Rides a Stranger (4 page)

Hell, maybe he already knew about it and was just toying with me and making me sweat.

Finally, he said, “Apparently, your father had a book Mr. Caledonia wanted.”

“Which book?” I asked. “Hell, if he’d told me the title I would have brought it to him last night.”

“If he’d have told me the title,” Mom said, “I’d have given him
all
the books.”

Hyland was shaking his head. “I don’t think you understand,” he said. “Caledonia didn’t want one of the books your father
owned
. He wanted a copy of the book your father
wrote
.”

Mom laughed. I would have laughed, but the idea of my father writing a book was so bizarre that I couldn’t say anything.

“No,” Mom said. “That’s not true.” She laughed again. “My husband never wrote a book. He couldn’t write a grocery list. He once went away fishing for the weekend, and he didn’t even bother to write me a note. He didn’t write anything.”

“My dad read a lot. But he was a salesman. He didn’t write any books.”

Hyland shifted around on the couch. He reached into his back pants pocket and brought out a small notebook. He flipped through it to the page he wanted.

“Well,” Hyland said, “you may not think your father wrote a book, but Lou Caledonia most certainly did.”

“He did?” I asked. “Is that why he came to the viewing?”

“That’s a good guess,” Hyland said.

“Well, what book?” I asked. “Are we talking about a novel? Or what?”

“There’s no book, Donnie,” Mom said.

Hyland ignored her. “We’re talking about a novel,” he said. “According to the information in the letters and files in Mr. Caledonia’s office, he thinks your father wrote the novel,
Rides a Stranger
, under the pseudonym Herbert Henry.”

“Henry,” I said. “That’s Dad’s middle name.”

Hyland said, “Believe me, Lou Caledonia was aware of that.” He looked at the notebook. Apparently, he thought your father wrote this novel, which was published in 1972 by Woodworth Books as part of their Monarch Series.” Hyland looked over at us. “The Monarch Series was dedicated to novels about the American west. They published twenty books in the series, and
Rides a Stranger
is number nineteen.”

Rides a Stranger? The obituary I took from Caledonia’s desk.
Stranger
.

Hyland looked at his notebook again. “But even though the books were meant to be mass produced and widely distributed to be sold in grocery stores, drug stores, airports etc., something went wrong with number nineteen. There was a printer’s strike at the plant that manufactured the book. The first batch was printed by replacement workers.” Hyland looked over again. “Scabs for lack of a better word.”

“I see,” I said.

“They printing went horribly wrong. Blurred cover. Pages cut wrong. A disaster. So they had to pulp that whole batch. Throw them out. They were worthless. The strike ended a few weeks after that, and the regular workers came back. They did a test run of about one hundred books in order to make sure the problems from the last batch—the scab batch—were corrected. And the problems were fixed. But by that point book number nineteen was so far off-schedule that they went ahead and decided to print number twenty and then go back and do number nineteen later. And guess what?”

“What?” Mom asked.

“They never did,” Hyland said. “They printed number twenty, and then Woodworth Books folded their tents and went out of business. Number nineteen was never given a full print run.”

“How many were printed?” I asked.

“Lou Caledonia guesses they printed about fifty. Fifty cheap paperback books were printed about forty years ago. Understandably, not very many of those fifty are still around. Some went to libraries and got worn out. Some were sold in a few places. But mostly they’re gone. The book itself, your dad’s book, isn’t that valuable in and of itself. You see, it’s the set of all twenty Monarchs that would be the real prize. Lots of people have managed to collect the nineteen mass produced titles, but to find a set with all twenty … well, that’s a rare thing. And one of those sets is worth thousands of dollars on the collector’s market.”

“He didn’t write the book,” Mom said.

“Why is this set worth so much?” I asked. “I mean, who cares about twenty old western paperbacks? Aren’t they a dime a dozen?”

Hyland flipped his notebook shut. “You would think that, wouldn’t you? Except there’s one catch with this Monarch Series. Number eight in the series is a book called
The Midnight Guns.
It was written by someone named T.J. Tucker.”

Hyland looked at both of us as though the name should mean something to us. It didn’t.

“What’s so special about a guy named T.J. Tucker?” I asked.

“T.J. Tucker isn’t a guy,” Hyland said. “T.J. Tucker is a woman who wrote under a pseudonym. I guess they figured men were more likely to buy a western, and they wouldn’t buy a western if it was written by a woman. That was her first book, and she never published another western. Her real name is Tonya Jane Hood. You know who that is, right?”

“It sounds familiar,” I said.

“Are you shitting me?” Mom said.

“I’m not,” Hyland said.

I looked at Mom. “Who is this?”

“Tonya Jane Hood,” Mom said. “She writes the
Glitter Blood
series. You know, the books, the movies, the TV show.
Glitter Blood.
I read all of them.”

“That’s right,” Hyland said. “The Hood novel is very desirable, but they printed close to one hundred thousand copies of that one. And when you combine the desirability of Hood with the rarity of Henry you get a valuable series. Very valuable. Maybe even worth killing over.”

“This is ridiculous,” Mom said. “My husband died. We buried him today. I don’t want to hear this crazy stuff about these books. It doesn’t have anything to do with us.”

I held out my hand, hoping to calm down Mom a little bit. But I didn’t disagree with her.

“Detective,” I said. “Lou Caledonia seemed like an odd guy. So he thought my dad wrote a book, a rare book. What’s his evidence for this? The whole thing seems kind of far-fetched.”

“You may be right,” Hyland said. “Maybe Caledonia’s death was just a robbery gone wrong. Maybe he was dreaming when he thought your father wrote this book. But there is the middle name. There’s the fact that, according to the biography in the book
Rides a Stranger
, the author of the book lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.”

