The Book Thing Read online

  “I don’t see—”

  “Trust me,” Tess said. “And one other thing?”

  “Sure.”

  “Would it kill you to ask Octavia out for coffee or something? Just once?”

  “Octavia! If I were going to ask someone there out, it would be—”

  “Mona, I know. But you know what, Tate? Not everyone can get the girl with the duck tattoo.”

  The next Saturday, Tess met William outside his house. He wore his knapsack on his back, she wore hers on the front, where Carla Scout nestled with a sippee cup. She was small for her age, not even twenty-five pounds, but it was still quite the cargo to carry on a hike.

  “Are you ready for our walk?”

  “I usually walk alone,” William said. He was unhappy with this arrangement and had agreed to it only after Tate had all but ordered him to do it.

  “After today, you can go back to walking alone. But I want to take you some place today. It’s almost three miles.”

  “That’s nothing,” William said.

  “Your pack might be heavier on the return trip.”

  “It often is,” he said.

  I bet, Tess thought. He had probably never given up stealing books despite what Tate thought.

  They walked south through the neighborhood, lovely even with the trees bare and the sky overcast. William, to Tess’s surprise, preferred the main thoroughfares. Given his aversion to people, she thought he would want to duck down less-trafficked side streets, make use of Stony Run Park’s green expanse, which ran parallel to much of their route. But William stuck to the busiest streets. She wondered if drivers glanced out their windows and thought: Oh, the walking man now has a walking woman and a walking baby.

  He did not speak and shut down any attempt Tess made at conversation. He walked as if he were alone. His face was set, his gait steady. She could tell it made him anxious, having to follow her path, so she began to narrate the route, turn by turn, which let him walk a few steps ahead. “We’ll take Roland Avenue to University Parkway, all the way to Barclay, where we’ll go left.” His pace was slow by Tess’s standards, but William didn’t walk to get places. He walked to walk. He walked to fill his days. Tate said his official diagnosis was bi-polar with OCD, which made finding the right mix of medications difficult. His work, as William termed it, seemed to keep him more grounded than anything else, which was why Tate indulged it.

  Finally, about an hour later, they stood outside a building of blue-and-pink cinderblocks.

  “This is it,” Tess said.

  “This is what?”

  “Go in.”

  They entered a warehouse stuffed with books. And not just any books—these were all unloved books, as William would have it, books donated to this unique Baltimore institution, the Book Thing, which accepted any and all books on one condition: They would then be offered free to anyone who wanted them.

  “Tens of thousands of books,” Tess said. “All free, every weekend.”

  “Is there a limit?”

  “Yes,” Tess said. “Only ten at a time. But you probably couldn’t carry much more, right?” Actually, the limit, according to the Book Thing’s rather whimsical website, was 150,000. But Tess had decided her aunt was right about people according more value to things they could not have so readily. If William thought he could have only ten, every week, it would be more meaningful to him.

  He walked through the aisles, his eyes strafing the spines. “How will I save them all?” William said.

  “One week at a time,” Tess said. “But you have to promise that this will be your only, um, supplier from now on. If you get books from anywhere else, you won’t be allowed to come here anymore. Do you understand, William? Can you agree to that?”

  “I’ll manage,” William said. “These books really need me.”

  It took him forty-five minutes to pick his first book, Manifold Destiny, a guide to cooking on one’s car engine.

  “Really?” Tess said. “That’s a book that needs to be liberated?”

  William looked at her with pity, as if she were a hopeless philistine.

  “He spent five hours there, selecting his books,” Tess told Crow that evening, over an early supper. Crow worked Saturday evenings, so they ate early in order to spend more time together.

  “Did you feel guilty at all? He’s just going to tear them apart and destroy them.”

  “Is he? Destroying them, I mean. Or is he making something beautiful, as his brother would have it? I go back and forth.”

  Crow shook his head. “An emotionally disturbed man with scissors, cutting up books inside his home, taking a walk with you and our daughter, whose middle name is Scout. And you didn’t make one Boo Radley joke the entire time?”

  “Not a one,” Tess said. “You do the bath. I’ll clean up.”

  But she didn’t clean up, not right away. She went into her own library, a cozy sun-room lined with bookshelves. She had spent much of her pregnancy here, reading away, but even in three months of confinement she barely made a dent in the unread books. She had always thought of it as being rich, having so many books she had yet to read. But in William’s view, she was keeping them confined. And no one else, other than Crow, had access to them. Was her library that different from William’s?

  Of course, she had paid for her books—most of them. Like almost every other bibliophile on the planet, Tess had books, borrowed from friends, that she had never returned, even as some of her favorite titles lingered in friends’ homes, never to be seen again.

  She picked up her iPad. Only seventy books loaded onto it. Only. Mainly things for work, but also the occasional self-help guide that promised to unlock the mysteries of toddlers. Forty of the seventy titles were virtually untouched. She wandered into Carla Scout’s room, where there was now a poster of a bearded man living in a pile of books, the Arnold Lobel print from The Children’s Bookstore. A payment/gift from a giddy Octavia, who didn’t know how Tess had stopped her books from disappearing, and certainly didn’t know that her crush had anything to do with it. During Carla Scout’s bedtime routine, Tess now stopped in front of the poster, read the verse printed there, then added her own couplet. “It’s just as much fun as it looks/To live in a house made of books.”

  It’s what’s in the book that matters. Standing in her daughter’s room, which also had shelves and shelves filled with books, Tess remembered a character in a favorite story saying that to someone who objected to using the Bible as a fan on a hot summer day. But she could no longer remember which story it was.

  Did that mean the book had ceased to live for her? The title she was trying to recall could be in this very room, along with all of Tess’s childhood favorites, waiting for Carla Scout to discover them one day. But what if she rejected them all, insisting on her own myths and legends, as Octavia had prophesied? How many of these books would be out of print in five, ten years? What did it mean to be out of print in a world where books could live inside devices, glowing like captured genies, desperate to get back out in the world and grant people’s wishes?

  Carla Scout burst into the room, wet hair gleaming, cheeks pink.

  “Buh,” she said, which was her word for book, unless it was her word for ball or, possibly, balloon. “Buh, p’ease.”

  She wasn’t even in her pajamas yet, just her diaper and hooded towel. Tess would have to use the promise of books to coax her through putting on her footed sleeper and gathering up her playthings. How long would she be able to bribe her daughter with books? Would they be shunted aside like the Velveteen Rabbit as other newer, shinier toys gained favor? Would her daughter even read The Velveteen Rabbit? William Kemper suddenly seemed less crazy to Tess than the people who managed to live their lives in houses that had no books at all.

  “Three tonight,” Tess said. “Pick out three. Only three, Carla Scout. One, two, three. You may have three.”

  They read five.

  Author’s note: The Book Thing is a very real thing and its hours and p
olicies are as described here. The Children’s Bookstore on 25th Street is my invention, along with all characters.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 by Laura Lippman

  cover design by Mauricio Diaz

  This 2013 edition distributed by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media

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