I came to work on Tuesday morning feeling a little down. Over the years, I’d come to terms with who my parents were and that they weren’t the parents who were going to show up for the big moments in my life with a bouquet of flowers and enthusiasm. But sometimes, especially when I knew I’d tried to avoid who they were instead of just dealing with it, I let my disappointment in them get to me.
But I had a business to run, and for yet another reason, I was grateful for this little shop, these people I worked with, and most of all for the books. Books had always been my refuge, a safe space where I could let my large, powerful emotions have free reign beside the characters on the pages. This morning, I arrived at the shop a few minutes after nine and grabbed Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass off the shelf, turned to what I thought was one of the most heartbreaking passages in literature, and let myself sob alongside Lyra.
By the time Marcus arrived, I was feeling better, all my emotions poured out and not repressed, and ready for the day. It didn’t hurt that Marcus bounced through the door with Taco at his heels and said, “New book day, Ms. B” with the enthusiasm of Tigger.
“I see you brought reinforcements,” I pointed at the lumbering form of Daniel’s Basset Hound.
“I figured we could use his ability to sleep as the reverse psychology of motivation.”
I laughed as Taco dropped onto his side, missing the dog bed on which Mayhem lay with everything but his tail.
Tuesday always was my favorite day in the bookshop – all those new titles to display, all those customers coming in with excitement for their favorite author’s new book. I couldn’t stay melancholy with all that to look forward to.
Marcus and I busied ourselves with helping customers and rearranging the new titles table at the front of the shop. Rocky supplied us with cups of her new dark roast from the local coffee roasters and lemon scones that were just the right balance of tart and sweet. Nothing like good books and baked goods.
Just as Marcus was about to take his lunch, Galen Gilbert came in with Mack, and we had a low and rather slow dog version of the running of the bulls among the bookshelves as Taco, Mayhem, and Mack played. Taco was a usual fixture at the shop now as it was far safer for everyone if he was here and not leaning against car jacks in Daniel’s shop. Marcus took it as part of his duty as the renter in Daniel’s apartment to pick up the pup each morning, and the two had become fast friends.
Now, he was corralling the three pooches to the bed in the front window before he went out the door with a wave.
Galen was, hands down, my favorite customer. He was, first and foremost, a mystery reader, but he also liked “expanding his horizons,” as he put it and asked me often for recommendations. Last week, I’d put Edward Ball’s Slaves in the Family into his hands when he said he wanted some history but nothing dry. Now, I was eager to hear what he thought.
“Well?” I asked as he leaned against the counter by the register. “Did you like it?”
He looked down at his hands and cleared his throat. “Not exactly, Harvey.” Then he looked up through the top of his eyes and said, “I loved it. What a brilliant amount of work Ball did, and I loved how honest he was about his family’s legacy as slave holders. Wow. I’ll be thinking about that one for a long time.”
“I thought you’d love it. It’s so good. I wish more people knew about it.”
Galen grinned and held up his phone. “They do now.”
On the screen was an image of a person’s shoulder just outside the front of my store with the sign clear as day, and I laughed. “I need to hire you as my PR manager, sir.” He handed me the phone, and I read his glowing caption that had, in the first five minutes, 656 likes. “You are a master.”
“I can only do my work with the support of worthy experts like you.” He laughed and headed off to the mystery section.
I did a lap around the shop to tidy and say hello to the folks reading and browsing among the shelves, and when I circled back, Galen had returned to the register with his usual stack of titles. “You’ve read Lauren Elliot, I presume,” he said as I began to ring up the books, sliding my twenty percent employee discount into the mix as a bit of gratitude for his publicity.
“Just this first one, so far. But I loved it.” I slipped Murder by the Book into the tote Galen always brought with him and finished ringing up his other purchases. “Thank you, Galen. For everything.”
“My pleasure, Harvey. Really. You’ve made my life better with your shop, and Mack loves coming here, too.” We looked over to see Mayhem giving Mack a face bath with her tongue. “Plus, the free spa services are a delight as well.”
