I’m the first to look away, unsettled by her open regard, but I see your eyes snag hers for the merest instant. I don’t know how you arranged it—you never did say—but something about the look leaves me certain that this second meeting is no accident. Out of politeness—or perhaps because I’ve already drunk too many cocktails—I allow you to draw me into conversation. We speak of horses, or at least we begin that way. My newfound interest in Thoroughbred racing, my recent trip to Saratoga for the Spinaway Stakes, my birthday present from my father.
Eventually, or perhaps inevitably, we land on the subject of breeding. Whether it was my mention or yours, I do not recall. You ask how I happened to become interested in such a subject. You’re so condescending and snide, so sure of yourself and your smooth British charm, that I find myself gritting my teeth. You’re goading me with that bland smile of yours, writing me off as some rich little miss who asked for a pony for her birthday and got two, but I refuse to be underestimated. Suddenly, I want very badly to put you in your place.
And just like that we’re no longer talking about horses. You know it and I know it, but we both keep sparring, raising the stakes with each clever innuendo and double entendre, skating perilously close to the edge of indecency.
It’s a place I’ve never been, this sensual war of words. And yet it feels startlingly familiar. A déjà vu of the body. A knowing—of where it might lead and how it might end. All at once, I understand the danger I sensed earlier. It’s this. This moment of needing to prove something to you. And perhaps to myself. Something even I don’t understand.
You’re smirking, clearly pleased with yourself, and I’m furious for becoming tangled in my own web. I don’t know how to get out of it without exposing myself as the novice I am, and I’d sooner bite off my own tongue than give you that satisfaction. And so I play on, brash, reckless, and completely out of my depth, as I suspect you well know. I mean to shock you, but you’re not shocked at all. Far from it.
In the end, you call my bluff.
Your eyes hold fast to mine—a deeper blue than I had previously noted, with small gold flecks around the pupils—and suddenly I’m terribly warm, which I suppose is what usually happens when one plays with fire.
“I should like very much to see these fine animals of yours,” you say with that lazy smile you’ve perfected to keep little fools like me off-balance.
“And I should very much like to show them to you,” I answer, because what else can I say? You’ve laid your cards on the table, and I must do the same. “Perhaps we can manage it sometime.”
“I’m free tomorrow afternoon,” you suggest smoothly. “And I rather fancy a trip out to the Hamptons. I hear it’s pretty country.”
And just like that, I’m caught.
FIVE
ASHLYN
Restoration is a long and involved business, particularly when the damage is extensive. Progress will be slow. Expect setbacks. Exercise patience. Persist.
—Ashlyn Greer, The Care & Feeding of Old Books
September 28, 1984
Portsmouth, New Hampshire
Ashlyn reminded herself to focus on the job at hand as she worked to remove a strip of old linen tape from the second of Gertrude’s Nancy Drew books, but it was difficult when all she could think about was the mystery surrounding her latest literary find.
After several chapters of Regretting Belle with its decidedly masculine slant, it had been fascinating to immerse herself in Forever, and Other Lies and see the lovers’ first meeting through Belle’s eyes. The details of that night in the ballroom of the St. Regis. The nearly identical lines of dialogue. The mutual, slow-smoldering attraction. It all synced up neatly.
Perhaps . . . too neatly?
She was convinced the books weren’t actually works of fiction, that the characters were real, that the love story—if it could be called a love story—was real. But what if she had it wrong? What if they were something else entirely? What if they’d been conceived as a kind of metafiction, a literary gimmick designed to hook readers with the illusion of two distinctly different voices? A pair of lovers with old axes to grind. A kind of romantic whodunit.
It was an intriguing concept and might explain the lack of a publisher’s imprint on both books. Experimental fiction of the quirky, rule-breaking variety was still a heated topic among the literati. Thirty years ago, such books would likely have been passed over in favor of safer projects. Perhaps the author had resorted to a print-on-demand publisher, as Ernest Vincent Wright had done in 1939 when he couldn’t find a publisher for his novel Gadsby. （Not to be confused with Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.）
By design, Wright’s book hadn’t included a single word containing the letter E—the most common letter in the English language. Legend had it, the author had tied down the E key on his typewriter, assuring that no stray instances of the vowel would appear in the manuscript. The book had barely raised an eyebrow in its day but had eventually earned its own curious brand of notoriety. Today, a collector lucky enough to locate a copy would be looking at a $5,000 price tag.
Was it possible she’d stumbled onto something of that sort? Possibly. But it didn’t explain the echoes. No amount of clever writing could account for what she felt when she touched them. The echoes weren’t a gimmick. They were real, dark and visceral aftershocks from the past. But whose past?
Her hands went quiet as she imagined Regretting Belle and Forever, and Other Lies being pulled from their shelves and packed into boxes, bound for Kevin’s store, with its lava lamps and Bakelite radios. And now they’d found their way to her. Was it possible there was a reason she’d been the one to rescue them from Kevin’s back room? That she was meant to solve the mystery?
The thought continued to nag as she picked up a bookbinding knife and made her first cut, then carefully detached the front and back boards from the text block. It was an intriguing idea, but she had next to nothing to go on. None of the characters had proper names, and there wasn’t much she could do with names like Belle and Cee-Cee. There was Goldie, of course, but that, too, appeared to be a nickname. But hadn’t Belle mentioned that everyone in New York knew Goldie’s name? Surely that was worth looking into. How many women had owned newspapers in 1941?
She felt a fizz of excitement as she made a beeline for the shop’s journalism section. It was probably a long shot, but it was a place to start. Sadly, the journalism shelf contained exactly eight books, all of them to do with foreign correspondents during the first and second World Wars, including a tired copy of A Moveable Feast, a rather nice edition of Hemingway on War, and a copy of The Face of War by Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s third wife. Not surprising. Frank had been fascinated by all things Hemingway.
She checked American history next, but most of the titles dealt with either war or politics. Moving on to commerce and industry, she found plenty of books on mining, railroads, and the auto industry, but nothing to do with the newspaper business.
This was clearly a job for Ruth Truman. In fact, Ruth should have been her first call. Though now part-time, she’d chalked up nearly thirty years as a librarian and was an absolute godsend when it came to research.