Carter & Lovecraft (5 page)

It was an old city, but he didn’t feel that when he went there. It felt artificial to him, as if it was procedurally generated by some video game. There was never a sense of place he could feel comfortable with, just the nagging idea that they were constructing the city as he traveled into it, and struck it like a stage set when he left. He had once read a book by William S. Burroughs called
The Place of Dead Roads
. In it, there was an artificial town run by a conspiracy. It looked like any other place, but if you hung around long enough, you’d realize the old-timers were always having the same conversation in the same words, that the same things happened in the street again and again, that the existence of the town as a town was nothing more than a mechanical tableau, designed to encourage the casual visitor in the belief that all was normal, and that the casual visitor should move on.

Providence felt like that to Carter, except he could swear he could hear the clockwork whirring behind the bland facades of the buildings, the flutter of script pages when he turned away. He did not like Providence at all, and he didn’t care what Providence thought of him in return.

The address was in an area to the northeast of the city he had not heard of before—Hastings. Carter’s dislike of Providence grew calcified and unforgiving as he navigated the streets of Hastings. Everything seemed to be of white clapboard construction, every house looking like every other house. It was like driving through Stepford.

Carter felt a headache starting to nag. The GPS said he was close, so he pulled into the parking lot of a small strip mall next to a row of stores in older buildings. He bought himself some aspirin and a bottle of water, swallowed a couple of tablets, and went to find the golden castle he’d inherited.

*   *   *

He walked down the row of stores—hairdressers, sandwich shop, vacuum cleaner repairs, car parts, a couple boarded up—and was surprised to realize that the numbers were closer than he’d gauged to the address. He wasn’t sure what to think when he reached 1117 Havilland Street, and found it was a store, too. To be exact, a bookstore. To be perfectly exact, a functioning bookstore.

Hill’s Books
he read on the sign.
Antiquarian & Secondhand
. The store window was lined with an amber-colored plastic film, to protect the books from sunlight, he guessed. Beyond it, he could see sets of encyclopedias, Dickens, Henry James, Shakespeare, and examples of prints like maps and stiffly engraved soldiers of the Continental Army. Everything looked yellowed and old, not entirely due to the colored light.

Inside, he could see electric lights were on, and the sign hanging in the door said
Open
. With misgivings, Carter entered.

A bell, an actual bell with a coiled brass striker mounted by it, struck a bright note as he swung the door open. The shop smelled just like every old bookshop he had ever been in. Not a huge number, but the smell was distinctive and not unpleasant. Everything other than the books seemed varnished and polished—the floorboards, the shelves, and the fancy paneling that rose up to hip height on the walls. It didn’t look new. Nothing in the shop looked new.

No, that wasn’t quite correct. Behind the counter, an African American woman was watching him, an open book on her lap. She was, he guessed, somewhere around her mid-twenties, not conventionally pretty, with broad cheekbones that would have given her the look of a lazy cat but for the very intelligent dark eyes that were currently looking at him. Not conventionally pretty, perhaps, but he found her attractive all the same. She wasn’t simply looking at him, he realized; she was assessing him.

Seeing that he was studying her in return, she smiled. “Hi,” she said, rising from her stool. She closed the book and put it on the counter by her. He unconsciously noted the title:
Diableries: Stereoscopic Adventures in Hell
. It took her a long time to get from “H” to the last “i” in “Hi.” She had a voice that made Katharine Hepburn sound like Phyllis Diller. “Can I help you?”

Carter couldn’t decide whether the smile was fake, flirtatious, or just patronizing.

“I guess so,” he said. “This is 1117 Havilland, yeah?”

The smile faded. “Yes,” she said. Her tone had become more cautious.

“I … Look, this is going to sound weird. Do you know an Alfred Hill?”

“He’s my uncle.” She had been leaning lightly on the counter with her fingertips, but now she straightened up.

Carter wasn’t sure what to make of the present tense in that answer. Despite himself, his cop instincts were starting to nag.

“You’ve seen him recently?”

“What are you? An investigator? Debt collector?”

Carter looked around him. The shop was in pristine condition: the stock properly displayed, the interior neat, the exterior maintained. On a shelf behind the counter was a little cartoonish vinyl figure of some sort of monster, bright green, with tentacles dangling from its face and thin bat wings on its back.

