His Lass Wears Tartan (24 page)

The cat flattened itself to the carpet near the front bookcase, ears lost against its orange-striped head, frozen in fear. A terrified hiss leaked through his open mouth and, slinking backward, the cat spun and ran toward the back of the store.

Catching a brief flash of orange out of the corner of her eye, Baillie shook her head. “Now what’s gotten into Sebastian? Must be a mouse.” She fanned her painted fingernails along the spines of books stacked on the shelf beside her. Listening to the hushed clicking sounds of her nails against the bindings as she walked down the aisle, she inhaled the intoxicating aroma of paper and leather around her. She loved opening her bookshop every morning, where antique classics, used and new volumes of various sizes filled the shelves around her. Framed paintings by local artists dotted the walls between the bookcases.

“Morning,” Baillie called to the previously owned hardbacks without the slightest apprehension of appearing insane. She talked to inanimate objects all the time — great audience, no heckling.
Besides, I’m alone in here unless you count the cat, and you can’t count on that spoiled feline for anything. Where did he dash off to just now in such a hurry?

A thin volume of poems lay exposed on a shelf. “You don’t belong here,” Baillie said, sweeping it up to reshelve. She hesitated; the book cover felt cold in her hand, the worn leather chilling her fingers, sucking the warmth from her fingertips in seconds. She quickly shook her head to keep her thoughts from running amok. Of course the book was cold; in the Northwest, things always seemed cold.

“I swear someone helps themselves around here at night. The least they could do is put the books back where they belong when they’re done.” She turned and pushed a ceramic bookend aside and placed the wayward book next to the others as a quick chill shivered down her spine.

“Hey, Einstein, ol’ buddy.” Baillie grabbed an ornate feather duster from a brass umbrella stand nearby and took a few housekeeping swipes against the framed lithograph hanging on the wall. “Dang, I’m looking more like you every day.” She checked her reflection in the glass. “Tell me, did you see who moved Robert Burns’s book of poems last night? Maybe I need to borrow your glasses — going blind in my old age and missed putting it away after closing.”

Baillie turned, whistling the theme song from
Fame
, at the end of the aisle. She missed seeing the slow, deliberate movement as the same book silently shifted out from the shelf. The dark brown edition slid away from the other poetry books, hanging suspended for a moment, then lay back on the empty surface of the shelf. The ceramic bookend moved, closing the empty gap.

The front door of the shop opened with a tinkling of metal chimes. “It’s just me,” yelled a female voice as she came in.

“I’m in the north quarter, Sally. Would you turn on the computer?” Baillie responded from somewhere behind the walls of books. “Time to open up, I guess.”

“No problem, boss.” Sally dropped her purse under the counter.

Baillie knew her assistant’s routine by heart: She’d click the black toggle switch on the power strip with the toe of her shoe, sending juice to all the electronics at the same time. Baillie heard the calculator, printer, and credit card unit each create its own hum as Sally pressed the power button.

“How are the hot flashes this morning?” Sally asked.

“Midlife under control, thank you very much young whiner.” Baillie dusted another shelf with a few fast swishes. “You can kick the personal heater on for a while.”

“Just a little damp for June this year, you know. Some of us don’t have the benefit of hormonal heaters,” she taunted.

“I heard that!” Baillie continued up and down the aisles, swishing the duster back and forth. Suddenly, a bitter cold swept around her, sending a blinding chill through her body. She gasped from the icy shock. Baillie couldn’t catch her breath as the splash of numbing cold flowed into her heart and out again, pounding inside her chest. The reddish blond hairs on the back of her exposed neck stood on end. Her teeth chattered against the chill, like Lucy Ricardo locked in the meat freezer.

“What the … ?” She leaned against the shelving for support. “Whoa.” Baillie blinked rapidly and focused on her right hand, more specifically the beige metal shelf under her crimson-painted fingernails. The metal felt warm, warmer than her soul at the moment. Goose bumps traveled up her bare arms and under her short-sleeved blouse. Titles describing Scotland and its clans stood in military straight rows in front of her.

As quickly as it had struck, the air around her trembling body returned to normal temperatures. She took a shaky breath, mentally searching for some logical explanation for the bone-chilling cold. “Who turned the air conditioner on?” she whispered to herself with mock confidence. Looking around the cramped quarters of bookshelves as she moved away, the store seemed peaceful. She dropped the feather duster into a stand with a soft thud.

