While Ava got her purse and jacket, Gage tried Zoe again on the pay phone in the lobby. It rang ten times before going to voicemail. He left a message telling her to call Alex when she got this, to give a time when he could call her, because he wanted to chat with her about some things. He did his best to keep any sense of alarm out of his voice, and he thought he did a good job of it, but Zoe knew him so well that she'd probably sense something was up. He didn't know how to avoid that. He didn't want to worry her unnecessarily, but he needed to know that she was all right. It was one time he'd be fine with her scolding him about not having his own phone.
Ava emerged as he was hanging up, dressed in a light brown suede jacket and a matching purse thrown over her shoulder.
"Canceling lunch with your girlfriend?" she said with a wink.
"My wife wants me to pick up the dry cleaning," Gage said. "I told her I'd get it after I was finished having lunch with this cute blonde."
"Ah," Ava said, "I guess I deserved that."
She said it with a grimace, but Gage saw the amused glint in her eyes that betrayed her real feelings. She liked being called cute. What was he thinking? Even knowing the mortal danger he was putting himself in flirting with the daughter of the police chief, he couldn't help himself. He must have a death wish.
The sun shone brightly on the asphalt, the only wind from the passing cars and trucks. The walk took less than five minutes, but Gage still felt exposed with all the traffic rushing by as they made their way along the stores to the north to Ester Anne's—which was actually a motel on a bluff that overlooked the ocean, the restaurant attached. He kept expecting to see Chief Quinn's truck, a police cruiser, or someone else who might rat him out. Maybe nobody knew who she was, though. He had that going for him, her being new to town.
"What's wrong?" Ava asked.
"Nothing," Gage said. For once, his knee actually felt pretty good. It was probably all the adrenaline coursing through his veins, being on high alert all the time in case Chief Quinn tried to do a drive by with his shotgun. "Nothing at all."
"You're worried someone's going to see us, aren't you?"
"Nope."
"Yes you are. Relax. You're worried too much about my dad. Our relationship isn't like that."
"Like what, exactly?"
"Like whatever you're worried about. Trust me, he doesn't care at all who I have lunch with—or anything else about what I do with my time. Getting him to pay attention to me at all was more my problem, especially after the divorce. And once Ginger came into the picture . . ."
She shook her head, as if realizing she'd said more than she'd intended. He wanted to ask about her own mother, but he didn't want her to clam up prematurely. Walking side by side, he felt a magnetic pull toward her, something powerful, a force of nature that his caution couldn't override. Even as he glanced worriedly at the road, he kept being drawn back to her—her long eyelashes, the part of her lips, the way the sun brought out the reddish hue in her hair.
The restaurant portion of Ester Anne was on the north corner, the front half a gift shop with the usual coastal kitsch, the back half a dozen cozy tables squeezed into a tight space. It was a locally owned establishment, started by Ester Anne herself back in the fifties and now run by the grandchildren, as Gage understood it. Everything felt homespun and local. None of the furniture matched, some had a fifties diner feel, some that of an upscale deli, but it somehow still worked. Midafternoon, as it was, only one other customer occupied a table, a silver-haired man who nibbled at a piece of apple pie while perusing The Oregonian.
The waitress told them to take any table. They sat by a window with a startling view, the sweep of bright blue ocean over the hedge disappearing into a line of mist along the horizon. Even after all these years, a good view of the Pacific never ceased to astonish Gage. It was calming and awe inspiring at the same time. He could almost forget that Percy Quinn might walk in the door at any moment.
Almost. He sat so he had his back to the wall, a good view of whoever might enter the restaurant.
"Relax," Ava said.
"I am relaxed," Gage said.
"Right."
"As relaxed as I get, anyway."
"You look like you're ready to break this window so you can escape."
"I'm always like that. It's my line of work."
"Yeah, I don't think so. I think it's something else." She unzipped her purse and pulled out an electronic cigarette, a black and silver thing. He must have looked surprised because she stopped and raised her eyebrows at him. "You okay with this? It's all water vapor, you know."
"Oh, yeah, I know. I just . . . The restaurant's fine?"
"Well, it's technically illegal in Oregon, but I tend to hold the vapor in my lungs long enough that nobody can tell. You're not going to turn me in, are you?" She smiled.
"It's all good," Gage said.
