[Carelessness, Wishes, Innocently, Smooth, Pale]

  I had just sat down to start reading more of the Fellowship. When I heard the woman shouting at Lucy.

  “UNACEPTABLE!”

  “Ma’am, that’s this store’s policy.”

  “UNACEPTABLE!”

  I headed for the counter as quickly as possible. A large well dressed woman was shouting at Lucy.

  “Lucy, what seems to be the trouble here.”

  “THIS YOUNG HEATHEN REFUSES TO SELL ME A BIBLE.”

  “Ma’am I’m sorry if you are hard of hearing but please lower your voice, there is no need to shout as both Lucy and I have excellent hearing, although I must say I do believe that hers is a touch better than mine.”

  “I DEMAND TO SEE THE OWNER!”

  “I’m the owner, but if you won’t lower your voice, I’ll ask you to leave.”

  “I’LL LEAVE WHEN I WISH TOO.”

  “Lucy call the police, tell them we have a trespasser on the premises and they refuse to leave.” I turned back to the woman. “Ma’am you have about five minutes before the police arrive, if you are still in my store when they arrive. I will press charges, maybe you’ll listen when the judge tells you to lower your voice.”

  “WELL I NEVER.”

  “Of course you haven’t, entitled people never have.”

  She turned on her heel and stamped out of the store.

  “Okay, their young heathen. First off, wear that moniker with pride. Next, what exactly was the hearing impaired ladies' problem?”

  “She wanted a bible sent here to the store instead of directly to her home. I explained that it is against store policy, I also pointed out that we sell bibles but make zero money on the sale. That’s when she started yelling. First we were unamerican, then that we were censoring her right to free speech and freedom of religion. That’s when she started to get really loud.”

  “Well if she comes back, just take her picture and tell her she is banned from the store by the owner, and call the police. Let them deal with her. Unless she apologizes before you get a chance to ban her, then just use your discretion, I won’t have my precious intern abused by the general public, that’s my job.”

  “Very funny, but do you mean it, I can ban people from the store.”

  “Certainly, in fact it’s required when they are shouting in the store, won’t quiet down and are disturbing the owner while she’s trying to read. Why don’t you load these books in my car and take them down to the post office before they close for the day. If we get any more orders from the Rabbit Hole, they’ll have to ship out tomorrow.”

  “You’ll let me drive your car?”

  “Sure, wait Lucy, you haven’t any marks on your license that I should know about have you?”

  “Zero marks on a license.”

  “Alright fine then pull it around back to the stock room and I’ll help you load it up.”

  “Alright, but I have to be honest.”

  “That’s usually a good policy, unless you think I'm getting fat, or you don’t like the way I style my hair. Otherwise honesty is the best policy. Lay it on me.”

  “Lay it on me?”

  “Yeah, hippy speak, for tell me what you have to be honest about.”

  “Oh right, I don’t have any marks on my license because I don’t have a license.”

  “Oh, Tolkien, would love you Lucy, I wish I didn’t have one either. Tolkien absolutely loathed cars, you have to read his new book, The Bovadium Fragments. But that aside, alas I’ll have to go to the post office myself. You start bringing these boxes to the stockroom and I’ll pull the car around. We have to hire someone to handle all this shipping. I’ll meet you around the back.”

  I was only gone for thirty minutes but I arrived to a scene of chaos when I did return. Two cop cars with lights flashing, blocking my parking space. The one with the sign, no parking allowed. Apparently, the police did not need to obey the law. But I hurried inside because it dawned on me that something might have happened to Lucy.

  Inside, there were shouts and confusion. Three cops stood there with pads out, noting I can only imagine what was being said.

  “Officer, I’m the owner of the store, could you please tell me what is going on?”

  “This woman.” He pointed at the large well dressed woman. “Claims that your clerk tried to bodily remove her from the store. Injuring her in the process.” He pointed at Lucy.

  “I see, and what does Lucy have to say about it?”

  “She says that this woman was banned from your store, that she told her that and when the woman refused to leave she called us.”

  “And who did call you?”

  “They both did.”

  “Alright, who called you first?”

  “Your clerk did.”

  “When you arrived did you see my clerk, place her hands on this woman who outweighs her by at least one hundred pounds?”

  “No, we did not.”

  “In that case please arrest this woman for trespass, I myself asked her to leave my store, when she wouldn’t stop shouting and berating my clerk. A little more than an hour ago. She left but apparently came back while I was gone.”

  “If we arrest the woman, I’m afraid that we’ll have to also arrest your clerk.”

  “Before you do that officer, I suggest you call Chief Hammarfors. I would hate for you to make a serious mistake, and be reprimanded by your boss. As you have no evidence nor a witness that my tiny clerk laid a hand on that brute of a woman, yet you have the undeniable evidence right in front of you, that the woman is trespassing in my store. Please just get her out of here.”

