Paper Cuts, page 13
“Wait!” Kirk rounded on Val. “I’m going to show her the books, but you should go upstairs. Check on Tucker. He could use the company.”
Val began loading the teacups onto the tray. The porcelain clinked in protest as her hands shook. “My whole life has been about your family. Just once, it would be nice if someone cared about what I want!”
As Val stormed out of the room, Kirk closed his eyes. He was the picture of misery. And though Nora felt sorry for him, she was more than ready to leave.
“I apologize for my wife’s behavior, and I’ll be calling the sheriff tonight. You have no reason to help us after this, and I wouldn’t ask if not for Tucker. You see, Lawrence’s mom left Tucker her book collection.”
Nora frowned. “Go on.”
“Kelly wanted to make peace with you. She hoped that, over time, you two would be friendly enough that she could ask you to sell the collection on Tucker’s behalf. She believed you’d get top dollar for the books, and the money would go toward Tucker’s college fund. We’re not wealthy people, Val and me. We’ll do our best by the boy, but he’s going to need more than we’ve got.”
“What about child support?”
“Lawrence will pay right up to the day Tucker turns eighteen. After that, he’s out. He made that crystal clear.”
What kind of monster has he become?
Nora remembered the look of pride she’d seen on her husband’s face the night he’d stood in Kelly’s doorway. He’d seemed larger than life then—a man protecting his lover and unborn child from his deranged wife.
“Isn’t he part of Tucker’s life?”
Lowering his voice, Kirk replied, “No, he isn’t. Tucker isn’t the son Lawrence wanted. He wanted a boy who played football and soccer. Who’d go fishing and join the Scouts. He rejected Tucker long before the Asperger’s diagnosis. Called him backward and weird. Said he acted retarded. His own kid. He wouldn’t pay child support without getting a paternity test first. Lawrence said he’d make the payments but wanted nothing to do with a kid he was ashamed to have fathered.”
Nora was aghast.
Kirk’s eyes pleaded with her. “Tucker’s a great kid, and I promised Kelly I’d look after him. So, can I show you the books?”
“Yes.”
Kirk led her to a small room at the back of the house that was part office, part craft area. A desk and two file cabinets took up half of the space. The rest was devoted to a bookcase filled with board games, puzzles, sewing materials, and painting supplies. There were also two card tables. One held a jigsaw puzzle. The second was covered in plastic bins.
“Tucker was very close to Grandma Virginia. He called her Meemaw, and she called him Sparky. Did you know Virginia well?”
“Sadly, no. Lawrence never asked his parents to visit, and they rarely spoke on the phone. He told me they had a falling-out because he didn’t want to go into the family business. They came to the wedding, and I thought they seemed like a nice couple, but I saw them only a few times after that.”
Kirk put a hand on one of the plastic bins. “They were good people, and they both loved Tucker. They made provisions for him in their wills, but Lawrence gained control over his mother’s assets before anyone realized she had dementia, and he made big changes. Lawrence’s brother took him to court over the whole thing but lost. Those two were too busy fighting over money to pay attention to the collection Meemaw left Tucker. I don’t know what this stuff’s worth, but I promised Kelly that I’d do whatever I could to see that Tucker got a college degree and a savings account.”
Nora eyed the tubs with a mixture of excitement and apprehension. By the time Tucker finished high school, a college education would probably cost well over $200,000. Did these boxes contain books valuable enough to cover the expense? She doubted it.
“Is there a catalog of the collection?” she asked.
Kirk gave her a blank look. “Is that the same thing as a list of contents?”
“Yes.”
“There is.” He turned to his desk and grabbed the folder sitting on the blotter. “Since it’s getting late and you’ve worked all day, you could just take this home if you’d like. I realize I’m asking an awful lot of you, considering what you’ve been through in the past few days. But if you’d look this over and tell me what you think, I’d be mighty grateful.”
