Read A Bookmarked Death for Free Online

Island seacoast village, the shop had stayed vacant, tributes crowding the doorway—handwritten messages, cone-wrapped flowers, and literary toys like Paddington Bear and Madeleine. Another bookseller, Marty Campagna, finally bought the property. He’d had it cleaned and fumigated and tried to hire me to sell his expensive stock.
    Unfortunately he’d acted as if Secondhand Prose was my little hobby, something I could give up as easily as knitting sweaters for soldiers. I’d refused and persuaded Marty to hire a younger bookseller, Susie Pevney. To do so I’d agreed that I would supervise her.
    As soon as I came into the shop that Monday morning I sensed trouble. Susie’s eyes were swollen, her normal optimism vanquished. Marty was sitting in one of the leather wing chairs, scowling down at the phone in his palm. Dressed as he was in a red Goodfella’s Bar T-shirt with a white line drawing of a pair of handcuffs, he looked as out-of-place as a mechanic who had wandered into the Harvard Club expecting to be served.
    He could at least replace his black-framed glasses, which were duct-taped at the bridge, I thought, but appearance had never been Marty’s thing. He spent the money he had inherited from his grandfather’s cesspool cleaning business on books and books alone. He bought books constantly, as if he would not be satisfied until every single volume ever published had passed through his hands. I had seen him vault sofas and push aside old ladies at estate sales to get to the good stuff. Yet as soon as he owned a book, he seemed to lose interest in it. His goal became to sell the book for as much as he could.
    Marty, Susie, and the bookshop. This was my everyday world.
    I moved toward Susie first, inclining my head questioningly toward Marty. If he had been bullying her . . .
    She shook her head quickly.
    “What’s the matter?” I said, my back to Marty so that he could not hear our conversation.
    “Nothing!” She gave me a quick, insincere smile, then looked back down at what she had been doing. Whatever was troubling her, she was not ready to share it.
    I turned back around to Marty. “What are you frowning about?”
    He looked up at me and shook his head, then growled, “Never trust little old lady librarians!”
    “What happened?”
    Marty leaned back against the leather chair, pressing his muscular arms into the armrests. “You know those books I picked up last month in Boston?”
    “You mean the Mary Shelley and the Lincoln?”
    “Yeah. Those were the best of the lot. This old bat, very genteel, said she was selling off her dead husband’s collection. The books were all embossed on the title page to the Melrose Library and some had ‘Discard’ stamped in red over the blind-stamp. So I thought—”
    “You thought they’d be discarding a first of Frankenstein ? That they’d deface it that way? C’mon, Marty!”
    “Well, I could hope. Maybe they had too many first editions. And what she was asking for them wasn’t crazy.”
    Meaning he probably thought he had slipped into the bank and found the vault unlocked. “So you didn’t check.”
    Of course he hadn’t. I would have, which was probably why I was still getting excited over twenty-five-dollar sales. I tend to forget that everyone hasn’t been raised in a Methodist parsonage, hasn’t been taught at a young age, “If it’s doubtful, it’s dirty .” When I was twelve and had shoplifted a red lipstick and a Baby Ruth bar, my father had asked me how much I was willing to “sell my soul for.”
    It was a question I still pondered. Would I sell my soul for a Shakespearean folio? A signed Gone with the Wind ?
    I knew I wouldn’t, though in Marty’s defense, seeing books stamped as discards made it easier to turn a blind eye.
    “So how did the old lady trick you?”
    He shook his head at the ugliness of humanity. “She told me her husband had been this high-rolling Boston lawyer and book collector. The house was full of antiques.