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Paige hesitated, finger poised over Scott’s name on her phone screen. After a few seconds, she closed her fist and lowered the phone. She didn’t want to call her brother and have him come racing over to the shop just to find nothing. The doors were locked from the inside, and no one was in the store now. She’d have an even harder time convincing Scott it was safe for her to stay in the attic apartment if she called him in the middle of her first night there, sounding frantic.
As she sat in bed wondering how on earth she was going to get any more sleep, she saw the boxes by the door. She jumped up and rummaged through one of the boxes on top. She found a thick, dusty dictionary that would do just fine. Carrying it with her, she climbed back into bed. It wasn’t super comfortable lying with the giant book on her chest, but at least she’d have something to defend herself with if needed. Smashing a dictionary over the head of an intruder seemed like a very “bookshop owner” thing to do.
Paige woke up when sun poured through the tiny window. The dictionary was on the floor, and her hand hung over the edge of the bed. She hadn’t been able to fall asleep for quite a while after the adventure downstairs, and the clock told her it was fifteen minutes until opening time.
She’d learned to dress quickly during college when they’d been awoken in the middle of the night for fire drills. She threw on her clothes and ran downstairs, Casper on her heels. She made the cat wait for his breakfast while she got a bucket full of hot, soapy water and found a scrub brush in a closet in the storeroom. She snapped a few pictures of the ominous red words on the countertop with her phone before she began scrubbing at them. It only took a few seconds to realize the paint must be oil-based. It wasn’t going to come off with soap and water. She glanced at the clock. No time right now. Paige looked around and her eyes fell on the stacks of newspapers on a small table by the door. She dropped the stacks on top of the thrteatening words to cover them.
She opened the store on time, fed Casper, and got a pot of coffee going because she wouldn’t have time to go to Just Baked. When Neal arrived, it was like a normal day at the shop.
A raven-haired thirty-something woman with big, round sunglasses entered the shop shortly after Paige got the door unlocked. She pushed the glasses to the top of her head and made a beeline for the checkout counter. “I’m looking for a copy of Little Women. Do you have it?”
Most customers who came into the shop were in vacation mode and liked to stroll around to study the titles and take a break from the heat. This woman was either on a caffeine high or didn’t understand the concept of relaxation.
Luckily, Paige knew right where to find her book.
The lady kept up a nonstop stream of chatter. “I need it for my niece. She’s at the right age now, and I loved it when I was a child. Do you have children?”
Paige only had time to shake her head before the lady continued. “I don’t either. I only have the one niece. I’m a fashion designer. My things are all the rage in Kansas.”
Kansas? Paige stifled a laugh. She hadn’t realized Kansas was a fashion mecca. “Here’s Little Women.” She gestured toward a shelf. “There’s paperback, hard cover, and it’s also available in this collection of five classics.”
“Hmmm.” The highly strung woman peered through her glasses at the box set. “Maybe I should get that. I think she’d like Frankenstein, actually. Do you like that one?”
“Yes. Mary Shelley . . .”
“Oh good. I’ll take this, then. Can you check me out right away? I want to get over to the hotel and give it to Isabelle so she’ll have something to read on the beach.”
“Of course.” Paige spoke fast to get some words in before the woman started talking again. “Did you see the magazine section? Maybe you’d like one or two for yourself? For the beach, I mean.”
“Oh. Well, I suppose I could look.” She picked up a fashion magazine and grimaced. She tossed it on the counter. “I’ll take this too. I like to see the train wrecks other designers call fashion.”
Paige grinned and checked the woman out, pleased she’d been able to upsell the lady twice. Maybe she’d get the bookshop back in the black after all.
Business was steady all morning, and Paige worked while Neal had lunch in the storeroom. Casper thought he needed more food too. Paige declined, telling him he’d get fat if she fed him every time he meowed, but she saw Neal slip some lunchmeat into the cat’s bowl out of the corner of her eye.
When it was her turn to have lunch, Paige decided to walk to the hardware store one street over and get a couple of deadbolts. She wanted one on the attic door. And even though the front and back doors of the shop’s main level had been locked when Paige checked them after the intruder left, she wanted to change them too. How could someone have picked the lock, come in, spray-painted the counter, and somehow relocked the door behind them? She’d be sure to get the best locks they sold.
It took her a while to find someone to help her choose the deadbolts, and then she remembered she needed some paint thinner to scrub the counter clean too. As she walked back toward the bookshop, she planned to head to her room and make a quick sandwich before getting back to work. When she rounded the corner, two police cars and an ambulance with lights flashing were positioned in front of her store. She broke into a run.
Two EMS workers pushed a stretcher through the shop’s door toward the ambulance as Paige arrived. It was Neal, his eyes closed and an oxygen mask covering the lower half of his face.
