Prose and Cons Read online

  Adrien shook his head. “We can’t accept your money. We owe you for telling us Danielle Cloud was looking for work. She will be such a welcome addition to La Crepe Jolie. We’re so excited for her to start working for us tomorrow.”

  Lacey nodded agreement and beamed up at her husband. He smiled down at her with such tenderness that I thought what they had was a happiness I could live with if I ever found it for myself.

  Finally, I said good-bye and left the Duponts in their booth. In my left hand, I carried a care package of food to take back to Grandma Daisy. It weighed as much as the Compact Oxford English Dictionary and I knew it contained all my grandmother’s favorite treats from the French café.

  I turned the corner on River Road where it veered away from the river and into the shopping district of the village. The blue Victorian that was Charming Books and my home stood on the corner just as it had for the last two hundred years. Afternoon sunlight sparkled off its windows. As I stared at the house, it wasn’t too much of a stretch to believe that magic could be found there.

  “I’ve always thought this was a beautiful house,” a voice said.

  I jumped, nearly dropping my grandmother’s bag of goodies. I spun around to find Fenimore standing behind me.

  His harmonica wasn’t around his neck, but he had his guitar slung over his right shoulder. “When your mother told me this was where she lived, I could hardly believe it. It’s like a place out of a fairy tale.”

  I headed toward the gate. “I need to get back to work.”

  “Violet, wait.” His voice held so much pain in it that I turned to face him again even though every thought in my head was screaming for me to run away from this man.

  He held his hand out to me. “Can I have just two minutes of your time? I will tell you what I need to say, and then I’ll be out of your life forever if that’s what you want. I’m heading to my next village later today. This will be the last time I have a chance to talk to you for a very long time.”

  “You want to talk to me about my mother?” I set the bag of food beside me on the sidewalk and folded my arms. It wasn’t until I made the movement that I remembered my injured shoulder. I dropped my arms to my sides.

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Fine. Go ahead. If you know so much about my mother, then just say it,” I snapped.

  “I know so much about your mother, Violet, because I’m your dad.”

  The air drained from my lungs in a whoosh, and I had to grasp onto the fence surrounding Charming Books’ front yard to remain upright. “What did you say?”

  “I’m your dad.” He said it almost apologetically.

  “I have to go.” I threw open the gate, completely forgetting my grandmother’s food. I had to get away from this liar. How dare he say something like this to me?

  “Wait.” He held out his hand.

  I froze.

  “Will you let me explain?”

  Explain what? I wondered. What a terrible prank this all was? I had no idea who my father was. My mother refused to tell me, and the father line on my birth certificate was even left blank. When I reached middle school and an age when I really was beginning to become curious and wanted to know who my father was, Mom had been diagnosed with cancer. She was so sick those last two years of her life, I never pressed her to find out the truth, but that didn’t mean the scruffy troubadour standing in front of me was my father. It didn’t.

  When I didn’t say anything, he went on to say, “I didn’t know I had a daughter until you were almost grown. Fern wrote me a letter before she died and sent it to the last known address she had for me. Since I move around so much, I didn’t receive the letter until months after she had passed.”

  “Why are you just coming forward now?” I asked.

  “Because I couldn’t deal with the idea of having a daughter, at least not at that point in my life. I wasn’t in a stable place.” He forced a laugh. “I suppose you could say I’m not stable now, but I’m better off. I even have a house over in Niagara Falls. It’s the first roots that I have ever put down.”

  He had a house in Niagara Falls, just twenty minutes from where we stood now, and he’d never once come to Charming Books to find me.

  “And,” he went on, “I didn’t want to barge in on you in your grief. I knew you were just a kid then. I thought me getting involved in your life at that point would just be a disruption.”

  “Why didn’t she tell me?” I asked, still not able to absorb what he was saying. “And how do I know that you aren’t lying?”

  He removed a crumpled yellow envelope from his flannel coat pocket and held it out to me. “This is the letter from Fern.”

  Even from a distance, I recognized my mother’s distinctive swooping handwriting.

  He shook the letter at me. “Here, take it. It has the proof you need.”

  I didn’t move to take the envelope from his hand. I didn’t want it. I didn’t want any of this. “Why are you here now? Why not go about your life as you always have, pretending that you don’t have a child?” I could hear the tears in my voice. I didn’t fight them. I didn’t care.

  “I’ve come back to the Food and Wine Festival every year for the last ten years, hoping to catch a glimpse of you. This was the first time that you were here. You looked so much like Fern—you acted so much like Fern—well, recognizing her in you gave me the courage I needed to tell you. I hadn’t planned to. I just wanted to see you, but when I did, I couldn’t run away again without you knowing the truth.”

  “Does my grandmother know any of this?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “No. In the letter, Fern said that she never told anyone about me.” He took a step toward me. “You look so much like her.”

  I backed away. “How dare you even say that? You don’t know that!” I was shouting now, and the tourists closest to the corner stared in my direction. I lowered my voice. “You have a one-night stand with my mother and now you want to be part of my life.”

