On Folly Beach (6 page)

Her mother sighed and turned her head to look at Emmy. “Just think about it, okay?”

Paige left, leaving Emmy clutching the jar of beach sand from a place she’d never been. Emmy closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of it again, imagining she smelled salt air and some other nameless thing: a heavy, pungent odor of sun-warmed earth and stagnant water. And she imagined something else, too: a shimmering in the air that hinted of unsaid good-byes and unpaid guilt. Or maybe it was the scent of new beginnings. The thought sent a shock of fear and anticipation through her that lifted the skin from her neck. It reminded her again of the wind in the bottle tree the night she’d become a widow, and as she sat down in front of the box of books, she began to think in possibilities.

EMMY AWOKE TO THE SOUND of diminishing footsteps—too heavy to be her mother’s and the sound of her father’s snoring from their bedroom down the hall told her that they weren’t his. She sat up, straining to hear them again, but heard only the night sleeping around her.

A sliver of moon spilled through her window shade, illuminating the jar of sand she’d inexplicably placed on her bedside table. She stared at it, imagining it had become liquid swirling inside the glass in tiny waves.

Emmy leaned over and switched on the lamp, relieved to see the jar of sand exactly as she’d left it. Her gaze traveled to the floor where the box of books from Folly’s Finds sat. She wasn’t entirely sure why she’d brought it from the store, only that she’d been looking for something to do when she invariably woke up in the middle of the night with no hope of further sleep.

Sliding from the bed, she knelt in front of the box and pried the flaps back before lifting away crumpled newspapers. Peering inside, Emmy smelled the comforting scent of old books, the indefinable mixture of worn leather, ancient glue, and the passage of years. She reached inside and lifted out a thick hardbound book coated in bubble wrap and placed it on her lap.

Buying boxes of old books was something her mother had begun to do on a regular basis as she’d expanded their store to carry used as well as new books, and it was Emmy’s job to sort through them. Every once in a while, Emmy would find something rare and valuable tucked in amongst the dog-eared doctor romances of a previous generation, or the coverless sagas from the eighties with food and coffee stains decorating the tattered pages. They invariably came from an estate sale, the unwanted books belonging to somebody’s grandmother or great-aunt inherited by a family member who wasn’t going to be the one to throw them away.

Emmy wasn’t sure if she’d been given the sorting task because of her degree and expertise or because her mother knew that all she had to do was place her hands on a box to determine if anything of real value was inside. She wasn’t always accurate, but accurate enough to warrant being the official sorter.

She flattened her hands on the book in her lap and felt the familiar heat against her palm, the slight tingling behind her ears, and she knew there was something in the box that warranted further inspection. She carefully removed the bubble wrap, then held the book at an angle to read the fading title better. Romeo and Juliet. Glancing inside to the front pages, she noted the copyright date of nineteen thirty-nine before placing the book on the floor beside her.

Methodically, she began unwrapping each book, disrobing it of its bubble-wrapped cover, revealing each book. She noted with interest that the majority of the books was travelogues or atlases, with a few classic novels—nothing autographed and no first editions to make them valuable—thrown in. Emmy spotted Austen, Fitzgerald, Tolstoy, and even a German translation of Shakespeare—all familiar friends, and she found herself smiling. It seemed a deliberate collection of books, almost as if they’d been in somebody’s personal library rather than on the shelves of a bookstore.

When she reached the bottom of the box, she peered inside to see if she’d missed anything. She’d been almost positive that something wonderful had been lurking within the corrugated walls of the box, but she must have missed it.

Too awake now to even contemplate sleep, she sorted through the books again one by one to see what she might have missed. When she’d finished, she sat back on her heels and regarded the piles in front of her with narrowed eyes. Her gaze fell upon the first book she’d held, Romeo and Juliet, the one that had made her skin prick. Leaning over she plucked it from the top of one of the stacks and flipped it open again to examine it more closely.

She’d already studied the copyright page, so this time she flipped immediately to the back of the book. Holding the book up to her nose, she wondered if it was her imagination that made her smell salty air. For the first time, she noticed the warped bottom edge of the book as if it had at some point in its life been in contact with water. Flipping the book over, Emmy realized the bottom of all of the pages showed water damage. She began to turn pages, looking for rot or mildew, and when she didn’t spot any, she surmised that the book had most likely been in contact with water for only a short while and then been properly dried instead of being left closed on a shelf.

Emmy was about to close the book again when it slipped from her hands, landing on a corner of the spine before toppling over splay-backed. Carefully, Emmy picked up the book, holding it fixed to the place where it had fallen open, and held it up to the light again. In the top right margin of the right-hand page was handwriting, the black of the ink now a bruised shade of purple.

The broad, thick strokes of the letters were undoubtedly made by a male and as she brought the book closer to read it better in the dim light, she found herself blushing at the intimacy of his words.

A great man once wrote, “Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and blows up the bonfire.”

If only I were as eloquent as Mr. de la Rochefoucauld . . . I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. And I want you. And I need your kiss. And your touch on my skin like a man needs water. Always.

