Finders Keepers (11 page)

Pete's math skills weren't the strongest—it was why he needed that summer course to bone up—but you didn't have to be an Einstein to run simple numbers and assess certain possibilities. If the surviving robber had been thirty-five in 1978, which seemed like a fair estimate to Pete, he would have been sixty-seven in 2010, when Pete found the trunk, and around seventy now. Seventy was ancient. If he turned up looking for his loot, he'd probably do so on a walker.

Pete smiled as he turned onto Sycamore Street.

He thought there were three possibilities for why the surviving robber had never come back for his trunk, all equally likely. One, he was in prison somewhere for some other crime. Two, he was dead. Three was a combination of one and two: he had died in prison. Whichever it was, Pete didn't think he had to worry about the guy. The notebooks, though, were a different story. About them he had plenty of worries. Sitting on them was like sitting on a bunch of beautiful stolen paintings you could never sell.

Or a crate filled with dynamite.

•••

In September of 2013—almost exactly thirty-five years from the date of John Rothstein's murder—Pete tucked the last of the trunk-money into an envelope addressed to his father. The final installment amounted to three hundred and forty dollars. And because he felt that hope which could never be realized was a cruel thing, he added a one-line note:

This is the last of it. I am sorry there's not more.

He took a city bus to Birch Hill Mall, where there was a mailbox between Discount Electronix and the yogurt place. He looked around, making sure he wasn't observed, and kissed the envelope. Then he slipped it through the slot and walked away. He did it Jimmy Gold–style: without looking back.

•••

A week or two after New Year's, Pete was in the kitchen, making himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, when he overheard his parents talking to Tina in the living room. It was about Chapel Ridge.

“I thought maybe we
could
afford it,” his dad was saying. “If I gave you false hope, I'm just as sorry as can be, Teens.”

“It's because the mystery money stopped coming,” Tina said. “Right?”

Mom said, “Partly but not entirely. Dad tried for a bank loan, but they wouldn't give it to him. They went over his business records and did something—”

“A two-year profit projection,” Dad said. Some of the old post-accident bitterness crept into his voice. “Lots of compliments, because those are free. They said they might be able to make the loan in 2016, if the business grows by five percent. In the meantime, this goddam Polar Vortex thing . . . we're way over your mom's budget on heating expenses. Everyone is, from Maine to Minnesota. I know that's no consolation, but there it is.”

“Honey, we're so, so sorry,” Mom said.

Pete expected Tina to explode into a full-fledged tantrum—there were lots more of those as she approached the big thirteen—but it didn't happen. She said she understood, and that Chapel Ridge was probably a snooty school, anyway. Then she came out to the kitchen and asked Pete if he would make her a sandwich, because his looked good. He did, and they went into the living room, and all four of them watched TV together and had some laughs over
The Big Bang Theory
.

Later that night, though, he heard Tina crying behind the closed door of her room. It made him feel awful. He went into his own room, pulled one of the Moleskines out from under his mattress, and began rereading
The Runner Goes West
.

•••

He was taking Mrs. Davis's creative writing course that semester, and although he got As on his stories, he knew by February that he
was never going to be a fiction-writer. Although he was good with words, a thing he didn't need Mrs. Davis to tell him (although she often did), he just didn't possess that kind of creative spark. His chief interest was in
reading
fiction, then trying to analyze what he had read, fitting it into a larger pattern. He had gotten a taste for this kind of detective work while writing his paper on Rothstein. At the Garner Street Library he hunted out one of the books Mr. Ricker had mentioned, Fiedler's
Love and Death in the American Novel
, and liked it so much that he bought his own copy in order to highlight certain passages and write in the margins. He wanted to major in English more than ever, and teach like Mr. Ricker (except maybe at a university instead of in high school), and at some point write a book like Mr. Fiedler's, getting into the faces of more traditional critics and questioning the established way those traditional critics looked at things.

And yet!

