On Folly Beach (16 page)

Peter pushed the door open and stepped inside, but not before Cat lifted her head and turned in Lulu’s direction as if she knew somebody was watching them. Lulu ducked back behind the tree and didn’t look back until she heard the front door slam.

Then she slid down to the base of the tree and opened her book, and began to read, making sure she had a good view of anybody entering or leaving the house. Because even though Cat was wrong about a lot of stuff, she’d been right about something: Lulu never missed a thing.

CHAPTER 8

FOLLY BEACH, SOUTH CAROLINA

July 2009

The glowing numbers of the clock by the side of the bed read three twenty-eight when Emmy awoke suddenly. She wasn’t sure what it was that had startled her awake; it was this still and dark at her parents’ house, too. But as she lay there staring toward the ceiling, she wondered if it could be the liquid feel of the air in the house where it lay between river marsh and ocean, taunting both with its existence. It made her feel vulnerable, as if the house’s pilings were no more than matchsticks, the water a crouching tiger.

Emmy closed her eyes, smelling an unfamiliar detergent in her sheets, the white starkness giving no hint of anybody’s presence but her own. She sat up, sleep as lost to her now as Ben’s scent on her pillowcase, and then slid from the bed. The sky had cleared and the full moon bled from the ocean-side windows, casting a pale veil over the room. Slowly, Emmy walked to the French door that led to the back porch and walked through it to stand outside.

She took a deep breath, the salty air seasoned with another more foreign one—one that reminded her of the jar of sand she’d left behind with her mother. The air felt heavy, full of something Emmy couldn’t understand but, as she’d thought before, seemed to be as much a part of her memory as her mother’s face.

A strong, humid breeze pushed past her and into the house, creating a ruffling sound behind her. Emmy turned and spotted the opened box of books she’d had Heath carry into the house. She’d have to transport them back to Folly’s Finds at some point, but hadn’t wanted to leave them in her car where the heat and humidity would play havoc with the delicate pages.

She returned inside, shut the door to the odd and unsettling scent of the night, and carried the box back to the bedroom. After flipping on the bedside lamp, she knelt beside the box and started taking out the books again, sorting them into three separate stacks—those she’d gone through already and didn’t have any writing in the margins, those that did have writing in the margins, and those she’d yet to check. Piling the latter onto the bed, she crawled on top of the sheets next to them and eyed the stack in front of her.

Her eyes alighted on an old familiar gray-blue cloth binding halfway down the pile. She’d forgotten it was there after her initial discovery of the margin writings had redirected her attention, but now, with a surge of excitement, she carefully removed it from its position. “The Quest of the Missing Map,” she read out loud. Her mother had given her the entire Nancy Drew collection, most of them first editions, but Emmy was fairly certain that she didn’t have the first edition of this particular one.

Almost giddy, she flipped open the book to the front to find the copyright date, and paused. There was an inscription inside, almost illegible as if it had been written in a hurry, with broad black strokes from a pen. To Lulu, Please accept this small token of my esteem. Stay good and sweet, Peter.

Lulu? Sweet? Surely it couldn’t be the same Lulu. Then again, the store had been owned by Lulu’s sister. And who was Peter? The handwriting was unusual, with feet on the capital letters, and the lowercase “g” written like a typewritten letter.

Quickly, Emmy flipped to the title page and saw that the book was, indeed, a first edition. And it was in excellent condition, as if it had been read very gently and carefully stored. Emmy felt her excitement fade when she realized she’d probably have to ask Lulu if she wanted it back before she could decide to sell it or keep it for her own first-edition collection.

Curiously, she flipped through the pages, looking for more notes in the margins, not really surprised when she didn’t find any. The copyright on the book read 1942, and judging from Emmy’s own calculations, Lulu would have been about ten years old at the time, much too young to be writing love notes. Emmy turned to the last page and stopped when she spotted a jagged tear at the bottom where about one third of the page had been ripped off. It was too even to have been made accidentally, but it was odd, too, seeing in what good condition the rest of the book was.

Emmy twisted and stuck the book on her nightstand, resigned to the fact that she’d have to find Lulu and offer the book to her. She even considered asking Heath to do it, but quickly dismissed the idea, as she had no interest in speaking with him again, either.

Facing the stack, she began pulling each book from the pile, painstakingly checking every page for any kind of marking, going through half of the books without finding anything. Frustrated, she stood and stretched, then retrieved a notepad from a pile of her belongings in the corner and began to make an inventory of the books in the box she’d already examined. At least that way she could feel she was being productive.

When she was finished with that, she stood and stretched again, then yawned. It was still dark outside and dawn was a few hours away, so she figured she could at least grab some sleep. But as she began to stack the books she hadn’t yet explored, she paused. There were so few left that it would be silly not to just finish up. That way, she could bring the entire box and inventory with her when she met Abigail at Folly’s Finds the next day.

She sank back down on the bed, crossed her legs, and reached for the first book. As she’d done previously, she turned each cover and each page methodically, looking for any markings. She found the selection of books eclectic, yet all seemed to yield a nod to travel or romanticism, or both: Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, D. H. Lawrence, Henry James, Hugo, Verne, Kipling. The names were all familiar to her, and holding the books in her hands and rereading favorite passages were a little like visiting old friends. She felt a kinship to the person who’d assembled this collection, wondering what else they might have in common.

