Page 19 of Beachfront Pages

"I insulted your entire genre last time. Most people don't return for seconds."

"Maybe I'm not most people." She set her bag down by the register. "Or maybe your coffee's better than the place down the street."

"I don't sell coffee."

"That's the trouble with this town. No one will let a person starve, but you can't get a decent cup unless you walk three blocks."

He came around the counter, and his boat shoes made that soft scuff against the old plank floor. "Harbor Brew's two blocks. And they'd give you the cup for free if you let Jan ask you enough questions."

"I've met Jan."

"Then you understand the price."

She laughed. It came out easy, which bothered her more than it should have. People who laughed like that had let their guard down, and she didn't do that. Not anymore.

"You said something about a back room," she said. "Last time. The rare collection."

"I did." He studied her for a beat, head tipped, the way he had of looking at a person like they were a sentence he was deciding whether to trust. "You sure? Most of it's local history and a lot of dust. Not a beach read in sight."

"I'll risk it."

"Your funeral." He waved her toward the rear of the shop. "Watch the third shelf. It's held together with spite and an old shipping strap."

The back room was smaller than she'd pictured, and warmer, the air thick with the smell of old paper and binding glue. Books crowded floor to ceiling on shelves that didn't match. A reading chair sat in one corner under a lamp with a crooked shade. One narrow, salt-fogged window let in a slice of harbor where a single masthead rocked.

"This is the part of the shop I actually like," Marty said. "Don't tell the front room."

"Your secret's safe." She turned a slow circle. "Why hide it back here? You could sell half of this to the right people."

"That's exactly why it's back here." He pulled his glasses down, settled them on his nose, and ran a finger along a spine. "The right people would buy it. Then it'd be gone, and I'd have the money instead of the book. Bad trade."

"You'd rather keep books you can't sell than make rent."

"Now you're starting to understand the business model." He tugged a slim clothbound volume free and held it out. "Here. First edition. Local poet, drowned in 1952, never published again because he was already dead. Three copies known to exist. I have one."

She took it carefully. The cover had faded to the color of weak tea, the title stamped in flaking gold. "And you won't sell it."

"To the wrong person? Never." He shrugged. "To the right one, maybe. I haven't met them yet."

"How do you know which is which?"

"They ask the right questions." He said it lightly, but his eyes stayed on her a second too long, and she made a show of opening the poetry book so she wouldn't have to answer that.

He showed her others. A water-stained ship's log from a schooner that had run aground off the point in the 1890s, the ink gone brown, the last entry breaking off mid-word. A hand-bound book of recipes someone's grandmother had kept, the margins crowded with notes in three different hands. A pamphlet on hurricane lore that he called nonsense and clearly treasured.

"You light up doing this," she said. "You know that?"

"Do I." He slid the log back into its slot, careful as a man returning a sleeping baby to a crib. "Annette used to say I only ever sounded happy when I was talking about a book nobody else had read."

He said the name plainly, no weight on it, but she caught the small hitch under the words. A wife, then. Past tense, by the way he handled it. She didn't ask. She knew better than anyone what it cost to be asked.

"Smart woman," was all she said.

"She was." He cleared his throat and nodded at the shelves. "Keep looking. You're not done."

For the better part of an hour she lost herself in his shelves, and Marty let her.

That was the thing she hadn't expected. He didn't hover. He didn't narrate. He pointed her at a row, told her one good fact about it, then drifted off to do something with a box of inventory and left her to it. Drake had never once let her browse in silence. He'd stood at her shoulder in every shop they ever entered, asking if she'd found anything yet, checking his watch, making her feel like a meter running down.