Larkspur

By

Uncial Press       Aloha, Oregon
2011

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are
products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real.
Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely
coincidental.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-122-6
ISBN 10: 1-60174-122-7

Larkspur
Copyright © 1990, 2011 by Sheila Simonson

Cover design
Copyright © 2011 by Judith B. Glad

Larkspur was originally published by St. Martin's in 1990
and in 1991 by
Worldwide.

All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work
in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or
hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the author or publisher.

Published by Uncial Press,
an imprint of GCT, Inc.

Visit us at http://www.uncialpress.com

In memory of Elisabeth McPherson, Louise Smith,
and
Georgia-Mae Gallivan:

"a good plot, good friends, and full of expectation"

--1 Henry IV

I got the letter from Dai Llewellyn in June, when the locals were still coming to my
bookstore out of curiosity and the tourists had not yet found it.

Ginger Gates tossed the bundled mail at me, and I fielded it left-handed. I was waiting
on a customer. He bought Joseph Wambaugh's
Lines and Shadows
, then fresh in
paperback, and a field guide to the High Sierras.

I chatted with the man for a while, handed him a flyer that described my book-ordering
service and map inventory, and smiled at the twelfth reference to the heat wave since 9:00 a.m. It
was four in the afternoon. Only three of the twelve customers had bought books, but all of them
had given me a free weather report.

"Hot out," Ginger shouted from the back room.

I contemplated homicide.

"Tam starts work today."

"Good." Tam was Ginger's daughter, second string guard on the junior college basketball
team I coached in the winter. Tammy was spending the summer guiding white-water rafters. I
hoped she wouldn't break her long legs.

I picked up the mail--two sweepstakes brochures, a coupon offering a free soft drink for
every two cheeseburgers purchased, the electric bill, and a letter in a heavy bond envelope with
my name, Lark Dailey, and the store name, Larkspur Books, in black ink and a rather crabbed
hand. Below that, another hand had written in the rest of the address.

I turned the envelope over. The initials EDL were embossed on the back flap, but there
was no return address. One of my players, I reflected, had decided to get married and chuck
basketball, and her granny had addressed the wedding announcements. It was that kind of
envelope.

Ginger stuck her head around the partition that separated the storeroom-office from the
shop itself. "How's business?"

"At this rate I'll file for bankruptcy before Christmas."

Ginger chortled as if I'd said something witty, gave her mouse-blonde perm a pat, and
picked up the feather duster. Books accumulate a lot of dust. She began whisking her duster over
the revolving science fiction rack.

I tossed the junk mail in the waste basket and took the bill and the heavy envelope to the
back room. My brand-new PC gleamed. When I had entered the amount of the bill, written a
check, and stuffed it into the return envelope, I opened my mystery letter. "My dear Miss Dailey,"
it said,

I have just learned from my friend, Lydia Huff, that you have opened a
bookstore, a real bookstore for the selling of real books--in Monte, California.
Forgive an old man's impertinent curiosity, but why? how? are you in earnest? If
so, I hope you will join the house party I'm assembling at my little fishing lodge
for the Fourth of July weekend, so we can talk it all over.

Lydia and Bill, Win D'Angelo,
la belle
Denise, and a handful of other
congenial souls have agreed to keep me company. Because I always spend July at
the lodge, I find I need a literary weekend at the beginning of the month to sustain
me through the sheer earthiness of the rest. Do come, and bring a guest, if you
like. Your mother and I are old friends, as you probably know, but even if we
weren't I'd still look forward to meeting another Literary Pioneer.

Yours faithfully,

Dai Llewellyn

P.S. Four days--Thursday through Sunday, if you can spare the time. We have
swimming, canoeing, fishing, and lucullan food in addition to the stellar
company.

I ransacked my memory. Ma had a lot of old friends. I had met Bill and Lydia Huff. Bill
published the local weekly and a great deal else, being sole proprietor of a rather famous small
press, the kind that prints high-quality chapbooks and regional histories.

Old Bill was a bit folksy for my taste, but I liked Lydia, and I'd cultivated the connection
in a desultory way. The only real bookstore and the only real press in the county ought to co-exist
in harmony.

I wasn't sure I could put up with four days of literary chit-chat, however. I had better
plans for the Fourth. I brooded. The annoying little bell that rang when a customer entered
bonged, and I went back into the shop. Ginger peered at me around the science fiction.

I shook my head, 'I'll get it,' and moved forward to greet the woman who had come in.
Lydia Huff's large, light gray eyes lit when she saw me. We embraced after the fashion of people
who have drunk cocktails together, and I mentioned the invitation.

The hundred kilowatt eyes beamed. "Oh, do come, Lark darling. We're apt to get
reminiscent and inky when there aren't any fresh faces. You'll like Dai. He's a dear."

I was about to say, "That's nice but who is he?" when memory kicked in. Of course. A
major minor poet. A distinguished teacher. My mother's mentor, or one of them. E. David
Llewellyn, poet. My heart sank.

"Uh, Jay and I..."

"Is that your lover?"

When older people use the word lover they make me uncomfortable, as if they were
popping me into a mental gilded cage. "We're friends."

"Bring him!" Lydia made an expansive gesture emphasized by the flowing sleeve of her
heavily embroidered lilac tunic. Lydia supported all the local arts and had once been a weaver
herself, so she was apt to look expensively homespun. "Bill's daughter will be there and Dai's
grandniece, Angharad. Do you know her?"

I nodded, and she went on with the guest list. I knew Angharad Peltz. She taught English
part time at the junior college and considered women's basketball an appropriate activity for
non-verbal ectomorphs and lesbians. She didn't say that, but that's what she meant.

