At the center of the store, an oak table displayed the staff recommendations. Malcolm’s were The Sun Also Rises, Infinite Jest, The Maltese Falcon and Ask the Dust. A Lucia offered Roberto Bolaño, Gabriel García Márquez, Julia Alvarez and Junot Díaz. A Charlie displayed James and the Giant Peach, Hugo Caberet, two Lemony Snicket titles and an Edward Gorey picture book. Billy’s recommendations were all classics: Portrait of a Lady, The Grapes of Wrath, Tender Is the Night, The Age of Innocence. I’d expected Billy’s books to be classics, but classics of a different nature—Robinson Crusoe, The Three Musketeers, Sherlock Holmes. I imagined the assortment of American history books I would have selected for my recommendations, the blurbs I would have written about the women of the Revolution and Lincoln’s steadfast cabinet.
I flipped through the novels on Billy’s side of the table, unsure what I was looking for. The antique key Billy had left with Elijah was still in my pocket. It had to lead somewhere in Prospero Books, only I didn’t see any safes or antique cabinets it may have opened. Still, something in the store had to guide me to the other side of that keyhole. Billy’s recommendations were all untouched, save a series of numbers written in faint pencil inside the back cover of The Grapes of Wrath.
I felt Malcolm lean over my shoulder to review the page.
“Billy’s secret language with the books he resurrected from hospital thrift shops.” He lifted the book from my hands and held it closer to his face. Malcolm explained that the two numbers before the decimal indicated the quality of the book. The four after the decimal the date Billy had bought it, although they didn’t translate clearly into a year. The letter noted the month. The next series of numbers commented on the different aspects of the book—the edition, the imprint, the font—and the final letter the season where, if the book hadn’t sold, its price would be marked down.
“Does it need to be so complicated?”
Malcolm closed the book and returned it to the table. “It was how Billy liked it.”
I ran my finger across Billy’s name on the card resting beneath his books. A sketch of his middle-aged face stared back at me. Slender nose, wide smile, hair perfectly coiffed. The smile was ripe with melancholy.
“I’m not the enemy,” I said.
“That remains to be seen.” For the first time, a smile flashed across his face, vanishing as quickly as it had materialized. He was kind of cute when he wasn’t glowering at me. “Come on. I’ll get you a coffee.”
I waited at one of the mosaic tables while Malcolm journeyed behind the café counter, and started texting Jay. We were having difficulty connecting with the three-hour time difference. He had to wake up early for soccer camp, which meant that he went to bed while I was still having dinner with my parents. Other than our phone call after Billy’s funeral, we’d only sent text messages. I’d reported to him about my unexpected inheritance, the next clue, about my memories of Prospero Books. Sounds like a cool place, he’d said, then proceeded to talk about camp. He sent me a video of his players shouting they missed me and making kissy faces, as well as other equally gushy texts. While I was aware of the vulnerability it required to get a group of teenage boys to participate in a romantic scheme, I wished he’d asked me about Jane Eyre, about whether I was nervous to revisit Prospero Books. I snapped a picture of the bookstore and sent it to Jay, along with the message, Welcome to Prospero Books. He sent back a smiley face. It would have been better if he hadn’t responded at all.
Behind the café counter, Malcolm stopped to talk to the Latina girl I’d met at Billy’s funeral. Her hair was woven into a bun, coffee grinds were smeared across the white apron tied around her waist. When the girl spotted me watching them, she waved enthusiastically. Malcolm looked over, too, his expression more cautious than the girl’s. He filled two cups of coffee and carried them over to my table.
I reached for the mug he held out to me and took a sip. The coffee was black and strong, but I drank it, anyway. Adding milk or sugar seemed like admitting weakness.
“Don’t you worry?” I pointed to a key dangling unsupervised from the cashbox as the girl wiped down the espresso machine. The key was modern, nickel or some metal composite. It didn’t resemble the antique key Billy had left me.
“Our infantry of regulars. They may only buy a cup of coffee, but they’re our eyes and ears.”
“Do you keep a safe somewhere?” I didn’t see any other locks that might match the key.
“There’s no money in it. I went to the bank this morning.”
“I wasn’t asking for money,” I said.
“It’s upstairs, in the storage closet.” Malcolm pointed to a door at the back of the café. His finger traveled to the girl behind the counter. “That’s Lucia. She covers the afternoons. Charlie’s here in the morning. Don’t be startled if you hear him downstairs at dawn. He gets here early to open the store.” I was about to ask him why he thought I’d be here before the store opened, then I remembered Billy’s apartment.
“I’m not staying here—upstairs, I mean. My parents live on the Westside.”
“It’s up to you,” he said.
“When did Billy move upstairs? Last I knew, he lived in Pasadena.” Billy’s house was large and had columns that reminded me of the White House, only it wasn’t populated with a first family or aides, just Billy and too many bedrooms.
“He’s lived upstairs as long as I’ve known him.”
“And how long is that?”
Malcolm squinted at me. “Why do I feel like this is a job interview?”
“How do you think you’re doing so far?”
“Hard to say.” And there was that hint of levity across his face before it vanished again. I’d won over arrogant fourteen-year-old girls who wore push-up bras and more makeup than I did. I’d inspired the class clown to write a six-page paper on how the cotton gin increased the South’s dependency on slavery. For fifty-minute intervals, I’d even gotten entire classrooms of eighth graders to put away their phones and be present. I could certainly charm a cagey thirty-something-year-old bookstore manager.
“Malcolm!” The man next to us looked up, suddenly realizing who was seated beside him.
Malcolm introduced me to Ray the screenwriter. “Ray promises not to forget us when he’s won an Oscar.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” Ray beamed as if he could picture it happening. His expression grew severe. “You look like him,” he said to me.
I instinctively flattened my hair, its reddish brown the same shade as Mom’s, the same shade as Billy’s. In my periphery, Malcolm stiffened.
Lucia wiped down a nearby table, then joined us for coffee. Her tight tank top revealed several tattoos along her shoulders and chest. When she caught me reading a line of Spanish on her forearm she said it was from One Hundred Years of Solitude.
“She doesn’t read fiction,” Malcolm said to Lucia.
“Come on, Malcolm. Everyone