The Book Thing (2 page)

Tess thought about Octavia’s brusque ways, Mona’s stories about how cranky she could get. Still, it was hard to imagine a disgruntled customer going to these lengths. Most people would satisfy themselves by writing a mean review on Yelp.

“I will tell you this,” Kitty said. “Years ago—and it was on Twenty-Fifth Street, when it had even more used bookstores—there was a rash of thefts. The owners couldn’t believe how much inventory they were losing, and how random it was. But then it stopped, just like that.”

“What happened then? I mean, why did it stop? Did they arrest someone?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“I should probably check with the other sellers on the street, see if they’re noticing anything,” Tess said. “But I wonder why it’s happening
now
.”

“Maybe someone’s worried that there won’t be books much longer, that they’re going to be extinct.”

It was clearly a joke on Kitty’s part, but Tess couldn’t help asking: “Are they?”

The pause on the other end of the phone line was so long that Tess began to wonder if her cell had dropped the call. When Kitty spoke again, her voice was low, without its usual mirth.

“I don’t dare predict the future. After all, I didn’t think newspapers could go away. Still, I believe that there will be a market for physical books; I just don’t know how large it will be. All I know is that I’m okay—for now. I own my building, I have a strong core of loyal customers, and I have a good walk-in trade from tourists. In the end, it comes down to what people value. Do they value bookstores? Do they value books? I don’t know, Tess. Books have been free in libraries for years and that didn’t devalue them. The Book Thing here in Baltimore gives books away to anyone who wants them. Free, no strings. Doesn’t hurt me at all. For decades, people have bought used books from everywhere—from flea markets to the Smith College Book Sale. But there’s something about pressing a button on your computer and buying something so ephemeral for 99 cents, having it whooshed instantly to you. Remember
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?”

“Of course.” Tess, like most children, had been drawn to Roald Dahl’s dark stories. He was another one on her list of writers she wanted Carla Scout to read.

“Well, what if you could do what Willie Wonka did—as Dahl fantasized—reach into your television and pull out a candy bar? What if everything you wanted was always available to you, all the time, on a 24/7 basis? It damn near is. Life has become so a la carte. We get what we want when we want it. But if you ask me, that means it’s that much harder to identify what we really want.”

“That’s not a problem in Baltimore,” Tess said. “All I can get delivered is pizza and Chinese—and not even my favorite pizza or Chinese.”

“You’re joking to get me off this morbid school of thought.”

“Not exactly.” She wasn’t joking. The state of food delivery in Baltimore was depressing. But she also wasn’t used to hearing her ebullient aunt in such a somber mood and she was trying to distract her, as she might play switcheroo with Carla Scout. And it worked. It turned out that dealing with a toddler, day in and day out, was actually good practice for dealing with the world at large.

The Children’s Bookstore was hectic on Saturdays as promised, although Tess quickly realized that there was a disproportionate relationship between the bustle in the aisles and the activity at the cash register.

She also noticed the phenomenon that Mona had described, people using the store as a real-life shopping center for their virtual needs. She couldn’t decide which was more obnoxious—the people who pulled out their various devices and made purchases while standing in the store, or those who waited until they were on the sidewalk again, who hunched over their phones and eReaders almost furtively as if committing a kind of crime. They were and they weren’t, Tess decided. It was legal, but they were ripping off Mona’s space and time, using her as a curator of sorts.

At the height of the hubbub, a delivery man arrived with boxes of books, wheeling his hand truck through the narrow aisles, losing the top box at one point. He was exceedingly handsome in a preppy way—and exceedingly clumsy. As he tried to work his way to the back of the store, his boxes fell off one, two, three times. Once, the top box burst open, spilling a few books onto the floor.

“Sorry,” he said with a bright smile as he knelt to collect them. Except—did Tess see him sweep several books off a shelf and into a box? Why would he do that? After all, the boxes were being delivered; it’s not as if he could take them with him.

“Tate is the clumsiest guy in the world,” Mona said with affection after he left. “A sweetheart, but just a mess.”

“You mean, he drops stuff all the time?”