Emmy had nearly reached the end of the pile before she found the first note. It was inside a leather-bound copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina , the spine well creased from frequent use. She smiled to herself, remembering the first time she’d read the book in tenth grade, being forced into secrecy so she wouldn’t take any ribbing from her school-mates. Again, she thought of the anonymous owner, Emmy’s affinity for her growing with each book she plucked from the pile.

Emmy opened up the front cover, then began the tedious task of examining each page in what was definitely the thickest book in the entire box. She’d reached page 623 when she finally found what she was looking for.

Soul meets soul on lover’s lips. Percy Shelley’s familiar words jolted Emmy out of a half sleep, her skin tingling from the intimacy of the words, and making her feel almost like an intruder. The words were written by a woman, the loops and curves of the cursive light and delicate. The squeezing pain around Emmy’s heart surprised her, as if to remind her that broken hearts were ageless and not her private domain.

Wanting to hear the man’s response, she rapidly flipped through the remaining pages, finding nothing else. Hurriedly now, Emmy picked up two more books before she found anything else. It was a single word, written in pencil, the pressure from the writing instrument so firm that an impression of the word traveled through the next two pages. The words were block-lettered and traced over so many times that it was hard to tell if a man or woman had written it: WHEN???

Emmy quickly searched through the three remaining books, nearly giving up until she reached the very last book in the pile, a late edition of Madame Bovary. At first glance, she was fairly certain that this one had been written by the same woman who’d written some of the other notes.

In our house in the sea, time waits in a bottle. At first, Emmy thought the writer was referencing more current music titles, but she couldn’t be sure. These books had presumably been packed up from Folly’s Finds in 1989 and stored in Abigail’s attic ever since. Although they were all editions from the nineteen forties or earlier, it was still possible that someone more recently had made the marks in the margins.

She studied the words, mulling them over again and again, trying to make sense of them. She didn’t recognize them, nor could she guess which famous author, if any, had penned them originally.

Yawning heavily, she dropped the book and inventory list next to the other books before crawling back into the bed and flipping off the light. She lay wide-awake for a long time, trying to make sense of everything she’d read in the margins so far. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their order, but from what she’d found, it was apparent to her that there had once been a stream of messages and responses back and forth, and invitations to clandestine meetings. There was no proof that they were secret, of course, but Emmy figured that to go through the trouble of putting messages into book margins meant that there had to be some reason for keeping them hidden.

She watched as the sky over the marsh illuminated the walls of her room, infusing everything with a peach glow like the inside of a shell. Emmy closed her eyes just as the sun rose on her first full day on Folly Beach, and in the moments before sleep found her, she wondered if she’d even stay on Folly long enough to figure out who the mysterious lovers were, and who the book collector was who had so much in common with Emmy’s own taste. Lulu’s name popped into her head, jarring her momentarily awake as she considered the possibility, before closing her eyes and drifting into sleep in her new bed without Ben for the last first time.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING, AFTER HAVING fortified herself with an entire pot of coffee, Emmy threw on a skirt and blouse, loaded the box of books into the Explorer, then headed for Folly’s Finds.

With the holiday weekend over, she was relieved to see that most of the cars that had lined East Ashley were gone, leaving behind garbage cans and recycling bins brimming over with beer cans, wine bottles, and other evidence of a good time.

Before she left, she walked to the bottom of the driveway to look for the mailbox to mail home a postcard of South Carolina that she’d purchased at her last stop for gas on her trip over. It had pictures of palmettos, and stately homes, and the shoreline, which she hadn’t even seen yet, but she’d wanted to let her parents have some physical reminder of where she was. She even pictured her dad pulling it out of the mail stack on the counter and sticking it to the same refrigerator door where her art projects had once hung.

She looked in vain for a mailbox on her side of the street, and then across the street, then ran up the front steps to see if maybe she hadn’t noticed a letter box stuck to the side of the house, but all of her efforts were in vain. Confused, she placed the postcard on her dashboard, then headed off to Center Street.

When she’d asked Abigail for a street address to help her find the store, Abigail had just told her to head down Center Street and take a right at the Planet Follywood restaurant onto East Eerie, then go down about a block, right past the Folly Beach Crab Shack on the right. Emmy brought her map just in case.

It was a lot easier than she’d expected, finding the pale pink stucco building within five minutes of leaving her house. She pulled into one of four grassy parking areas in front of the store, wondering how she’d get out if it ever rained.

The store had apparently once been a small cottage, judging by its large bay picture window out front displaying a variety of books and the single front door with a small overhang and simple columns on either side of it.

An ancient Volkswagen Beetle, its paint a barely discernible yellow, sat parked under a rusty carport. A bumper sticker, of perhaps only a slightly newer vintage than the car, read in bleached-out letters: Where’s the Beach? Emmy figured it was most likely referencing Hugo’s visit twenty years before. On the other side of the rust-speckled bumper was a newer sticker, the words making Emmy smile: Life Begins on Folly. She was about to turn away when she noticed the South Carolina license plate MRSDRCY.