An Illustrated Death (2 page)

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

W
HE
N
C
HARLES
T
REMAINE
stepped out of his Town Car and moved down the hill toward the silver gray building, other dealers were on him like butter on bread. Most carried empty cardboard boxes which they hoped to fill with treasure. I had my two vinyl boat bags tucked under one arm, my money hidden in my jeans front pocket to leave my hands free. We couldn’t have been more excited than if we were lining up for Shangri-La. I didn’t believe Charles’s dismal prediction that we were headed for Newark instead.

Judging from the Model-T weathervane on its roof, the building had probably been a stable, then a garage. It had not been well-maintained. The green paint was peeling from its oversized window frames, and one of the panes had a long vertical crack. Dealers took turns peering in, but the windows were too dusty to see anything but long tables of books.

Back on the gravel path we sorted ourselves into one-two-three order. Except for me, the other buyers today were men. I recognized Marty Campagna talking earnestly to Charles Tremaine.
Of course.
Marty was always one of the first three in line at good sales. Rumor had it that he paid someone to stand in his place overnight.

Today he wore a red T-shirt advertising “Joey’s Cadillac Repair.” His black-framed glasses were duct-taped at the bridge of his nose, his cheeks stubbly. Although Marty was tall and well-muscled, I knew his brawn came more from leaping over furniture to grab prize books than from workouts at Planet Fitness. But it didn’t matter how he looked, he had that elusive gift known as
Finger-Spitzengefuhl
, the tingling in his fingers that comes whenever a rare book is nearby. I didn’t know if
Finger-Spitzengefuhl
was real or not. I was still waiting for mine to kick in.

M
ARTY HAD WASTED
his money if he had paid to reserve a spot here. Once we were inside and had a chance to examine what had been laid out on the tables, I saw that Charles Tremaine was right. Someone in the family was a Danielle Steel fan. Someone else was parting with a stack of mathematics textbooks. I raced up and down the long plank tables to make sure, but there were no art books, no Erikson-illustrated volumes at all.

Yet the sale wasn’t a total loss. From underneath a table I pulled out a grimy carton of older first editions still in dust jackets:
The Bean Trees
,
The Circus of Dr. Lao
,
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
And—yes—two Ayn Rands! I didn’t even stop to see if the books were inscribed, just shoved them into my green-and-white vinyl bag. A dust jacket can increase a book’s value by up to ninety percent. Ayn Rand, like Mozart, never went out of style.

I was moving toward the cash table to pay when Marty stepped into my path. “Hey, Blondie. Find anything good?” He reached down and rummaged through my bag, dislodging books to see what was at the bottom. I held my breath. More than once he had examined my stash, seen something he wanted, and tried to force me to sell the book to him.

Today he jerked back his hand as if to avoid contamination. “
Dreck
.”

“No, it’s not.” I felt a moment of doubt, then remembered the Ayn Rands in dust jackets.

“Know what I bought? Three books. What a waste!”

Then why are you hanging around?

“I need to talk to you.” Evidently his
Finger-Spitzengefuhl
extended to reading minds. “Naw, too complicated. I’ll call you later.”

And he was off to another sale.

When I reached the gravel area, the dust from the ancient Cadillac Marty drove had long settled. Instead a young woman sat off to the side in a director’s chair, arms crossed. A lanky, bespectacled man stood protectively behind her.
Nate Erikson’s children?
They were definitely a matched set: gingery hair, pale freckled skin, high aristocratic noses. They had the look of money—her peach sweater was cashmere, her designer jeans fashionably white at the knees. His plaid flannel shirt and Levi’s had a deliberately worn-out air that hadn’t come from shooting deer.

They studied me, then exchanged a look.

If I had been anywhere but the Hamptons, I might have been worried.

“Hey there!” the woman called, as if I were her neighbor’s pet dog.

“Hi.”

She pushed up from the canvas seat and the pair edged closer.

“Are you a book dealer?” he demanded.

“Yes.” I had run into owners who were hostile to professionals, the last time a month ago. As I left a tag sale carrying a stack of profusely illustrated books on Wedgwood china, a woman in a denim skirt had stopped me.

“How much did you pay for those?” she’d asked.

I could tell from the pinched look of her eyes and mouth that my acquisitions had once been hers.

I should have made up something, but I’d told her the truth.

