CHAPTER SEVEN
The thing about Oliver Hartley was that he made it very difficult to investigate him.
He arrived at twenty past eleven on Friday with the unhurried certainty of a man who had nowhere more important to be and no awareness whatsoever that he was currently the subject of a forensic analysis. He wore an Army green t-shirt. He smelled faintly of the outdoors and something antiseptic that he presumably didn't notice anymore. He said good morning to Heathcliff, who regarded him from the top of the fiction shelf with the tolerant contempt he reserved for people he'd decided weren't worth expending energy on. And then he said good morning to Wren. His smile was warm and completely uncomplicated and told her absolutely nothing.
This was the problem. Oliver Hartley was warm and completely uncomplicated in a way that made him an excellent suspect and a terrible subject for interrogation. Because everything about him was pleasant and nothing about him was readable. Wren had been trying to read him for three days now with diminishing returns.
"Anything new this week?" he asked, gravitating toward the front table in the way all her good customers did.
"A few things." Wren kept her voice in its normal register; interested, professional, the voice of a woman who was not mentally cross-referencing everything he said against a list of letter phrases. "I've got the new Maggie O'Farrell in, finally. And a restock on the Donna Tartt because we sold out faster than I expected."
"I've been meaning to read the Tartt," he said, picking it up, turning it over with the care of someone who had a genuine relationship with books as physical objects, which was either a character trait or evidence, and Wren could not currently determine which.
From the back of the shop, almost entirely concealed behind a shelf of local history, Bea was shelving travel books. Wren could feel her attention like a second presence in the room.
Oliver drifted. He did this on every visit. A slow, comfortable orbit of the room, picking things up and setting them down, occasionally reading the first page of something, occasionally reading the recommendation wall cards in the way that always made Wren hold her breath slightly, because three of those cards used phrases she had since found echoed in the letters and she hadn't decided yet whether that was evidence or coincidence or her own imagination working against her.
He paused at the fall display. She had built it at the beginning of the week. It was a layered arrangement on the low table near the window, books grouped by the mood of the season. For the long walk home. For the first night the heating goes on. For the kind of Sunday that smells like rain and someone else's baking. She'd spent longer on it than was strictly professional. She was aware of that, and she wasn't going to apologize for it.
Oliver picked up the copy ofThe Wizard of Ozfrom the top of the arrangement. "I always thought this book was really about courage, you know. Not the journey, not the magic. Just — " he gestured vaguely with the book in hand — "someone finding outthey were brave all along. That they'd been carrying it the whole time without knowing." He set it back down. "There's something about this time of year that makes that feel true. All that golden light before everything goes dark. October always makes me want to be braver than I am."
"It's one of my favorites," Wren said.
Oliver bought the book, declined a bag, wished Heathcliff a pleasant weekend — Heathcliff blinked once in response, which was more than he offered most people — and left with the easy stride of a man who had not just set off a small explosion in the room behind him.
Bea emerged from behind the shelf with the focused energy of a woman who had been holding something in for the last ten minutes and could no longer manage the restraint. She walked past Wren without a word, pushed through to the stockroom, and reappeared eleven seconds later.
The evidence board occupied the back wall of the stockroom, between the spare stock shelves and the boiler that occasionally made a noise like a disappointed sigh. It had started four days ago as a single Post-it and had since evolved into something that Wren suspected would concern a mental health professional if encountered without context. Index cards. Printed photos of the shop's customer records. A timeline on graph paper. Several lengths of red yarn that Bea had produced from her bag with no explanation and no apology.
In the center, circled twice in green marker: OLIVER HARTLEY — PRIMARY SUSPECT.
Bea smoothed the new Post-it onto the board with the precision of someone adding a critical piece to a case they were about to crack. It read, in block capitals: OZ. LION. BRAVE.
Below it, she had drawn an arrow.
"The last letter referenced the cowardly lion and bravery." Bea tapped the card. "'That is what he just described. In different words, but in the same — Wren. Look at the board."
"I'm looking at the board."
"Are you seeing it?"
"I'm seeing it, Bea."
Bea looked at her with the expression she reserved for moments when Wren was being insufficiently urgent about something Bea considered urgent. "He picked upOzand described the theme of the letters without knowing he was doing it. That is either the most compelling circumstantial evidence we have, or he's psychic, and I don't believe in psychics."
"He could just likeThe Wizard of Oz."
"Wren."
"I'm not saying you're wrong," Wren said, because she wasn't saying that; she was just saying it out loud felt like the kind of thing you shouldn't do until you were more certain than they currently were. The tenth letter had arrived sometime in the middle of the night. Wren had torn it open and read it ten times before she'd had her coffee. But something still didn't feel right. Her secret admirer said he didn't want to be found. So why would he practically announce himself to her just now?
"I'm saying we need more before?—"
"More," Bea said, in the tone of someone pushed past a threshold. "We have ten letters, a customer visit pattern, two shared book references, a comment about October light, and the fact that he was the only person in this shop on the Tuesday you read aloud fromThe Remains of the Dayand letter six showed up forty-eight hours later." She capped her pen. "What exactly is 'more' in your estimation?"
Wren looked at the board for a long moment.
She thought about the letters — all ten of them, tucked in the box under the front counter in order of arrival. The first onehad been tentative, literary, more essay than declaration. They had grown, over seven weeks, into something else: more specific, more personal, more nakedly about her rather than about the books. The last one had ended with three sentences that weren't about any book at all, and she had read them standing at the counter at eight in the morning and had to sit down on the step stool and take a breath before she could open the shop.
