothy L. Sayers
The Corpse in the Snowman (1941) by Nicholas Blake
Tied Up in Tinsel (1972) by Ngaio Marsh
The Shining (1977) by Stephen King
Gorky Park (1981) by Martin Cruz Smith
Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992) by Peter H?eg
A Simple Plan (1993) by Scott Smith
The Ice Harvest (2000) by Scott Phillips
Raven Black (2006) by Ann Cleeves
I remembered putting it together, remembered worrying about including The Shining, because it was a horror novel and not at all a mystery, but included it anyway because it was a book I loved. It was strange to remember such minutiae, these insignificant thoughts I’d had less than two weeks before my world would change forever. If I could go back to late December of that year, then I would never have written this list. I would have spent all my time fighting tooth and nail for my wife, telling her that I knew about her affair, that I knew she was doing drugs again, telling her I forgave her, and that she could come back to me. Who knows if any of it would have made a difference? But at least I would have tried.
I scrolled back some more, found another list, “Crime Novels About Cheating,” and quickly checked the date. I didn’t officially know about my wife at that point, but I must have guessed, must have known something was going on at a gut level. I kept scrolling backward, the blog posts coming more and more frequently as I reached the years when I’d been better at keeping the blog updated. I thought, not for the first time: Why does everything need to be a list? What compels us to do that? It was something I’d been doing ever since I became an obsessed reader, ever since I started spending all my money at Annie’s Book Swap. Ten favorite books. Ten scariest books. Best James Bond novels. Best Roald Dahl. I suppose I know why I did it back then. It doesn’t take a psychology degree to understand that it was a way of giving myself an identity. Because if I wasn’t a twelve-year-old who’d already read every single Dick Francis novel (and could name the five best), then I was just a lonely kid without friends, with a distant mother and a father who drank too much. That was my identity, and who wants that? So I guess the question is, Why keep doing it, making lists, even after I was living in Boston, had a good job, was married and in love? Why wasn’t all that enough?
Eventually I made it all the way back to the start of the blog, to “Eight Perfect Murders.” I’d read it so many times in the past twenty-four hours that I didn’t need to read it again.
The front door opened, and I lifted my head. It was a middle-aged couple, both encased in puffy winter coats with hoods. They were probably already large under their coats, but the added layers rendered them almost spherical. They had to walk single file through the door. When their hoods were down and their parkas unzipped they approached me, smiling, introduced themselves as Mike and Becky Swenson from Minnesota. I recognized them immediately as a certain kind of customer we occasionally get, fanatical mystery readers who make a point to visit us during their trip to Boston. Old Devils is not a famous store, but we are famous to a certain kind of reader.
“You brought your weather with you,” I said, and they both laughed, told me how they’d been planning on coming to Boston for years.
“Got to see Cheers, got to try some clam chowder, and definitely got to come to Old Devils,” the man said.
“Where’s Nero?” his wife said, and as if on cue, Nero rounded the New Releases shelf and visited the pair. We all had to chip in, I guess.
Mike and Becky left an hour and a half later. It was 90 percent talking and 10 percent shopping, although they did buy a hundred dollars’ worth of signed hardcovers, giving me their address in East Grand Forks so that we could mail the books to them. “We forgot to leave any room in our suitcases,” Becky said.
It had stopped snowing when they left. They had taken several of our bookmarks with them as souvenirs, plus I’d steered them to a few restaurants in the nearby area that were better than Cheers. As I held the door for them, Brandon arrived, dressed only in a hooded sweatshirt, although he was wearing gloves and a wooly hat under the hood. I’d forgotten he was scheduled to come in today. “You look surprised,” he said. “It’s Friday.”
“I know,” I said.
“Thank God it’s Friday,” he added, in his booming voice, stretching the vowel sound on the word God to an impressive length. “And thank God I’ve got work to go to, so I don’t have to be home all day.”
“Your class was canceled?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. He was taking business classes, mostly in the mornings, and had been since he’d started working at the bookstore. Last I checked he would graduate soon, and I knew I’d most likely lose him. It was going to be fine, but I was going to miss his nonstop chatter. It was a nice counterpoint to Emily’s silence. My silence, as well, I guess.
He pulled a paperback—Richard Stark’s The Hunter—from the pouch at the front of the hoodie and handed it to me. “Effing awesome,” he said. When he’d first started at the store, I had to keep reminding him not to swear, because of the customers, so he’d amended his ways. He’d borrowed the book from the store at my suggestion just two days earlier. Between working full-time and going to school and maintaining (according to him) a pretty active social life, he also managed to read about three books a week. I looked at the paperback, one in which the name of the book had been changed to Point Blank! in order to reflect the Lee Marvin movie that was made in 1967.