The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry: A Novel (3 page)

“Lamb. So she kills the guy with the frozen lamb chop then she puts it in the oven to cook without even thawing it. I’m no Rachael Ray, but . . .”

Nic had begun to freeze by the time they had pulled her car out of the water, and in the morgue drawer her lips had been blue. The color had reminded A.J. of the black lipstick she’d worn to the book party she’d thrown for the latest vampire whatever. He hadn’t cared for the idea of silly teenage girls prancing about Island in prom dresses, but Nic, who had actually
liked
that damned vampire book and the woman who wrote it, insisted that a vampire prom was good for business and also fun. “You remember fun, right?”

“Dimly,” he had said. “Long ago, back before I was a bookseller, back when I had my weekends and my nights to myself, back when I read for pleasure, I recall that there was fun. So, dimly, dimly. Yes.”

“Let me refresh your memory. Fun is having a smart, pretty, easy wife with whom you get to spend every working day.”

He could still picture her in that ridiculous black satin dress, her right arm draped around the porch column and her comely stained lips in a line. “Tragically, my wife has been turned into a vampire.”

“You poor man.” She crossed the porch and kissed him, leaving a lipstick trace like a bruise. “Your only move is to become a vampire, too. Don’t try to fight it. That’s the absolute worst thing you could do. You gotta be cool, nerd. Invite me in.”

Though he can’t remember how he got there or having taken off his clothes, A.J. wakes in bed wearing only his underwear. He remembers that Harvey Rhodes is dead; he remembers being an asshole to the comely Knightley Press rep; he remembers throwing the vindaloo across the room; he remembers the first glass of wine and the toast to
Tamerlane
. After that, oblivion. From his point of view, the evening had been a triumph.

His head is pounding. He walks out to the main room, expecting to find the vindaloo detritus. The floor and the walls are spotless. A.J. digs an aspirin out of the cabinet while silently congratulating himself for having had the foresight to clean up the vindaloo. He sits down at the dining-room table and notices that the wine bottle has also been thrown out. Odd for him to have been so fastidious but not unprecedented. He is nothing if not a neat drunk. He looks across the table to where he’d left
Tamerlane
. The book is gone. Maybe he only
thought
he’d taken it out of the case?

As he walks across the room, A.J.’s heart is pounding in competition with his head. Halfway to the bookcase, he can see that the combination-locked, climate-controlled glass coffin, which protects
Tamerlane
from the world, is wide open and empty.

He pulls on a bathrobe and throws on his running shoes, which haven’t gotten much mileage on them of late.

A.
J. jogs down Captain Wiggins Street with his dingy plaid bathrobe flapping out behind him. He looks like a depressed, malnourished superhero. He turns onto Main and runs straight into the sleepy Alice Island Police Station. “I’ve been robbed!” A.J. announces. It was only a short run, but A.J. is breathing hard. “Please, someone help me!” He tries not to feel like an old lady with a stolen handbag.

Lambiase sets down his cup of coffee and takes in the distraught man in the bathrobe. He recognizes him as the owner of the bookstore and the man whose pretty young wife had driven into the lake a year and a half back. A.J. looks much older than the last time he’d seen him, though Lambiase supposes that is to be expected.

“All right, Mr. Fikry,” Lambiase says, “tell me what happened.”

“Someone stole
Tamerlane,
” A.J. says.

“What’s
Tamerlane
?”

“It’s a book. It’s a very valuable book.”

“To clarify. You mean someone
shoplifted
a book from the store.”

“No. It was
my
book from my personal collection. It is an extremely rare collection of poems by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“So, it’s, like, your favorite book?” Lambiase asks.

“No. I don’t even like it. It’s crap, it’s jejune crap. It’s . . .” A.J. is hyperventilating. “Fuck.”

“Calm down, Mr. Fikry. I’m trying to understand. You don’t like the book, but it has sentimental value?”

“No! Fuck sentimental value. It has great financial value.
Tamerlane
is like the Honus Wagner of rare books! You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure, my pops was a baseball card collector.” Lambiase nods. “That valuable?”

A.J. can’t get the words out fast enough. “It was the first thing Edgar Allan Poe ever wrote, back when he was eighteen. Copies are extremely rare because the print run was fifty copies, and it was published anonymously. Instead of ‘by Edgar Allan Poe,’ it says ‘by a Bostonian’ on the cover. Copies sell for upward of four hundred thousand dollars depending on condition and the mood of the rare books market. I was planning to auction it off in a couple of years when the economy had had a little time to improve. I was planning to close the shop and retire on the proceeds.”

“If you don’t mind my asking,” Lambiase says, “why would you keep something like that in your house and not in a bank vault?”

A.J. shakes his head. “I don’t know. I was stupid. I liked keeping it close by, I suppose. I liked being able to look at it and be reminded that I could quit anytime I wanted to. I kept it in a combination-locked glass case. I thought it was safe enough.” In his defense, there is very little theft in Alice Island except during tourist season. It is October.

