Rides a Stranger Read online

  “Work goes on down there.”

  “Is there a special someone in your life?” she asked. “Since Rebecca?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You know, I called there once, your apartment, on a Saturday morning. Some girl answered.”

  “Mom. Please.”

  “She sounded very young. She said you were in the shower or something.”

  “Mom. Enough.”

  “I worry. You’re my only child. I don’t want to think of you being alone. You’re forty now. If you want to have children … I just worry about you living in that house full of books. Would any woman want to come into that? And how are you going to leave something behind if you’re not married? Your father and I, we had you. You’re our legacy.”

  “I have work, Mom. I have my work.”

  She nodded. “I know. The articles. The presentations.”

  “And teaching,” I said. “The lives I’ve touched.”

  Mom smiled. I recognized the sly look on her face. She had something to zing me with, and she said, “I bet you were touching that girl’s life, the one who answered your phone on a Saturday morning.”

  “Jesus. You’re my mother.”

  She laughed. And I couldn’t help but laugh a little too.

  “I’m going out in a little bit,” I said.

  Mom turned and looked at the clock. “Are you meeting some old friends?”

  “I’m going to that bookstore. To see Lou Caledonia.”

  “Why on earth for?” She stood up and started clearing dishes.

  “He wants to see me,” I said. “I think he knows something about Dad.”

  “Honey, the only thing to know about your dad is that he liked to sit in his chair and read more than he liked to work. And that’s pretty much that. It’s after nine, and you have to get up early tomorrow. We both do. Besides, maybe this guy is a crazy person? What if he’s a serial killer or something?”

  “A serial killer?” I said. “He looks more like a hobbit.”

  “A what?”

  “Never mind.” I brought my plate to the sink. “How much trouble could a used book dealer cause?”

  It was nearly nine forty-five when I pulled up in front of Lou Caledonia’s bookstore. The streets downtown were quiet and empty. No cars went past, and the streetlights all blinked monotonously yellow. The storefront looked dark. I checked his card. It gave no name for the store. Above the glass display windows the word BOOKS was spelled out in chipped gold letters. The sign looked like it came from another time.

  I climbed out of the car and went to the door. I looked for a bell or an intercom, but there was nothing. I pressed my face against the glass. In the shadowy light I saw rickety wooden shelves filled with endless rows of paperback books. More books sat on the floors of the aisles, and even more were stacked at the end of aisles. Cardboard boxes on the floor overflowed with additional books. Even though I didn’t think the titles interested me, I had to admit to feeling a thrill of excitement at the sight of all those books. The shop seemed crammed full of the essence of reading—the simple book. How long had it been since I’d simply taken one off the shelf and read it and enjoyed it? How long since I’d read a book without the red pen of the critic in my hand, the theorist’s coldly detached eye formulating a jargony thesis as I read the words?

  I didn’t know what to do, so I knocked. And waited. The wind picked up a little. It was a cool fall night, the sky clear and inky black. I looked around and still didn’t see anyone on the streets. No one came downtown anymore. I figured they were all home streaming movies or TV or texting. When I was a kid, we came downtown for movies, for plays, for restaurants. Most of those establishments were gone.

  I knocked again. Then I tried the door. It opened.

  I looked around again. I don’t know what I expected. The police coming to arrest me for breaking into an unlocked and nearly forgotten bookstore on an empty street? I pushed open the door and stepped inside.

  “Mr. Caledonia?” I said. “Lou?”

  I considered backing up and leaving. He told me to come by anytime, but maybe it was simply too late. If I wanted, I could try again when I left town, as I had originally proposed. Or maybe I wouldn’t bother at all. What could this man know about my father that I didn’t know? That’s when it struck me: I didn’t know anything about my father.

  I took a step toward the door when I heard something rustle near the back of the room. I froze in place.

  “Mr. Caledonia?”

  I heard the noise again. This time it was followed by a sound I definitely recognized—a stack of books falling over. Someone was in the room.

  I walked down the center aisle of the store, picking my way carefully. I stepped over the many books on the floor. The musty scent, the decaying paper of the pages and the heavier stock of the covers filled my nostrils. I loved it. It comforted me. I wished my own apartment smelled that way.

  “Lou? It’s me. Don Kurtwood. Remember? From the funeral?”

  I reached the end of the aisle. There was a door ahead of me. I assumed it led to Mr. Caledonia’s office. The door sat open a few inches, and weak light from a desk lamp leaked out in a narrow sliver.

  “Lou?”

  I took a slow, deliberate step toward that door, my foot stretching out before me, when I figured out the source of the rustling noise I heard earlier. The fat, gray cat leaped across my path, his body brushing against my pant leg. I pulled back my foot, losing my balance. I knocked over a stack of books behind me and grabbed hold of the shelf for balance.

  “Jesus,” I said.

  I held on longer than I needed to. I held on until my heart stopped thudding in my chest. I finally looked down. The cat stared at me, its eyes glowing yellow in the gloomy store. The cat looked edgy and agitated. Its fur stood up along the ridge of its back.

  “You scared the hell out of me, cat,” I said.