Smirking as she poured the liquid into the container, she said, "Would you say the same thing if I was smoking cigarettes?"
"Hmm."
She laughed. She didn't laugh much, but when she did it was rich and genuine. Like her smile, her laugh was like an arrow fired straight at his heart. He resolved not to make her laugh on purpose at anything.
The waitress took their order, Ava a bowl of clam chowder, Gage a turkey and cranberry sandwich. Ava was right about the vapor; she held each puff in her mouth so long that when she exhaled, she couldn't even see it. The sun, already dipping lower on the horizon, cut a hard yellow line across the middle of the scuffed maple table. Gage felt the heat of the sun on his face. If he leaned just a little toward the window, it was in his eyes.
"I'd been meaning to quit smoking for years," Ava said, when the waitress had gone, "but I could never get it to stick. But when I went back to school to get my MLS, I decided there was no way I could work around books smelling like cigarettes, so e-cigs were my compromise. I get my nicotine fix and the books are safe."
"Not to mention your lungs," Gage said.
"It was an added bonus. So who was on the phone?"
"Boy, you do ask direct questions, don't you?"
She took another puff, smiling around the pipe, waiting. He debated about how much to tell her about himself at this point.
"It was my daughter," he said.
"Ah."
He watched her eyes, to see if there was disappointment there. He didn't see any. She nodded, leaning in, interested. He also felt something in himself that he didn't expect—relief. That troubled him. He didn't want to feel relieved. He wanted to feel glad that he'd scared her off.
"How many kids do you have?"
"Just one. She's adopted."
"Oh."
Even more interest. She made a gesture with her hand, prompting him to say more. Now he had no choice. He told her, as succinctly as he could, about how Zoe had come to live with him, finishing by saying the going with Zoe had been rough for a while, and still occasionally was, but he couldn't imagine her not being in his life now.
"That's . . . amazing," Ava said.
"What is?
"That you took her in like that. After everything you'd been through . . ." She trailed off, then put the pipe on the table. "I'm sorry, I admit I read up on you—about how your wife died. I don't mean to sound like I'm snooping."
Gage shrugged. "It's part of the public record. And really, you can ask me anything you like."
"Oooh . . . I don't know if I can pass up that opportunity. Well, then—"
"If," Gage cut in, "I can do the same with you."
"Fair enough. I get to go first, though."
Gage made the same gesture she'd made earlier asking her to proceed. She gave him one of her dazzling smiles, clearly enjoying this, and he felt a little more of his defenses crumble. A few more of those smiles and he'd be working for her as an indentured servant. She started with some easy ones, about why he'd chosen Barnacle Bluffs (it was as far from New York as he could get after Janet died), what he did for fun (crossword puzzles, read, walk on the beach, try to make one glass of bourbon last the whole evening and fail), and who his friends were in this town (he talked most about Alex and Eve). Then she asked if he'd killed anyone (yes), how many (more than he could count with his fingers but not that many more), and whether he thought of his work as a private investigator as his calling in life.
The last one made him pause. By then the food had come, and he put down his turkey sandwich and dabbed at his mouth with a napkin while he considered the question.
"I guess it's my calling," he said finally. "I never thought about it that way, though. It's just something I was good at, so I decided to keep doing it."
"But the FBI wasn't for you?"
"I don't remember mentioning that I was in the FBI. Doing more research on me?"
She shrugged, spooning up more chowder, smiling a prim little smile. The intoxicating aroma almost made him wish he'd ordered it himself, though the cranberries in his sandwich were about as sweet as he'd ever tasted.
"I'm a librarian," she said. "Research is what I do."
"Right. Well, I found out very quickly that I wasn't good at following orders."
"Somehow I'm not shocked."
"All right," Gage said, "now it's my turn to ask questions. I want to learn all about Ava Quinn."
"Uh oh."
"First question. How the heck did you end up getting the job at the library here? Did your father call you and ask you to come up when Albert passed away?"
"Nope, he had nothing to do with it."
"Really? Well, then how—"
"I grew up in Barnacle Bluffs—or at least at the end. We moved here from Texas when I was a sophomore in high school. It was . . . a rough transition. I didn't know anybody, and I had a hard time fitting in. Other than Harriet Abel, I didn't like any of my teachers. I hung out in the library a lot. I got really close to the librarian, so much so that I decided to get my MLS at the University of Washington and see if I could be a librarian myself."