  I don’t think that he liked my suggestion that he call his boss. But it seemed that this cop might not like taking advice from a citizen, but at least appeared to consider said advice.

  “She’s Brother Benoit’s wife.”

  “I don’t really care if she is the pope, officer. I want her out of my store and I want her to stay out of my store. If you don’t want to call the chief, I’ll be happy to call him. I’ll also be marching my clerk down to the police station so that we can get an order of protection against that woman.”

  At this juncture Amy came down the stairs.

  “Laura, what’s going on? Oh hi Sammy, how are you? Is everything okay?”

  I decided my wisest course of action was to let Amy talk to Sammy, as they obviously knew each other. So I kept my mouth shut. It’s not what you know, it's who you know.

  “Hi Amy, we miss you in dispatch. That new guy has to look up everything in a binder you gave him.”

  “Ahh, give him a chance Sammy, it’s only his second day. I didn’t know what I was doing on my second day either. Besides I’m so glad I retired, I work here now, now what’s going on?”

  “Your clerk called us on a trespassing complaint, but Brother Kai’s wife claims the clerk assaulted her.”

  I couldn’t stop myself. “Well she did come here for a bible so she must not know about the ninth commandment." I had said to myself to butt out, but I just couldn’t resist. I was surprised when the cop actually smiled. He must know his commandants.

  He turned back to me. “Do you really want her arrested ma’am?”

  “I want her out of here, and if she promises you, that she’ll never come back. Don’t bother arresting her, just make it clear that this is a one time, get out of jail free card. But I don’t like that she lied about Lucy. Please make note the size of the woman, versus the size of my clerk. Also the one who’s doing all the shouting and the calm responsible clerk. Who as you pointed out called you first. Also you can point out to her that a bookstore is not required to stock bibles.”

  “Yes ma’am, thank you ma’am, it was great seeing you Amy. I hope you enjoy your new job.”

  “Thanks Sammy, I actually love it already. Give that new lad a chance Sammy. I’m sure he’ll be doing great, in just a few weeks once he gets his confidence.”

  “I will Amy.”

  With that they all left.

  “Thanks, Amy, you really defused that situation and you intern are you alright?”

  “Yes, I’m fine. That lady came back yelling that she wanted to talk to the owner. I told her you were gone but she didn’t believe me.”

  “No, liars never believe other people, because they lied themselves so they expect others to do it to them.”

  “Your welcome, Sammy’s a good boy. I knew he’d do the right thing, but I have to get back upstairs before I burn our supper.”

  I remembered that I’d promised Amy, I’d call Willow.

  “Lucy, if I want to talk to a clerk at the Rabbit Hole, I just push the b key right?”

  “Yep, that’s it, just give them a second and you can video chat. I’ll start a sweep through the store, to tidy up before the book club gets here.”

  So I tapped the b key a couple of times and waited. Suddenly a pretty young girl filled the screen.

  “Hi, I’m Laura, I own ‘Genres’ are you Willow?”

  “Yes, it’s nice to finally meet you Laura, what can I do for you and is Lucy alright?”

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  “Yes, thanks Lucy is fine, but how did you know?”

  “We were chatting when that horrible woman came in and threatened Lucy.”

  “Threatened her?”

  “Yes, she said that if Lucy didn’t get the owner this instant, she’d squash her like a bug. That’s when Lucy asked her to leave, she refused and Lucy called the police. I heard the police arrive, then I had to wait on a customer. Who I just got rid of, so I was going to call Lucy back to make sure that she was ok.”

  “Would you mind typing that up and emailing it to me, the woman accused Lucy of assault.”

  “I’ll do that, but I can do even better, when I heard the woman come in yelling I hit the record button. I can send you the video, it proves that Lucy never moved from behind the counter, it shows her calling the police and you can hear the other woman call the police and say that a clerk just attacked her in ‘Genres’.”

  “Willow, I know that we just met, but let me tell you that I love you. In a completely non-sexual way, I just don’t want you getting the wrong idea.”

  She laughed, “Now, I know why Lucy said she loves working at your store. Bianca said it’d be good for sales, and it has been, but it’s also fun. Lucy said you are all like hippies, plucked out to time. Well Woodstock, we take our hippies seriously so I’d love to meet you in person Laura if you can get down here some time. I’m not hitting on you, nothing sexual, just saying.”

  I laughed, “Yes, that’s actually why I was calling you. My best friend just retired and she wanted to go to a Renaissance Festival your town is hosting in a few weeks, she also mentioned you might have a room we could crash in.”

  “I do indeed have a room and you're welcome to ‘crash’ here anytime. I’ll pencil you in. I’ll email you the video and copies of the call logs for time stamps, just check with Ezra if you need help with any of it.”