“That’s all you paid? I hope you feel good, profiting from someone else’s tragedy.”

I started to offer her more money, then realized that no amount would be enough to make things right for her. Still I could not shake my guilt, though I told myself that if I hadn’t bought those books, someone else would have.
Sure.
Like rationalizing it was okay to wear a fur coat because those particular animals were already dead.

I reminded myself that the Eriksons had sought out bookstore owners.

“Do you assess books too?” he wanted to know.

“Yes.”

“You can tell how valuable—”

“What did you think of these books?” she interrupted him, pointing to my bag.

What could I say that wouldn’t insult someone they were related to?

“Well, I bought some.”

Her pale blue eyes probed my face. “Were they what you wanted?”

Another trick question. “Not what I was hoping for, maybe, but I did find some good fiction. No art books though.”

“No. That’s what we want to talk to you about.” She looked at the man and he nodded. “We need someone to appraise my father’s books. His library is good, but we need to know how good.”

Be still, my heart.
It was a dream I hadn’t known I had. “I could do that.” Yet a part of myself asked,
Why me
? Why not Charles Tremaine or someone who looked like an authority? I knew they had invited only professional booksellers, perhaps for that reason, but something about it made less than perfect sense.

“What’s your fee?” plaid-shirt demanded.

My fee?
“Forty-five dollars an hour.” That sounded like a lot of money for something I would have done for nothing. Just to have the opportunity to look at Nate Erikson’s books . . .

“Forty-five dollars?” The woman sounded scandalized. “Mechanics get
ninety
-five an hour. Lawyers are over three hundred!”

“Plus gas and expenses,” I added hastily.

She laughed then, a clear note that carried out over the early September landscape. “Fifty-five dollars an hour, none of this nickel-and-dime stuff. When can you start?”

I made myself breathe. “Monday?”

“Fine. Come around nine. I’m Bianca Erikson, by the way, and this is my brother, Claude. The books—”

“How long do you think it will take you to tell us what they’re worth?” he interrupted. “This horse has to run.”

“Well—it depends on how many there are.”

“We have no idea,” Bianca said. “They’re in his studio covered in dust. The door’s been padlocked since the day it happened.”

“The studio’s been locked since the accident?” It came out before I could censor it.

She rounded on both of us. “Why does everyone keep saying what happened was an accident? It was no damn accident!”

Claude made a protesting sound in his throat.

Bianca gave her brother a scornful look, her eyes as pale and hard as my amethyst birthstone. “Go on, just sweep it under the rug like everything else.” Then she strode away, pushing the director’s chair over backward as she went.

Claude righted the chair quickly. “I don’t know why she says crazy things like that,” he muttered. “Even the autopsy said they drowned.” He started down the hill after her.

If this had been a Nate Erikson illustration, a serpent would have peered out of the bushes with a quizzical look.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

I
DROVE AWAY
feeling lightheaded, either because I would be spending time with Nate Erikson’s books
and
getting paid, or because it was nearly ten o’clock and I had not yet eaten anything. I decided to stop for a bagel and cream cheese, something I could eat on my way to the next sale.

More than anything, I was shocked by what Bianca Erikson had said. If what happened wasn’t an accident, what were the choices? Surely a man with Nate’s talent and sensibilities would not have committed suicide, much less drowned his own granddaughter. Even if in despair, I couldn’t imagine him inflicting that pain on his family.

That left murder.

Yet as Claude Erikson had pointed out, the police had been satisfied. Something else occurred to me: Had it been
her
daughter who drowned? Maybe Bianca was unable to accept the fact that life was so precarious that a single moment of inattention could have fatal and permanent results.

Tell me about it.

I
DECIDED TO
stop at the sale closest to home, along an unpaved country road in Shoreham. The ad had emphasized the large amount of craft supplies, so I wasn’t expecting much in the way of books. If there was still a line, I wouldn’t even wait. But there was no crowd at the front door and I walked right in. I bypassed balls of colored wool and paint tubes twisted into odd shapes, and found some books on the basement shelves. I knew to look for small publishers and esoteric subjects, detailed explanations of weaving techniques or lithographic processes.
100 Sock Monkeys You Can Make
wasn’t on my list.