"Wait a minute," Gage said. "You said you didn't really know Albert."
"This was before Albert. This was almost . . . geez, almost twenty years ago now. The librarian at the time was a lovely woman named Sally Sargent. She asked me to be on the public library board after I graduated from high school. It's mostly an advisory board made up of members from the community, but the board asked me to stay on even after I left the city—especially since they knew I was going to library school eventually. Which I did. But when Sally died . . ."
"I'm sorry," Gage said.
"Oh, she was very old, so it was time. I finished my degree, but my heart wasn't in it right then, and of course I met a guy . . ."
"Of course."
"He was an actor, ten years older than me, determined to make it in Hollywood. I always had a thing for older guys, I guess." She smiled furtively. "I followed him down to Los Angeles. I thought we were madly in love. Then of course I found out he was madly in love—with someone else. Actually, a lot of someone else's. But by then I was more interested in the movie business myself. And that's where I worked for a while, mostly as an assistant producer. Didn't make a lot of money but it was fun. The funny thing is my boyfriend at the time never made it as an actor. I think he's selling cars in Topeka."
"Funny," Gage said.
"No, really, he had a brother in Kansas who owned a car lot. When Kenny—that was his name—finally gave up on acting, he went back and worked for his brother. He posts all their sales on Facebook."
"So you worked in Hollywood? How was that?"
"Equal measures of exciting and soul crushing. I met a lot of celebrities. I also got very disillusioned very quickly because most of them are about as shallow as you can possibly imagine. The business is great when your studio is riding a hit. But the hits don't come along as often as you like, and the rest of the time it's like pushing a boulder up a hill."
"Well," Gage said, "I figured you probably didn't spend the bulk of your career inside a library."
She raised an eyebrow, pausing mid-bite with her clam chowder. "Oh yeah? Why's that?"
"I guess you just don’t look like a librarian."
"Really? And what does a librarian look like?"
"Um . . . "
"Big glasses? Gray hair up in a bun? Mousy and unassuming?"
"Well . . ."
"I'm just curious, that's all. What about me doesn't look like a librarian?"
Gage took a bite of his sandwich, biding his time, trying to determine the proper way to make a tactical retreat. He chanced a look at her eyes. The green pupils glinted like the jagged edge of unpolished emeralds. She held the look for only a moment before the skin around her eyes crinkled and her lips curled into a barely suppressed smile.
"You're joking," Gage said, breathing a sigh of relief. "Man, I thought I'd really stepped in it there."
"You did," she said. "A lot of librarians are very sensitive to the stereotype." She raised her index finger to her lips in a shushing motion, grinning behind her finger.
"So when did you make the move to working in a library?"
"When the Barnacle Bluffs library board called me," Ava said. "Literally, this is my first time running a library. I worked in the University of Washington library while I was a student there, but they called me, asked me if I might be interested in stepping as an interim for a while, and I said yes."
"Somehow I don't think it was quite that straightforward."
"Well, when Albert died, I sent letters of condolences to everyone on the board. I might have let slip that I'd been thinking of getting back into libraries."
"Let slip."
"Right."
"And I'm guessing that the interim is only interim if you don't want the job."
She shrugged and took another spoonful of her chowder. The cool exterior was still there, but he saw now how much his first impression of her had been wrong—or maybe not wrong but at least not the whole picture. She wasn't cool and distant. She was calm and in control. She was confident, sure of her abilities, and felt no need to apologize for any of it.
"So how about your father?" he asked.
"How about him?"
"You two get along?"
"We get along."
"Well?"
"Well enough."
"You told me it was hard to get him to pay attention to you after your parents divorced. I'm sensing there's more to the story."
"You're probably sensing correctly."
"Not going there, are you?"
"Nope. I think I said too much on that front already."
"After I spilled my guts to you about my whole sordid life?"
"Yep. Not right now."
"Well, then when?"
"Later."
"Doesn't seem fair."
She finished off her soup and pushed the bowl away. When she answered, her voice was cool, but she was still smiling with her eyes. "Just think of it as something to look forward to on our second date."
"Second date," Alex said. "Are you insane?"
