“Croak,” declared the raven.
“Stop torturing her.” Earnshaw glared at the bird.
He pulled out two of my tail feathers,a dark voice shot back.
I glanced up. It was that same voice from yesterday. It wasn’t Morrie’s London private schoolboy drawl or Earnshaw’s northern dialect. It was throaty, rich, and utterly entrancing.
It also didn’t appear to have an owner.
“Is there someone else here?” I asked.
“We’re not open yet,” Earnshaw snapped.
“But I just heard a voice talking about feathers—”
“Oh, I’m sorry.” A woman spoke. I whirled around and saw an old lady standing in the door, clutching a large tapestry purse between her trembling hands. “The door was open. I just wanted to know if you had a certain book. I’ve been looking for it for years in different bookshops, but no one can help me.”
Earnshaw’s eyebrows shot up in my direction, as if to say, “See?”
But… but that’s not the same voice!
The lady approached the counter, holding her hands six inches apart. “Do you have this book? I read it at a hotel in London back in 1984. Or ’83. I can’t quite remember. It’s about this big, with a blue cover, and it’s called something likeThe Idiot’s Confectionary Shop…”
Earnshaw sighed. He lurched his massive frame from the chair, and moved to the Classics shelf, which occupied one entire wall of the room. He pulled out a copy of John Kennedy Toole’sA Confederacy of Duncesand shoved it into her hands. “This the one?”
“Er, why yes… yes it is!” She stared at the book with shock.
“Shall I ring it up for you?” I beamed, moving behind the counter.I can’t believe we’re already making a sale this early in the morning. This is thrilling!
“Oh, well, I…” she flipped open the cover. “It’s a little bit too pricey for me, I’m sorry. But thank you.” She dropped the book on the desk and backed away. “I’ll just be on my way—”
“Croak,” the raven spoke from his position on the chandelier.
“Oh, a raven!” The woman’s face broke into an enchanted smile. ‘What’s he doing inside the bookshop?”
“He lives here,” Morrie said.
“He sure looks comfortable up there on his wee perch,” she cooed. “He’s like the shop mascot. It reminds me of that poem… the nuns made me memorize it as a wee lass in school. 'Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, by the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore—’”
“Croak,” said the raven.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” Morrie warned, sliding his phone into his jacket pocket and steepling his fingers as if he expected something specific to happen.
“—‘Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,’ I said, ‘art sure no craven—’”
“Croak.”
“Seriously, lady.”
“Leave her, Morrie.” Earnshaw placed Toole’s book in Morrie’s lap and flipped open the cover, pointing to something on the page. “She’s sealed her fate.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, just as the raven lifted a leg, angled its body, and dropped an almighty poop onto the woman’s shoulder.
She screamed, flinging her purse up to clobber the raven, but it had already swooped away, landing gracefully on the armadillo. The woman screeched a string of words that would have made the nuns blush and scrambled down the hall. The whole house shuddered as the door slammed on its frame. The bell tinkled.
“Croak!” the raven called after her, and proceeded to preen its wing.
Earnshaw and Morrie burst out laughing. I put my hands on my hips. “You might have helped her!” I cried. “You could have given her a tissue or at least knocked a couple of quid off the price of that book.”
