The Ghost and the Dead Man's Library

SADIE DROPPED THE receiver into its cradle, then dropped herself into a chair. “Goodness. That man nearly talked my ear off!”

“Another Poe collector?”

Sadie nodded.

I glanced at my watch. It was now just after seven P.M. Spencer often came into the store in the evening, but tonight he remained in front of the TV, brooding.

Over dinner, I gently told my son about the call I’d received from his friend’s mother. He reddened and tried to shrug off his being bullied as “no big deal,” but I wasn’t letting this go. Having his Reader’s Notebook and first place certificate ripped up was a big deal, and I was going to do the dealing.

I made a huge fuss over his winning first prize for the most books read over the summer, and told him he was getting a big reward. I would take him and a group of his friends to the haunted house on Green Apple Road and treat them to ice cream. This cheered him up considerably.

But then I told him that I’d be going to his school the next morning. He begged me to reconsider, but I was resolved. A talk with the principal was in order, whether my son liked it or not.

Meanwhile, as incredible as it seemed, Sadie had fielded five more long-distance calls inquiring about the Phelps editions. I walked over to my aunt, who’d collapsed into one of the overstuffed armchairs at the end of the aisle I was restocking.

The comfy chairs, like the antique floor and table lamps and oak bookcases, were part of the renovations I’d instigated when I first went into partnership with Sadie. Out went the ancient fluorescent ceiling fixtures and old metal shelves, in came the Shaker-style rockers, author appearances, and twenty-first-century book-selling tools.

I’d overhauled the inventory, too, adding plenty of mysteries and true crime to give us our theme, but Sadie had insisted that we keep the store’s original rare book business—and, brother, was I glad she did.

“With word of mouth like this,” I said, eyeballing our backlist levels on McCrumb, MacDonald, Mailer, and Marlowe, “we don’t need to advertise those Poe books. The collectors are coming to us.”

Sadie nodded. “News never traveled this fast in the book-collecting world that I can recall.” With a tissue, she cleaned her glasses, which dangled from her silver chain. “Between cell phones and the Internet, things move at the speed of light! I feel like I’m suddenly in the world of high finance, the way that last caller pressured me!”

“You held out, though?” I replied.

“Yes, I certainly want to hear what Brainert’s expert has to say. But he better stop by the shop soon. I’ve managed to fend off everyone so far, but it hasn’t been easy. I’m sorry to say that last fellow actually became verbally abusive. He was convinced I was simply holding out for a better price.”

Garfield, who’d finished restocking the new release table, scratched his full beard. “That’s because he’s probably a corporate goon. They all think you’re ripping them off because they do it.”

Junior here’s a real Confucius, Jack groused. He knows a lot, for someone who’s done bupkus.

“He’s young,” I silently replied. “Garfield likes to think he’s sticking it to the man.”

Lamb chop, I’m not reading your frequency.

“My frequency?…Oh! You mean my slang? Well here’s a bulletin, Jack, sometimes I don’t read yours either.”

What’s not to get? You’re the one who claims to be a fan of these fantasyland detective stories you peddle, not me.

I noticed Garfield retrieving his jacket from the store closet. “Gotta go, Mrs. McClure. Time for the night shift at the gas station.”

Sadie shook her head. “When do you sleep, young man?”

“Sleep! Who needs it?” Garfield smiled and waved. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Ah, youth,” she murmured as she rose and stretched. She’d already brought the store’s laptop up front. While she took a seat behind the counter and read the store’s e-mails, I continued checking our backlist levels. It took me about twenty minutes to finish—as well as clean up some muddy footprints tracked between Mickey Spillane and Sara Paretsky. That’s when the front door chimed.

“Penelope?”

I recognized Brainert’s voice. “Hey,” I called, standing up and pushing the hair out of my face, now damp with perspiration. I crossed the store and rounded the corner of a bookcase to find my friend walking up to the counter. He was wearing the same salmon-colored V-neck and white button-down he’d had on this morning, save for the addition of a bow tie. He’d also exchanged the J. Crew wind breaker for a heavier J. Crew peacoat—and he’d brought another man with him.

The newcomer was tall with broad athletic shoulders. He had the sort of late-season tan you see on die-hard surfers or golfers with second homes in Palm Beach. His hair was sun-kissed golden, and he wore it in a boyish twentysomething mop, which suited him even though his attractive weathered features said, “definitely over thirty.” Then his electric blue eyes focused on me, and (though I am loath to admit something like this) I actually stopped breathing for a few seconds.

Brainert stepped forward. “Penelope, I’d like to introduce you to Associate Professor Nelson Spinner, Department of English, St. Francis College.”