  The cat meowed once, and then slipped through the narrow opening into the office. Was I crazy to think he wanted me to follow him?

  Maybe the whole thing was crazy, but I did. I took those two slow steps to the office door and pushed it open. The light from the desk lamp illuminated the portion of the floor where Lou Caledonia lay.

  He was dead. The thin trickle of blood from the gunshot wound in his temple telling me all I needed to know about that. He was most definitely dead.

  I called the police from my cell phone and told them what I had found. The dispatcher sounded cool and calm. She asked me if I was safe, and I told her I thought I was. But I wasn’t certain. I was still in Lou’s little office, standing over his dead body. How could I feel safe?

  The dispatcher also asked me if I had touched anything or moved the body. I told her I hadn’t.

  “That’s good,” she said. “Why don’t you leave the premises and wait for the police outside? You shouldn’t disturb the scene.”

  Her words made sense to me. Even though I didn’t watch a lot of popular TV shows, I’d seen enough at least to know not to disturb any of the evidence. I didn’t need a dispatcher to tell me that.

  “The officers should be there soon,” she said. “Would you like me to stay on the line with you until they arrive?”

  “No,” I said. “That’s not necessary.”

  I hung up and started out of the office. I really did intend to leave. Why would I want to stand around in a cramped office with the dead body of a man I barely knew? A man who had been murdered in the last few hours?

  But then another thought crossed my mind: How would I ever know what Lou Caledonia wanted from me? How would I ever know what he had to do with my father—and why he showed up at Dad’s funeral?

  The nearest police station was located about ten blocks away. They’d probably dispatch a detective from there, which gave me about ten minutes. And that was assuming there wasn’t a patro
l car in the immediate vicinity of the store. An officer could show up in a matter of seconds.

  But I just wanted to take a quick glance. I moved forward, my feet getting as close as possible to Lou’s body without touching it. I had to get that close in order to see what sat on the top of his desk. I could see no discernible order to the papers, pens, and books scattered there. Most of the papers were handwritten bills of sale, either for books he had sold or books he had purchased. There were a couple of flyers advertising antique sales, and in the upper right corner of the desk a thick, well-worn paperback book called The Guide To Rare Book Collecting, 1979 edition.

  I looked around the room. The shelves above and to the side of the desk were crammed with more books and papers—again a haphazard jumble. On the floor, framing Lou’s body, were more cartons of books and accordion files overflowing with papers.

  I heard something from the front of the store.

  “Hello? This is the police. Is anyone in here?”

  “Shit,” I said.

  The cat jumped onto the desk and stared at me. It eyeballed me, its tail swishing back and forth across the papers on the desk. I took one more look. The cat’s paw rested on a clipping torn from the local newspaper. I saw one word in bold type across the top: Kurtwood. I picked it up. Dad’s obituary. Across the top someone, presumably Lou Caledonia, had written: “Stranger. Could it be?”

  I stuffed the clipping into the pocket of my pants just before a young, uniformed police officer appeared behind me and said, “Sir? I’m going to have to ask you to step outside.”

  I thought it would take longer to deal with the police and a murder investigation. I stood in the cold with the uniformed officers for about five minutes. They took basic information from me and looked at my driver’s license while I shivered, and then a detective showed up. He was a middle-aged man who wore a shirt and tie but no jacket of any kind. His hair was thick and gray, and when the wind blew it flopped around on his head. He never reached up to straighten it. His handshake felt like a vice.

  “I’m Phil Hyland,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me what happened here?”

  So I did. He didn’t take notes. He listened to everything I said, a look of concentration on his face. I told him about Lou Caledonia showing up at my dad’s funeral and then insisting I come down to the bookstore to talk to him as soon as possible.

  “The door was open, and I found him dead back there,” I said.

  “You say your father just died?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “What were the circumstances of his death?” Hyland asked.

  “Natural causes,” I said. “He had a neurological disorder.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Hyland said. “So you’d never met this Caledonia fellow before?”

  “Never.”

  “And what did he want with your father?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I assume was something to do with books. My father owned a lot of books. But Mr. Caledonia acted offended when I suggested that’s why he was at the funeral home.” I tried to remember his exact words. “He told me that he had tried to talk to my father before but had always been rebuffed. That’s the word he used. ‘Rebuffed.’ I guess I came here to see what he knew about my dad. If anything.”

  “Dads can be a tricky business,” Hyland said. “I never knew mine that well.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “Do any of us really know our fathers?”

  I thought I was on the brink of a connection with Hyland, but just as quickly, the moment seemed to pass.

  He asked, “Did the officers take your information?”

  “Yes.”

  “We’ll be in touch if we need anything more,” he said. “We’re probably looking at a robbery here. The neighborhood isn’t what it used to be.”

  He started toward the door of Lou Caledonia’s shop but, before he went in, he turned back to me.

  “Are you sure there isn’t anything else, Mr. Kurtwood?” he asked. “Anything else you saw in there?”

  I could feel the clipping in my pants’ pocket. It itched and scraped against my thigh. I knew I should give it back. But … I didn’t want to give up that scrap. I knew it made no sense, but I guess I saw it as an artifact from my dad.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  Hyland went inside, and I went back to my parents’ house.