  “Thank you Willow, I really mean it, you are a life saver in more ways than one. Before I go, just my condolences for your loss, I was very sorry to hear it. But you are one very impressive young lady.”

  “Thank’s Laura, I hope we talk again soon, and I look forward to meeting you in person in a few weeks.”

  Luke and Lis came in and headed over to the reading nook, just as Amelie was coming down the stairs for the Fantasy Book Club. I was so tied up in Lachlan’s case I missed their topic for this week. I called Lis, because I wanted to speak to her in private. I also went over and locked the door and put the closed sign up.

  “What’s up Laura?”

  “Lis I was just wondering if you would consider working here after school, maybe a couple of hours a day?”

  “What would I be doing Laura?”

  “Well we now have a sister store down in Woodstock. They only sell non-fiction, so if their customers want fiction we ship it directly to the customer. They do the same for us for non-fiction books. So you’d pull books off the shelf, pack them and seal them up with a mailing label. Do you have a drivers license?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “Great, then after the books are all packed you just drive to the post office and ship them out.”

  “Would I get a discount on books?”

  “How funny you should ask, how about ten percent above cost? But just for you, you can’t buy all of your friends' books as well.”

  “Great, when do I start?”

  “Is tomorrow too soon?”

  “No, tomorrow will be perfect. Are you joining bookclub tonight, because Luke and I have a proposal for you.”

  “Yes and your co-worker Lucy will be there as well.”

  “Cool, we know each other from school.”

  Lis and I went over to the reading nook, Lucy came into the nook just as we arrived.

  I introduced Lucy to Luke and Amelie and took my seat. Luke looked at Lis expectantly before he stood up.

  “Laura, Lis and I had a great idea for your store, that will increase high dollar sales. Make the fantasy book club super happy and bring more customers into your store. Now we know this is a fiction only bookstore but we have a genre that fits firmly on the line. On the one hand it’s fiction and on the other it’s also non-fiction.”

  “Okay, Luke, you’ve got me hooked, I’m interested.”

  “Good that’s what I was going for.”

  “Once you have the fish hooked Luke, you are supposed to reel them in.”

  “Yes, right of course. We’d like you to stock table top role playing games. Probably seventy five percent are fantasy, and then science fiction, spy thriller, horror, mystery they cover just about every genre. Some people buy them to play them. Some just read them about world building, character creation, settings, histories. They can be played in groups or solo, no one in Placid or Saranac sells them, occasionally the used bookstore in Saranac will get in the odd book, but they sell out as soon as they arrive. What do you say?”

  “If our sister store doesn’t already sell them, I’ll think about getting a small selection, but I would guess that they probably already sell them, so I won’t step on their toes. We have an agreement, they handle all the non-fiction and we handle the fiction. If they don’t already stock them, like I said, I’ll start with a small selection.”

  “Laura, I want one of those Mythic Gamemaster Emulators like we were talking about at the last bookclub you were at.”

  “Amelie, you want the second edition of that book, it’s been expanded with lots of great new content and it still only retails for fourteen ninety five.” Luke said

  “Thank’s Luke, Laura, I want the second edition.”

  “Got ya, I’ll check with Willow, tomorrow.”

  Lis stood up and said “Alright, with that out of the way, we’ll start talking about "Sweet Silver Blues" the first book in the ‘Garrett, P.I.’ series by Glen Cook. Since we have two, people here who haven’t read it. Let’s keep it spoiler free and just talk about what you learn in the first couple of chapters.”

  I usually keep quiet during book club, but I just couldn’t. I was intrigued and would read the book, because I love the source.

  “Amelie, this is a total homage, right? Or outright theft?”

  “Defintely an homage, Laura?”

  “Of what Laura?” Lucy asked.

  “Probably my favorite detective team of all time. Nero Wolfe, a very fat man, who almost never leaves his home. But he is a genius detective. Since Nero never leaves the house, you have the smart aleck Archie Goodwin act as the narrator and partner. That’s Garrett to the Deadman. I’ve read every one of the Nero Wolfe books but somehow I missed out on this series.”

  Now I had another series to read after I finished my Lord of the Rings, re-read. I was happy the store wasn’t going under. But I got a lot more read, when it was just me ignoring the customers until they practically begged me to check them out. But with two employees now. Maybe I’d be able to get back to reading. The entire point of owning a bookstore.

  “Okay, Lucy as the new member, you pick the book for next week’s read, as long as it isn’t one that we just read recently.”

  “How about a brand new one by JRR Tolkien, “The Bovadium Fragments”. Laura said it was fantasy satire at its best.”

  That was it, I let Luke and Lis out. Lis saying she’d see me tomorrow at three. Anais was precisely on time, Amy was just coming down the stairs from the second floor.

  “Let me guess, you need to get your coat?”

  “Exactly, I’ll be right down, the bookclub just ended.”