Carter had been expecting a musty old house with maybe a few shingles missing and probably a few mice running around. A functioning bookstore with staff in it was nowhere in his plans.

“No. Well, yes, I
am
an investigator, but that’s not why I’m here.”

“No? Why all the questions, then?”

Carter knew this wasn’t going to go down well, but bit the bullet and said it anyway. He pointed vaguely around him. “This place. It’s mine.”

The woman’s face hardened. “What the actual
fuck
are you talking about?”

“You always talk to strangers like that?” She said nothing, but just glared at him. He figured she might throw a punch if he didn’t explain things quickly. “Your uncle’s been missing seven years, is that right? He’s been declared legally dead. Didn’t you know that?”

Her expression of surprise being quickly overwhelmed by anger indicated clearly that she had not known that at all. “This is the first I’ve heard about it. Who the hell…? How could that happen without them telling me? I work here. He’s my uncle, damn it! How is it…? Who told you?”

“Your uncle’s lawyer did.”

“He did
what
? How could he do that without warning me? Wait … why was he talking to you?”

“I’m the beneficiary of your uncle’s will.”

“I haven’t—”

“I’m the
sole
beneficiary.”

The anger left her as suddenly as it had come. She looked at him as if he’d just come in to tell her he was very sorry, but he’d just run over her dog. She sat down heavily on the stool.

“This isn’t right,” she said finally.

“I’m sorry,” said Carter, and he was. He knew there were plenty of people in the world who would be enjoying themselves in his situation.
Thanks very much for all your hard work. Now fuck off while I strip this place of whatever it’s worth.
He wasn’t one of them. “You’ve been working here for seven years without your uncle?”

“I dropped out of postgrad. He gave me the job.” She looked hopelessly at him. “Not even a year later he didn’t come down one day.” She nodded at the ceiling, and Carter understood her to mean there was an apartment above. “I went to check on him, but he wasn’t there. His car was still around the back, but no sign of him. He hadn’t come back by the evening, so I called the police. Yeah, it must be seven years. Yeah…”

She reached under the counter and pulled out several ledgers. She checked the covers where accounting years were written in ballpoint until she found the one she wanted. She flicked through the pages. “Son of a bitch,” she said, her finger on an entry. “Seven years ago today.” She looked up angrily at him. “You didn’t hang around, did you? Couldn’t wait to grab the place.”

“You’ve got me all wrong,” said Carter. “The lawyer came to me. I hadn’t even heard of your uncle before this morning. I don’t know why he named me in his will at all. This is as weird to me as it is to you. I came up here thinking I’d inherited some run-down, abandoned house. A working bookstore … I wasn’t expecting this at all.”

She was looking at him suspiciously. “You didn’t know Alfred?”

“Never even heard his name before.”

“So who are you?”

“I’m Dan Carter.”

There was a flicker in her face at that, but he couldn’t exactly identify what it meant. It wasn’t surprise or recognition nearly as much as it was realization, but the expression was gone in a moment.

The bell rang again, and the woman looked across at the entrance. This time she was startled. A man was making his way past the freestanding bookshelves to the counter. Carter sized him up very quickly. He knew a real Armani suit when he saw one, a pair of Salvatore Ferragamos that wouldn’t have left much change from a grand, and a shirt and tie that he suspected could well be Kiton. He looked at the man’s face—not movie star handsome, but self-assured and undeniably charismatic, blond and blue-eyed—and thought,
Politician
.

“Hi,” said the man to the woman behind the counter, but his gaze slid over Carter. “Not interrupting business, am I?”

“Ken, I—” The woman seemed more flustered now than she had at the discovery that the bookstore belonged to Carter. “I wasn’t expecting you for an hour. It’s—” She shook her head hopelessly. Carter felt sorry for her. It wasn’t a good day.

“What’s going on?” said Ken, with the half smile of somebody whose instinct is to be friendly, but who will tear off your head if you turn out to be a problem. He looked curiously at Carter. “Is there a problem?”

“No. Yes. Yes, there’s a problem. Alfred’s been declared legally dead.”