Nora accepted the proffered folder. “I will, but I don’t want you to get your hopes up. For these to contain books of substantial value, they’d have to be very rare and very desirable books. I don’t come across books like that very often. I’m not trying to bring you down, but it’s better to have realistic expectations.”
“My dad used to say that a lie could be halfway around the world before the truth got its boots on. You can be straight with me. I might not like the answer, but I’ll appreciate it.”
Maybe, thought Nora.
She’d been on countless house calls where she’d patiently explained why someone’s book collection wasn’t worth a small fortune. Perfectly reasonable adults had burst into tears or raged at her after learning that their literary treasures weren’t coveted by the rest of the world.
If there’s nothing good in those boxes, Val will have another reason to be mad at me.
Still, Nora wanted to help Tucker. If it took a whole village to raise a child, then Tucker’s village was on the small side. He had his aunt and uncle, but they were grieving. Grieving families needed support. Did the Walshes have friends or relatives to lean on?
“Do you have kids?” she asked as Kirk walked her to the door.
“Just Tucker. From the day he was born, he’s been partly mine and Val’s. I’m the closest thing to a father he’s ever known, and between Kelly and Val, he’s had two moms.”
Glancing at the staircase, Nora imagined Tucker in his room, quietly folding butterflies. She said goodnight to Kirk and left.
* * *
At home, she opened a fresh pint of Chocolate Therapy ice cream and grabbed a spoon from the drying rack. She carried the ice cream to the table and powered up her laptop. Then she opened the folder and began to read.
She was immediately impressed by the neatness of the enclosed list. Each entry contained the title and author, publication date, edition, overall condition, and original purchase price. An asterisk indicated that the sales receipt was stored in a separate folder.
The list dispelled some of Nora’s pessimism. This level of detail and organization indicated that Virginia had a serious collection. Her hunch was confirmed when she reached the fourth item on the list.
“A signed first edition of Evelyn Waugh’s Love Among the Ruins. Originally purchased for 725 dollars.” Nora tapped the spoon against her lips. “Wonder what it’s going for these days?”
Nora used three sites to look up book values: Abe Books, LiveAuctioneers, and WorthPoint. After finding the Waugh edition on all three sites, Nora felt a rush of adrenaline.
She punched numbers into her phone’s calculator app and smiled. “Sells for an average of fifteen hundred. Not bad.”
After reloading her spoon with ice cream, Nora moved to the next item on the list. The leather-bound edition of The Love Affairs of Lord Byron was heavily illustrated and included a portrait of the poet on the front cover. Virginia had spent a cool thousand on the book.
“Was she a big Byron fan? Because I bet she overpaid,” Nora murmured as her fingers raced over the keyboard. “Yeah, it’s leatherbound. But it’s from 1910. There are older, finer, leather-bound Byrons and—whoa!”
A search result informed her that the same book had just sold at auction for nearly $7000.
“Nice one, Virginia.”
Nora kept shoveling ice cream into her mouth without really tasting it. Her body was on autopilot while her brain fixated on titles and dollar signs.
She took a brief break to fetch a pen and notepad, and after jotting down the current market value of ten books, she added them up and whistled.
“Twenty grand.”
The first page of the twelve-page list was made of classic English literature, but the first item on the second page was Ian Fleming’s From Russia, with Love. When Nora read the description, she almost choked on a piece of chocolate cookie.
She put the ice cream back in the freezer and returned to the table with a glass of water. After rereading the description, she shook her head in amazement.
“A limited edition signed by Ian Fleming. She paid seven grand in the ’80s. Now it’s worth . . .”
It had been two years since a similar book had sold online. A signed first edition of Fleming’s You Only Live Twice had realized $25,000 at a London auction house, but Nora believed Virginia’s book was worth even more because her book was a first edition, first impression, presentation copy. The edition of You Only Live Twice was second state, which meant a small change had been made to the original printing. A single correction or a slight alteration in the book cover kept it from being labeled as a true original.