I'm a little paranoid about basketball, because my family is hyper-intellectual, and they
did not look upon my selection to the varsity basketball team as they would have, say, regarded
precocious publication in
Poetry Magazine
or
The Journal of the
American
Historical Society.
My mother is a poet, my father a history professor.

By the time I made the Olympic team--via Ohio State--they were almost reconciled to
having produced a sport in both senses of the word. Unfortunately that Olympic team was
sacrificed to the gods of politics. If I had come home with a gold medal, or more likely a bronze,
I think they would have understood my enthusiasm, but my basketball career fizzled like a damp
firecracker. So there I was, five years later, coaching part-time, and running a bookstore on the
wrong side of the Rockies.

Lydia had paused.

"It sounds nice." I hoped that was a suitable but non-committal response.

"Oh, it is. The lodge is pure 1930's rustic--lots of peeled logs and paneling--but Dai has
transformed it into a kind of high-class hotel. Not that he rents it out." She laughed, ho-ho-ho. I
deduced that Llewellyn was a fat cat. If he owned a lake he had to be.

Lydia was enthusing about the amenities, which included a Filipino chef. There was a
private dock, canoes only--no motor boats or speedboats, my dear, he doesn't like noise--and so
on. Eventually she wound down, and I said I'd think about it. She had come to check out our
display of Huff Press books, naturally, not to buy anything. She rearranged a couple of titles, said
she was satisfied, and left.

"He's an old goat."

I jumped. I'd forgotten Ginger. "Llewellyn?"

Ginger waved the feather duster almost fiercely. "Dennis took me out there last year. It's
a fancy place, okay, but who wants to be sneered at by eighty year old faggots?"

I wondered whether 'faggot' was local parlance for anyone from San Francisco who
didn't crumple beer cans with his bare hands or a more precise metaphor. "He must've been pretty
hard to take."

"He was." She whacked the dust from a row of Penguin mysteries so hard the rack
revolved. We had mysteries and science fiction on specially constructed wooden racks. The real
books reposed on real bookshelves. "He looked at me as if I wore polyester pantsuits."

"Patronizing," I guessed.

"Yeah." Ginger brooded. I suspected she had a polyester pantsuit in her past, but she was
now strictly natural fiber. She was also, belatedly, going to college, having married at eighteen,
divorced at twenty-two, and hand-raised a pair of kids while waiting tables. College was very
disturbing to Ginger's assumptions. I was fond of her, maybe because her assumptions were
disturbable.

"Does Dennis like the old man? He's a distinguished poet, you know."

"Maybe he is, but he treats Dennis like the chauffeur." Dennis Fromm, Ginger's
whatchacallum, was a forest ranger. She snorted. "Worse than the chauffeur. The old guy has this
pretty boy Mexican kid to drive for him, and they flirt."

"Oh."

"Well, they do. Dennis had to take his mom out to stay at the lodge, so I went along. I
was glad when we left."

"I suppose Denise likes the old man."

"Oh, you know Denise. She fluttered all over him." Dennis's mother, oddly enough, was
a dancer. That is, she had been a dancer in the Isadora Duncan-Martha Graham mold. She was
now in her sixties, still graceful, still dramatic. How such a haunting, romantic type had produced
a son like Dennis was more than I could figure out, but, hey, my mother produced a female
basketball player. Dennis was dumb but sweet. I had reservations about Denise.

The longer I thought about it--and I brooded for several hours--the less I liked the
coincidence, Lydia Huff just dropping by in time to abet Llewellyn's invitation. I began to smell
conspiracy.

Whenever I succumb to paranoia I go to the source. My mother was home--between
writers' conferences--and she sounded innocent.

"You're sure you didn't set me up?" I took a bite of taco salad, tipping the mouthpiece of
the phone up around my forehead so I could chew corn chips and listen.

"Set you up? What do you mean, darling? I've known Dai forever, of course, but I
haven't talked to him in, oh, it must be months, now." The line crackled. Thunderstorm. I missed
New York thunderstorms.

"And you didn't just happen to mention my bookstore to him..."

"I probably did," Mother said cheerfully. "It's not a secret, is it?"

I ground my teeth on another chip.

"What is that noise?"

"I'm eating dinner."

"I always forget the time difference. We had brook trout."

"Dad's been fishing again. Canada?"

She described my father's end-of-semester escape to the wilds of Quebec. Nice but
beside the point.

I said, "Give him a kiss for me. Now, about this invitation..."

"The lodge is supposed to be fabulous. Dai wrote 'Siskiyou Summit' there. You ought to
go."

Clearly I was supposed to recognize the import of 'Siskiyou Summit.' I didn't. I speared a
chunk of cheddar. "The weekend of July Fourth will be my first big tourist rush. I should stay
with the store."

"That's probably true..." A burst of static intruded. "...say you'd found a reliable
clerk?"

"Ginger." I craned around the door of the office for a view of the shop. Ginger was
waiting on an elderly couple who looked as if they might actually buy a hardback. "She's pretty
good." But not literary.

"Why don't you have, er, Ginger hold the fort? You could drive into town from the lodge
a couple of times to check up."

"Expensive."

"I'll underwrite it, darling."

I chewed vigorously.

"Really, Lark, you're in business now. You shouldn't overlook the advantage of having
connections."

She was right. When it came to books I had connections in a big way. The idea of using
her name to sell things didn't sit well with the taco salad, but there were a lot of things about my
bookstore set-up that bothered me. It was financed by a loan on the family trust fund--one kind of
"connection." And now this.