“What’s going on?” Paige pushed through a few bystanders to get up front.
The EMS guys didn’t respond, but a man standing next to her said, “I went into the bookstore to look for a newspaper and found him lying on the floor. He wasn’t conscious, so I called 9-1-1.”
Paige glanced at the guy. She didn’t know him, but he was about her age, with sandy-blond hair, wearing board shorts and a tense look on his face.
“I stayed with him until they got here, but he never woke up.”
“Was there anyone else in the store?” Paige asked. She wondered where Casper was.
The man shook his head, but before she could ask any more questions, a cop appeared and ushered the guy away for questioning. Another police officer appeared in front of Paige. “Are you the new owner of the bookshop?”
“Yes. I inherited it from my aunt.”
Paige didn’t know either of these cops and she wondered briefly where Scott was. Then the officer started asking her a litany of questions about the morning and where she was when Neal collapsed. She answered truthfully but didn’t offer the story about the spray paint from the night before. She was pretty sure no one was supposed to be living in the shop, and it probably wasn’t a good idea to share that info.
By the time the questioning was over, the ambulance was long gone and the crowd on the sidewalk had cleared out. Paige went into the shop and looked around. Almost immediately, her eyes fell on Nora’s special locked case. It was open. Paige moved closer. The logbook was on the floor just outside the glass case. What in the world? The only one who could have unlocked the cabinet and gotten the book out was Neal. What was he planning to do with it?
Paige picked up the logbook and saw the case’s key sitting under it. She replaced the book in the case, relocked it, and slipped the key in her pocket. Whether he was sick or not, Neal had some explaining to do.
After checking on the cat, Paige turned the sign on the door to Closed and locked the shop door behind her.
“Was that Neal I saw being carried away?” Lucy’s round face popped into Paige’s view as she turned away from the shop. The woman still had on an apron and hairnet.
“Yes. I guess he collapsed in the shop while I was out. I’m going to the hospital.”
Lucy reached behind her back to untie the apron. “I’ll come with you, dear,” she said. “Just let me get my hair fluffed and tell Betsy where I’m going. We can take my car.” She gestured toward a royal-blue minivan.
Paige nodded and got in the passenger seat. Lucy was out again in only a few minutes, and they were on their way.
The nurse at the hospital’s front desk informed Paige and Lucy they’d have to wait a few minutes, but Neal was stable and they could see him shortly. In fact, it wasn’t more than a few minutes before they were motioned into his room, which stood right across from the nurses’ station. Neal was awake, without an oxygen mask, but he did have an IV in his left arm, which led to a pump that whirred and beeped periodically.
Lucy made a fuss over Neal, brushing his hair off his forehead and messing with his blankets and pillow. The young man seemed to eat it up, probably enjoying the attention. Once they’d gotten through the initial greetings, Paige jumped right in to serious talk. “What happened?”
Neal shook his head a little. “I don’t know. I really don’t remember much.” He lifted his left hand, and Paige could tell he meant to run it through his hair, a gesture she’d watched him perform countless times. The IV stopped him, and a wince crossed his face.
“What do you remember? Exactly.” Paige wasn’t going to let this kid out of the hot seat. Something odd had been going on with him since she met him, and she intended to get to the bottom of it. First, her aunt had collapsed in the shop and died, and now Neal had to be swept away by an ambulance. Maybe there was a connection.
Neal’s eyes shifted to Lucy.
“It’s fine,” Paige said. “You can tell both of us.” She didn’t know why, but Paige had begun to trust Lucy despite some of her odd behavior. She’d been Aunt Nora’s best friend, and she didn’t seem to have a mean bone in her body.
“Well, I unlocked the case and got the logbook out.” He glanced at Paige but looked away again just as fast.
“Why?” Paige knew she was staring at Neal intently, probably not looking like she cared much about his medical situation.
“I was going to show it to a customer.” He used his right hand to rub his head. “It kind of fell open when I pulled it out, and then I smelled something really weird. Like seaweed or something, only rotten. Putrid, almost. Then, a cold, clammy mist started piling up around me.” He stopped talking, though his mouth kept moving.
“Then what, dear?” Lucy patted the young man’s arm.
Neal coughed. Then he blurted out the remaining words on his tongue so fast Paige had to strain to catch them all. “A ghost appeared in front of me. I passed out. That’s all I remember.” He closed his eyes and turned his head away from the women.
Paige would have totally dismissed what Neal said if she hadn’t heard almost exactly the same story from Scott the day before. Could Neal have been hiding somewhere in the shop and heard Paige’s brother tell the story? If so, he might have been the one who spray-painted the counter. After all, Neal did have his own key to the shop. He might be pretending something happened to get some days off or workman’s comp. If so, what a weasel.