“So, did someone break the case or did someone know the combination?” Lambiase asks.

“Neither. I wanted to get wasted last night. Fucking stupid, but I took out the book so I could look at it. A poor excuse for company, I know.”

“Mr. Fikry, was
Tamerlane
insured?”

A.J. puts his head in his hands. Lambiase takes that to mean that the book wasn’t. “I only found the book about a year ago, a couple of months after my wife died. I didn’t want to spend the extra money. I never got around to it. I don’t know. A million retrospectively idiotic reasons, the main one being that I am an idiot, Officer Lambiase.”

Lambiase doesn’t bother telling him that it is
Chief
Lambiase. “Here’s what I’m gonna do. First, you and me are gonna file a police report. Then, when my detective comes in—she’s only on half days during the off-season—I’m gonna send her down to your place to look for fingerprints and other evidence. Maybe something’ll come up. The other thing we can do is call the auction houses and other people who deal in these sorts of items. If it’s as rare a book as you say, people will notice if an unaccounted-for copy comes on the market. Don’t things like that need to have a record of who owned them, a whatchamacallit?”

“A provenance,” A.J. says.

“Yeah, exactly! My wife used to watch
Antiques Roadshow.
You ever seen that show?”

A.J. doesn’t reply.

“One last thing, I’m wondering who knew about the book?”

A.J. snorts. “Everyone. My wife’s sister, Ismay, teaches at the high school. She worries about me since Nic . . . She’s always bugging me to get out of the store, get off the island. About a year ago, she dragged me to this dreary estate sale in Milton. It was sitting in a box with about fifty other books, all worthless except
Tamerlane
. I paid five dollars. The people had no idea what they had. I felt kind of shitty about taking it, if you want to know the truth. Not that it matters now. Anyway, Ismay thought it would be good for business and educational or some crap if I put it on display in the store. So I kept the case in the shop all last summer. You never come to the store, I guess.”

Lambiase looks at his shoes, the familiar shame of a thousand high school English classes where he’d failed to do the minimum required reading rushing back to him. “Not much of a reader.”

“You read some crime, though, right?”

“Good memory,” Lambiase says. In fact, A.J. has a perfect memory for people’s reading tastes.

“Deaver, was it? If you like that, there’s this new writer from—”

“Sure, I’ll stop by some time. Is there someone I can call for you? Your wife’s sister is Ismay Evans-Parish, right?”

“Ismay’s at—” At that moment, A.J. freezes as if someone has pressed the pause button on him. His eyes are blank and his mouth drops open.

“Mr. Fikry?”

For nearly thirty seconds, A.J. is frozen and then he resumes speaking as if nothing has happened. “Ismay’s at work, and I’m fine. There’s no need to call her.”

“You were gone for a minute there,” Lambiase says.

“What?”

“You blacked out.”

“Oh Christ. It’s just an
absence
seizure. I used to have them a lot as a kid. I rarely have them as an adult except when I’m unusually stressed.”

“You should see a doctor.”

“No, it’s fine. Honestly. I just want to find my book.”

“I’d feel better,” Lambiase insists. “You’ve had a pretty traumatic morning, and I know you live alone. I’m gonna take you to the hospital and then I’m gonna have your in-laws meet you there. Meanwhile, I’ll have my guys see if they can figure anything out about your book.”

At the hospital,
A.J. waits, fills out forms, waits, strips, waits, takes tests, waits, puts his clothes back on, waits, takes more tests, waits, strips again, and at last is seen by a middle-aged general practitioner. She is not particularly concerned about the seizure. The tests, however, have revealed that his blood pressure and cholesterol are on the border between acceptable and high for a thirty-nine-year-old man. She asks A.J. about his lifestyle. He answers the question truthfully. “I’m not what you’d call an alcoholic, but I do like to drink until I pass out at least once a week. I smoke occasionally and I subsist on a diet of frozen entrees. I rarely floss. I used to be a long-distance runner, but now I don’t exercise at all. I live alone and I lack meaningful personal relationships. Since my wife died, I hate my work, too.”

“Oh, is that all?” the doctor asks. “You’re still a young man, Mr. Fikry, but a body can only take so much. If you’re trying to kill yourself, I can certainly think of faster, easier ways to go about it. Do you want to die?”

A response doesn’t immediately occur to him.

“Because if you really want to die, I can put you under psychiatric observation.”

“I don’t want to die,” A.J. says after a bit. “I just find it difficult to be
here
all the time. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No. I can see why you would feel that way. You’re going through a bear of a time. Start with exercise,” she says. “You’ll feel better.”

“Okay.”

“Your wife was lovely,” the doctor says. “I used to be in the mother-daughter book club she ran at the store. My daughter still works for you part-time.”

“Molly Klock?”

“Klock is my partner’s name. I’m Dr. Rosen.” She taps her name tag.

