“Yes. There are three novellas. I believe.”
Merritt added the “I believe” at the last moment, hoping to suggest that this was just casual knowledge for her, the sort of thing a bookseller and ad hoc school librarian had bouncing around in her head. But the truth was that she knew everything there was to know about the books of Helen Albright Longacre.
She walked toward the children’s section, Whit following behind at a polite distance. “So,” she said, as they reached the shelves in the corner, a snug nook with extra fairy lights and cut-out letters that said, “Reading Is Magical.” “There are the standard books in the series here. And here are the companion things. There’s the collection of fairy tales”—she pulled it off the shelf—“and the villain origin story one”—she added it to her pile—“and the one about the missing unicorn that turns out to be a dream sequence. People were mad about that one.”
Merritt stood straight and handed all three to Whit, who looked somewhere between guilty and confused. “We have all these,” he laughed.
“What?”
He shrugged. “We have these. Multiple copies. It’s silly, but I have this vague memory of another short story, even though I’m certain these are the only ones.”
Merritt eyed him for a second. How could this man not know his own wife’s work better than this?
“I know she appears in two anthologies—”
Whit interrupted. “The Christmas one,” he said, nodding, “and the one about ‘magical’ summer nights. I checked those.”
“Oh,” she said, called up short. So he did knowthat.
Whit seemed to search his mind for a second before speaking again.
“But is there something somewhere about a giant baby, or a baby giant, or—”
“Oh!” A firework laced through her brain, and Whit’s confusion suddenly made sense. “Yes! I know exactly what you’re looking for.”
His eyebrows rose, and a smile that was hardly a smile grew above the sand-stubbled chin on his square jaw.
But then, just as quickly, Merritt felt herself making her own guilty face.
“Okay, but there’s bad news.”
She watched as the man in front of her seemed to tire in place.
“There’s only one copy.”
He narrowed his eyes. “That sounds fake.”
“It’s real.”
“Can we steal it? Do theNational Treasureof children’s books?”
She smiled. “It’s less exciting than that, sadly. The book was a tiny little novella, and it was written,” she said, intentionally using the passive voice to avoid making his late wife into a subject, “for a charity thing. She, your wife...” Well, there went the passive voice. The English language had its limits. “She wrote it to be auctioned off, and as far as I know, shehand-wrote it. The thing they bought, whoever bought it, was just, like, a Moleskine notebook.”
“Oh.” Whit looked out across the shelves, then nodded to himself. “I remember that. Or I remember the auction part. But that would mean no one has read it, right? Other than whoever bought it.”
“Right.” Then, after a moment’s thought, Merritt added, “Should we find out who that was, and maybe what they did with it?”
Whit nodded, and again he followed her across the store, this time to the register.
“Sorry, Huong, can I use the computer?”
The young woman glanced up, then clocked that Merritt was not alone. She looked at Whit, then back at Merritt, and widened her eyes just slightly. Merritt rolled hers.
At the computer, she started googling.
“How’s your mom?”
Merritt smiled at him, touched. “She’s all back to normal.”