Gage leaned against the front counter at Books and Oddities while his friend digested all the news from the past two days. The fluorescent lights buzzed over the rows of tightly packed shelves, the store smelling of old books and pine. A woman and a pig-tailed child sat on the threadbare couch in the back reading a Curious George book together, but otherwise the store was empty. An eighteen-wheeler rumbled past on Highway 101, rattling the knickknacks and curios that filled the cases.
"I just told you everything I'd learned about Harriet Abel," Gage said, "along with the fact that someone left a threatening flyer on my windshield, and you're most interested in the fact that I agreed to a second date with Ava Quinn?"
Alex, who'd been pricing a stack of children's books while Gage spoke, put his pencil back in his front pocket and regarded Gage silently over the tops of his reading glasses for a long time before finally sighing.
"It's not your second date I'm worried about," he said. "It's your sense of self-preservation that I'm most concerned with—or lack thereof."
"Well, what was I supposed to say? She paid for lunch before I got a chance. Then she asked if I wanted to return the favor by buying her dinner Monday night. It would have been rude to say no at that point."
"If you were concerned about living until Tuesday," Alex said, "you should have been less concerned with being rude and more concerned about the fact that Percy Quinn won the Barnacle Bluffs Sharp Shooting Contest three years in a row. Or that you already saw that his wife's condition put him in a pretty foul mood."
"Uh huh, I'll keep that in mind. Now tell me exactly what Zoe said on the phone again."
"I told you, she just said to tell you she's fine, but she's got stuff going on and she'll talk to you later. But don't change the subject. I want you to tell me that you're going to call the library right now and find an excuse to cancel your date tomorrow with Ava Quinn."
"I'll think about it."
"Garrison, this is insane."
"I told you, I didn't ask for it. It just happened. And she's picking me up at my house. She said she wanted the dinner to be a surprise."
"She's picking you up at your house?"
"Sure. Like I said, it all just kind of happened."
Alex stroked his mustache, a quizzical look in his eyes. "Why did you stop at the library in the first place?"
"To use their computer, of course."
"But usually you come here. And you were obviously planning on coming here anyway. You could have commandeered the computer behind the counter like you usually do."
"I was on that side of town already. It was just more convenient."
"Or . . . an alternative hypothesis is that subconsciously you wanted to go to the library because you were hoping you might run into her."
"It's an interesting hypothesis," Gage said. "Let's move on, shall we? What do you think I should do about Zoe? Should I call her back? Should I drive up there? Should I at least warn her to watch her back a little more?"
"You should go out with that nice teacher you mentioned. What was her name? Rena?"
"Rita," Gage said. "And now I'm starting to question your ancestry."
"My ancestry? Why?"
"Because I thought you were Spanish, but you're acting like a Jewish mother."
Alex shook his hands at the ceiling, as if making a gesture to a higher power. "It's pointless! Fine. It's some thanks I get trying to keep you alive. Maybe you could use a good Jewish mother. She might have better luck keeping you in line."
"Zoe," Gage said.
Alex took off his glasses, letting them dangle from the red cord around his neck, and rubbed the bridge of his nose. The bags under his eyes ended at sharp lines, deep enough they could have held quarters in them. He sighed.
"Let me see the flyer," he said.
Gage took it out of the inside pocket of his jacket and handed it to Alex, who unfolded it and held the paper away from him, studying it without his reading glasses.
"Not subtle, is it?" he said.
"Nope."
"And no guesses who it might be?"
"Nope."
"Anything to make you think there's something real behind this, that somebody might actually do something to her and it's not just a crude scare tactic?"
"None."
Alex handed the paper back to Gage. "Well, you have had a busy weekend. Who knows what you've stirred up? How about the guy that threw a punch at you? Maybe this is just about you getting between him and his . . . girlfriend?"
"I don't think so," Gage said. "It might be worth looking into, though. The cash in Winnie's room makes me think he was more of a . . . customer . . . but I'm definitely going to have to figure out what the situation is with Harriet's daughter."
"If, as you say, there were no yearbooks at the public library, where else would someone get access to it?"
"I've been thinking about that," Gage said. "A couple possibilities. One is the high school itself, like their own school library. Students, teachers, staff. Could be a former student, or a parent of a former student, since Zoe has been out a couple years now. Harriet Abel might have had them, so yes, that means anyone who'd been in her house could get to it. But it could have been Brianna Hobart. It could have also been someone who wanted me to think the threat was coming from someone with connections to the school."
