Absolutely Truly (12 page)

“If you're worried about an ambush, that's a problem easily solved,” said my aunt. “I have an errand to run, so why don't I just go along and make sure you both arrive at your destinations safely? I need to check on Memphis first, though—he and Miss Marple weren't getting along this afternoon, so I had to separate them.”

Cha Cha turned to me as my aunt disappeared out the side door toward the stairs to her apartment. “Real quick, can you show me where you found the envelope?”

“The one with the
B
on it?” asked Lucas.

Cha Cha and I exchanged a glance. Lucas had obviously been paying attention! Cha Cha raised an eyebrow, and her unspoken question hung in the air.

“Oh, fine,” I said. It wasn't as if Lucas would blab our secret to anyone—he barely spoke as it was. I explained about the mystery as I led the two of them back to the Annex.

“It was here in the used-book section,” I told them, waving vaguely at the bottom shelf and handing the envelope to Lucas. He opened it and read the letter inside while I looked around for the basket of books without bar codes. There was no sign of it. “It was inside a copy of
Charlotte's Web
.”

“Do you remember the pages it was stuck between?” asked Cha Cha. “That could be important.”

I shook my head. “I wasn't really paying attention.”

“And nothing else was in there?”

“Not that I noticed.”

Just then, there was a sharp knock on the bookshop's front door.

“We're closed!” I heard my father yell from the office. “Can't you see the sign?”

The knocking escalated frantically. Grabbing the letter and envelope from Lucas, I stuffed them back into the pocket of my jeans and hurried to the front of the store to see what was going on. My friends were right behind me.

“For heaven's sake!” said Aunt True, crossing to the door and unlocking it. “What's the matter?”

“Where's that blasted January thaw when you need it?” fussed a small, plump, elderly person, barging past her into the store. She was bundled in more layers than Lucas Winthrop,
but hers were considerably rattier. The two scarves wound around her neck clashed horribly with her threadbare jacket—red and blue stripes and purple plaid do not go well with green camouflage—and her boots, which looked about two sizes too big, were stuffed with crumpled newspaper. A face as wrinkled as a dried plum peeked out from beneath a bright orange hunter's hat. The earflaps were tied securely under her chin. Emerging from beneath the flaps were a few wisps of snow-white hair and the telltale wires from a pair of earbuds.

An elf owl, if ever I'd seen one.

“We're closed,” my father repeated.

“Good afternoon, Miss Marple,” she said, ignoring him.

Miss Marple got to her feet and trotted over expectantly.

“Don't worry, I didn't forget your treat.” There was a rustling noise as the woman plunged an orange mitten into one of the many plastic bags she was carrying. “Oops, that's not it.”

The five of us stared at her mittened hand. There was a kitten in it. The tiny creature let out a squeak, and at the sound another furry little head popped out of the woman's jacket pocket.

“How many kittens do you generally carry with you?” asked Aunt True, blinking in astonishment.

There was no response, so my aunt repeated her question, louder this time.

The elderly woman removed one of her earbuds. I heard
the faint, tinny strains of the Beatles' “Can't Buy Me Love.” “Depends,” she replied.

Tucking both kittens back into their hiding places, she rummaged in the plastic bag once again, this time pulling out what looked like toast crusts. What I hoped were toast crusts, at least. Miss Marple had had enough food surprises today, what with Aunt True's cookies.

“We're closed,” my father repeated for the third time.

“It's a book emergency,” said our visitor.

Seeing our blank looks, she wiped her nose on the end of one of her scarves and rooted around in another plastic bag, emerging with a battered paperback this time. “Mystery swap,” she added, waving it at us. “You know, bring a book, take a book?” When that got no response either, she heaved a sigh. “Never mind, I'll do it myself.”

“Who's that?” I whispered, as she trundled off toward the Annex.

“No idea,” Aunt True whispered back.

“It's Belinda Winchester,” said Cha Cha.

Dad's head snapped around. “
That's
Belinda Winchester?” he said, watching her walk away. “She was at least a hundred when I was a kid! I can't believe she's still living here. Or still living, period.”

“She looks kind of homeless,” I said.

“She wasn't when I was growing up,” my father replied. “She used to live in a big old house at the end of our street.”

“She still does,” said Cha Cha.

“I remember her now!” said Aunt True. “A little nutty, had about twenty-seven cats—or at least she did back then—house crammed with stuff?”

“That's her,” said Cha Cha.

Belinda Winchester returned a moment later with a different paperback. My father stepped over to the cash register. “How would you like to pay for that this afternoon?”

“
Pay
for it?” the older woman screeched. The furry heads popped out again, their round kitten eyes wide in alarm. “What part of ‘swap' don't you understand?” She peered at my father more closely. “Say, aren't you Walt and Lola's boy?”

I'd never heard my father called a “boy” before. He hesitated for a moment, then nodded.

“You're the delinquent who broke my garage window with a slingshot!”

My father reddened. “That was a long time ago, Miss Winchester,” he replied stiffly. “And as I recall, I saved up my allowance to pay for the repair.”

Aunt True was smiling broadly by now. I could tell she was enjoying this.

Our visitor sniffed. “Don't know as I remember it that way.” She stuffed the paperback into a plastic bag. “I'd say this makes us even.” And with that she and her kittens stalked out.

Aunt True laughed so hard her knees went weak. She collapsed on the bench by the door, gasping for breath.

My father shook his head in disgust. “Whose idea was it to have a mystery swap? What are we running here, a charity?”