Nelson Spinner clearly eschewed the preppy look favored by Brainert and most of the other faculty members at St. Francis. He wore a beautifully tailored charcoal suit with a crisp, blue shirt and matching Windsor-knotted tie that perfectly matched his penetrating eyes. A fine, black tailored overcoat was draped on his arm.

“Mrs. McClure, Professor Parker has told me so much about you,” he said, extending his hand. His voice was pleasant, his grip firm but gentle, and I felt his hand linger in mine a beat longer than necessary.

“You’re not from around here,” I said, detecting no tell-tale signs of dropped R’s and drawn-out vowels.

“Bucks County, Pennsylvania,” Spinner replied with a polite smile.

“Nelson did his graduate work in Philly,” Brainert noted.

“Really? You didn’t have the good fortune of studying with Camille Paglia, did you?”

Spinner’s smile warmed. “Actually, I attended the University of Pennsylvania and Professor Paglia is part of the faculty at the University of the Arts. But I did attend quite a few of her public lectures, and I found the experience quite edifying.”

I nodded in agreement. “I saw her speak in Boston a few years ago and envied her students. I wish we could lure her here for a talk on the femme fatale in popular culture. I’m sure I could pack this place with people who’d buy up her backlist. She’s a wonderful speaker, isn’t she?”

“Indeed she is, Mrs. McClure.”

My aunt suddenly cut in. “Let’s not be so formal, Professor Spinner. Call her Penelope. And I’m Sadie.”

Spinner turned to offer his hand to my aunt. “Ah, the owner of those rare volumes.”

“You’re talking about the Phelps books, I presume?”

“You bet,” Brainert answered. “Nelson is something of an expert.”

Spinner modestly waved off Brainert’s compliment. “I’m no expert, truly. But I do know a bit about Eugene Phelps.”

I managed to dust myself off and lose the shapeless smock I’d donned while doing the store’s housekeeping. As I worried whether my powder-blue sweater and jeans were presentable, I realized Spinner had managed to come off as warm and intimidating at the same time—no easy feat…then again, maybe it was just me.

Stop fussing, baby, Jack commanded. I’ve told you plenty of times…you’re whistle bait. No man alive wouldn’t want you heating his sheets.

“For pity’s sake, Jack…” I tried to will my cheeks from flaming. “Not now, please?”

Sure, honey, but why your heart’s beating twice its speed for Blondie here’s beyond me. The guy dresses well, but his expression’s got more sap than a maple tree.

“Not everyone’s as hard-boiled as you, you know.”

Sweetheart, strawberry jam would be more hard-boiled than this joker.

“Stow it, Jack!”

Stow it? What are you, on a nautical frequency now? Did you join the coast guard when I wasn’t looking?

“Jack…”

And another thing, why in hell is Bow Tie Boy wearing a peacoat? Last I checked he hadn’t joined the swabbie corp—yet in he waltzes wearing navy surplus, for cripe’s sake!

“Well, let’s see now,” Sadie said, making a show of glancing at her watch. “I’ll have to close the store and shut out the register.” She paused to give a theatrical sigh. “I’ll be along shortly, but Penelope can certainly take you back, get you started.”

“Well…I…I’m really not well-versed about the Phelps books,” I said, glaring at Sadie. She winked back!

“Nonsense,” she told me firmly. “Professor Spinner is the expert. That’s why he’s here. To tell us all about them.”

“Come on, Nelson. Let’s go,” Brainert said, impatiently charging forward.

Spinner followed Brainert through the archway, into the Community Events space, and presumably to the storage room beyond.

As I stepped around the counter to follow, Sadie lightly squeezed my arm and whispered, “I think you should be very nice to Professor Spinner.”

“I don’t know what you think you’re doing. For all I know, he’s married.”

Sadie shook her head. “There’s no ring on his finger, dear. And you really should pay more attention to things like that. You won’t always have me around to play matchmaker.”

“You can quit anytime.”

“Now, Pen, last night you were complaining that you had a better chance of being struck by lightning than meeting an available man around Quindicott. Professor Spinner looks available to me!”

“Well, the joke may be on both of us,” I replied. “He’s Brainert’s colleague, remember? Maybe Spinner’s gay, too.”

Sadie grinned, patted my arm. “Have fun finding out.”

I felt like a piece of undercooked meat being thrown to the lions. Clenching my fists, I walked through the archway to the events space. Only the emergency lights were glowing, so I paused (read: stalled) and turned on the ceiling lights.

“Come on, Pen, hurry up!” Brainert called. “The door’s locked.”

As the two men waited by the storeroom, I overheard Brainert reciting a blow-by-blow description of Rene Montour’s purchase earlier in the day.