"So really," Alex said, "you haven't narrowed the list much at all. My bet is that it's an empty threat, just trying to throw you off, but it does raise the question of why someone felt the need to throw you off in the first place."
"Exactly," Gage said. "I must have been getting too close to something, and they didn't like it. The question is what."
"You were in the church at the time, so maybe there's a connection there."
"That's my first instinct," Gage said. "When I talked to Alice Zeitel, she knew something about Brianna Hobart that she didn't tell me. And then there's the car."
"What about the car?"
"She was driving a brand new Toyota Highlander. Those aren't cheap."
"Well, maybe her husband made more money than her. Maybe they won the lottery. Who knows?"
"That's one of the things I'm hoping you can help me find out," Gage said. "First, though, what do you think I should do about Zoe?"
Alex sank back into his swivel chair, drumming his fingers on the top of the cash register. "If I tell you what I think you should do, you'll do the exact opposite, so it's probably best I should remain silent."
"No, seriously, I want your advice. I've screwed up so many things with her, and I'm trying to avoid doing it again."
"Okay then. I think you should hold back a bit, see if this is a credible threat, before you call her again. You've already told her plenty of times to be careful, that you've made a fair number of enemies over the years, and that she should always watch her back. No reason to get her alarmed when it's most likely someone just trying to scare you."
Gage thought about it.
"You're right, I should call her," he said.
"I just said—"
"It doesn't hurt to warn her. I'll feel better."
Alex groaned. "See! See! I knew it. You'd just do the opposite."
"Right, that's what I meant. You knew I'd do the opposite, which meant you wanted me to call her.
"What? No! No, it doesn't."
"Give me the phone."
Rolling his eyes, Alex slapped the cordless phone on the glass counter. Then, muttering to himself, he wandered into the back of the store with an armload of paperbacks. Gage wasn't fooled. He knew Alex was just as worried about Zoe as he was. The woman and her daughter, at the back of the store, giggled at something. In the stillness, the laughter felt abrupt, out of place, but not unwelcome. Gage took the cordless around the counter to the corner, away from the door. Through the glass panes in the front door, he saw seagulls pecking at the gravel parking lot.
He didn't expect her to answer, but she did, answering on the second ring.
"Alex?"
Her voice sounded funny, hoarse, drained of energy. Wind whistled against her receiver. He thought he heard the trickle of water.
"No, it's me," Gage said.
"Hey," Zoe said.
"Hey," Gage said. "You all right?"
"Sure, why wouldn't I be?"
"Oh, no reason."
She sighed. "Something's up. Otherwise you wouldn't have called—twice in a couple hours. Spill the beans."
Gage debated. Say too little and she might ignore him completely. Say too much and she might decide to interject herself into the situation in a way that wasn't helpful and put herself even more at risk. The woman and her daughter rose from the couch, heading for the counter. The girl, smiling a gap-toothed smile, carried a couple of books.
"It's about the case—your teacher," Gage said.
"Former teacher," Zoe said. She said it sharply, a sharpness that must have surprised her as much as it surprised him, because she did something she almost never did: apologize. "Sorry. That came out wrong. I just mean—well, I don't know what I meant. What's going on?"
"I don't know yet," Gage said, "but I might have stirred up something. I'm . . . I'm concerned that somebody might . . . Well, concerned is probably too strong a word. There's just . . . there's a possibility, that's all, that somebody might try to go after people I care about. It's probably a bluff—"
"Ah," Zoe said.
"As I said, it's probably nothing. But you can never be too careful, you know? I just wanted to make sure you're being careful."
"I'm being careful. I'm always careful."
"I know."
"The stuff I've been through . . . I'm always looking over my back anyway."
"I'm sorry."
"Why are you apologizing? I wasn't blaming you. It is what it is. Just like with Harriet Abel dying. Stuff happens."
"Well . . ."
"Look, I gotta go, okay?" Her voice had gone from hoarse and drained to loud and warbly, as if she was straining to keep her emotions in check. "Stuff to do, you know. We can talk later."
"Zoe—"
"I'm fine. You don't have to worry about me. I'll be careful."
"Zoe, what's going on?"
"There's nothing going on. I'm just . . . Look, it's nothing, all right?"
"You can talk to me."