Baillie walked with determination toward the front of the spacious lobby, checking from one side to the other — for what, she couldn’t imagine. As she walked, her hand came up and absent-mindedly played with an escaped tendril of hair from the casual bun she had pinned on the back of her head. A habit from childhood, she twirled the soft hair around her finger in concentration.

“Sally? Did you play with the thermostat just now?”

“No, my heater’s on low; haven’t touched the wall unit.” The twenty-seven-year-old assistant bent her head over the index card file she’d been sorting. Locks of dark, straight hair fell across the gold-colored, wire-framed glasses on her face.

Baillie leaned against the polished oak counter, spotting a few morning customers already settled in overstuffed reading chairs or studying the latest local art hanging in the lobby. Baillie even noted a crusty old weekly regular absorbed in the newspapers of the Puget Sound. All seemed normal at Pen and Pages.

“Too weird.” Baillie rubbed her hands together, trying to forget the icy anomaly, and grabbed a stack of new books waiting for shelving. Her arm wrapped around the volumes as naturally and lovingly as a mother cradled a newborn baby.

The entryway of Pen and Pages smelled of remodeling from recently installed rose-patterned carpet and coats of fresh paint on the walls to match the mauve in the threaded petals. Baillie took a deep breath and exhaled to the count of six. She felt her pulse slow back to normal.
I’m not alone.
The company of customers felt like a warm knitted wrap over her shoulders. She tightened her hold on the armload of books, hesitant to move from the security of the counter and Sally’s presence.

“Is everything all right?” Sally stared at her, holding her finger inside the small white cards to mark her place. Though Baillie kept the shop’s sales, billing and cost accounting on the computer, she insisted the shop keep a manual file of certain art forms on consignment, a throwback of her childhood delight in handling 3 x 5 index cards and endless searches in the old card catalogs at the local library. Sally didn’t mind the odd recordkeeping.

“I’m sure it’s nothing. I just felt this bizarre rush of cold air while standing in the travel books. Not a blast really; I mean, nothing stirred or moved I don’t think. You didn’t feel anything, right?” Baillie chewed on her lower lip as Sally shook her head. “Dang, it felt like I was standing on top of Mt. Rainier for a moment or two.”

Sally crossed her short but shapely legs and tucked loose strands of hair behind her ear for the tenth time in an hour. “The Queen of Menopause suffering from chills? That’s a new one,” she teased with gentle affection.

“Excuse me.” Baillie stared at the young woman across from her with mock surprise. “Your turn will come sooner than you think, Ms. Generation X. Don’t make fun of my freakishly early passage into mature womanhood.”

“Maybe your Aunt Fran’s upset over the remodeling. This was her house first.”

“Wha — ?” Baillie felt the blood drain from her face. “You think it was a ghost?”

“I’m kidding! I didn’t mean it. Seriously,” Sally stuttered at Baillie’s scared reaction. “My grandma used to say something crazy like if you got a chill or shiver down your back that someone’s walking over your grave.”

“I knew you were just pulling my chain, Sally,” Baillie said, aiming for nonchalance in her tone.
Get a grip, you’re freaking out the hired help.
“You know, I don’t plan on having a grave for anyone to tromp over.” Baillie fiddled with a stack of Post-It notes, avoiding Sally’s brilliant blue eyes behind the gold-rimmed glasses, the ghost idea still making her heart race. “I’m going with a bake-and-shake process when I die. Someone can spread my ashes across the Sound or inside some potted plant for all I care. I won’t be here.”

“Baillie, that’s morbid. And probably illegal. Don’t they have laws about interring cremated ashes?”

“Me, worry about breaking stupid laws? I’m an orphan, for gosh sake, with no relatives anywhere. Who’d worry about me? Sebastian? Anyone gives him a bowl of tuna and he’d forget me in a minute, the fickle old feline. I intend to leave my worldly goods to Wolf Haven with a clause that my orange buddy be given a good home with some lady who will continue to spoil him rotten. Where is that darn nuisance anyway?”