There had to be more money. Mr. Feldman, the guidance counselor, told him that getting a full-boat scholarship to an Ivy League school was “rather unlikely,” and Pete knew even that was an exaggeration. He was just another whitebread high school kid from a so-so Midwestern school, a kid with a part-time library job and a few unglamorous extracurriculars like newspaper and yearbook. Even if he did manage to catch a boat, there was Tina to think about. She was basically trudging through her days, getting mostly Bs and Cs, and seemed more interested in makeup and shoes and pop music than school these days. She needed a change, a clean break. He was wise enough, even at not quite seventeen, to know that Chapel Ridge might not fix his little sister . . . but then again, it might. Especially since she wasn't broken. At least not yet.

I need a plan, he thought, only that wasn't precisely what he
needed. What he needed was a
story
, and although he was never going to be a great fiction-writer like Mr. Rothstein or Mr. Lawrence, he
was
able to plot. That was what he had to do now. Only every plot stood on an idea, and on that score he kept coming up empty.

•••

He had begun to spend a lot of time at Water Street Books, where the coffee was cheap and even new paperbacks were thirty percent off. He went by one afternoon in March, on his way to his after-school job at the library, thinking he might pick up something by Joseph Conrad. In one of his few interviews, Rothstein had called Conrad “the first great writer of the twentieth century, even though his best work was written before 1900.”

Outside the bookstore, a long table had been set up beneath an awning. SPRING CLEANING, the sign said. EVERYTHING ON THIS TABLE 70% OFF! And below it: WHO KNOWS WHAT BURIED TREASURE YOU WILL FIND! This line was flanked by big yellow smiley-faces, to show it was a joke, but Pete didn't think it was funny.

He finally had an idea.

A week later, he stayed after school to talk to Mr. Ricker.

•••

“Great to see you, Pete.” Mr. Ricker was wearing a paisley shirt with billowy sleeves today, along with a psychedelic tie. Pete thought the combination said quite a lot about why the love-and-peace generation had collapsed. “Mrs. Davis says great things about you.”

“She's cool,” Pete said. “I'm learning a lot.” Actually he wasn't, and he didn't think anyone else in her class was, either. She was
nice enough, and quite often had interesting things to say, but Pete was coming to the conclusion that creative writing couldn't really be taught, only learned.

“What can I do for you?”

“Remember when you were talking about how valuable a handwritten Shakespeare manuscript would be?”

Mr. Ricker grinned. “I always talk about that during a midweek class, when things get dozy. There's nothing like a little avarice to perk kids up. Why? Have you found a folio, Malvolio?”

Pete smiled politely. “No, but when we were visiting my uncle Phil in Cleveland during February vacation, I went out to his garage and found a whole bunch of old books. Most of them were about Tom Swift. He was this kid inventor.”

“I remember Tom and his friend Ned Newton well,” Mr. Ricker said. “
Tom Swift and His Motor Cycle
,
Tom Swift and His Wizard Camera
 . . . when I was a kid myself, we used to joke about
Tom Swift and His Electric Grandmother
.”

Pete renewed his polite smile. “There were also a dozen or so about a girl detective named Trixie Belden, and another one named Nancy Drew.”

“I believe I see where you're going with this, and I hate to disappoint you, but I must. Tom Swift, Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, Trixie Belden . . . all interesting relics of a bygone age, and a wonderful yardstick to judge how much what is called ‘YA fiction' has changed in the last eighty years or so, but those books have little or no monetary value, even when found in excellent condition.”

“I know,” Pete said. “I checked it out later on
Fine Books
. That's a blog. But while I was looking those books over, Uncle Phil came out to the garage and said he had something else that might interest me even more. Because I'd told him I was into John Rothstein.
It was a signed hardback of
The Runner
. Not dedicated, just a flat signature. Uncle Phil said some guy named Al gave it to him because he owed my uncle ten dollars from a poker game. Uncle Phil said he'd had it for almost fifty years. I looked at the copyright page, and it's a first edition.”

