A Novel Death (17 page)

"It's to prevent clots," he said. "You get them if you don't move around."

"They put them on me the first day," Mrs. Cassidy announced. "I ripped them right off!"

Her men laughed. I turned back to Margaret.

"It's Delhi," I whispered again, squeezing her hand. We stayed that way for several minutes as I told her about Jane and Lance and the travails of the young on Fire Island. She looked peaceful and unresponsive. The subjects we actually had in common, the people we knew, seemed too upsetting to mention. I started to tell her that I had kept The Old Frigate open, but remembering how everything had ended, I didn't. Did she know anything about Amil? I leaned close to her ear. "Margaret, I found the book. Don't worry, it's safe." As safe as it could be locked up in my basement.

The stiffening of her arm, her hand imprisoning mine, was so startling that I almost cried out. Then her grip dropped away.

"Margaret?" I gave her hand the slightest shake. But there was no response.

I talked on, skirting any mention of Amil, the shop, or Little Black Samba.

Finally I stood up and bent over to kiss her forehead, promising that I would come back later. "Is there anything I can bring you?" I asked. "A triple latte?"

It was a silly comment, especially when I belatedly remembered who had said it, but it agitated her. "Police!" She said the word clearly. "Police!"

She was talking to me. Margaret was talking to me. She would come out of this after all.

"That's right, the police are protecting you. You're safe now. You're in the hospital and no one is going to hurt you." She must have thought she was going to die on the floor of the shop she loved so much. "They're here to keep you safe. You just concentrate on getting better." I gave her hand a squeeze.

She did not stir.

At the nurses' station, I asked them to page Dr. Gallagher and was told that she was enjoying a rare day off.

"Is Margaret Weller's nurse around?"

"She's in 617? I think that's Clarisse. Wait."

I waited.

Several minutes later, a young woman came over to where I stood near the elevator. She had the look and cadence of someone from the Caribbean, but a brisk efficiency I did not associate with the islands. Her overblouse of pale flowers hung crisply around navy pants, and she had a scent of oranges that I liked.

"You have a question about Miz Weller?"

"She said something to me!"

Clarisse did not look quite as excited as I felt. "What did she say?"

"'Police.' Somehow she knows the police are protecting her."

"Yeah, they've been here. Anything else?"

"Not really," I admitted.

"Well, that's more than that detective got." She smiled. "She wouldn't say anything to him. Then he kept asking me questions. But I didn't tell him nothing either."

I didn't know what we were talking about.

"They're going to move her out, maybe even tomorrow," she added, as if she had just thought of it. "They can't keep her here."

"Oh, no," I cried. "You mean to a nursing home?"

"Maybe they should let her go home."

"She can't go home." Obviously Clarisse didn't know that Margaret was by herself now. "She'd just lie there and die!"

Clarisse gave me a polite but disappointed look. Somehow I had said the wrong thing.

"Gotta run," she told me, and did.

And I was lost. I hesitated, and then went back into Margaret's room

The Cassidy grandsons were teasing their grandmother about something to do with a fireman's picnic and too much free beer; I wished they would go away. Standing beside Margaret, watching the drip of pale gold nourishment that was keeping her alive, I felt my eyes blur. How could life be this unfair? To Margaret, of all people ...

Taking her hand, I whispered. "Ve haf ways of making you talk."

There was not the response I had hoped for; there was no response at all.

Bending down, I kissed her warm forehead. "See you later!"

I said good-bye to the Cassidys, who responded with laconic waves, and started for the elevator. But as I passed the nurses' station, I was intercepted by a policewoman in official navy pants and short-sleeved shirt. She was young and very thin with straight blonde hair.

"Speak to you a moment?" she said.

"Uh-sure."

"You were visiting Margaret Weller."

"Yes."

"Name and address?"

I gave them to her.

"I need to see some identification."

Digging into my purse for my wallet, I brought out my driver's license. Why hadn't she checked me before I went into the room? By the time someone pulled out a stiletto and stabbed Margaret to death they would have it on tape, but be too late to save her. With my back to the camera, bending solicitously over her, I could have covered her mouth with my hand and pinched her nose shut. What kind of police protection was that?

Waiting for the elevator next to a gurney packed with supplies, I thought again of Little Black Sambo. There were, no doubt, Sambo aficionados as well as black memorabilia collectors who would be very interested in an inscribed original. Unlike a handwritten fragment of Moby Dick, which would need a provenance to help prove its authenticity, the book was what it was. Besides, as Margaret was fond of telling me, "The paper never lies." I would stake my bookseller's reputation, modest though it was, that the Black Sambo paper, printing, and binding were one hundred years old. And that the author's inscription was authentic too.

That still left the puzzle of JRK. John Keats? No, I had seen the small stone house next to the Spanish steps in Rome where he died, and I was sure he had succumbed around 1823. Just a friend? Jane Rebecca? Jasmine Rachel? Perversely, I could not think of one notable turn-of-the-century woman with the initials J. R. K. Famous men were not plentiful either.

Was I trying to make something from nothing? The odds were that the book was inscribed to a friend, not to anyone famous. The people I knew who signed books of poetry, Colin and his friends, were more than happy to write something memorable for any stranger who approached them with $12.95 for a volume the size of a brochure.

Outside on the path to the parking garage, I realized that I had forgotten something crucial. This was not my book. All I was supposed to do was keep it safe for Margaret. Still, what could it hurt to figure out to whom the book had been inscribed?

Back in the barn, I checked my e-mail and was happy to see that there were three new book sales. Two were quite modest, but the third was for a $55.00 copy of Tarzan the Terrible, complete with dust jacket. And there was a nice e-mail from a buyer in Pennsylvania telling me how thrilled her mother had been to receive the copy of Skippack School by Marguerite De Angeli.