I laughed and waved as he clipped a leash onto a lumbering Mack and headed out the door.
As usual, the day got busier as people took lunch breaks and coffee breaks and “book breaks,” as the woman who ran the yarn shop down the street called her daily visit to the shop. Plus, a number of folks who stopped by told me they’d seen Galen’s posts about the shop and finally decided to visit since they lived nearby. Every time I saw some young twenty-something come into the store and hold up Galen’s Instagram feed to show me why they were here, I wondered if they knew who was behind that beautiful assortment of images and book recommendations. Galen used Mack as his profile pic, and I thought that was probably a thoughtful choice.
A bit later in the day, I was straightening up the children’s sections that had been beautifully pillaged by the after-school crowd when two men came in. The slimmer of the two was a white man, about sixty or so with a moustache that turned up at the ends, and the other was a balding black man with just the beginning of a potbelly. “Pickle and Bear!” I didn’t mean to say their names – especially their nicknames – out loud, but clearly I had, because they both turned toward me as I prized myself up from the floor by the easy readers.
“You must be Harvey Beckett.” Bear put out his hand. “We’ve been meaning to stop by and say hello. My wife simply raves about you and your shop.”
For a split second I thought about playing dumb, but given that I’d just shouted their small-town nicknames across the store, I figured the jig was up and shook his hand saying, “You must be Bear. I mean, is it okay if I call you Bear?” I sucked my breath in through my teeth.
“Unless you’re my mother and prefer Berrington Rutherford Johnson.” He laughed. “Everyone calls me Bear.”
I smiled. “I don’t know. Berrington Rutherford has a certain ring to it.”
“My mother believed that names set up a person for life, giving them power and stature that supports them each day. She was thoroughly disgusted when the nickname Bear arrived as I started kindergarten and became notorious for giving ‘bear hugs’ to all the girls.”
“A ladies’ man from a young age, I see.” I winked. “It appears your mother and mine shared that perspective. My given name is Anastasia Lovejoy.”
Bear’s eyes got wide. “That is quite the name.”
“Indeed it is. You can see why I stuck with Harvey.”
The other man put out his hand, and I shook it. “Pickle Herring, ma’am. I probably don’t have to explain . . .”
I gave him a wink. “I think I got it.” I swung my arm in an arc behind me. “What brings you into my fine establishment, gentlemen?”
“Can’t two people just want to visit the newest shop in town?” Bear looked at me slyly.
“Of course they can, but if you don’t mind me saying, I do believe you are the first pair of men – who weren’t a couple – who have come into the shop. Unless there’s something you haven’t revealed to the town yet.”
Both men leaned back and laughed. “You are not the first person to suggest this possibility, Harvey, but no, just friends here,” Pickle said.
“To be truthful, we heard that you were curious about some treasure over at Huckabee Harris’s house,” Bear said with a small smile.
I shouldn’t have been surprised. There were no secrets in St. Marin’s, but still, I thought we’d been pretty discrete, at least about how Bear and Pickle were connected to our visit yesterday. I sighed. “You found me out. Word travels fast around here.” I pointed to the café. “Buy you a cup of coffee?”
The men looked at each other and shrugged. We took a table by the window, and given that the gossip train had already run its way right back to me again, I figured our public conversation would either be the source of great speculation or silence the chatter.
As I went up to the counter to get our coffee, Rocky said, “Pickle and Bear are notorious pranksters, Harvey. Even worse than the sheriff. I’ll put on these lids to keep your coffee from being laced with salt or something.” I brought three cups from a fresh pot of that delicious dark roast back to the table and set them down before going back for a small carton of half and half and a sugar jar.
“Let’s lay it all out there. Who told you I was, er, investigating?”
Pickle looked at Bear and then over at me before saying, “Mum’s the word. We don’t reveal our sources.” He gave me a wink. “Besides, it doesn’t really matter. Everyone at breakfast heard the story.”
