Chapter 2
Half an hour later, Quinn arrived at the bookstore on his bike. He was still wearing his pajama bottoms and the impression of his pillow was clear across his cheek.
“You guys are going to owe me big time,” he said, “I wasn’t planning on getting up until lunch.”
“Jack’s going to owe you,” said Cable, who was waiting out front for him, “this was his idea.”
“What’s going on, anyway?” asked Quinn.
“Book buy,” said Cable.
“Anything interesting?” asked Quinn.
Cable shook his head. He pointed to Jack inside the bookstore, talking on the phone and jotting something down.
“He’s looking for adventure,” said Cable. “It was one of those people who stands on the threshold and shouts into the store. She’s got a house full of books, she says.”
“Hers?” asked Quinn. He locked his bike to the tree in front of the store.
Cable shrugged. “Doubt it.”
Quinn and Cable went into the store just as Jack was putting the phone back on the receiver. “So that was Patty Thomas, real estate agent,” he said, “Giving me directions to our next big purchase. Evidently the books belonged to a tenant who disappeared a few weeks ago, owing her money. She’s trying to get the house empty so she can re-rent it. Are you ready to go?”
“Why do I have to go, anyway?” asked Cable.
“You just do,” said Jack, “the story requires it.”
The Boys drove the old bookstore car, their uncle and aunt’s rusty old Honda Element, half an hour up the road to Glenshire Ridge. There, in a maze of bent streets, they found the realtor’s SUV parked in front of a small house. It was the smallest house on the block, the one wooden house amongst a flotilla of fiberglass and plastic pre-fab homes. The grass was high, but unlike most of the other houses, there was a mature garden in the front yard, with tomato cages, mounded rows of potato plants, and a trellis for beans. All of it was overgrown, but it had once been tended. A few fruit trees had been trained to grow in large planters, their branches strapped low for easy harvesting.
“Get a load of that scarecrow,” noted Jack, as they walked towards the front door. He pointed to a stuffed owl attached to the top of the bean trellis. Its wings were spread and its talons were bared, as if it were about to snatch a mouse off the top of the structure. “That ought to keep the rabbits away.”
It was incredibly lifelike. Cable crossed the overgrown lawn to look at it.
“I think these are real feathers,” he said, “I think it’s a real owl.”
“It’s too big,” said Jack.
Cable shrugged. “I’m just telling you what it looks like.” He reached up and touched it. “It is real. Or it was, anyway.”
“Wild,” said Jack.
They stepped up on the narrow front porch and rang the doorbell. A moment later Patty Thomas opened it for them. She was wearing bright yellow rubber gloves that went up to her elbows and a dust mask in addition to a slick black apron. The elastic straps from the dust mask parted her frizzed hair twice on each side of her head.
“Honestly, I don’t know how I’m ever going to get to the end of this,” she exclaimed. “I mean, have you ever seen so much stuff?”
The Boys followed her into the front room. It was a dining room, of sorts. Patty crossed the room, waving her hands at its contents in despair as she passed through it. The Boys slowed to look around. A large table with six chairs took up the center of the room. It was covered in file folders and rolled papers and yellow legal pads. Towers of magazines filled all but one of the chairs, stacked up as high as their slick covers would allow, then slumped over sideways. Along one wall were two old glass-front cabinets. They were mismatched and one of them blocked the window. Behind the dusty glass, the shelves were crammed with books and with boxes. On top of the cabinet a squirrel sat staring at them, still as a stone.
Jack jumped when he saw it, despite himself. Cable turned to see what he was looking it. The squirrel didn’t move. The long hairs on its tail twitched in an invisible breeze, but it remained entirely motionless. Jack took a step one way, then the other. The squirrel didn’t so much as turn its head. Jack approached the cabinet. The squirrel still didn’t budge. Jack reached up and poked it, then picked it up. It was stiff.
“Stuffed,” said Jack, holding it up and showing it to Cable.
Cable nodded. “Good thing,” he said, “you should have seen yourself. You looked like you thought it was going to attack you.”
“Whoa,” said Jack. He put the squirrel back on top of the cabinet and looked more closely inside. “There are more stuffed things in here. A frog. Beetles.”
“Can you stuff a frog?” asked Cable.
“I know,” said Patty, returning to the room and joining in their conversation as though she’d been a part of it all along, “I mean, I know. A frog? Right? So you’ve seen those books in there. Let me show you this in here.”