In
the lobby,
A.J. encounters a familiar scene. “Would you mind terribly?” a nurse in pink scrubs asks, holding out a battered mass-market paperback to a man in a corduroy jacket with patches on the elbows.

“I’d be delighted,” Daniel Parish says. “What’s your name?”

“Jill, like Jack and Jill went up the hill. Macy, like the store. I’ve read all your books, but I like this one the best. Like, by far.”

“
That
is the popular opinion, Jill from the hill.” Daniel isn’t kidding. None of his books have sold nearly as well as the first.

“I can’t even express how much it meant to me. Like, I start to tear up thinking about it.” She bows her head and lowers her eyes, deferent as a geisha. “It’s what made me want to be a nurse! I just started working here. When I found out you lived in town, I kept hoping you’d come in someday.”

“You mean, you hoped I’d get sick?” Daniel says, smiling.

“No, of course not!” She blushes, then swats him on the arm. “You! You’re terrible!”

“I am,” Daniel replies. “I am, indeed, terrible.”

The first time Nic had met Daniel Parish, she had commented that he had the good looks of an anchorman for a local news station. By the car ride home, she had revised her opinion. “His eyes are too small for an anchor. He’d be the weatherman.”

“He does have a sonorous voice,” A.J. had said.

“If that man told you that the storm had passed, you would definitely believe him. Probably even if you were still standing smack in the middle of it,” she had said.

A.J. interrupts the flirtation. “Dan,” he says. “I thought they’d called
your wife
.” A.J. is not going for subtle.

Daniel clears his throat. “She’s feeling under the weather, so I came instead. How you holding up, old man?” Daniel calls A.J. “old man” despite the fact that Daniel is five years older than A.J.

“I’ve lost my fortune, and the doctor says I’m going to die, but other than that, I’m fantastic.” The sedative has given him perspective.

“Great. Let’s get drinks.” Daniel turns to Nurse Jill and whispers something in her ear. When Daniel returns the book to her, A.J. can see that he has written his phone number. “Come, thou monarch of the vine!” Daniel says as he heads for the exit.

Despite the fact that he loves books and owns a bookstore, A.J. does not particularly care for writers. He finds them to be unkempt, narcissistic, silly, and generally unpleasant people. He tries to avoid meeting the ones who’ve written books he loves for fear that they will ruin their books for him. Luckily, he does not love Daniel’s books, not even the popular first novel. As for the man? Well, he amuses A.J. to an extent. This is to say, Daniel Parish is one of A.J.’s closest friends.

“IT’S MY OWN
fault,” A.J. says after his second beer. “Should have gotten insurance. Should have stored it in a safe. Shouldn’t have taken it out when I was drunk. No matter who stole it, I can’t say my conduct was exactly faultless.” The alcohol in combination with the sedative is mellowing A.J., making him philosophical. Daniel pours him another glass from the pitcher.

“Don’t do that, A.J. Don’t blame yourself,” Daniel says.

“It’s a wake-up call is what it is,” A.J. says. “I’m definitely gonna cut down on my drinking.”

“Right after this beer,” Daniel quips. They clink mugs. A high school girl in denim cutoffs so short her buttocks peeks out the bottom walks into the bar. Daniel holds up his mug to her. “Nice outfit!” The girl gives him the finger. “You gotta stop drinking. I gotta stop cheating on Ismay,” Daniel says. “But then I see a pair of shorts like that, and my resolve is seriously tested. This night’s been ridiculous. The nurse! Those shorts!”

A.J. sips the beer. “How’s the book coming?”

Daniel shrugs. “It is a book. It will have pages and a cover. It will have a plot, characters, complications. It will reflect years of studying, refining, and practicing my craft. For all that, it will surely be less popular than the first one I wrote at the age of twenty-five.”

“Poor bastard,” A.J. says.

“I’m pretty sure you win the Poor Bastard of the Year Award, old man.”

“Lucky me.”

“Poe’s a lousy writer, you know? And ‘Tamerlane’ is the worst. Boring Lord Byron rip-off. It’d be one thing if it were a first edition of something fucking decent. You should be glad to be rid of it. I loathe collectible books anyway. People getting all moony over particular paper carcasses. It’s the ideas that matter, man. The words,” Daniel Parish says.

A.J. finishes his beer. “You, sir, are an idiot.”

THE INVESTIGATION LASTS
a month, which in Alice Island PD time is like a year. Lambiase and his team find no relevant physical evidence at the scene. In addition to throwing out the wine bottle and cleaning up the vindaloo, the criminal had apparently wiped down the apartment of fingerprints. The investigators question A.J.’s employees and also his few friends and relations in Alice. These interviews result in nothing particularly incriminating. No book dealers or auction houses report any copies of
Tamerlane
turning up either. (Of course, auction houses are notoriously quiet about these matters.) The investigation is considered unsolved. The book is gone, and A.J. knows he will never see it again.