Neal turned his head back toward them and opened his eyes. “I think I was drugged,” he said. “That’s why I passed out. The doctors are doing blood tests to figure out what kind of drug it was.”
Drugged? This wasn’t adding up. Paige felt a headache coming on.
Lucy sniffled a few times and patted Neal’s arm. “Dear, tell Paige the truth now. Were you smoking something or doing something you ought not to have been doing when she was out of the shop?”
Neal shook his head emphatically this time. He turned his face toward Paige. “Miss Murphy, when I went to the attic to look for the missing first editions the other day, I saw something up there. White bricks—ten or twelve of them. Like bricks of drugs you see on TV. I was spooked, and I didn’t know what to do. By the time I decided to tell you about it the next day, I went back up to get them and they were gone. Do you know where they went?”
Paige felt her jaw drop. Why did she get the impression he was accusing her of something? Did he think she drugged Nora all the way from Italy and then decided to come after him? She remembered Neal’s strange behavior those first few days. At the time, she’d chalked it up to his odd personality. Maybe he wasn’t so innocent after all.
“Okay, honey. You rest up,” Lucy said. “Is there anyone we need to call for you?”
He shook his head.
“Hopefully they’ll let you out of here soon.” Lucy patted Neal again and pulled Paige by the arm behind her.
“One more question before we go, Neal,” Paige said. “Who was the customer you were showing the logbook to? Did he or she see this ghost too?”
Neal turned his head away from them. “I don’t know,” he answered and then coughed with a forced effort. “Maybe I have amnesia.”
Amnesia, my a—.
Lucy dragged Paige out into the hall, across the lobby, and back into the minivan. As the baker pulled the car out of the parking lot, she said, “You know, I didn’t want to drop this on you right away when you came to town. Then, after you started spending time at the bookshop, I thought maybe you’d find it on your own. I didn’t want to seem like the crazy neighbor lady going on about nonsense. But after Neal’s story, I think you should hear what I know.”
Paige watched Lucy’s face, which was open and earnest.
“A few years ago, I got to worrying about Nora. There would be times when I’d glance up toward the attic window when I’d leave in the evenings. I’d see Nora up there, talking to someone. Sometimes I’d see her doing it when I passed by the front window of the shop during the day too.” Lucy glanced at Paige. “I thought she was getting dementia. I started paying close attention to her then. Eventually, after she realized I was pretty much stalking her, she confided in me about a friend of hers. He’s a ghost, you see. The ghost of Captain McDougall, the pirate.”
Paige held her breath. Was it true? Was the bookshop haunted like Scott said?
Lucy drove slowly as she talked. “Nora said she’d found his logbook in the shop, and when she opened it, she discovered that he resides within its pages.”
Paige wanted to scoff, but she’d been told this ghost story from so many angles now that there really was no way to refute it. “I see,” was all she managed to say.
Lucy parked the car and both women got out. The baker turned to Paige. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you earlier, dear. I really didn’t know how much you already knew. And, of course, I still feel such loyalty to Nora. We shop owners— and witches—need to stick together, you know.”
“Witches?” Paige choked on the word.
“I know you must find this hard to believe, dear, but your Aunt Nora and I were part of a . . . a . . . club, of sorts.”
“A club?” Paige repeated. “Like a book club?”
“No, dear. Like a coven. You see, she and I were working on a new potion the night before she fell ill. When you told me about a drug in her system, I thought maybe it was something we included in the mix. That’s why I was so rattled before. But after checking the recipe, I saw there was nothing even remotely poisonous. Unless we’d gotten ahold of some bad frog legs, but they were fresh from the fish market, so I think they were okay.”
Paige just stared at the woman. “Are you saying you have special powers or something?”
“Oh yes. For one, I can smell if someone is lying to me. I come from a long line of Truth Sniffers. That’s where the expression ‘I smell a rat’ comes from. I could smell that Neal was lying to you back there at the hospital.” She headed for the bakery.
Paige started to follow her. “But—”
Lucy held up her hands. “Sorry, dear. I have to get back to work, but we’ll talk soon.” She gave a little wave and then the door slammed behind her.
The cop cars were gone. Paige unlocked the shop door and went inside. She absentmindedly filled the yowling cat’s bowl with food even though it wasn’t his mealtime. Her mind swirled with thoughts of pirate ghosts and witches.
Did Captain McDougall leave the ominous message on the shop’s front counter for Paige? Could ghosts even use spray paint? Could he see her right now? The thought creeped her out. She sighed. It seemed like there was only one way to find out. She needed to find this pirate and talk to him herself.