The Boys followed her into the next room, which should have been the living room, with a nice little fireplace built into the back wall. It was open on one side to a small kitchen. The whole space was filled with bookshelves and work tables. The kitchen counters had clearly not been used for food preparation in a long time. The magnetic strip for knives, on the wall above the sink, held pliers and small wrenches and bits of wire instead of kitchen utensils. A vise grip was bolted to the counter and the track light above was focused on the only open surface in the kitchen, right beside that clamp. A large magnifying glass was attached to a tripod, also focused down on that empty spot on the counter.
The work tables had been left in a state of complete disorganization. Books were stacked on top of one another, some open and some shut. Small hand tools and loose papers were mixed into the mess. Against the only wall with a window stood a small desk which was piled so high with stuff both on top of it and leaning up against it on either side, that it had been engulfed by the clutter entirely.
“Where is a person even supposed to begin?” continued Patty.
Jack and Cable looked around in amazement. There was too much for their minds to take in. Too much to look at. It had become, as Patty observed, just so much stuff. She stood in front of them and put her hands on her hips.
“I’ve never done this before,” she said, “What do we do? What do you do, for the books?”
Jack searched for words.
“Normally,” he began, looking around him and trying to turn the piles and overstuffed shelves into manageable pieces, “normally we’d look at the books that you want to sell and set aside the ones that we’d be interesting in buying. Then we’d make you an offer for them. Usually we pay about a quarter of what we think we’re going to sell them for.”
She waved her yellow hand, “honestly, I don’t care about the money at this point.”
“Well, don’t say that,” said Jack, “if there’s anything we can use, we’ll pay for it.”
“What if I want you to take it all?” she asked.
“Um,” said Jack, “We can do that. I mean, if we have to, I suppose. If it’s stuff that we don’t really want either, we might have to reduce the amount that we pay for the whole thing, because at that point we’re just hauling stuff to the dump.”
“Agreed,” said Patty. “It’s all yours. How quickly can you get it out of here?”
“I’m not sure,” said Jack, “is this all of it? These two rooms?”
“Don’t I wish,” said Patty, “there’s more upstairs and there’s boxes on the screen porch.”
“It’ll take some time,” said Jack, “especially if we’re going to try to give you a fair price for it. I can’t tell yet what’s junk and what might be good.”
“It’s all junk, as far as I can tell,” said Patty.
“Well but—“
“Look sweetie, I’ve got a toilet overflowing on Bunker Hill, some people coming to look at this house tomorrow and there’s no way they’re going to rent it if it looks like this. I’ve got an entire AC system on Prospect that won’t start up, painters who half finished a house before they got a better offer to go do something else—“
As if on cue, her phone started ringing in the middle of her list of projects. She answered it without missing a beat. While she talked, Jack and Cable conferred.
“We could just say no,” said Cable, “but now that we’re here I kind of want to see what all this is.”
“It will take us days to box all this stuff up and take it away,” observed Jack, “and that’s if we only take the books. If we start looking at magazines too—“
“And how can we not?” asked Cable.
“It’s got to be two tons of stuff,” said Jack, “Quinn can close the shop and bring the library van up, too. We can fit everything in two vans, don’t you think.”
Cable didn’t answer. His attention had wandered to the bookshelf along the wall and his hair had fallen down in front of his eyes, as if to signal that he wasn’t paying attention any more.
“You’re right, Jack,” continued Jack to himself, since Cable didn’t reply, “it’d probably fit in 2 vans. What are you looking at?”
Cable was squatting down, looking at a pile of books on the floor in front of the bookcase. He pivoted and looked around the whole room again.
“Did you notice that everything is out?” asked Cable.
“You can say that again,” said Jack.
“No, I mean, look. All the shelves have been emptied out. Everything is out on the tables. Or stacked sideways on the shelves.”
“So?”
“That’s not how people store things. People put things on the shelves first. Then when the shelves are full, they stack things in front of them. It gets cluttered over time, not all at once. But that’s not what we’ve got here. Everything looks like it’s just been dumped here. Stacked all at once. Do you see what I mean? Something doesn’t seem right about this.”
“I was almost attacked by a stuffed squirrel in the dining room; you don’t have to tell me that there’s something weird about this,” said Jack.
“That’s not what I meant,” said Cable. “Don’t get me wrong, that was hilarious because I didn’t know you were scared of squirrels. But I mean, who lives like this? What’s the story here? I kind of want to get my hands into things, see who this guy was.”
Jack grinned, “You see? That’s why I bring you along on these trips. You’re a gamer. A grungy one, to be sure, but you’ve got game. “
Patty finished her conversation and inserted herself between the boys. “You going to take it?” she asked, “because if you’re not, I’ve got other calls I can make.”
“Can we have the owl from out front?” asked Cable.
“Sweetie, you can have any blessed thing you want if you can get it out of here today.”
No comments:
Post a Comment