When I finished responding to the buyers, I logged into my Internet dealers' site, BookEm. I enjoyed reading the rants of other booksellers, whether about customers or each other. As cantankerous as members could be, there were bookmen and women in the group whose experience took my breath away. Most of what I knew about bookselling I had learned on this list. As with the Oracle, if you asked a stupid question, you would be held up to ridicule. On the other hand, members vied with each other to tell you what they knew.

Again I ran through all the names I could think of beginning with J-James, Joshua, Jedadiah-but came up empty. Impulsively I clicked on the New Message icon, and then stopped. What was I doing? Wouldn't this advertise that I had something valuable-like Margaret's find? Yet as far as I knew, none of the Long Island dealers belonged to this list. They operated in parallel universes: selling to private collectors, issuing catalogs, auctioning books on eBay, running a brick-and-mortar shop. BookEm wasn't even the only site for Internet booksellers. My question was tangential to the book itself anyway. People asked questions like this every day. I just hoped that JRK was not a famous personality who every other bookseller would know instantly. In the headline, I put:

QUERY: Identifying Inscription Initials

Good morning,

Can anyone identify these initials from an inscription: JRK?

There is a connection with India ca. 1900.

Thank you for your help!

As soon as I sent the e-mail off, framed that way, I had a nagging feeling that I already knew the answer. But it stayed stubbornly beneath the surface.

Reaching for a yellow-lined pad, I made a "To Do" list:

1. Find out if local calls to your phone line can be traced.

2. Drive around the area and look for houses under renovation where caller might be working.

3. Call Marty and ask if he knows who the mystery seller is and if he thought Margaret was researching more than one book.

But before I embarked on any of those activities I had to list some of my own books for sale.

There were fewer orders than I had hoped that day, none from Barnes & Noble or Amazon. Things slow down in the summer, but it is odd: Whenever you upload twenty-five or thirty new titles, there is a jump in orders-but not necessarily for the newly listed books. It is as if a psychic spotlight has been turned on your entire collection, making people notice titles that have been languishing for months.

On the other hand, online competition had increased even as the economy waned. As I climbed the stairs to the loft, I imagined myself wiping down tables at McDonald's. Yet better that than wiping little faces under Loretta's benign glare.

When describing books became as onerous as writing book reports in fourth grade, I turned to my to-do list and decided to call Marty. I pulled his card from a collection in my small file box.

Marty's was a real business card, the kind my brother-in-law Ben would approve of, with raised black printing on a cream surface. There were no cat photos or the perforated edges that came from making the cards yourself. The front was simplicity itself, with CAMPAGNA ARTS LTD in the center and Fine Paintings and Literature underneath. In the lower left-hand corner was a nod to his cesspool-business roots-We pay cash!-and in the right corner a phone number, a Web site, and an e-mail address.

Knowing how Marty roamed Long Island, I figured I would have to leave a message. As I dialed, I wondered if his restlessness had been inherited from his inventive grandfather, and if his grandfather had been as scornful of wealth's trappings as Marty was. He usually looked as if he was about to crawl under his old Caddy and work on the brakes. When I first met him, the bridge of his black glasses had been repaired with duct tape.

The call was picked up on the second ring. "Marty here"

"Hi, this is Delhi Laine. I'm the-"

"Right. Blondie. What's up? How's Margaret doing?"

"Better. She's out of intensive care, thank God."

"She say what happened?"

I hesitated. "Not yet."

"So what's up?" he repeated.

"This guy, this kind of strange guy who's renovating a house, called me last week. About some books he'd found."

"Oh, yeah. He was planning to take bids?" Marty gave a snort. "He hasn't got anything."

"Who is he?"

"I don't remember his last name. Shawn something."

"He'd mentioned something about a children's book I might be interested in. But I didn't get his phone number."

"I have it here somewhere. I don't even talk to people unless they give me their information first."

My first mistake.

After a moment he read the number off to me. "You're lucky you caught me at home."

"Yeah. Thanks." But before he could hang up, I asked, "Was Margaret trying to research more than one book?"

"Could be. Why?"

"I'm trying to figure out why she and Amil were attacked. If there were several valuable books, it might have been worth somebody's while."

"Didn't tell me anything." It was his usual dismissive tone.

"Did you smell anything when you were in the bookstore?"

"Only Howard."

I laughed.

When I hung up, I dialed the number Marty had given me and let it ring twelve times. Shawn was probably still at his day job, renovating houses-or stealing rare books. No answering machine came on. I checked for a reverse address at whitepages.com and got a No Match.

Too restless to sit at my desk any longer, I decided to head out to the university library. I could check the Coles Reverse Directory there for better information. The real reason, which I barely admitted to myself, was to see if they had a biography of Helen Bannerman with a clue to JRK in the index.

It was the kind of day outside that reminds people why they chose Long Island. A sky the Kodachrome blue of 1950s National Geographics, warm sunshine, and a breeze off the Sound to keep the air fresh. The dusky sweetness of a thousand flowers in bloom. And, as always, the tang of saltwater just out of view.

I drove to the university with the windows down and parked at the edge of the campus near the LIRR station, and then walked on past athletic fields and brick dormitories. A number of students were playing tennis, and another group was tossing a Frisbee across the grass, teasing a small red setter by sluicing the yellow disk just over his head. The metal glint off a window frame reminded me of Detective Marselli's badge on my porch yesterday when he flipped the holder open, but I quickly pushed it aside. On this perfect day I didn't want to think about all the things I had seen in the bookshop. I especially didn't want to relive my terror when I thought he was about to catch me there.