“So I’m the talk of the town, huh?” I joked.
“Have been for about a month now, my lady,” Bear said.
I blushed. “Well, I hope the rumors are making me out to be amazing.”
“How could they not?” Bear laughed and took a sip of his coffee.
“So you two want to get into the oil business.” I said with a smile as I took my first sip.
“Oil? What are you talking about, woman?” Pickle said as he leaned forward in his chair. “We aren’t interested in any oil.”
I almost spit out my coffee, but managed to swallow it first. “You’re not interested in the oil at Harris’s place.”
Another look between them. Another shrug. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
I tried to put together the train of thought that had made that seem so obvious, but as I did, I realized I’d jumped a lot of tracks to get to that particular station. My turn to shrug. “It seemed like buried treasure, I guess.”
“You know Miranda gets all that, right? And we’ve got no problem with that. She’s got enough problems, and maybe that’ll be a way for her to solve some of them.”
I put up a little mental note to come back to Miranda’s problems, but I didn’t want to lose the treasure track again. I suddenly had an idea, and I tried not to snicker when it came to mind. “You’re looking for Confederate gold.”
Without a second’s pause, Bear shouted, “Darn tootin’ we are, young lady! Even have a map.”
Pickle snapped, “Bear!”
I looked from man to man, trying to get a read on these two fellows who appeared far too smart to buy into that fool’s legend. The scowl Pickle was giving Bear after he mentioned that map looked pretty serious. “Don’t worry, fellas, I won’t be horning in on your treasure hunt. But you do know that most of those rumors,” I wanted to say all of those rumors, but didn’t like to dash people’s hopes, “aren’t true, right?”
Bear looked at me like I was pointing out the earth was flat and said, “Of course we know that. We’re not just some country bumpkins who fell off the turnip truck.”
I smiled at the lovely mix of metaphors.
Pickled leaned over the table. “But this one is true. Huckabee’s grandmother herself told me about it.”
“His grandmother? Really?” I figured I might as well get their full story. If nothing else, my friends would love to hear all about it.
“Yep. On her death bed. She leaned over and said, ‘By the willow, Pickle. By the willow.’” He sat back firmly in his seat like those seven words settled it.
I nodded solemnly, even as I puzzled over why Pickle was at the deathbed of someone else’s grandmother. “So the treasure is by the willow then?”
Bear rolled his eyes. “Pay attention. No, that’s where the map was.”
“Oh, I see,” I said with gravitas. “Can I see the map?”
Bear looked at Pickle, and Pickle gave a slight nod. A smartphone was laid in front of me, and I saw a photo of what looked like a drawing done by a third grader – or by me. I was not the finest artist and still employed the farmhouse with a long lane against a mountain backdrop with a sun in the corner technique that this artist also used.
The “map” showed a building with four windows equally placed on the front façade and surrounding a door. A couple of waving lines that were roughly parallel ran up to that door, and in the background, some arcs that overlapped formed what I assumed were mountains. On one of the mountains, a thin line disappeared at the peak, and of course, there was a sun drawn in the upper right-hand corner.
Pickle’s thick pointer finger drew my attention to the squiggle on the mountain. “You see that? That’s a road.”
“Yep,” Bear added. “We’ve studied the outlines of these hills, and we know just where they are.”
“Let me guess. On the Harris property?”
“This girl’s smart, Pickle.” Bear grinned at his friend.
“Sure is, but not smart enough to know when she’s been played,” Pickle said matter-of-factly.
Both men turned and looked at me, and I just stared at them. “What?” I finally spit out.
Their roars of laughter echoed through the store and still I stared, trying to figure out why they were laughing when I’d just been told the most ridiculous tale of treasure hunting. And that’s when it hit me, and I felt a blush run all the way from my chest to my scalp. “You are pulling my leg.”
Bear wheezed out, “Did anyone ever tell you gullible isn’t in the dictionary?”