"Dad, I'm fine. Really. Just working through a few things. You know. You do it too. Just thinking. That's all."
As usual, her use of the word dad was rare enough that it always gave him a jolt, not an unpleasant one, but still unsettling even as much as it made him happy. "Where are you, anyway?"
"I gotta go."
"It sounds like you're by the river."
"I'm sitting outside OMSI. On a bench."
OMSI was the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, situated on the east bank of the Willamette River in Portland. He'd never been there, but he remembered that it was considered one of the better educational museums geared toward science on the West Coast.
"Were you inside?" he asked.
"Yeah, for a bit."
"How was it?"
She sighed. The woman and her daughter, who'd detoured at a display of Halloween-themed books by the front door, finally made their way to the cash register. The girl happily placed her books on the glass counter. Alex was nowhere to be found. Gage stepped behind the counter and put the phone in the crook between his shoulder and his ear.
"Look," Zoe said, "can we talk later?"
"Hold on a second," Gage said, taking the books and ringing them up for the girl. It wasn't the first time he'd stepped in for his friend at the cash register, but it was rare enough that he struggled for a moment to remember the keys. He found his way, though, only suffering through a few annoying beeps and buzzes as the cash register protested his fumbling. Still, he emerged victorious. He was multi-talented that way. Garrison Gage, top private investigator at night, skilled bookstore clerk by day. "Just ringing up a sale, here. Be only a moment."
"Dad, we can talk later."
"Almost done."
Fortunately, the woman paid cash, handing him a twenty. He didn't know what he would do if she offered him a credit card. The credit card machine had the potential of exposing the limits of his multi-talented nature. He dropped the children's books into a blue plastic bag and handed them to the girl, who grinned broadly. Alex finally emerged from the back, his books gone, moseying his way to the front with all the urgency of someone enjoying watching someone else struggle. He even had the temerity to smile, the bastard.
It was then, with the woman and the child heading to the door, that a man in a gray suit walked into the store.
At first, Gage didn't think anything of him—a man on the back end of middle age, average height and a few inches shorter than Gage, a little stocky but not too fat, bald except for wisps of gray hair that lay across his shiny scalp like wet yarn. Gage's first impression was that the man was an accountant or some other back office employee, unremarkable in both his appearance and his demeanor. The gray suit fit him. There were gray men like him all across America, men that came and went, blending in with their environments, part of the background in most people's lives and probably even part of the background in their own. The suit, cheap and wrinkled, hung loosely on his body as if parts of it had been taped together.
This first impression came from a glance, a brief moment but long enough still that Gage felt at least a flicker of guilt of stereotyping the man so easily. Not that it mattered. He fully expected the man to pass by the counter and out of Gage's life most likely never to be seen again as the vast majority of people, gray or not, did for everyone.
Until the man looked at him.
It wasn't just the man's suit that was gray. The man's eyes were gray, too—not just in color, which they were—dishwater gray, smog gray, a colorless, formless, shapeless gray—but the person behind those eyes was gray too. It was a dead and dying gray, the gray of something that once lived and was now passing out of the world. Gage had looked into a lot of people's eyes over the course of his life, and he'd always felt he could get a pretty good sense of a person's character by looking in their eyes, one that usually turned out to be correct. He'd seen coolness. He'd seen anger. He's seen judgment, love, and fear. He'd thought he'd seen the entire gamut of human emotions, but he'd never seen what was in this man's eyes.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
If someone had called the man a zombie, Gage would have believed them. There was no life there. He was a walking corpse. Looking into his eyes was like looking into a bottomless void. Even as he held open the door for the woman and the child, smiling faintly, the bell above the door chiming, there was something unnerving about the flatness of his gaze. The smile meant nothing. It was an act. They could have been animals to him, or worse, pieces of furniture. Nothing that mattered.
"What's going on?" Zoe said.
Gage, holding the phone up to his ear, had forgotten that Zoe was even there. He cleared his throat. "Hey, can I call you back, kiddo?"
"What is it?"
"Just another customer. I want to talk some more, though. Are you—"
"I'll call you in a day or two. I need some time to think, Dad. That's all."
"Zoe—"
"It's fine, really." There was a beat, then: "I love you. See you later."