“Calm down, J. T.” said Aunt True, wiping her eyes. “It's just a used paperback. And it was a book emergency, remember? With a side of kittens.” She dissolved in laughter again.

“We're the ones with a book emergency, especially if we just let our inventory walk out of here,” my father told her. “This is a business, not the public library.”

Beside me, I heard Lucas suck in his breath.

“No more stalling, Truly,” my father said curtly. “Say good-bye to your friends. I want you in the office on the double.” He spun on his heel and left.

As Aunt True started out the door, Lucas turned to Cha Cha and me, his pale face alight with excitement. “I know what the numbers on your mystery envelope mean.”

Telling Lucas about the envelope turned out to be a good idea.

Except for the fact that I could barely concentrate on my math tutoring afterward. I stared blindly at the open book in front of me, my shoe woodpeckering against the metal base of my chair.

Across the room, my father threw down his pen. “You've got ants in your pants this afternoon, Truly!”

“Sorry.”

“Try and focus, would you?”

“Yes, sir.” I wondered just how well he'd be able to focus if he was on the brink of solving a mystery.

“They're library call numbers,” Lucas had told Cha Cha and me. “See?” Reaching into his backpack, he'd pulled out a copy of
Your Government and You
and pointed to the sequence of numbers across the sticker on the book's spine.

Sure enough, although the numbers were completely
different from the ones on my letter, the pattern was the same.

Cha Cha had frowned. “So whoever wrote the letter was sending the person it was meant for off to find another book?”

I'd nodded. “It's like a scavenger hunt! We need to go the library.”

The problem was, none of us could. My father would have been breathing fire if I hadn't shown up for my tutoring session in about thirty seconds flat, Cha Cha was due over at her parents' dance studio to fill in for the receptionist again, and Lucas's mother was probably having a cow because he wasn't there yet. So we'd agreed to meet at the library after dinner.

I chewed the end of my pencil nervously and glanced at the clock. The other problem was, my mother had scheduled that family meeting tonight. This narrowed my brief window of time even further for making it to the library before it closed. I felt like I'd explode if I had to wait until tomorrow.

I sighed and stared again at the worksheet in front of me. Math is usually something I enjoy, but word problems?
Puh-leez.

My father pushed back from his desk a little while later and came over to check my work. “You can do better,” he told me, pointing out a couple of errors.

“Yes, sir,” I replied glumly.

Suddenly, there was a loud squawk from out in the store. “J. T.!” shouted Aunt True. “Come quick!”

My father bolted out the office door. I was right on his
heels, grateful for an excuse to ditch the word problems.

We found my aunt over by the travel section. “Would you look at this?” she said in amazement. She was kneeling on the floor by the basket of books I'd been looking for earlier, holding up the copy of
Charlotte's Web.
For a second I wondered if maybe she'd found another letter inside, but that wasn't what she was excited about. “It's an autographed first edition!” She showed us the inscription, which read:
To my nifty little neighbor Bee, from Andy White.

“Who's Andy?” my father asked.

“That was E. B. White's nickname,” Aunt True told him.

Dad stared at her. “And here I thought the place was on fire or something from all the fuss you were making.”

Aunt True scrambled to her feet. “Don't you understand? Some autographed first editions go for thousands of dollars!”

My eyebrows shot up. There were people willing to pay that kind of money for an old book?

“Really?” Now my father sounded excited too. “We might be able to pay off the bank loan if that's the case—or at least make a serious dent in it.”

Aunt True looked over at me. “Were you the one who found this book, Truly?”

I nodded. “Yeah, when I was scanning stuff in the Annex.”

“You just may have saved the day.” She kissed me on the cheek, then waltzed happily toward the front of the store. My father and I followed her. “I'm going to do a little research and
see if I can come up with a value for it, then we'll put it in the rare books cabinet for safekeeping.”

The rare books cabinet was a locked, glass-fronted bookcase by the sales counter. There wasn't much in it these days—I guess anything of value had long since been sold to help keep the store afloat.

As Aunt True disappeared into the office, there was a knock on the front door.

“Does everyone in Pumpkin Falls have a book emergency today?” my father grumbled, going to answer it.

This time it wasn't a desperate customer, though; it was my mother.

“Big news!” she announced as she came in. The rest of my family was right behind her. “I have a job!”

Pippa did a pirouette. “Mommy ith going to be a danther!”

“No, honey, I'm just
working
at a dance studio,” my mother corrected. “Big difference.” She turned to my father. “I saw an ad in the
Patriot-Bugle
this morning and answered it.”

My mouth dropped open. “You're going to be the receptionist at the Starlite?”

My mother looked over at me, astonished. “How on earth did you know that?”

I explained about Cha Cha, and she laughed. “See? It was meant to be.”

“Are you sure you're going to be able to handle it, Dinah?” my father asked.

“It's only part-time, and it's just until the dance studio's regular receptionist gets back from maternity leave,” she told him. “And guess what? As one of the perks, Pippa and Lauren get free dance lessons.”

Hearing this, Pippa spun around the room again.

Lauren plopped down on the floor near Miss Marple and opened her latest book—she'd moved on from Laura Ingalls Wilder to
The Borrowers
. Danny and Hatcher made a beeline for Aunt True's cookies. I watched, waiting for the fireworks, but my brothers scarfed down the cookies without so much as a peep. Their stomachs must be made of iron.

“Where's True?” my mother asked. “I can't wait to tell her.”

My father gestured toward the office with his right hand. Only it wasn't his right hand any more, of course. It was a hook.