That tired joke sent the two of them into another fit of laughter.
I watched these two men roll in their chairs, and while my pride was a little dinged up, I found myself laughing, too. Soon all three of us were wiping tears from our eyes and trying to get our breath.
“You got me, fellows. You got me good.”
Pickle took a pair of tortoiseshell glasses in the latest style out of his pocket and put them on his nose before smoothing back his hair into a very business-like style just as Bear stood up, tucked in his shirt, and slid a sports jacket on over his button-down. Clearly these two had planned this . . . and I suddenly had a suspicion. “Sheriff Mason put you up to this, didn’t he?”
“I cannot tell a lie,” Bear said with his hand over his heart. “So I’m not going to say anything at all.
And speak of the devil, in came our esteemed sheriff himself. He took one look at the three of us and bent over double with amusement. “You got her, didn’t you?” he said between bursts of laughter.
“Hook, line, and Confederate gold sinker,” Pickle said.
“Woody told you we went to the Harris place,” I said to the sheriff as I got up from the table. “Didn’t he?”
“Serves you right for snooping around about a murder.” He was still laughing, but I could also hear the reminder in his words.
“You’re right, I guess. But I mean, I found the body. I have a vested—“
“Stop right there, Harvey.” The sheriff wasn’t laughing anymore. “I know you want to know what happened. We all do. But you can’t be digging into police matters. It’s not wise, and it might be dangerous.”
I sighed. I knew he was right, and a small part of me wanted to heed his caution. But I already knew I wouldn’t.
The sheriff’s radio squawked, and he put it to his ear as he turned down the volume. “Gotta go, folks. Rocky, you got all that, right?”
I looked over at my friend and saw her grin. “What’s he talking about, Rocky?”
“Already emailed the video to you, Sheriff.”
“Good woman,” he said as he went out the door.
“Rocky Chevalier, you were in on this?”
She shrugged. “If you could have seen your face . . .”
I gave her my strongest fake glare, then smiled and sat back down.
“You do know that the two of you owe me now, right?”
Bear nodded as he took a napkin and scribbled on it. “Consider this our IOU.”
“Is that what this says?” I stared down at the napkin at what looked like a toddler’s first drawing.
Bear grinned. “I do have another favor to ask, though.” I gave him a skeptical look as he continued. “Henry sent over a list of books that I’m supposed to bring her when I leave. I have explicit instructions to ask you to order them if you don’t have them in stock.” He handed me a sheet of notebook paper with about twenty titles on it.
“Wow. She’s quite the reader.” I gave the list a scan. “I think we have most of these, but it’ll take me a while to pull them. Why don’t I bring them to Henry later this afternoon?”
“Well, that’s what I call service . . .” Bear squinted, “But I suspect that this generosity may come with a price tag. How may we help?”
“You mentioned that Miranda Harris-Lewis had problems. I take it that this wasn’t just part of your ruse.”
Pickle looked at me askance. “You haven’t heard?” When I shook my head, he said, “Oh. Her husband is, well, what we might call in my line of work, a repeat offender.”
“He’s got a criminal record?”
Bear almost shouted, “No, and that’s the problem. That woman has more bruises and bumps to the head than any person I’ve ever known, and I’ve been an ER doctor for three decades.”
“He beats her?” I whispered, imagining the perfectly put-together woman who was here the day before.
“No doubt about it in anyone’s mind, but she won’t press charges or leave him. She’s too scared,” Pickle said quietly. “And honestly, she has reason to be. Rafe Lewis is a dangerous man.”
“Oh, that’s terrible.” I sighed. “I had a friend back in California who was in a similar situation. It took her years to leave, but when she did, she never looked back.”
“May it be so for that poor woman.” Bear’s voice was somber.
“That’s the reason for the falling out with her dad, I imagine. I mean neither of them seems like the most warm and fuzzy of personalities, but it takes a special kind of damage to make a child give up on a parent.”
