A girl with an armful of books lingered by the register, and Malcolm rushed to the front desk to help her. Lucia and I watched Malcolm ring up the girl. He said something that made her laugh, and when he laughed, too, I saw the kind eyes from his portrait in the noir section.
“Don’t let him intimidate you,” Lucia said. “He’s really attached to the store. We all are.” Her tone was kinder than Malcolm’s, but her words carried the same vague threat, should I aim to do anything that might ruin Prospero Books.
* * *
I couldn’t help but think of Jane Eyre as I ascended the narrow staircase toward the eerily silent top floor. While I could remember every dusty corner and piquant scent of the bookshop below, I had no recollection of an upstairs. I’d certainly never been up there. There were two doors, one on each side of the hall. I tried the right one first. A storage room, filled with shelves of books, more in boxes, and cleaning supplies. Behind the stacks of books, I located the safe. It had a combination lock. There weren’t any vaults hidden under panels in the floor, any keyholes that might match the antique key Billy had given me. That left only Billy’s apartment.
I creaked open the door waiting for someone to tell me I was trespassing, invading my uncle’s private life. When no one did, I braved a step inside and shut the door behind me.
Sun dust glittered throughout the spacious living room. It looked like a spread from a design magazine: a brown leather couch with an old chest positioned as a coffee table; an antique vanity beside the door with three mismatching vases spaced across its tabletop. I spotted a keyhole on the chest and tried the antique key. It didn’t fit. Besides, it was unlocked. Inside, piles of clothing were folded neatly. Collared linen shirts and waterproof khaki pants, the style of clothes Billy had worn when I knew him. I unfolded an olive green button-down and inhaled it deeply. It smelled of baby powder, pleasant and fresh, but it didn’t remind me of Billy.
I scanned the room for another keyhole. The kitchen didn’t have a door. It reeked of disinfectant. The tiled countertops and stove had been scrubbed clean. The fridge was empty, the ice tray lonely in the freezer. Elijah said he’d had the apartment prepared for me. Logical enough, yet there was so much I could have discovered if the fridge had been stocked with Billy’s food, the trash can cluttered with his waste.
The door to the bedroom didn’t have a lock. It was as quaint and characterless as the rest of the apartment, complete with white wicker furniture and a modest bookshelf beside the door, hardbacks faded from years of sun exposure. On the dresser, a bouquet of dried wildflowers rested beside a photograph of a blonde woman. I lifted the frame from the dresser, blowing off the dust that had collected on the glass. She leaned against a boulder on a narrow strip of beach below the cliffs, her thin, white-blond hair pulled over her right shoulder. She had translucent skin and somber green eyes that matched her earrings, or perhaps I only imagined that they were somber because I knew she was dead.
I removed the picture from the frame, checking for an inscription. The Kodak emblem was stamped on the back, nothing handwritten, no dates, no names. This had to be Evelyn. Mom had offered no details on Evelyn Weston’s appearance, but she looked exactly as I expected. Young, late twenties, early thirties. Blonde. Beautiful, hauntingly so.
I stared at the photograph, searching for some indication where or when it was taken. The rocky bluffs looked like Malibu, but Malibu had countless pockets of beach and this wasn’t one I recognized. Evelyn wore no makeup. Her hair was long and straight. Her emerald earrings were antique. Her white T-shirt could have been manufactured at any point in the second half of the twentieth century.
I put the picture back in its frame and positioned it on the dresser exactly as it had been before. Looking at it, I felt a profound sadness. It was the only photograph Billy had displayed in the apartment. While it must have comforted Billy to return to Evelyn’s likeness each day, it seemed to magnify how empty his personal life otherwise was. Goose bumps rose on my arms. The muscles of my back tensed. His lonesomeness scared me. I scanned the bedroom one last time for a keyhole, and when I didn’t find one, I hurried out, wanting to get as far away from that picture as I could.
In the living room, there was no old bank on the table by the front door. No jewelry box perched on the drop-front mahogany desk against the wall near the kitchen. The desk looked like the one my parents had in their upstairs hall, an ornamental heirloom that had belonged to my father’s grandmother. I ran my hand along the smooth wood, wondering whether Billy had seen the similarity between our desk and his, if he’d sat at this desk and occasionally thought of us. I tried to pull down the front, but it was locked. My fingers traced the ivy carved into the front, a brass keyhole cover that deftly hid the lock. When I slid the antique key into the lock, it fit snugly. I twisted it to the right and the lock clicked open.
The first thing that hit me was the stench of the old wood, its musk. The desk was cluttered with receipts and tattered pieces of cream-colored stationery. I sorted through the crumpled heating bills and yellowed pages of the Los Angeles Times, inspecting each article for the next clue before deciding it was little more than an abandoned article. Beneath the forsaken artifacts of Billy’s daily life, I found a folder filled with the keepsakes he’d concealed for me.
Billy had photographs, a playbill from my middle-school play, flyers from my debate competitions. I laid the artifacts in chronological order and saw the framework of my childhood unfold before me. The timeline began with a photograph of Billy holding me, swaddled in lavender-colored cotton, his expression somewhere between amazed and terrified. Two years later, a snapshot from a dark restaurant, Billy and me eating the same string of spaghetti like in Lady and the Tramp. An action shot from 1991, me running in a sequined bikini. The next January, 1993. My seventh birthday party. The only party I remembered Billy attending. In the photograph, Billy and I posed with a goat. I’d begged Mom to turn our backyard into a petting zoo. I don’t know, Miranda. It sounds unsanitary, she’d said. I’d enlisted Billy, and together we’d prepared a pitch for Mom, filled with facts about the Nigerian dwarf goat—it bred year-round and had a lifespan of fifteen years. About the zedonk—also known as the zonkey, zebrula, zebrinny, zebronkey, zebonkey or zebadonk—which despite its many names was incredibly rare. We outlined the precautions we’d take to ensure cleanliness—a washing station and lots of hand sanitizer—and scientific studies proving how unlikely it was anyone would catch a disease from the Nigerian dwarf goats of Southern California. In the photograph, Billy held the goat like a trophy.
The next picture was from my sixth-grade play, Billy’s arms around Joanie and me dressed in Puritan costumes. Identical bonnets and blue dresses, yet in our postures you could tell who was Abigail Williams and who was a forgettable woman she’d accused of witchery.
In the final photograph, the pet shop looked exactly as I remembered. Speckled linoleum floor, metal cages confining colorful birds. Billy held me close to him as I lifted the puppy toward the camera. We both wore exhilarated smiles. We both seemed happy. How quickly thereafter everything had changed.
I rummaged through the desk, searching for anything else that pertained to me. Amid the credit card advertisements and gas station receipts, I found a folded sheet of lined paper. My handwriting looked pretty much the same, but the words were unfamiliar.
Hi, Uncle Billy!
I bet you’re surprised to hear from me. I know it’s been forever! I graduated high school yesterday. Can you believe it? At graduation, everyone else had tons of family with them. All I had were my parents. That made me think of you, how at one point you might have been there, too.
Do you ever think about me anymore? Sometimes I think about how much fun we used to have