Not that there was anything
wrong
with sock puppets, I assured an imaginary mob of angry craftspeople. During the years when I’d followed Colin around the globe to guest lectureships and archeological digs, I often had to educate the kids myself. We did leaf rubbings and identified rocks, wrote stories and learned pottery-making at kivas. In England, I took photographs of the countryside and hand-colored them. I would have kept doing that if . . .

I wasn’t a born craftsperson anyway. My real passion had been reading, whenever and wherever I could. A memory: Colin coming in sweaty and tired after a long day and the kids wild and shrieking. His exasperated command: “Put down that book and make dinner!”

“I’m tired of cooking. Let’s phone out for Chinese.”

“Delhi, we’re in the middle of the Chihuahuan Desert!”

I knew that. I was only teasing. In the next moment I’d relent, and jump up and kiss him. He’d shower, and we’d end up sitting in camp chairs drink icy Dos Equis, watching the tangerine sunset play on the ruffles of sand. Sometimes we clasped hands as he described his day and the children played quietly at our feet.

Memories, memories.

I didn’t seriously get into bookselling until my parents died. My sister, Patience, didn’t want their collection of books cluttering up her Manhattan apartment or beach house, and my brother, Jon, in Hollywood, was too busy making movies like
Poisoned Carrots
to want a retired minister’s library. So I brought the books home, along with the faded Oriental rugs that are now on the barn floor. I didn’t know what to do with so many books, so I started selling them online. That’s how I discovered what I was born to do.

A
T TODAY’S SALE
in Shoreham, I found several advanced quilting books and a few on watercolor that showed interesting techniques. I had been back in the barn for about an hour describing the day’s finds for the Internet—
Atlas Shrugged
was a true first edition in great condition and I listed the book for four hundred dollars—when the phone rang. I answered it cheerfully, as I did no matter my mood. “Secondhand Prose!”

“Meet me at the Old Frigate.”

“Marty?”

I was only trying to identify the voice, but he took the question as a challenge. “
What?
”

“Why there?”

“Because it’s mine now.”

“What do you mean? You bought the Old Frigate?”

“Be there in five minutes.”

“I can’t—”

But I was explaining that I had too much work to do to a dial tone.

P
ORT
L
EWIS IS
an old whaling village, one of a number that make up Long Island’s North Shore. The village has a natural harbor and quaint setting, but it came late to the party. When we first moved here, Port Lewis was dominated by a Salvation Army thrift shop and a seafood restaurant whose proprietor was always drunk, making it a source of pride if he let you in to eat. The grocery store had sawdust-covered wooden floors back then. But one summer when we were at a dig in Peru, Farm Foods was replaced by The Gap. Now we had You’re Worth It! Day Spa, five nautical gift stores, and an English tea room. There were rumors about a taxidermy shop soon to open, though I couldn’t imagine what kind of tourists that would attract.

I parked in the residents-only lot and walked slowly up the street. After the murder of the Old Frigate owner, Margaret Weller, people had started leaving flowers and stuffed toys with literary themes—Babar, Madeleine, and Winnie-the-Pooh—crammed up against the bookshop door. I dreaded seeing the remnants. Margaret had been my best friend.

I was relieved to see that Marty had cleared everything away. “The Old Frigate” was still painted in gold script on the glass, but the front windows were bare. Seeing its nakedness, I was overtaken by a sense of desolation. I had loved the bookshop with its look of a British men’s club, its fireplace, the leather sofa and paisley wing chairs, the Oriental rugs. You could get lost for hours, and sometimes in winter, when book sales were few, I had. How could something so wonderful have gone so wrong?

Marty, still wearing his red “Cadillac Repair” T-shirt and stained khakis, unlocked the door. “Come in, come in!”

He actually reached out and grabbed my arm to pull me inside, then locked the door again as if hordes of people were clamoring to get in.

Unwillingly, I looked around. The beautiful oak shelves were empty, but the chairs and brown leather sofa still surrounded the fireplace. Even the small photograph of Emily Dickinson, who had inspired the bookshop’s name by writing, “There is no frigate like a book to bear us lands away,” still hung beside the door. My eyes flickered over to the marble fireplace hearth.

“I had a cleaning service in, got rid the blood.” Marty assured me. “I hired fumigators too, the basement smelled like rotten—”

“Don’t!” I remembered that nauseating stench, like meat left out in the sun for days. Margaret had still been in the hospital after being attacked. I had been the one to discover her assistant Amil’s body jammed and rotting in a downstairs closet.