“Virginia’s Fleming could be worth $30,000,” Nora whispered.
She considered the rare and collectible books on display at Miracle Books. Her most expensive titles cost a few hundred dollars, and the books tended to move slowly. She sold the majority of her signed and first editions to online buyers, and she was a small fish in the world of rare book dealers.
I’m not the person for this job, she thought.
Virginia’s books had to bring top dollar, which meant her collection should be sold by a reputable and experienced book dealer or auction house. Putting the collection into the right hands was key. Nora needed to recommend a business with a large reach and generous advertising budget. A reasonable commission fee was also a must. The profits from this sale would likely be used for more than Tucker’s college education. With Kelly gone, Kirk and Val were now responsible for his welfare. They’d receive child support payments for another eight years, but Nora had no idea if those would cover all of Tucker’s expenses.
Having finished her water, Nora switched to wine and continued to peruse the inventory list. Usually, collectors stuck to a certain genre, author, or time period, but Virginia’s books ran the gamut from classic lit to contemporary romance. There were novels, plays, poetry, and a handful of children’s books.
Nora was about to look up the value of Hugh Leonard’s play Love in the Title, when she suddenly barked out a laugh. The theme of the collection was staring her right in the face.
“Love, love, love,” the Beatles sang in Nora’s head.
Scanning the titles on the third page, she saw Anthony Trollope’s An Old Man’s Love, Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Toni Morrison’s Love, Stephen King’s The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, and more.
If the condition reports on the list were accurate, the collection could possibly sell for $200,000 or more.
Nora pictured the little room in the back of Kirk and Val’s house. She saw the tidy desk, the incomplete jigsaw puzzle, and tableful of plastic bins. She thought of the strange woman showing up at their house. The woman with the helmet and the shoulder-length hair.
Are the books safe?
Suddenly agitated, Nora walked into her kitchen. She took out a dishrag and a bottle of Windex and began to clean the counter. It wasn’t the least bit dirty, but she needed to move while processing her thoughts.
Someone had talked to Kelly the night of her murder. What if that person knew about the books? They were worth a lot of money. Had Kelly been killed because of them?
Nora picked up her phone. She couldn’t call McCabe, but she could call Deputy Jasper Andrews.
I hope he’s with Hester.
“He’s out on patrol,” Hester said when Nora explained why she was looking for him. “Try his cell. I just talked to him a few minutes ago and nothing’s going on, so he’ll be glad to hear from you. Don’t tell him I said this, but he doesn’t think you had anything to do with Kelly’s death.”
“Thanks, Hester. See you in the morning.”
Andrews answered his phone with a professional detachment that he immediately dropped after listening to what Nora had to say.
“I’m off duty in an hour, but I’ll put in a request for the next patrol to keep an eye on the house. Have you told the sheriff?”
“I thought it would be better to leave that to you.”
After promising to relay the information, Andrews ended the call.
Abandoning her cleaning, Nora got a refill on wine and carried her glass and the inventory list to the sofa. As she sipped, she wondered how many people knew about Virginia’s collection.
Did she leave it to Tucker in her will?
Hopefully, Kirk had the necessary legal documents. One set to prove that the books belonged to Tucker and another showing that he had the right to sell the collection on Tucker’s behalf.
Nora uncapped her pen and wrote a short to-do list.
1. Examine the books
2. Advise Kirk about legal docs
3. Is the collection safe? Do they have a security system? If not, does Tea Flowers?
4. Who knew about Virginia’s collection?
The high, jarring shriek of an owl broke her concentration. She put the pen down and carried her wineglass outside to the deck.
Moonlight leaked through the trees and oozed over the grassy slope behind her house. The owl screamed again—a primeval call of hunger that echoed through the silent night.
As Nora’s gaze swept over the shadows amassing in the woods and down by the railroad tracks, she thought about the mysterious woman Val had seen on her back lawn.