  The morning paper carried no news of Lou Caledonia’s death. Either it happened too late to make the cut, or it was deemed too insignificant to mention. As we dressed in the morning, Mom didn’t even ask me about my trip to the bookstore the night before. Either she was too distracted by the funeral service, or it had slipped her mind. And I wasn’t going to bring it up. She had enough to worry about and I didn’t want to add to her stress.

  We both maintained our composure during the service. Neither of us was big on emotional displays, and the Catholic Church provided enough rigidity and structure in the service that there was little room for genuine feeling. I sat in the front pew of the church next to Mom and recited the responses and hymns by memory, even though I hadn’t been inside a church in about fifteen years.

  When my mind wandered, it wasn’t to bad memories. I thought of my childhood and the things my dad and I did together. He took me to the library a lot. He let me wander wherever I liked and was willing to let me read whatever books I happened to find. I first read On the Road that way, as well as Lord of the Flies and The Great Gatsby. Dad always found something from the bestseller list, but he never commented on what I read. Except once. When I was about fourteen, I picked up a copy of Crime and Punishment, and he said, offhandedly, “Yeah. I read that a long time ago.”

  “You read this?” I asked. “For school?”

  “Not for school. Because I wanted to.” He looked at me over the top of his glasses. “Do you think you have the market cornered on reading the great books?”

  I hadn’t thought of that in a long time. But sitting there in the church, I remembered that the old man could surprise me, that I shouldn’t assume I understood him—or anyone else—easily. He was a stranger to me in many ways, and perhaps to my mother, too. But what did that have to do with a murdered bookstore owner? I wondered if I’d ever know.

  A small group travelled to the graveside service. The day started to turn cool, gray clouds building in from the west along with a stiff breeze. The priest didn’t waste any time getting through his prayers and rituals. I started to think about the food spread waiting for us back in the church basement. Hot chicken salad, coffee, peach cobbler. Except for a pasty communion wafer, I hadn’t eaten all day. When the service concluded and we turned toward our cars, I saw a woman standing at a distance. She wore oversized sunglasses despite the day’s gloom, and a barn coat and work boots. I couldn’t tell how old she was, but she seemed to move with an easy grace as she turned and climbed into the cab of a pickup truck and drove off before we reached our cars.

  “Do you know who that was?” I asked Mom.

  But she didn’t even answer. She was talking to one of my aunts, and then the pickup was gone.

  “Did you say something something, honey?” Mom asked.

  “I saw someone and I was wondering if you knew who they were.”

  “I’m so tired,” she said. “I don’t even know who I am anymore. Family and friends are a great support, but they wear me out.”

  I hadn’t slept much the night before, so I said, “I understand.”

  “But if you’re up for it later, I’d like your help with some of Dad’s things. He has old boxes in the attic I can’t carry down. You don’t have to sort through them, but just bring them down so I can.”

  “There’s no hurry, Mom,” I said.

  “I know,” she said. “But it’s therapeutic. I did the same thing when my mother died, Grandma Nancy. I went through all of her clothes and pictu
res. It helped me cope.”

  “Mom?” I asked. “You know I went to that bookstore last night.”

  “That’s right. I must have been sound asleep; I didn’t hear you come in. What happened with that man? What did he want?”

  “Well, it’s a long story. But he had a copy of Dad’s obituary on his desk.” I paused. “I took it.”

  “Why?”

  “It seemed like a keepsake of some kind,” I said. “I guess it seems silly. But the bookstore owner wrote the word ‘stranger’ on it. Does that mean anything to you?”

  “Does that mean anything to me?” she asked. “That sums your father up perfectly. Do you know we dated for two years before I even knew his middle name? Two years. At first I thought he didn’t have one because he always used the initial H. Then one day I saw his birth certificate. I saw that his middle name was Henry. Now why hadn’t he ever told me that?”

  “Did you ask?”

  “I shouldn’t have to ask,” she said, sniffing. “Husbands are supposed to tell their wives these things. But not your father. Maybe he wanted to maintain some mystery in our marriage.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Let’s face it,” she said. “I loved the man dearly. Dearly. But I didn’t know him. And now I never will.”

  I hauled six cardboard boxes down from the attic that afternoon. They were heavy as iron bars, and when I was finished carrying them, I slumped into a living room chair, my back screaming. Dad’s prophecy about me had come true—I was too bookish and didn’t spend enough time playing sports. I decided forty was too old to change and asked Mom where she kept the ibuprofen.

  That evening, we ate food that a neighbor had dropped off. Chicken casserole followed by a peanut butter pie. I hated the fact that we all died, that people I loved—like my father—could be taken away so cruelly. But the food was amazing. Comfort food in the truest sense of the term.

  Mom seemed distracted while we ate. I finally asked her what was on her mind.

  “Are you just feeling sad about Dad?” I asked.

  “Not exactly,” she said. “I’m just thinking about the fact that you’re going to leave and go back to your life. And I want you to do that. But the house is going to feel awfully lonely.”