The phone rang, and both women jumped at the sudden intrusion and laughed nervously at their dual reactions. Sally picked up the receiver, and Baillie pushed herself away from the counter. These books weren’t going to sell themselves.

“Hmm, what
will
I do when this pitiful body quits?” Baillie mused. She stopped in the first aisle of fiction and shoved two books apart. “Hell, at fifty-four, I’ve got twenty, thirty years to figure out something.” She added the top book from her stack and then read the author’s name and title of the next book. “Guarantee me the Angel of Death who comes to take me to the other side looks as good as Andrew on
Touched by an Angel
, and I’ll put my request in early. God, was he gorgeous or what?” she said to no one.
Okay, I’m losing it worse than usual. No more talking to myself; there are customers around
.

Floor-to-ceiling bookcases filled various rooms like a fractured maze from Lewis Carroll’s
Wonderland
, with hard-covered beauties or glazed pottery works adding to the colorful personality of the old house’s first floor. Walking among the mismatched bookcases, some painted eggshell white, some collected from going-out-of-business sales of other stores, Baillie focused on moving and shifting the volumes, making room for the new additions. For every book she added, she automatically checked if one or two volumes might be out of alphabetical sequence.

Baillie was born a librarian her maternal grandmother had always told her. “Black ink flows through those veins of yours,” Grammie often said during her visits when Baillie was a child. Baillie would curl up with a book in the corner of the couch with her Grammie during most of her visits and had kept a stack of additional books waiting by her bed.

She agreed with her grandmother’s assessment. She’d wanted to be a librarian since she was a little girl proudly carting her first library card in a tiny, white wicker purse. At least she had until she noted the job requirements during her high school years. Who decided it took a master’s degree to organize books? What a high-priced concept, enduring years of advanced schooling to memorize the numbered file system of Dewy Decimal. Only after sweat and thesis could you work for low government wages under a maniacal boss
just
to do what you loved most in the world. Sounded like a Dilbert comic strip to Baillie.

Books held magic and knowledge that broke her loose from the sterile home life she had been raised in. Granted, being raised in Southern California held nothing of the descriptive seasons she found in the printed pages of Beverly Cleary’s books long ago. Her characters lived in neatly packaged, tree-lined neighborhoods where it snowed in the winter, and woolen underwear was a necessity for walking to school. At least Ellen Tibbets had to.

Baillie was probably allergic to wool. Who wore anything other than cotton and polyester in Southern California? Her only-child household had sat in the middle of a cement and asphalt suburb. The constant sun blazed from season to season. If the temperature dropped below sixty degrees, Baillie felt frostbitten and crabby. Cold was nasty and unforgiving back then.
Beezus and Ramona, eat your paper hearts out.

Cold. Baillie found herself turning into aisle three, the frozen section from earlier. She stared down the familiar aisle as seconds ticked by. Nothing looked out of the ordinary. She felt her heart slam against her chest in a jarring beat.
Snap out of it, this is ridiculous.
Smiling at the superstitious fear, Baillie focused on her work, though her knuckles whitened around the books in her arm.

Scenes from the haunted forest in the
Wizard of Oz
ran through her mind as she stared down the aisle. “I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks,” the Cowardly Lion had cried as he held his tail between his paws. “Nonsense. It’s probably nothing. I haven’t eaten breakfast yet; maybe this is just low blood sugar. More likely a miserable draft I’ll be spending a fortune to fix. There’s no such thing as spooks.”

Baillie found that her body wouldn’t move. Her feet were firmly planted on the carpet as if long roots had sprouted through the floor. She looked down at her sensible black pumps with irritation. “I have work to do,” she muttered under her breath. She lifted her right foot with every intention of taking a step forward. Nothing happened.

A lilting sound tickled her ear, faint notes of a melody. “The CD player’s broken. There’s no music playing in the shop,” she said out loud to herself. “Has been for days; it still has my favorite Jimmy Buffett disc inside.”
Maybe someone’s MP3 player is turned up too high.

Nothing. Silence. Only the fast beating of her heart and a hum of conversations in the front of the store could be heard. She slowly placed her foot, still dangling in midair, back on the carpet. Straining her ears, she tried to decipher what she thought she’d heard. There it was again, more audible this time, a handful of notes like a flute or pipe played.
A Celtic sound
, she thought, as it faded away.