Nora was suddenly struck by a thought.
What if there was no woman?
Val was angry. She admitted that she’d been mad at Nora for years. She hated Lawrence, and Nora had a feeling that she resented Kelly and Tucker too. She’d wanted a different life from the one she’d been leading—a life that seemed to revolve around Kirk’s sister and her child.
“Was she the woman who’d argued with Kelly? The best lies are close versions of the truth.”
Nora turned over several theories in her head but knew too little about Val to come up with a concrete idea.
Val was hiding something; she was sure of it. Maybe she’d pointed the finger at Nora to keep her away from Virginia’s book collection. Maybe she had her own plans for it.
Whatever her secrets, Nora was confident that McCabe and his team would ferret them out. She’d done her part by reporting her findings. The rest was in the hands of the professionals.
It was too cool to linger outside, so Nora stretched out on the sofa and lost herself in her current read.
By the time she climbed into bed, the moon had risen to its full height. It cast a river of light over her quilt and to the edge of her nightstand, where it set the origami lily pad aglow.
Nora picked up the flower and unfolded the petals to reveal the little bee. Its yellow body shone like a tiny star, but it made her sad.
This bee had no queen. He was alone in his hive of paper.
Chapter 10
To a true collector, the acquisition of an old book is its rebirth.
—Walter Benjamin
The next morning, Nora brewed coffee and called Kirk. An hour later, she was knocking on his front door.
“I just got off the phone with the sheriff. He asked me lots of questions about Virginia’s books. I assume you had something to do with that,” he said as he led Nora back to the office.
“I did. If the condition of those books matches the description on the inventory forms, then that collection is worth a pretty penny. If so, they need to be in a safe place.”
Kirk paused in the office doorway. “The woman Val saw in our yard—was she after the books?”
If there was anyone out there, Nora thought. Aloud, she said, “It’s something to consider.”
“I dunno. I can count the number of people who know about this collection on one hand, and none of them live within driving distance of Miracle Springs. Have you eaten breakfast?”
Nora had grabbed a banana on the way out the door, but when she saw a tray containing two steaming mugs of tea and a plate of golden-brown crumpets, she said, “I had a piece of fruit.”
“That won’t stick to your bones. Val’s been making these for the past two weeks to see if we should add them to the menu. Help yourself to butter, jam, and honey. The tea is Earl Grey.”
Kirk moved a pile of puzzle pieces aside and laid their plates in between sections of blue sky and flowering cherry trees.
“This is how Kelly liked to start her day. She’d wake up before the rest of us, make a cup of coffee, and come in here to work her puzzle. Sometimes, she’d listen to music or an audiobook. Other times, it was just her and her thoughts. I don’t know what to do with this now. I can’t put it away. But I don’t want to finish it either.”
“Does Tucker like puzzles?”
Kirk shook his head. “I know it sounds crazy, considering how many hours he can focus on origami, or LEGO, or drawing maps, but he doesn’t have the patience for this.”
Nora looked at the mound of flower pieces near her mug. “Maybe you could put in a piece a day. First thing in the morning. It could be your time with your sister.”
Kirk smiled. “I like that.”
“And I like this crumpet. Where’d you get the honey? It has such a unique taste.”
“It’s wildflower honey. Unlike processed honey, it has bee pollen and little bits of honeycomb. We buy our honey from a small company in Hendersonville. We’re going to start stocking their lotion, lip balm, and furniture polish. If you have the chance to walk around during the festival, they’ll have a booth outside Tea Flowers tomorrow.”
“You haven’t been here for a festival yet. You’re lucky if you can use the restroom, let alone go outside.”
Kirk’s eyes went wide. “Really? I guess Val will be baking more crumpets tonight.”
“You might want to have premade sandwiches ready to go too. Visitors will roll through like locusts. They’ll eat anything you’ve got, but they’ll leave your cash register stuffed.”