Mr. Ricker had been rocked back in his chair, but now he sat down with a bang. “Whoa! You probably know that Rothstein didn't sign many autographs, right?”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “He called it ‘defacing a perfectly good book.'”

“Uh-huh, he was like Raymond Chandler that way. And you know signed volumes are worth more when it's just the signature?
Sans
dedication?”

“Yes. It says so on
Fine Books
.”

“A signed first of Rothstein's most famous book probably
would
be worth money.” Mr. Ricker considered. “On second thought, strike the probably. What kind of condition is it in?”

“Good,” Pete said promptly. “Some foxing on the inside cover and title page, is all.”

“You
have
been reading up on this stuff.”

“More since my uncle showed me the Rothstein.”

“I don't suppose you're in possession of this fabulous book, are you?”

I've got something a lot better, Pete thought. If you only knew.

Sometimes he felt the weight of that knowledge, and never more than today, telling these lies.

Necessary
lies, he reminded himself.

“I don't, but my uncle said he'd give it to me, if I wanted it. I said I needed to think about it, because he doesn't . . . you know . . .”

“He doesn't have any idea of how much it might really be worth?”

“Yeah. But then I started wondering . . .”

“What?”

Pete dug into his back pocket, took out a folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Mr. Ricker. “I went looking on the Internet for book dealers here in town that buy and sell first editions, and I found these three. I know you're sort of a book collector yourself—”

“Not much, I can't afford serious collecting on my salary, but I've got a signed Theodore Roethke that I intend to hand down to my children.
The Waking
. Very fine poems. Also a Vonnegut, but that's not worth so much; unlike Rothstein, Father Kurt signed everything.”

“Anyway, I wondered if you knew any of these, and if you do, which one might be the best. If I decided to let him give me the book . . . and then, you know, sell it.”

Mr. Ricker unfolded the sheet, glanced at it, then looked at Pete again. That gaze, both keen and sympathetic, made Pete feel uneasy. This might have been a bad idea, he really
wasn't
much good at fiction, but he was in it now and would have to plow through somehow.

“As it happens, I know all of them. But jeez, kiddo, I also know how much Rothstein means to you, and not just from your paper last year. Annie Davis says you bring him up often in Creative Writing. Claims the Gold trilogy is your Bible.”

Pete supposed this was true, but he hadn't realized how blabby he'd been until now. He resolved to stop talking about Rothstein so much. It might be dangerous. People might think back and remember, if—

If.

“It's good to have literary heroes, Pete, especially if you plan to major in English when you get to college. Rothstein is yours—at
least for now—and that book could be the beginning of your own library. Are you sure you want to sell it?”

Pete could answer this question with fair honesty, even though it wasn't really a signed book he was talking about. “Pretty sure, yeah. Things have been a little tough at home—”

“I know what happened to your father at City Center, and I'm sorry as hell. At least they caught the psycho before he could do any more damage.”

“Dad's better now, and both he and my mom are working again, only I'm probably going to need money for college, see . . .”

“I understand.”

“But that's not the biggest thing, at least not now. My sister wants to go to Chapel Ridge, and my parents told her she couldn't, at least not this coming year. They can't quite swing it. Close, but no cigar. And I think she needs a place like that. She's kind of, I don't know,
lagging
.”

Mr. Ricker, who had undoubtedly known lots of students who were lagging, nodded gravely.

“But if Tina could get in with a bunch of strivers—especially this one girl, Barbara Robinson, she used to know from when we lived on the West Side—things might turn around.”

“It's good of you to think of her future, Pete. Noble, even.”

Pete had never thought of himself as noble. The idea made him blink.

Perhaps seeing his embarrassment, Mr. Ricker turned his attention to the list again. “Okay. Grissom Books would have been your best bet when Teddy Grissom was still alive, but his son runs the shop now, and he's a bit of a tightwad. Honest, but close with a buck. He'd say it's the times, but it's also his nature.”