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“It wasn’t that,” Cassie snapped, her words sharp with irritation. “He was just a nice man. Don’t make it something it wasn’t.”
The young cop nodded an approximation of an apology but made no attempt to hide the loaded glance he then threw at his colleague. He walked to the door to hold it open for the EMTs.
“Here we go,” the older cop said, pulling out Mr. Webber’s driver’s license. “Apartment four, 300 East Ninety-Fourth Street. Nice neighborhood.” He returned the driver’s license to the wallet and folded the wallet shut. “We’ll let you know if we need any more information,” he said to Cassie. “But call us if you think of anything.” He handed her an NYPD business card with a phone number on it.
“Like what?” Cassie asked.
The cop shrugged loosely. “Just anything we need to know.”
Cassie nodded as if this were a good answer even though it wasn’t. “What about his family?”
“We’ll deal with that,” the older cop said.
“If he has any,” the younger cop added, waiting by the door. He wanted to go, Cassie saw; this was boring for him, and she hated him for it. Mr. Webber deserved better. Everyone deserved better.
“You gonna be all right, miss?” the older cop asked her. Everything about the man seemed tired, but he was still doing his job, and doing it better than his younger partner.
“Yeah,” Cassie said, frowning in annoyance. “Of course.”
He watched her for a moment.
“Hey, sometimes people just die,” he said, trying his best to say something consoling. “That’s just the way of it.”
Cassie nodded. She knew. Sometimes people just died.
Cassie stood at the front of the shop and watched them go, the ambulance first and then the cop car. Her own reflection was a ghost in the window—the tall, awkward girl dressed in thrift shop clothes: an old woolen crewneck sweater, and blue jeans that were almost worn through at the knees.
“Goodbye, Mr. Webber,” she said, absently pulling the sleeves of her sweater up to her elbows.
She told herself not to be sad—Mr. Webber had been old, and he had died peacefully and swiftly, it seemed, in a place that gave him joy—but her sadness was stubborn, a constant bass note rumbling in the background of her thoughts.
She picked up the phone and called Mrs. Kellner at home.
“Dead?” Mrs. Kellner said, when Cassie told her what had happened. The word was a bullet from a gun, a short, sharp bang.
Cassie waited, and she heard a long, tired sigh.
“Poor Mr. Webber,” Mrs. Kellner said, and Cassie could hear her shaking her head. “But there are worse ways to go. Certainly Mr. Webber would think so. How are you, Cassie?”
The question surprised Cassie, as it always did when someone inquired about how she was doing.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she lied, brushing it off. “Just shocked, I guess.”
“Mmm, well. It comes to us all, and Mr. Webber was a good age. It’s sad, but no reason to be depressed, you hear?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Cassie said, enjoying Mrs. Kellner’s robustly given kind advice.
“You lock up now and get on home. It’s a blizzard out there and I don’t want you getting hypothermia. That’s an instruction not a request.”
Cassie said good night to Mrs. Kellner and got to work tidying up, wondering how well the Kellners had known Mr. Webber. They seemed to know most people who came into the store regularly. Not that Mr. Kellner knew much of anything anymore, dementia having stolen his memories from him a few years ago. Cassie’s mind wandered, trying to remember when Mr. Kellner had last been in the store. It had been years, she was sure. Now Mrs. Kellner barely spoke about her husband at all.
When Cassie swept the floor around the coffee tables, around Mr. Webber’s seat, she saw his copy ofThe Count of Monte Cristostill lying on the table by the half-empty coffee cup. The sight of the book hit her like a punch in the gut, as if Mr. Webber had been taken away without his most prized possession. Then she saw another book next to it, a smaller book with a brown leather cover, faded and cracked like weathered paint on a door. Cassie hadn’t noticed the book earlier, not when Mr. Webber had arrived, not during all the activity with the EMTs and the cops. Had she just overlooked it?
She cradled the broom against her shoulder and picked up the book. It felt oddly light, as if it was more insubstantial than it should have been. The leather spine creaked pleasantly as she opened it. The pages were thick and coarse, and covered in what looked like scribbled text in dark ink, but in a language and script that Cassie didn’t recognize. As Cassie flicked through the book, she saw that there were sketched images and doodles as well, some dotted around the text, others taking up whole pages. It looked like a journal of some kind, a place where someone had collected their thoughts over many years, but chaotically so. The textdidn’t run in a single direction; it was up and down and cutting through and curling around images.
On the very first page of the book Cassie saw a few lines, written in the same handwriting as the text on every other page, but in English:
This is the Book of Doors.
