“Onlybooks? Are they okay?” I left the mess and hurried off the steps and down the tight aisles. “Let me see.”
Max opened the box on the floor, motioning to the antiques. “All present and accounted for.”
“What happened?”
“Spider.” He grinned sheepishly.
I crouched down, eyeing the contents. “Go through these next. Make sure the spines and corners are okay. Some of these look like original bindings by the publisher.”
“All right. Sorry, Sebastian.”
I left Max’s side and returned to the register to see Calvin tossing the soiled paper towels in the wastebasket. “Don’t worry about that. I’ll clean it.”
He looked at me. “I’d better go, if there was nothing else you needed to tell me?”
I shook my head. “No, that was it.”
Calvin stepped down and nodded. “I’ll be in touch.”
I was surprised. “Will you?”
He looked to be contemplating his own choice of words. “I’m sure you’ll worm your way into my case again.”
“Gee, thanks.”
That made him laugh, and without another word, Calvin turned to walk out of the shop.
THE RESTof the day at the Emporium was comfortably busy. I didn’t have time to dwell on Neil, which was a relief. What spare time I did have was dedicated to eating my sushi lunch, brought to me by a very well-tipped delivery boy, and fixating on Calvin’s cases.
Or I should say, case.
Because my little fiasco was a closed book. Nothing more than a prank. Right?
And yet, two antique shops in the same week had experienced an event very reminiscent of Poe, and one had ended with a fatality. What if I had caught the individual in my shop planting the heart? Would I have been cut up and put under the floor, just like in “Tell-Tale”?
Yeah. I wasn’t obsessing over this.
I popped a tuna roll into my mouth while endorsing a few checks that had been delivered by mail. I needed to stop at the bank on the way home. I should buy some food too.
I could ask Neil—
No. I wasn’t going to think about him, about our relationship that he had essentially crumpled into a ball and thrown in the trash last night. He hadn’t called, texted, hadn’t done anything to indicate he was sorry. AndIcertainly wasn’t apologizing. I had nothing to apologize for.
“The Black Cat” isn’t one of Poe’s terribly common stories, I thought instead, while refusing to acknowledge I was directing my thoughts of Neil to an equally unhealthy topic.
“Max?” I called from my office. I looked out the open door at the register, where he was wrapping a small trinket in tissue paper for a customer. “What do you think of when I say Edgar Allan Poe?”
“‘The Raven,’” Max offered. He handed over the sale to the older woman, flashing one of his killer smiles and thanking her for her business before warning her to be safe on the slippery sidewalk.
Kind of obvious, but I guess Max had a point. If there was one work that Poe was known for above all else, it was probably “The Raven.” It gave me an idea, and I turned to power the desktop computer on.
The welcome screen’s brightness levels had been readjusted. I swore, typing the password in and immediately lowering the settings. “Set the levels on the computer back to normal when you’re done,” I called to Max.
“Sorry! You know, they technicallyareset at normal,” he teased. Max poked his head in. “Sorry,” he added again.
I waved him away and resumed eating sushi while scanning recent newspaper headlines. Nothing jumped out as unordinary, but then again, it took quite a bit to rattle the nerves of a native New Yorker. I took a different approach and checked out the NYPD’s crime statistics for the end of the year.
Overall crime was down 20 percent from the same time the year before. Well, that was good news, I supposed. Ah, but there’s always an asterisk to these comments. Murder was up. An interactive map told me just where in particular too.
