Ashlyn stared at the single line. The script was jagged, the shard-like words intended to cut, to wound. But there was sadness, too, in the spaces between, woven through the ellipses, the desolation of a question unanswered. The inscription was neither signed nor dated, implying that the recipient would have required neither. An intimate acquaintance, then. A lover perhaps, or spouse. Belle. The name leapt off the page. Might the book’s recipient have also been its namesake? The giver its author?
Intrigued, she began flipping pages, on the lookout for an author’s name, a publisher’s imprint. But there was nothing. No trace of how this strange and beautiful book had come into the world.
The absence of a copyright page suggested the book might be in the public domain, meaning it would have to have been written before 1923. If so, it was in amazing condition. But there was another possibility, one that seemed more likely. The book may have been rebound at some point and the binder had been unable to include the original copyright page.
Some of the pages may have been damaged or lost. It certainly happened. She’d been tasked with rebinding books that came into the shop in grocery bags, loose pages held together with twine or rubber bands, warped boards left to mold in damp basements, attic finds whose pages were so dry they crumbled when touched. But never had she come across a book missing all traces of its origins.
People rehabbed old books for all sorts of reasons, but those reasons almost always fell into one of two categories: sentiment or collector value. In either case, preserving the author’s name would be critical. Why would someone go to the trouble and expense of having the book rebound and then omit such important details? Unless the omission had been intentional. But why?
Lured by the promise of a literary mystery, Ashlyn laid the book open. She had just turned to the first chapter when a jolt of what felt like current surged through her fingers. Startled, she jerked her hand back. What had just happened? A moment ago, the book had been silent—pulseless—until she opened it and roused whatever lay within, like the flashover that occurs when a door is suddenly thrown open and a small fire erupts into a fully involved blaze. This was a new experience, and one she definitely intended to explore.
Breath held, she placed the flats of both hands against the open pages, bracing for what she now knew was coming. Every book presented differently. Most registered as a subtle physical sensation. A humming in her jaw, a sudden flutter in her belly. Other times, the echoes were more intense. A ringing in her ears or a stinging sensation in her cheeks, as if she’d just been slapped. Occasionally, they registered as tastes or smells. Vanilla. Ripe cherries. Vinegar. Smoke. But this felt different, deeper somehow and more visceral. The taste of ash sharp on her tongue. The ache of tears scorching her throat. A searing pain at the center of her chest.
A heart in ruins.
And yet she’d felt nothing until she opened the book, as if the echoes had been holding their breath, biding their time. But for how long? And whose echoes? The inscription—How, Belle?—was clearly intended for a woman, yet the book gave off a decidedly masculine energy.
She examined the spine again, scoured the flyleaf, the verso, the endpapers, hoping to find some clue as to the book’s origins. Again, she came up empty. It was as if the book had simply manifested out of thin air, a phantom volume existing out of literary time and space. Except she was holding it in her hands. And its echoes were very real.
She lifted her palms from the pages, shaking out the fingers of her right hand in an attempt to dispel the dull ache in her palm. The scar was playing up again. She peered at the crescent-shaped lesion running from her little finger to the base of her thumb. A shard of glass inadvertently grabbed in a moment of panic.
The wound had healed without incident, leaving a curved line of puckered white flesh cutting across her life line. Ashlyn pressed a thumb deep into her palm and flexed her fingers repeatedly, an exercise they had given her after the accident to prevent contracture. Maybe it was time to slow it down a little in the bindery and give her hand a rest. And speaking of the bindery, it was time to get back to the shop.
After returning the no books to their respective boxes, she carried the mystery volume to the front, where she found Kevin lovingly polishing a pink Bakelite radio.
“Looks like you got lucky this time.” He picked up the book, opened it briefly, then closed it again with a shrug. “Never heard of it. Who’s it by?”
Ashlyn looked at him, astonished that he could be oblivious to the emotions boiling up from the book. “I have no idea. There’s no author name, no copyright page, not even anything about who the publisher was. I’m thinking it may have been rebound at some point. Or it could be a vanity press kind of thing—a few copies of Uncle John’s novel printed for family and friends.”
“And someone will actually want a book like that?”
Ashlyn shot him a conspiratorial wink. “Probably not. But I’m a sucker for a mystery.”
TWO
ASHLYN
Where is human nature so weak as in a bookstore?
—Henry Ward Beecher
Ashlyn locked the door behind her, savoring the reassuring calm that descended each time she stepped through the door of An Unlikely Story, the sense that she was wholly and completely where she belonged.
The shop had been hers for almost four years now, though in a way it had always belonged to her. Just as she had always belonged to it. As far back as she could remember, the shop had felt like home, the books lining its jumbled shelves like trusted friends. Books were safe. They had plots that followed predictable patterns, beginnings, middles, and endings. Usually happy, though not always. But if something tragic happened in a book, you could just close it and choose a new one, unlike real life, where events often played out without the protagonist’s consent.
Like a father who couldn’t hold a job. Not because he wasn’t smart enough or skilled enough but because he was simply too angry. The entire neighborhood had known about Gerald Greer’s temper. They’d either experienced it firsthand or heard it spilling out of the windows on a near-daily basis. Berating her mother for overcooking the pork chops, buying the wrong brand of chips, or using too much starch on his shirts. Nothing was ever right or good enough.
People used to whisper that he had a drinking problem, but she never knew her father to keep liquor in the house. Good thing, too, according to Grandma Trina, who had once grumbled that her son-in-law was never more than one ruined dinner away from burning down the house. The last thing he needed was an accelerant.
And then there was her mother, the shadow figure who could generally be found in her room, watching game shows or sleeping away her afternoons, aided by the seemingly bottomless vial of yellow pills in her nightstand. Her coping pills, she’d called them.
The summer Ashlyn turned fifteen, Willa Greer had been diagnosed with uterine cancer. There’d been talk of an operation, followed by chemo and radiation, but her mother had refused treatment, concluding that there was nothing in her life worth hanging around for. She was dead within a year, buried four weeks to the day before Ashlyn’s sixteenth birthday. She had chosen death over her family—over her daughter.
Ashlyn’s father had been strangely unmoored by the loss of his wife, shutting himself up in his room or staying away from home entirely. He ate little and rarely spoke, and his eyes took on an unsettling emptiness. And then, on the afternoon of her sixteenth birthday, during the party her grandmother insisted on giving her—a party she hadn’t wanted—her father had climbed up to the attic, braced a loaded Winchester side-by-side beneath his chin, and pulled the trigger.