I said, “Lots of people named Henry live in Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s a big city.”

“True,” Hyland said. “Very true.”

A silence settled between us. No one said anything. Hyland looked lost in thought for a moment, as though contemplating whether or not he wanted to say anything else. Finally, he just stood up. “Perhaps I’m just fishing.”

Mom and I stood up as well, and Hyland nodded to us. He shook my hand.

“Do accept my sympathies,” he said. “If you think of anything else that’s relevant, just give me a call.”

He let himself out.

When Hyland was gone, Mom started puttering around in the kitchen. She scrubbed the countertops and rattled dishes into the dishwasher. I stood in the doorway and watched for a few moments. I knew she knew I was there, but she didn’t look up from her work.

“Mom?” I said.

“Yeah?”

“What do you think of all that?” I asked.

I didn’t think she was going to answer me. She kept cleaning. But then she stopped what she was doing and said, “I don’t put much stock in it.”

“Did you ever know Dad wanted to write something?” I asked.

“Your father wanted to do a lot of things,” she said. “He had a lot of dreams. He wanted to run his own business, and he wanted to retire to Florida, and he wanted us to take a trip to Europe. He did none of it. Your father was a dreamer but not a doer. There’s a big difference there.”

“That sounds depressing.”

“Be glad you didn’t get those qualities from him,” she said. “You got an advanced degree. You have a good career.”

“Dad had a career,” I said.

“Dad had a job. That’s it. He hated it, and it made him miserable.”

“So maybe he really wanted to be a writer. Maybe he tried it …”

I stopped in mid-sentence as something occurred to me.

Mom didn’t notice. She dried her hands on a red towel and turned off the light over the sink. When she turned around, she said, “What’s wrong with you?”

“What year did Hyland say that book was published?” I asked. “The one Lou Caledonia thinks Dad wrote? Do you remember?”

Mom’s forehead creased, but I knew she remembered.

“What’s the year?” I asked.

“1972,” she said.

“1972. That’s the year I was born,” I said. “He quit writing because I was born.”

After Mom went to sleep, I tore into the boxes. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but I hoped to find something related to all the things I had been talking about with Detective Hyland and Lou Caledonia. What did the used book dealer really want with Dad? Had the old man written a book—a novel—and a rare one at that? Could the book be so rare and valuable that someone would kill for it?

But then I had to ask myself something else: Did I really care about the book stuff at all? What was I really trying to understand? It was pretty simple, really. If I could get my hands on a copy of that book, then I assumed I would understand something about my dad. Up until that point, I really didn’t understand anything about him. How did he marry my mom? What made him choose the life he chose?

And his death and the death/murder of Lou Caledonia only raised more questions. Did he really write a novel? And if he did, why did he stop? Was it just because he had a wife and a child and had to make a better, more stable living than writing could provide?

The boxes provided no answers in terms of the books. I hoped to find manuscripts and rejection letters, book contracts or correspondence with editors and agents. But there was nothing like that in the boxes. In fact, looking at the contents of those boxes, one would think my father didn’t have any literary aspirations at all. I found nothing about books or writing. Nothing like that.

So what did I find? Pictures. Lots and lots of pictures. And all of these pictures were taken before I was born. Before Dad met and married Mom, I guessed. They revealed that Dad did, indeed, have a life before he was married. My father had few friends when I was growing up—and maintained little in the way of friendships even after I was an adult and he was retired from work. My mother had friends. My father had his books and sports on the television.

But the pictures in the boxes told a different story. In the pictures Dad lived in a swirl of friends, men and women. He went to parties, to bars, to nightclubs. He spent time at the beach and in the big city. He drank from beer cans and champagne bottles. He wore suits and swim trunks. He had a life, one that I never imagined. He apparently had more of a life than I ever had.

One woman showed up in more of the pictures than anyone else. She was pretty, very pretty. Slender. Her hair was blonde, her smile bright. And she stood by my father’s side a lot, her head resting on his shoulder, her lips parted to laugh. Dad smiled in all of these pictures, too. He looked happy. And young.

I turned one of the photos over and found a name. “Mary Ann.” On another, the same woman appeared with the nickname “Peanuts” written on the back. Mary Ann? Peanuts? My father appeared to have had a serious girlfriend before he met Mom, one he appeared to love—or at least felt an immense amount of affection for.

Who knew the old man had done so much better than me?

I must have dozed off in the chair. When the phone rang, I opened my eyes and saw my father’s photographs spread out on my lap like a blanket. As I moved, the photos shifted and slid, some of them falling to the floor and others dropping into the cracks between the cushion and the bulk of the chair itself.

I checked the time on the ringing phone. 11:35. I didn’t recognize the number, but it was local. I answered.

“Mr. Kurtwood?”

“Yes.”

“This is Detective Hyland again. Sorry to bother you.”

“It’s okay. I was just …”

“I was hoping we could speak tomorrow, before you leave town. There are some other aspects to your father’s case I was hoping to go over with you, and I’m not sure your mother would want to hear them. At least not yet.”

“Is this about the book?” I asked.

“Among other things.”

“I can be there at nine.”

“Excellent,” Hyland said. “See you then.”

Before I went to sleep, I put back all the photos in their boxes and closed the lids. When I came downstairs in the morning, Mom was sitting at the kitchen table working a crossword puzzle, and the coffeemaker puffed along on the counter. She looked up expectantly and said, “So, are you all packed?”

“I was thinking I might not head back today.”

“Oh.”

“I only have one class tomorrow, and I don’t really need to be there for it. Maybe I’ll stay another day and enjoy the old homestead.”