“I expect so,” Pickle said as he stood. “Now, I need to get back to the office. I’ve got depositions starting in an hour.
Bear rose on the other side of me. “And my shift starts at the hospital in thirty minutes. Thank you for a great laugh, Harvey. That’s one of our finest pieces of work.”
I smiled and walked with them to the door. They had already swung it open when I realized something. “Guys, wait? What did my mother overhear you talking about then? What’s the treasure?”
“Oil, my dear. Black gold,” Pickle said.
Bear nodded. “We’re buying the mineral rights to the land from Miranda. Giving her a great return with the hopes she can put it to good use.”
My throat got a little tight. “That seems like an incredibly kind thing to do, gentlemen.”
“We try, my lady, we try,” Bear said as he slid a flat top hat on his head and walked out the door with his friend.
That night, everyone gathered at my house for pizza night. Lucas and Cate brought homemade dough, Elle brought a salad fresh from her garden, Mart and I contributed the cheese, meat and sauce, and Daniel and Marcus got the beverages. I’d suggested the idea of a get-together – with food, always with food – when I’d texted everyone to say I had to catch them up on things, and everyone was game, except Rocky who had to study for her exams. I’d offered to quiz her over pizza, but she wisely pointed out that wine and nineteenth century British literature probably weren’t a good combo.
While we stretched the dough, spread the sauce, and chose our toppings, I told the tale of Pickle and Bear’s prank. Mart was a little defensive on my behalf – “Oh, Harvey, that must have been so embarrassing.”
I laughed. “It was, but then it wouldn’t have been a good joke if it wasn’t, right? Besides, unless Rocky puts the video on YouTube, I feel pretty safe knowing it’ll just be St. Marin’s folks who hear about it.”
“Oh no. You don’t think she’d put that up do you?” Mart looked genuinely alarmed.
I put an arm around her shoulders. “You are so sweet. No, she would never do that. Don’t worry.” Mart had been working nonstop for two days and had raced home after her last meeting for dinner. She was exhausted, and like me, when she was tired, her emotions got bigger and came right to the surface. “Besides, if it did go live, people would just laugh.”
“Or go hunting for that Confederate gold because their attention spans didn’t last through the punchline,” Cate said as she spread a glorious amount of mozzarella on her pizza.
We got the pizza onto trays and into the oven and then all took our beverages to the living room to chat. “But I haven’t told you the really interesting part yet.” I felt a little bad for talking about Miranda’s abuse this way, but I knew my friends would be more concerned than lurid in their listening. And I really wanted their thoughts on whether Rafe Lewis could have killed Miranda’s dad.
I shared what Pickle and Bear had told me, and no one but Mart was surprised. Even Daniel, who was notoriously out of the loop about town tales, nodded when I shared what I’d learned. “You knew?” I asked him when I was done.
“Of course I knew. Everyone in town knows.”
“But you didn’t think to tell me?”
He shrugged. “I try not to gossip, Harvey. I didn’t know how it would be relevant, and to be truthful, the abuse has been going on so long that I kind of forgot about it.” He winced. “I know that sounds awful.”
“No, I know what you mean,” Lucas added. “I think everyone in town has tried to help her. Cate here even offered to let her and the girls live with us. But she’s never accepted help. In fact, she gets defensive and sort of mean when someone offers. Eventually, everyone stopped asking.”
“She’s terrified. It’s not rational, but it seems like she thinks if she accepts help, then Rafe will find out, and it’ll get worse for her. She may well be right.” Cate’s voice was tender.
“Are the girls okay?” I asked. “I mean, child protective services?”
Marcus shook his head violently. “That would only make things worse. I don’t think the girls are getting hurt. At least, when I see them, they’re quiet and almost too obedient, but I’ve never seen sign of a physical injury.”
Cate nodded. “I agree. That doesn’t mean they aren’t being traumatized of course, poor things, but Marcus is right. If we call CPS and they come and do a wellness check and don’t find cause to remove the girls, then they could be Rafe’s next victims.”