My keys to the storeroom were bundled with a halfdozen others on a long chain connected to my belt. It wasn’t very attractive, I have to admit—looked like something a building supervisor in a New York apartment house would wear on his tool belt. But Spencer gave the chain to me last Christmas, and I found it surprisingly efficient.

While I fumbled for the right key, Brainert finished his story.

“So, Pen,” he said, “any more interest in the books?”

“Six calls this afternoon.”

Brainert blinked. “If they all show up in person to pick up their books, then Finch Inn is going to be booked solid. You ought to get a kickback from Fiona.”

“That’ll be the day.”

I pushed the door open, flicked on the lights. Sadie had made the back room presentable in anticipation of Spinner’s arrival. She’d briefly opened the back door to let in some fresh air and placed the Phelps editions on the desk, which had been cleared—the laptop moved up front. She’d even arranged folding chairs around the desk.

When Brainert saw the books, he smacked his lips as if he were anticipating a gourmet meal.

“May I?” Professor Spinner asked, simultaneously meeting my gaze and gesturing to the volumes.

“Of course.” I settled into a folding chair and watched him pick up Volume One. He slowly ran his hand down the spine and cover. I noticed his hands were nimble, his fingers long and elegant.

Brainert cocked an eyebrow. “Interesting that these books are all bound so differently—”

Spinner nodded. He was obviously observing just that.

“—I mean, considering they’re supposed to be uniform editions.”

“That’s because it took so long for Eugene Phelps to get the complete set out there,” Spinner noted, his eyes never leaving the book in his hand. “The man was editing and publishing the volumes, one at a time, over the span of decades. Poor Phelps set an impossible task for himself—it’s no wonder he failed.”

“I don’t understand,” Brainert said, sinking into the chair next to me and crossing his legs. “There are dozens of editions of Poe. What’s so challenging about putting one together?”

Spinner lifted a new book from the pile and stepped around the desk to face us, as if he were lecturing to a class. “There is, of course, no such thing as a complete Poe. Much of Poe’s journalism—his puzzles, anecdotes, contemporary observations, things of that nature—were written anonymously and lost in the reams of yellow journalism printed in Poe’s time. Phelps made a valiant effort to track down material he suspected had been written by Poe, but in the end many of the passages Phelps identified were discredited by more rigorous scholars and linguistic analysts who came later.”

Spinner’s pedagogical tone didn’t bother me in the least. I’d heard it a hundred times—from Brainert. He went into lecture mode at nearly every meeting of the Quindicott Business Owners Association (or, as my aunt called it, the Quibble Over Anything Gang). What was fascinating to me was Brainert’s reaction. It was obvious from his fidgeting that he didn’t like the tables being turned. As far as my friend was concerned, he was the professor and everyone else was the potential student.

On the other hand, these two were in the same department at St. Francis College, and I wondered if the specter of competition was rearing its ugly head.

You talking ’bout me again, baby?

“No, Jack. Another specter. Go back to sleep. I know this isn’t your thing.”

Sister, you got that right. I thought those mooks you had traipsing through here, hawking their dime novels were wearing, but these chattering skulls deserve an award for most tedious discussion in half a century. I’m beginning to wish I’d caught lead poisoning in a hardware store.

I noticed Spinner was now opening Volume Eight of the Phelps editions. This one was titled A Dream Within a Dream.

“Unfortunately, much of Eugene Phelps’s lifework was dismissed in the years after his death,” Spinner continued. “One look at an index and it’s easy to see why. The contents are all over the place. Several poems and even a few stories appear in more than one volume, and the way the works are assembled is utterly arbitrary.” Spinner sighed and set the book down on the desk. “And of Phelps so called commentary—well, the less said, the better.”

I cleared my throat, and almost raised my hand. Thank goodness I squelched the impulse. “But, Professor, these volumes have always been of interest to collectors. According to my aunt, their value has skyrocketed in the last seven or eight years. Do you know why that is?”

“It’s this Poe Code nonsense,” Spinner declared. “It all dates back to an academic paper from a decade ago, written by Dr. Robert Conte, a professor of comparative literature at Mount Olive University in South Carolina. The good doctor stated that he’d discovered the hidden code buried in the Phelps edition, and he claimed to have deciphered it, too.”

“Amazing!” Brainert leaned forward in his chair.

Spinner shrugged. “If I recall, the puzzle had something to do with the words being out of order in the text of a poem or story. I really can’t recall the specific details. But Dr. Conte was only the first to make such a claim. In the years since his treatise was published, other scholars chimed in with their own pet theories, and the legend of the Poe Code was sustained.”

Brainert raised a finger. “You say the legend was ‘sustained.’ An interesting choice of words.”