  He shook his head sadly. “It wasn’t like that. I loved her. We were together an entire summer. I was here working a summer job, and we met at one of the village fairs they have in the summer. She was the one who broke it off. She broke my heart, and I fled Cascade Springs, which is why I knew nothing about you.”

  “Why would she do that?” I couldn’t believe my mother would do such a thing.

  “She said that it was her destiny to be alone, and if we stayed together, both of us were bound to become more hurt than we already were.”

  The Caretaker role. By the time my mother would have met Fenimore, she would have already known she was to be the shop’s next Caretaker. She would have known from our family history that all the Waverly women ended up alone one way or another to take on their duties. I refused to believe that it had to be that way.

  “If you loved her, why didn’t you argue with her? Why didn’t you insist on staying?”

  “It wasn’t my way,” he said sadly. “I’m a nomad, Violet. My life is on the road. It always has been, and it always will be. Even though I own a little house in Niagara Falls, I’m hardly ever there.”

  “Is Fenimore your first or last name?” I had to know.

  “It’s my first name.”

  “So what’s the rest of your name?”

  “Fenimore James,” he said.

  Fenimore James was my father. It was still too much to believe.

  He adjusted his guitar on his shoulder. “I’ve told you what I needed to say.” He held out the letter to me. “I’d like you to have this. I have carried it with me for too long. It belongs to you now.”

  I still made no move to take the letter.

  He set the yellowed envelope on the fence post. “I will leave this with you. You will know what to do with it when you’re ready.” He nodded, and just like he walked away from my mother thirty years ago, he wal
ked away from me.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Violet, you don’t look well,” Grandma Daisy said. “Are you all right? Are you in pain from the fall?”

  It wasn’t from the fall. After Fenimore’s bombshell, the fall was nothing.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Maybe a little tired.” I plastered a smile on my face. “I see the shop is filling with customers. I think we should get to the business of selling books, don’t you?”

  She gave me a curious look. Her silver bob covered half her face as she tilted her head. Finally, she nodded. “All right.”

  For the rest of the afternoon and into the early evening, Grandma Daisy and I focused on our job as booksellers. During that time, I pushed thoughts of fathers and murder to the very back of my mind. Not that the shop was happy with my need of avoidance at the moment. Every book that I touched became a volume of Poe’s works.

  “I’m not in the mood,” I whispered to the essence, to the tree, to the shop itself. The last thing in the world I wanted to think about at the moment was Anastasia’s murder. All I wanted to do was concentrate on my job as a bookseller. The shop’s essence seemed to get the message after I refused to look at the works of Poe that it presented, because after a while it stopped directing me to certain books. Part of me worried whether I had scared it off altogether, but a larger part of me was too overwhelmed by what Fenimore had to say to me outside the shop to care.

  Grandma Daisy and I were closing up for the night when Sadie came into the shop. She carried a tray of cupcakes decorated in Halloween colors and looked happier than I had seen her since before Anastasia died.

  “Hi, Sadie.” I waved at her from behind the sales counter, where I was counting out the cash drawer for the night. “Can we do something for you?”

  Her face fell. “Aren’t we having a Red Inkers meeting tonight?”

  I smacked myself on the forehead. “I’m sorry. I completely forgot. I don’t even have the chairs set up yet.”

  “If it’s not a good time, we can meet in Midcentury Vintage.” Her eyebrows pinched together.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s a fine time. We were just so busy today that it slipped my mind. Of course the Red Inkers meeting can go on as planned.”

  Her face broke into the bright smile that I had missed so much over the last few days.

  I started to move around the counter. “Just let me grab the folding chairs from the storage room.”

  She set the cupcakes on an end table and waved me away. “You keep doing what you’re doing, and I will set everything up. Just because we meet in Charming Books doesn’t mean that you have to do all the work.”

  I smiled my thanks. As I closed the cash drawer, Grandma Daisy put on her coat. “It’s been quite a day. I think we sold more books today than all last month.” She grinned.

  “Quite a week,” I said.

  She nodded. “I’ll give you that. Well, I’m off. I’m looking forward to putting my feet up and curling up with a novel of my own.”

  “That sounds nice,” I admitted. “I’ll be doing the same just as soon as the Red Inkers meeting is over.”

  She searched my face. “Are you all right, my dear?”

  “Don’t I look all right?” I smiled.

  “No.” She pressed her lips together as if in thought. “You look stricken.”

  That was a perfect word for how I felt. I was stricken, but I wasn’t going to tell my grandmother that. Fenimore’s announcement would be just as much a bombshell to her as it had been to me. I had to come to terms with it myself before I told anyone, even my grandma Daisy, whom I loved more than anyone else on this earth.

  I laughed it off. “It’s just the strain from the week, I’m sure. It’s not often that someone dies in our shop, is it?”

  “Thank heavens for that.” She shook her head, sending her silver locks swaying back and forth around her cat’s-eye glasses. “If you say so.”

  She left not long after that.

  I finished closing up the shop and helped Sadie set up the chairs for the meeting. “Sadie.” I unfolded one of the chairs. “Have you thought about who might have gone into your apartment and taken your liquid nicotine?”