I curled my legs up under me and took a big swig of my chardonnay. “I guess, too, then Miranda would get it even worse.” I put my head against Daniel’s shoulder.
Mart sniffled. “So there’s nothing we can do?”
We all sat quietly for a few moments until the oven timer went off and startled us all.
“Well, time to eat.” Lucas stood and helped Cate up from the floor. It felt a little callous to just move on after a conversation like that, but we had other business to attend to . . . namely trying to figure out if Miranda killed her father as her escape.
“So she could have done it, I guess,” Elle said between bites, “but she was going to inherit all that wealth anyway, right? Plus, don’t we think her dad would have given her anything she asked for?”
I shook my head slowly. “I’m finding it hard to imagine Huckabee Harris as a doting father,” an image of my dad standing at the cash register in the shop came to mind, “but I suspect every father is protective of his baby girl.”
“Exactly. But maybe Huckabee put conditions on his generosity. Maybe he said Miranda had to leave Rafe, and she just wouldn’t – or couldn’t – do that.” Cate’s voice was strident. “Terror can make a person very irrational.”
I peeled the cheese off my slice of pizza and ate it before saying, “Okay, so maybe she’s still a possible suspect. But it sounds like we need to consider other options, too.”
“Like Rafe,” Daniel said. “I mean if Huckabee was trying to get Miranda to leave him . . .”
“That’s a good point,” Marcus said. “Maybe he took care of the one escape route Miranda had.
I put my pizza down and pulled my sweater tighter around me. “This guy. I hope I don’t meet him in a dark alley.”
Cate looked at me intently, “I’d suggest trying not to meet him at all. He’s pretty scary.”
Mart nodded then said. “But something is bothering me. It’s the oil. I mean, I don’t know how oil wells work, but no one is living out there now. Couldn’t someone just be stealing the oil?”
“Well, Homer is out there. I expect he’s keeping an eye on things.”
From the blank expressions on most of the faces in the room, I realized that I hadn’t yet mentioned Homer. “Ah, he’s the caretaker. The farm manager, I think he said his title was. Nice guy. Friend of Woody’s.”
Mart nodded. “So the oil is safe, and that means whoever killed Huckabee still doesn’t have access to the oil.” Her eyes got very wide. “Oh no, what if Homer is in danger?”
She had a point, but I’d seen him packing a pretty big pistol on his hip. I figured he could handle himself, and my friends agreed when I told them about the gun.
We tossed around theories about who could have killed Huckabee – an angry shop owner who had been at the brunt of his forceful attitude, a disgruntled employee, etc. – but when we our conversation devolved into a Criminal Minds-like theory on serial killers, Daniel suggested that perhaps our conversation had gone as far as it could . . . and also that maybe we should all watch a little less TV.
As Mart, Daniel, and I cleaned up, my mind kept returning to Miranda and to the girls. Suddenly, I knew what I had to do. I also knew my friends would not approve so I kept my mouth shut and loaded the dishwasher.
I walked Daniel and Marcus to the door. Marcus said goodnight and went on ahead to wait for Daniel in his truck.
“Thank you for being here,” I said as I looked up into his face.
“Always, Harvey. Always.” He leaned down and gave me a tender kiss and then led Taco down the walk. I closed the door and leaned against it, feeling peaceful. That man always made me feel peaceful.
But then Mart rounded the corner, stood in front of me with her hands on her hips, and said, “You have that look, Harvey.”
“Look? What look?” I asked, not meeting her eyes.
“The one where your jaw tightens just a bit, and your brow furrows. The look that says you have a plan.”
Gracious, there were downsides to having a best friend. I poured us another glass of wine and told Mart what I thought I’d do the next day. She didn’t like it, but “I’m in,” she said. “You need a wing woman for this kind of venture.”
There were upsides to having a best friend, too.