Emmy’s mouth went dry, as if an unknown lover had whispered in her ear. Who was he? Who was he writing to? She flipped through the rest of the book twice until she was satisfied that there were no more notes in the margins. Curious and fully awake now, she pulled the next book off of a stack and began to thumb through it before hastily putting it aside when she didn’t find anything. It wasn’t until she’d reached the fifth book, a tattered copy of Wuthering Heights, that she found another note handwritten in the margin. The black ink was small and faded, eluding discovery until Emmy’s third perusal of the book. She might have missed it, too, if she hadn’t been so dogged about it, like a child searching for a lost favorite toy. The search had become almost like a lifeline thrown to her in the darkness, something to hang on to.

The handwriting was different in this book, softer, more feminine, and all thoughts that it was another random note fled as Emmy read the neatly printed words.

I saw you last night on the pier and I know you saw me, too, but your eyes wouldn’t meet mine as long as she was around. I understand it and am glad you are not so bold in her presence as to acknowledge me too openly. But then I saw you touch her hand, then place your arm around her shoulder, and I had to look away. And when I lay awake all night, I kept seeing your hand on hers and I died a little inside. How long can we do this? How will this end? I’m like a ðHow long can we do this? How will this end? I’m like a bird f ly ing into a glass window again and again, trying to reach the unattainable yet willing to die trying. I must be with you again. Where?

Emmy sat back, her breathing loud and her forefinger pressed against the page. Who are these people? The books were old, and the handwriting faded, which made her fairly positive that whoever had written these notes hadn’t done so recently.

A clock struck four times somewhere in the house, and Emmy closed her eyes. She needed to at least try to get some sleep if she didn’t want to be a complete zombie later that day. Reluctantly, she began stacking the books back into the box, being careful to stick book-marks into the books she’d found with notes, and to separate the stack into books she’d searched through already and those that she hadn’t. It would give her something to look forward to, and she felt the old flutter of anticipation.

She reached for a short stack of books, accidentally flicking open the back cover of the one on top, a dog-eared copy of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. As Emmy bent to close it, her skin pricked again, and she knew with absolute certainty that something was about to happen—some change or shift in her universe was going to take place and there was nothing she could do about it. She paused, realizing she’d reached such a dark place in her life that she no longer even cared.

Peering down at the book in the dimly lit room, she found herself holding her breath. Staring out at her from the opened inside back cover was a hand-drawn picture of what appeared to be tall sticks dug into the ground to give the resemblance of a tree. On the tip of each limb, inverted so that the openings could fit onto the tips, were bottles of different shapes and sizes, all colored in shades of black ink.

Emmy sat on the edge of her bed, the book open on her lap to the picture of the bottle tree. She felt an odd compulsion to laugh but instead fell back on the bed, the book clutched in her hands. Ever since Emmy’s mother had given her the jar of sand, everything had taken on an air of inevitability, as if she were slipping on ice and unable to right herself.

It’s time to go. She wasn’t sure if the voice came from inside her head or if it was just a memory of Ben’s voice. She listened to the silence for a moment, then, feeling bolder, said the words out loud: “It’s time to go.” She didn’t know who had written the messages in the books, or who had drawn the picture of the bottle tree, but they had managed to shake her awake. They’d given her something to look forward to: unanswered questions in a life that she’d begun to assume wouldn’t have any more. Folly Beach was unknown to her, but it seemed to be as good as any other place without Ben. She’d done the equivalent of spinning the globe and pointing her finger, but she couldn’t help the feeling that the box of books had nudged her hand toward the small barrier island off the coast of South Carolina.

She closed her eyes again, listening for the footsteps but heard instead the soft sighing of a summer wind whispering inside the glass of her mother’s bottle tree.

CHAPTER 3

FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

January 1942

Maggie kneeled in front of the bookshelf in the back of Folly’s Finds, reshelving the atlas she’d borrowed to take home the previous night. She was always careful not to leave fingerprints on the covers or bend the spines, and since the atlas was one of the more expensive books she had in the store, she’d been extra careful. She normally limited her selection to a classic romance, but she’d taken the atlas on impulse, wanting to learn what she could about Poland.

She eyed the shelf critically, noticing how some of the books had been wrongly shelved and began pulling them off to reorganize. She gritted her teeth as she wondered if Cat had done it deliberately so that she wouldn’t be asked to do it again or if she really was incapable of shelving books alphabetically by author. Sitting back on her heels, Maggie called out, “Lulu, could you please open that small box behind the counter—the one that arrived yesterday? It’s toothpaste and shaving cream, and needs to go on the shelves.”

Lulu didn’t answer right away and Maggie pictured her sitting behind the counter out of view, her nose buried in yet another Nancy Drew mystery. Or drawing inside the back cover in ink. The first time she’d caught Lulu drawing in a book, she’d been angry until she’d seen how good it was. She’d held her anger in check and instructed Lulu to contain her drawings to her notepads, but every now and then she’d find an ink drawing tucked into the back cover of one of her precious books, like Lulu’s signature.

With a halfhearted voice, Lulu called out, “Where do you want them?”

“On the front shelf to the right, third row down. Next to the soap if we have any left.”