  She frowned as she unfolded a chair of her own. “I don’t know who could have done it. My apartment is so small. It’s just a studio. I hardly ever have anyone over other than Grant.”

  I opened my mouth.

  “And before you say anything, Grant didn’t take it. He didn’t know about me smoking e-cigarettes—I made sure of that. Besides, he would have no reason to kill Anastasia.”

  I frowned. I guessed she had a point no matter how much I didn’t want to admit it. “So Grant was the only one in your apartment?”

  “I didn’t say that. Sometimes, I have fittings there when people can’t make it to the shop.”

  I straightened the folding chair in front of me. “Who comes to these fittings?”

  “Regular clients. They don’t happen often. The shop is much more comfortable to have a fitting in, but Trudy was there about three weeks ago when I was fitting her for her dress for the Poe-try reading.”

  “Trudy?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “So Trudy knew about all the costumes before you unveiled them the night before the reading?”

  “Maybe not all of them, but I was working on the three dresses—yours, Trudy’s, and Anastasia’s—at my apartment at night after work. You know, while I watched TV.”

  “I thought you said Anastasia’s dress never left your shop before you gave it to her.”

  “I might have fibbed to David about that. I just didn’t want to give him more reason to search my apartment. I already felt exposed when he and his officers searched my shop.”

  There was a knock on the front door.

  “I’ll get it.” Sadie ran to the door.

  There was so much more that I wanted to ask her, but before I could, Sadie threw the door wide open for Richard and Trudy to enter.

  Rainwater was going to have to miss the meeting because of his police chief duties. Honestly, I was relieved he wasn’t going to be there. I didn’t know what he thought about my boldness of kissing him on the cheek the last time I saw him. I didn’t even know what I thought about it, and I wasn’t in the mood for any more emotional turmoil that day. I had already been given more than my share.

  My mind was buzzing over my conversation with Sadie. I had to be wrong.

  The four of us sat on folding chairs in a circle under the birch tree. As if by a force of habit, Sadie had set up six chairs for the meeting. Two stood empty as a constant reminder as to what had happened. One was for Chief Rainwater, and one was for Anastasia. Only one of those seats would ever be filled again.

  Richard cleared his throat, pulling me from my thoughts. “Violet, I brought those exams from your American Literature class. I put them on the sales counter for you when I came in.”

  “Thanks, Richard.” I smiled gratefully, hoping that I was acting normally. “I’ll be back on campus tomorrow to teach all my classes. I really appreciate you covering for me today.”

  Sadie passed around the tray of cupcakes. “I thought we all needed a little treat after the week we’ve had,” she said.

  She was right. I was tempted to take two, but I restrained myself and selected the largest cupcake from the tray.

  Richard cleared his throat. “We’re a little off schedule because of recent events. Did anyone bring a writing sample to read to the group?”

  “Are we not even going to mention Anastasia’s death?” Sadie asked, returning to her seat and taking a cupcake for herself. “Should we have a moment of silence or something to remember her by?”

  “Why?” Trudy snapped. “Is she worth remembering?”

  The three of us stared at Trudy, and my heart began to beat faster. Maybe
I wasn’t wrong.

  Trudy licked icing off her index finger. “She got what was coming to her.”

  Richard stopped his cupcake halfway to his mouth. “Trudy, how can you say such a thing?”

  She glared at him over her own cupcake. “How can you not? You know how she has treated all of us over the years. She ridiculed our choices to write fiction for fun and enjoyment, and all this time she was doing it herself and making money hand over fist at it. Doesn’t that steam you?”

  Richard pulled at the cuffs of his oxford shirt, looking uncomfortable. “I’m sure we were all surprised when we heard the news, but I wouldn’t say I’m angry at Anastasia. I suppose I am more hurt that she didn’t trust us with her secret. We’re a close-knit group here, and I thought we shared all of our literary endeavors and accomplishments with each other.”

  Trudy wiped her mouth with a napkin. “The moment I found out she was Evanna Blue, I knew she was a hypocrite, and it just wasn’t something I was going to stand for. I told her so too.” She took a big bite of her cupcake as if to seal her point.

  The room grew very silent at her announcement. She told Anastasia she was a hypocrite. That meant she knew Anastasia was Evanna Blue before she died. I wasn’t wrong. I wasn’t wrong at all.

  Sadie spoke first. “You knew she was Evanna Blue before the murder? I wasn’t the only one who knew?”

  Trudy’s face turned a dark shade of red as if she just realized her grave mistake.

  “Hidden in plain sight,” I whispered. That’s what the shop’s essence was trying to tell me. It didn’t want me to peg Coleridge as the killer because he was the most obvious choice and served to gain the most from Anastasia’s death. The essence wanted me to suspect Trudy, because she was the murderer hiding in plain sight right in front of me all this time.

  My heart dropped to the soles of my shoes. Trudy? Could it really be Trudy who killed Anastasia? No, that wasn’t possible. Trudy was Mrs. Conner, my first-grade teacher. First-grade teachers don’t kill people, they just don’t. Even with that in mind, I had to know. I had to know for certain.