  “Yes, I saw them, a dangerous looking pair of high school students, you couldn’t possibly risk your twenty year old coat next to them two. They’d have knocked you out and stolen the coat.”

  Lucy yelled goodnight as she let herself out the front door. I ran up and grabbed my coat. Amy, Anais and I were headed to the Brew House to celebrate. Once we arrived, I filled a drinks card, Amy went for quarters for the video games and Anais went up to Hazel and ordered appetizers for us all to go with the beer.

  “We had the police come to the store this afternoon, " I told Laura earlier, "we should all try to solve another mystery now that I’m retired. Don’t you think with that eidetic memory she was made for it, Anais. It’s not fair that you two got to do it together, and I was busy training my replacement.”

  “Cheers to Amy, for retiring, moving and donating her house.”

  “Don’t either of you think that I’m going to donate my house and move in. I need to be independent, plus your total lack of structure would drive me just mad. Why were the cops at the store, were they still mad about the essay you threatened to send to the gazette?”

  “No, a crazy religious woman was shouting in the store. I asked her to leave, she wouldn’t until I threatened to call the cops. But while I went to the post office, she came back and started screaming again. I told Lucy if she came back and she didn’t apologize first off to ban her from the store and call the cops. Which Lucy did, but get this, the woman calls the cops herself and says that Lucy assaulted her.”

  “Did she?”

  “Did she what?”

  Did Lucy assault her?”

  “Of course not, Lucy would never do that.”

  “She did try to shoplift from you, Laura.”

  “Anais, will you stop saying that?”

  “That sweet little girl tried to steal from you, Laura, why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Amy, she didn’t shoplift.”

  “No, because you caught her.”

  “Anais, stop it. Amy, she wanted to read a book but was too embarrassed to buy it, so because some religious nut had it removed from the high school library, she was going to borrow it and bring it back after she read it.” I glared at Anais, daring her to say another word.

  “So what happened with the cops?”

  “It turns out that Amy knew the cop, and he escorted her off of the premises.”

  “So you lost a sale, because you refused to stock the bible.”

  “Lucy offered to sell it to her at cost and have it shipped to her home. But the woman refused and wanted to be shipped to the store. Which Lucy refused to do then the woman started yelling, that’s when I had to get involved.”

  “You smoothed it right over I bet.”

  “No I told her neither Lucy or I were deaf and if she didn’t lower her voice I’d ask her to leave.”

  “If you just stocked the book, you could make money and avoid trouble.”

  “Look it’s my store, I get to choose what I stock, when they take out the gay slurs and the thy shalt not suffer a witch to live bits, maybe, just maybe I’d change my mind. But if it was in my store, it’d be in the fantasy section, on the bottom shelf. That’d set off another round of arguments. You can just bet. I also refuse to allow my bias against it, make me into a censor or a book burner, so even though I think it is a horrendous book, I will order it and have it, drop shipped for them at cost.”

  “So the cops escorted her out and that was the end of it?”

  “No wait till you hear this, I called up Willow, the owner of our sister bookstore, The Rabbit Hole. Because Amy wants the three of us to go to Woodstock in a few weeks, for the Woodstock Renaissance Festival. We have a free room at their writers collective, we might have to sleep on cots, but beggars can’t be choosers. We can walk to the festival from our room and we can meet this kid, who runs the bookstore and the collective down there. She was only sixteen when her dad died, but she took over right away, running both. Plus she set up the video link between stores on her own. I think she’s some kind of polymath genius. Her and Lucy were chatting over the video link when the woman came back screaming again. So Willow knows trouble when she hears it. She hits the record button on the video chat. Lucy is kind of frozen in place in the video and you can hear the woman tell the police that Lucy just assaulted her. When clearly Lucy is just standing there, not assaulting anyone. I have the video, call logs, Willow even ran the video through an A I to get a transcript of exactly what was said.”

  Then because it was Amy’s retirement party we went into the video game room and Amy beat the pants off of Anais and I. When we ran out of both quarters and beers we headed for home.

  “Anais, are you sure you don’t want to donate your house and move into the collective? We could do fun stuff like this every night.” I winked at Amy, and she giggled.

  “I do not, and never will, live in this chaotic house. Never ever.”

  “Well, it’s your loss, Amy is the best baker ever. I could have eaten half a dozen of her cinnamon rolls this morning.”

  We said good night at the bookstore door, Anais, heading home. Amy wanted to look at her room, which I had painted for her just late this morning. But we walked down, all the furniture still piled in the hall. I could still smell the new paint even with the door shut. I opened the door and the paint job was all I could have asked for. The wall that the headboard went against was painted a deep dark blue, then clockwise each wall was a lighter shade of blue, until the wall at nine o'clock was sky blue. Just like Amy had asked for. Her eyes glistened with tears.

  “It’s perfect.”