“Drops things, mixes up orders, you name it. But Octavia dotes on him. Those dimples …”

Tess had not picked up on the dimples, but she had a chance to see how they affected Octavia when the delivery man returned fifteen minutes later, looking sheepish.

“Tate!” Octavia said with genuine delight.

“I feel so stupid. One of those boxes I left—it’s for Royal Books up the block.”

“No problem,” Octavia said. “You know I never get around to unpacking the Saturday deliveries until the store clears out late in the day.”

He looked through the stack of boxes he had left, showed Octavia that one was addressed to Royal Books and hoisted it on his shoulder. Tess couldn’t help noticing that there wasn’t any tape on the box; the top had been folded with the overlapping flaps that people used when boxing their own possessions for a move. She ambled out in the street behind him, saw him put the box on his truck—then drive away, west and then north on Howard Street, completely bypassing Royal Books.

He looks like someone,
Tess thought.
Someone I know, yet don’t know. Someone famous?
He probably just resembled some actor on television.

Back inside the bookstore, she didn’t have the heart to tell Octavia what she suspected. Octavia had practically glowed when she saw Tate. Besides, Tess had no proof. Yet.

“So, did you see anything?” Octavia asked at day’s end.

“Maybe. If there was anything taken today, it was from this shelf.” Tess pointed to the low one next to where the box had fallen, spilling its contents. Mona crouched on her haunches and poked at the titles. “I can’t be sure until I check our computer, but the shelf was full yesterday. I mean—there’s no Seuss and we always have Seuss.”

“If you saw it, why didn’t you say something?” Octavia demanded, as peevish as any paying customer. “Or
do
something, for God’s sake.”

“I wasn’t sure I saw anything and I didn’t want to offend … a potential customer. I’ll be back next Saturday. This is a two-person job.” Life is unfair. Tess Monaghan, toting her toddler daughter in a baby carrier, was invisible to most of the world, except for leering men who observed the baby’s chest-level position and said things like “Best seat in the house.”

But when Crow put on the Ergo and shouldered their baby to
his
chest, the world melted, or at least the female half did. So he stood in the bookstore the next Saturday morning, trying to be polite to the cooing women around him, even as he waited to see if he would observe something similar to what Tess had seen the week before. Once again, Tate arrived when story hour was in full swing, six boxes on his hand truck.

No dropped box,
Crow reported via text.

Damn, Tess thought. Maybe he was smart enough to vary the days, despite Mona’s conviction that the thefts had been concentrated on Saturdays. Maybe she was deluded, maybe —

Her phone pinged again.
Taking one box with him. Says it was on cart by mistake. I didn’t see anything, tho. He’s good.

Tess was on her bike, which she had decided was her best bet for following someone in North Baltimore on a Saturday. A delivery guy, even an off-brand one working the weekends, had to make frequent stops, right? She counted on being able to keep up with him. And she did, as he moved through his route, although she almost ran down Walking Man near the Baltimore Museum of Art. Still, she was flying along, watching him unload boxes at stop after stop until she realized the flaw in her plan: How could she know which box was the box from the Children’s Bookstore?

She sighed, resigned to donating yet another Saturday to The Children’s Bookstore.

And another and another and another. The next four Saturdays went by without any incidents. Tate showed up, delivered his boxes, made no mistakes, dropped nothing. Yet, throughout the week, customer requests would point out missing volumes—books listed as in-stock in the computer, yet nowhere to be found in the store.

By the fifth Saturday, the Christmas rush appeared to be on and the store was even more chaotic when Tate arrived—and dropped a box in one of the store’s remote corners, one that could never be seen from the cash register or the story-time alcove on the converted sun porch. Tess, out on the street on her bike, ready to ride, watched it unfold via Facetime on Crow’s phone, which he was holding at hip level. The action suddenly blurred—Mona, taken into Tess’s confidence, had rushed forward try and help Tate. Tate brushed her away, but not before Carla Scout’s sippee cup somehow fell on the box, the lid bouncing off and releasing a torrent of red juice, enough to leave a visible splotch on the box’s side, an image that Crow captured and forwarded in a text. Tess, across the street, watched as he loaded it, noted the placement of the large stain.