“Yeah, right. So sit down.”

“I can’t stay—” But the shop was already pulling me in.
Sit here
, my favorite wing chair urged.
Have you forgotten us already?

I ignored my favorite chair and perched on the edge of a leather love seat. “I can’t believe you bought this. There was a huge balloon loan coming due.”

“Popped it,” Marty said smugly, pushing up his taped glasses. “The place is mine, free and clear. All those years Margaret had it, I was dying to make something of it. The moment I heard it was for sale, ka-boom.”

I tend to forget that Marty can afford anything he wants. When Suffolk County was still farmland, his grandfather arrived with a cesspool-pumping truck and, impatient with how long the process took, he created a faster waste-dissolving substance. Mario Campagna’s timing was perfect. He sold the patent to a national manufacturer, and guaranteed the family fortune. You can still see a few of the original Campagna trucks on the road with their slogan, “We turn your waste into gold!” along with a drawing of a mischievous little king perched on a toilet.

Marty was one of the first booksellers I met when I started going to sales. He was already legendary: He had picked up his first book at a rummage sale for a quarter—a book that turned out to be a signed copy of Jack Kerouac’s first novel. I noticed him because he seemed to know exactly where in the house to head the moment the doors opened. Marty would be stacking valuable books in cartons while I still stood in the hallway, wondering where to start. I’d been attracted to his confidence, but put off by his bulldozer approach.

“What are you going to do with the shop?” I asked.

“Do with it? This place is a class act. It’s a perfect venue to sell the books I don’t have collectors lined up for. I’ve been getting into art lately, buying up old paintings. They can go in here too. And that”—he made his finger into a gun and cocked it at me—“is where
you
come in.”

The gesture was so unlike Marty, who scorned anything affected, that I realized he was nervous about what he was going to say.

“You’re good with people, Blondie. People like you. And you know your books.”

And?
It took me a moment to understand. “You want me to run the Old Frigate?”

“I’d change the name, of course. It would be a higher-end shop.”

“But what about my business?” How could I run his bookshop full-time and still keep up with Secondhand Prose?

He waved that away. “Internet selling is
so
over
.
You’ll make a lot more money working for me.”

I stared at him. In a New York minute he had erased my reason for getting up in the morning. He had made Secondhand Prose into a hobby, something like crocheting scarves for boutiques. No, not even that, since I didn’t make the books—only scavenged them.

The most insulting part was that he hadn’t
meant
to be insulting. He hadn’t suggested I sell my books here either. No doubt they would compromise his high-end shop. Worst of all, what he said about the Internet was true. The golden days of online bookselling were over, the prices on the book sites eroding for years. Several years ago an army of amateurs had marched in, pricing perfectly good books for under a dollar. Nobody in my dealers’ group, BookEm.com, could figure out how such sellers made any money. Maybe they didn’t. Now
there
was a hobby for you.

Marty also held a card he didn’t know he possessed. My living situation was precarious. My husband, Colin, in his position as archeology professor at Stony Brook University, was the reason I could live cheaply in the university-owned farmhouse and barn. If he decided to make our separation permanent, I would have to move. I had been shocked when he left, and he was still calling the shots. Where would I find a place I could afford that could hold eight thousand books? If I didn’t accept Marty’s offer, I might be forced to work nights at McDonald’s.

I looked past Marty to the beautiful, now forlorn, bookshop I had once loved. It could be brought back to life—of course it could. I saw myself decorating the shop windows with books and antiques for special occasions, discussing literature with the collectors who stopped by. I loved to talk about books, and Marty’s were the kind of treasures that other shops kept locked in glass cases. At the annual open house, I would be the one offering cups of champagne punch and smoked salmon hors d’oeuvres. I would be—finally—respectable in Colin’s eyes. Maybe he would decide I was worthy of him.

I gave my head a shake to clear it. What was I thinking? I had fallen under Marty’s spell just like the Little Match Girl had been enticed by the flames in the matches she struck. When the glorious visions faded, I would be left in the dark and cold too.

“Well, it’s something to think about.”

Wrong answer. Marty looked surprised—and displeased.

You need to work on your people skills, buddy.

“Better not take too long,” he warned.

Or what?
The worst that could happen would be that he would find someone else to run his shop, and I would be left to my own bliss.