She hung up. The Gray Man closed the door after the woman and child, the cool air flitting through the crack and blowing a bookmark that had been left behind off the counter. The man's wispy hair didn't move. When he was turned away, Gage doubted himself. He hadn't really seen what he thought he'd seen, had he? But when the man closed the door and turned back to him, there was no doubt. If anything, his stare was even more detached—a vacuousness, a presence so distant and removed that it was hard to tell if there was a person there at all.
It was just the three of them in the store now. The chime of the door faded into the buzz of the fluorescent lights. The highway lay still, the world outside silent. The Gray Man turned his empty stare to Alex as Alex reached the counter, and it was Alex's reaction, a stutter step, a slight widening of his eyes behind his glasses, that really confirmed to Gage that there truly was something unusual about this person.
"Can—can I help you?" Alex asked.
His voice cracked, a small thing and barely noticeable, but Gage thought he saw the Gray Man's pallid little lips curl upward at the corners. "I hope so," he said. Even his voice came out gray and flat, a soft tone, no inflection. "I have a job to do and I am hoping you can provide assistance."
Gage shivered. It was an involuntary reaction, one he couldn't remember having with anyone else before, and it betrayed him to the Gray Man just as Alex's cracked voice did. He felt exposed. The Gray Man spoke with all the authority of a state worker three levels down in a useless bureaucratic job, but the words were just window dressing to hide the rotten husk behind them.
Alex leaned against the other side of the counter, putting his elbow on top of the cash register—a subconscious move, no doubt, but it came across as if he was protecting his treasure.
"Um, certainly," Alex said. "What can I help you with?"
The Gray Man paused. The beat lasted only a second, but it would soon become apparent that he did this often, breaking any possible flow in the conversation, a staccato effect as if everything he said came in isolation from everything else.
"Are you the owner of this fine establishment?" the Gray Man asked.
"I am," Alex said. "What is—what is the job you're doing, if I can ask? It would help me understand what kind of books you need."
"I'm afraid that must remain confidential. But my work requires that I know the area quite well. Could you direct me to anything you have on local tourism or history?"
"I could do that. This is a used shop, though. You might want to try The Book Stop in the outlet mall if you want something newer."
A limp smile, then: "I'm sure whatever you have will be sufficient."
"All right, then. Let me show you."
Alex led him to the back of the store, glancing once over his shoulder at Gage, the look in his eyes like a man who was heading to the gallows. The Gray Man followed, his gait neither purposeful nor lackadaisical, but simply the inconsequential, nondescript walk of a man who could have been making his way across his living room to pick up his slippers. Every movement was bland. If not for those eyes—which he turned on Gage for just a second, revealing, once again, the fathomless emptiness there—it was tough for Gage to keep his attention fixed on him. His gaze just kept sliding off him the way his grip might slide off ice. It was a hell of a talent and it felt nearly supernatural to Gage, like the man was a chameleon for the ordinary.
He heard some murmuring in the back, then Alex returned, stroking his mustache, his face a shade paler. He joined Gage behind the counter, leaning in close.
"Know him?"
Gage shook his head. He heard books sliding on pine shelving. Even now, the highway lay still. Where had all the cars gone? It was so quiet he thought he could hear the ocean even through the glass windows, and even over the faint buzz of overhead fluorescents. The sun picked that moment to duck behind some stray clouds, so even the light turned gray. The books, the greeting card rack, the box of comic books, the curios inside their glass cases—everything felt two-dimensional, poor stand-ins for the real thing. He felt a growing unease. Even now, Gage did not feel fear, but he knew he was at least within shouting distance of fear. It was such a foreign feeling to him that it took him a moment to recognize it for what it was, but yes, there was a mild stirring of apprehension that could definitely turn into something more.
It perplexed him. This lifeless little man in a flaccid suit? It was all in the eyes. He'd looked in those eyes and seen a void that would swallow him whole and feel nothing doing it.
"Got your . . . you know?" Alex whispered.
"It's in the van," Gage said. "You?"
"Back office."
"Oh."
"Maybe we should—"
But by then the Gray Man returned, a measured, unremarkable pace, smiling with no feeling behind it, holding two books in his pale fingers. Gage could barely imagine those fingers holding a pencil, let alone a gun, but when the Gray Man put his two books on the counter, his gray suit jacket parted and revealed a leather gun holster tucked into the shadows.
An icy shock of adrenaline blasted through Gage's veins.