It was a long, cold afternoon, with no respite for Tess as she followed the truck. No time to grab so much as a cup of coffee, and she wouldn’t have risked drinking anything because that could have forced her to search out a bathroom.

It was coming up on four o’clock, the wintry light beginning to weaken, when Tate headed up one of the most notorious hills in the residential neighborhood of Roland Park, not far from where Tess lived. She would have loved to wait at the bottom, but how could she know where he made the delivery? She gave him a five-minute head start, hoping that Tate, like most Baltimore drivers, simply didn’t see cyclists.

His truck was parked outside a rambling Victorian, perhaps one of the old summer houses built when people would travel a mere five to fifteen miles to escape the closed-in heat of downtown Baltimore. Yet this house, on a street full of million-dollar houses, did not appear to be holding its end up. Cedar shingles had dropped off as if the house were molting, the roof was inexpertly patched in places, and the chimney looked like a liability suit waiting to happen. The delivery truck idled in the driveway, Tate still in the driver’s seat. Tess crouched by her wheel in a driveway three houses down, pretending to be engaged in a repair. Eventually, a man came out, but not from the house. He had been inside the stable at the head of the driveway. Most such outbuildings in the neighborhood had been converted to new uses or torn down, but this one appeared to have been untouched. A light burned inside, but that was all Tess could glimpse before the doors rolled shut again.

That man looks familiar,
she thought, as she had thought about Tate the first time she saw him.
Is he famous or do I know him?

The man who walked to the end of the driveway, she realized, was Walking Man. No backpack, but it was clearly him, his shoulders rounding even farther forward without their usual counterweight. He shook the driver’s hand and Tess realized why she thought she had seen Tate before—he was a handsomer, younger version of Walking Man.

Tate handed Walking Man the box with the red stain. No money changed hands. Nothing changed hands. But even in the dim light, the stain was evident. The man took the box into the old stable and muscled the doors back into place.

Tess was faced with a choice, one she hadn’t anticipated. She could follow Tate and confront him, figuring that he had the most to lose. His job was on the line. But she couldn’t prove he was guilty of theft until she looked inside the box. If she followed Tate, the books could be gone before she returned and she wouldn’t be able to prove anything. She had to see what was inside that box.

She texted Crow, told him what she was going to do and walked up the driveway without waiting for his reply, which she supposed would urge caution, or tell her to call the police. But it was only a box of books from a children’s bookstore. How high could the stakes be?

She knocked on the stable door. Minutes passed. She knocked again.

“I saw you,” she said to the dusk, to herself, possibly to the man inside. “I know you’re in there.”

Another minute or so passed, a very long time to stand outside as darkness encroached and the cold deepened. But, eventually, the door was rolled open.

“I don’t know you,” Walking Man said in the flat affect of a child.

“My name is Tess Monaghan and I sort of know you. You’re the—”

She stopped herself just in time. Walking Man didn’t know he was Walking Man. She realized, somewhat belatedly, that
he
had not boiled his existence down to one quirk. Whoever he was, he didn’t define himself as Walking Man. He had a life, a history. Perhaps a sad and gloomy one, based on these surroundings and his compulsive, constant hiking, but he was not, in his head or mirror, a man who did nothing but walk around North Baltimore.

Or was he?

“I’ve seen you around. I don’t live far from here. We’re practically neighbors.”

He stared at her oddly, said nothing. His arm was braced against the frame of the door—she could not enter without pushing past him. She sensed he wouldn’t like that kind of contact, that he was not used to being touched. She remembered how quickly he had whirled around the day she rolled her stroller up on his heels. But unlike most people, who would turn toward the person who had jostled them, he moved away.

“May I come in?”

He dropped his arm and she took that as an invitation—and also as a sign that he believed himself to have nothing to fear. He wasn’t acting like someone who felt guilty, or in the wrong. Then again, he didn’t know that she had followed the books here.

The juice-stained box sat on a work table, illuminated by an overhead light strung from the ceiling on a long cable. Tess walked over to the box, careful not to turn her back to Walking Man, wishing she had a name for him other than Walking Man, but he had not offered his name when she gave hers.