“Phelps himself claimed there was a code, but he probably said that in a bid to sell more books,” Spinner replied. “Of course, the idea of a secret code is certainly intriguing. Why, even I was drawn to the lure of a Poe Code, once upon a time.” Spinner chuckled at the memory. “When I was a first-year graduate student, I thought about making the Phelps editions the subject of my own doctoral dissertation.”

Brainert nodded. “Sounds great, why not?”

Spinner shook his head. “I realized that such a study would be a waste of my valuable time. I came to the sensible conclusion that there are more important American authors worthy of study. Literary diversions like the Poe Code are excellent fodder for less-serious academics like Dr. Conte, a scholar who prefers the works of American Gothicists like Poe, Hawthorne, and H. P. Lovecraft, over more serious, ambitious, and important American authors—novelists like Kerouac. Poets like Alan Ginsberg.”

Though my friend did not react, I knew Spinner’s words had stung Brainert. Not only did he admire the works of Poe and Hawthorne, Brainert also claimed to be distantly related to H. P. Lovecraft, the New England recluse whose horror fiction has begun to rival Poe’s in popularity with the public and even certain scholars. And as I recalled, Brainert was rather disdainful of Kerouac and Ginsberg.

I suspected Nelson Spinner was aware of this.

Brainert shifted in his chair. “So you don’t believe there is a Poe Code? It’s all a myth?”

“What’s all a myth?” Sadie asked, finally showing up.

“This Poe Code nonsense,” Spinner informed her.

Sadie looked to Brainert. He frowned and gestured back to Spinner.

“Eugene Phelps was a New England eccentric. That’s all,” Spinner said. “Follow the logic, and you’ll come to the same conclusion I did. Just ask yourself these questions: If Phelps really possessed some mysterious treasure, why did he go bankrupt? And why would he blow his brains out if he wasn’t flat broke?”

I nearly spoke up then. Maybe money wasn’t the reason for Eugene Phelps’s suicide, I wanted to say, recalling my own husband’s descent—not into the maelstrom but into a concrete sidewalk.

Calvin and I never struggled financially. His family was so wealthy that we never wanted for money. Yet my husband chose to kill himself, right in front of me, driven by personal demons I could do nothing to stop…or, at the time, even really comprehend.

I wanted to say those things, but of course I kept silent. Some thoughts are too personal to share with a perfect stranger—or even a close friend like Brainert.

But not me, right, sweetheart?

“Right, Jack…not you.”

This is a real yawnfest you’ve got going here, you know?

“It could have been earth-shattering,” I silently pointed out, “if the Poe Code was real.”

But Blondie claims it’s not. Too bad, looks like he just burst Bow Tie Boy’s bubble.

“What a shame,” Brainert said.

He looked crestfallen. Clearly, he had hoped for better news.

Nelson Spinner glanced at his watch. “Well, this has been very pleasant. But I really do have to go. I have a long evening, papers to grade, you know.” He faced Brainert. “Can I give you a lift back to the campus, Parker?”

“No thanks,” Brainert replied. “I’m heading over to the theater. I’ll catch a ride home from Ronny Sutter.”

“Still hoping to resuscitate that old Movie Town Theater, eh?” Spinner asked.

“It’s been a financial struggle, but we’re almost there,” Brainert replied. “And since Ronny’s donating some of his time, the construction work has progressed much faster.”

Brainert had obviously told Spinner about his pet project. He and three other partners (including a film studies professor at St. Francis and an elderly retired screen actress who’d moved back to New England) had purchased the broken-down movie theater in Quindicott in hopes of reopening it and showing classic old films. Brainert gave Spinner an update on the restoration work as Sadie and I escorted them to the front door.

“A shame you have to go,” Sadie said. “Please feel free to come back soon, Professor Spinner. I don’t know how much longer the Phelps editions will be here, but I’m sure Penelope would be very glad to show you the store, perhaps escort you around town.”

I stiffened with embarrassment at the obvious sell job. My lord, I thought, is this how Spencer feels when I go into Mother Mode?

To Nelson Spinner’s credit, he smiled warmly, took my hand, and held it. “Yes. Thank you for the invitation…. Do you have a card?”

“I uh…”

“No,” said Brainert rather pointedly. “She doesn’t.”

Sadie glared. “Of course, she does.”

My aunt came ready to play, all right. She yanked on a drawer in her old desk and handed over one of the store’s new business cards.

“Thanks,” Nelson said, tucking it safely into an inside jacket pocket. Then he pulled out a thin leather wallet and one of his own business cards. It was quite something, gold embossed lettering on an electric blue background—the exact shade of his dress shirt and piercing cobalt eyes.

“I’ll be in touch soon then, Penelope. I know I’ll enjoy talking with you again. Good night.”