Neither the holster nor the handgun was all that large—from the exposed handle, he thought it might have been a Ruger .380, maybe. A fine weapon, great at extremely short distances, not so great at longer ones. But its advantage was how compact it was, how it could fit anywhere without drawing attention to itself. The holster and the gun simply disappeared next to the Gray Man's chest.
The Gray Man trained those empty eye sockets on them, still in no hurry, still not revealing even a whit of nervousness. Now Gage really did feel naked. He didn't even have his cane. The counter, which might have provided an advantage in warding off firsts and knives, was now a handicap. It was as if both he and Alex were animals trapped in a cage, easy targets. What could Gage throw? A stack of bookmarks?
Nobody moved for a few seconds. Then the Gray Man reached into his jacket—but the other side, the non-holster side. A wallet? Even so, Gage tensed and heard Alex suck in his breath. The Gray Man's limp smile returned, but he did not stop, pulling out a thin black wallet. The funny thing was, Gage was fairly certain that the jacket had been buttoned up when the Gray Man entered the store. He might have unbuttoned it now, to retrieve his wallet, but the fact that he had unbuttoned it ahead of time said something.
Strangely, this made Gage feel better. It was the first sign of something, anything, that Gage could grasp onto to make sense of the man.
"Do you take credit cards?" the Gray Man asked.
Alex didn't answer for a second. Gage looked at his friend, who blinked.
"What? Oh, yes. We certainly do."
"Excellent. I found two books. This guidebook here, only a year old, on the Oregon Coast. It should come in handy. And this one, for a little light reading in the evening . . . Have you read it?"
He took off the guidebook to reveal the tattered paperback underneath. It was In Cold Blood, the blockbuster book by Truman Capote about the brutal Kansas killings that kicked off the true crime genre. Gage didn't miss a beat.
"It's a little long," Gage said, "but it's certainly riveting. Later books, like those by Anne Rule, got a little too sensationalist for my taste, but this felt more like a reporter's take on the events."
"You've read it, then?"
"Oh, of course."
"Just reading the back jacket . . . It's so terrible to imagine people who are capable of that sort of thing."
"Yes, it is. You have to have a stomach for it . . . reading about it, that is. Not the doing it."
"Well, both, I imagine," the Gray Man said. Flat. Dead. No smile. No sarcasm. Just the words. He peered into his wallet. "You know, I've changed my mind. It turns out I have enough cash after all."
The Gray Man pulled out a twenty dollar bill and put it on the counter. Gage was disappointed. The credit card would have given them a name, and a means to find out more about him. Alex took the money and rang up the sale, his movements awkward. Gage took the books and slipped them into a blue plastic bag.
"You look familiar," Gage said.
"How interesting," the Gray Man said, with nothing beyond the word itself to indicate interest, no energy, no raise in pitch. "I assure you, we have never met."
"Just the same, I'd love to know your name. I'm Garrison Gage. What's yours?"
"I know who you are."
"Oh?"
"Yes. You're that detective."
"Read about me in the paper, did you?"
"No, someplace else."
It was the kind of thing that begged an explanation, but the Gray Man merely slipped the wallet back into his jacket. His uncaring eyes never wavered, fixing their deadness on both Gage and Alex the entire time. Gage didn't want to give the man the pleasure of asking a follow-up question only to have him dance away from it, so he merely stared back. The Gray Man, his hand still inside the left side of his jacket, paused. Would he go for the gun?
Finally, the Gray Man took his hand out and began to button his jacket. Again, the gun holster flashed briefly into view before it vanished.
"Well," the Gray Man said, "I do appreciate your help. By the way, I was thinking of going for a long walk on the beach. Is it true that all of the beaches are publicly owned here in Oregon?"
"Yes," Gage said. "You can often walk for miles."
"Miles? Really?"
"Unless you bump into an obstruction of some sort. You know, coves, mountains, that sort of thing."
"Interesting. Tell me, are there a lot of obstructions here in Barnacle Bluffs?"
"Depends on how you define obstructions, I guess."
"Yes. I suppose it would. Well then, I will be in town for a little while, so perhaps our paths will cross again. "
A million witty comebacks flashed through Gage's mind, but none of them felt appropriate for the moment. The Gray Man nodded to them both, then walked his plain, ordinary walk out of the store and down the wooden boardwalk.