“Alfred…”

“My uncle, Ken! Hill’s Books?” She ran her hand distractedly through her hair, black drizzled with red. “My uncle.”

“I’m sorry, Emily. I know it must be a shock, but it can’t be a complete one, surely? You’ve always known the day was going to come.”

“Yes, but…” She looked at Ken and sagged with defeat. “I kinda thought I’d get this place.”

Ken raised an eyebrow. “The will’s been read so soon?” Emily nodded. “Then what’s happening to it?”

There seemed no point in dragging it out. “I’ve inherited it,” said Carter.

Ken squared up to him, no longer smiling at all. “And who are you?”

Dan decided he didn’t like Ken. It wasn’t a great revelation; he disliked people who wore suits worth more than his car. It wasn’t envy so much as irritation with the sense of entitlement that came with such lifestyles. He could put up with most things, but arrogance—whether from some gangbanger or this Ivy League fuck—he had no time for.

“What’s your interest?”

“Emily is my girlfriend,” said Ken, indicating Emily with a backward jerk of his thumb. He didn’t look at her as he did it. “I have an interest.”

Carter looked at him, then her, and back to Ken. It wasn’t an obvious pairing. In the movie, she would be played by Zoë Kravitz and he would be played by Aaron Eckhart. It wouldn’t be perfect casting, but that was the gist of it.

“I’m Daniel Carter,” said Carter, and extended his hand. It was a measured gesture. Ken could ignore it and look an asshole, or he could accept it and lose the wind from his sails. Carter knew he would go for the political option, and he did.

He took Carter’s hand and shook it one of those firm, dry handshakes, delivering a squeezing pressure of a precise number of Newtons decided upon by focus groups that politicians practice. Carter still didn’t like him, and couldn’t see that changing anytime soon.

“Ken Rothwell.”

The Rothwells. Of course. It would be.

“How are you related to Alfred?” asked Rothwell.

“As far as I know, I’m not. This is as big a surprise to me as it was to…” He looked to the woman. “Emily, was it? We never really got around to introducing ourselves properly.”

She nodded.

“As big a surprise as it was to Emily,” Carter continued. “Out of the blue.”

“So, what are you going to do with the place?”

“I have no idea. I didn’t know there was a store at the address, a going concern. I’ll have to think about it.” He looked past Rothwell to Emily. “Maybe I can just sell it to you. I don’t know what to do with a bookstore.”

She shook her head quickly. “I can’t. I couldn’t afford it. Some of the stock, it’s worth a lot, never mind the building itself.”

So get your rich boyfriend to buy it for you
, thought Carter.

“Emily, we need to get moving,” said Rothwell. “One of the donors can’t stay for the fund-raiser, so I need to talk to her before it starts. That’s why I’m here early.”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll lock up.”

Carter had been intending to drive back to Red Hook the same evening, but the idea seemed less appealing now. “What time are you in tomorrow?” he asked Emily. “We can plan what to do with this place.”

“Plan?”

“You’re invested in this store, I’m not. You have to get a say in what happens to it; it’s only right.”

“Oh.” The thought that the store wasn’t just going to be taken away from her had clearly not crossed her mind. This small revelation seemed to put some heart back into her. “I’ll be in by half past eight.”

“Great, I’ll see you then. Are there any good hotels around here?”

“Not really. You’d have to drive a ways.” She considered. “There’s a sports shop across the street. If you get yourself a sleeping bag, you could sleep here. In the apartment. There’s a bed, so you wouldn’t be on the floor, but the bedding’s been in the cupboard all this time. Sleeping bag would be best. Yeah, I’d need to see your papers before I can let you do that, though.”

Carter nodded. He wanted to look the place over anyway, and there was still some daylight. He couldn’t imagine wanting to sleep in a musty apartment, but he was curious to see what was up there. If it was all spiders and Miss Havisham’s wedding feast, he’d go to a hotel.

“
You
need to get ready,” warned Rothwell. “You go, I’ll check Mr. Carter’s papers.” Emily looked like she was going to protest, but he was having none of it. “C’mon! Grab your stuff and go. I’ll pick you up in half an hour. Can you be ready by then?”

“My hair—”

“Looks great. Go!”