Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man (16 page)

Mr. Bell was in the middle of buying books. His hair was sticking out even more than usual, and he didn’t even say hello when I walked in. He just kept digging through a big box that a man had brought in, putting the books in three different stacks, kind of frowning with one side of his mouth and smiling with the other.

The guy who was selling the books wasn’t exactly the kind of person who mowed his own yard, if you know what I mean. He had on white slacks and a pinkie ring, which tells you something right there, but it was his feet that made me keep my distance. See, he was wearing loafers. Loafers with no socks.

He’s got his eye on Mr. Bell like he’s dealing poker instead of stacking books, and if you were just watching him from the knees up, you’d think Pinkie Ring was just making sure that Mr. Bell was doing his job right. But Pinkie’s toes are popping around inside his loafers like little mice trying to get out of a paper bag. And the more I stand there watching those toes trying to come up for air, the more I wonder what this guy’s so anxious about.

When Mr. Bell gets to the bottom of the box, he pushes one stack toward Pinkie and says, “I can’t take these.” Then he points to the other stacks and says, “I’ll give you twenty
for this group and a fourth the cover price for these.”

Pinkie’s eyebrow barely goes up, but his toes practically pop through his shoes. “
What?
Twenty for all of these?” He picks a book off the top of the third stack. “And you’re telling me you’ll only give me two fifty for this? It’s barely used! It may never even have been read! That’s highway robbery!”

Mr. Bell takes a deep breath and pushes up a sleeve. “I can give you thirty percent, but that would be store credit.”

“You mean I gotta turn around and spend my money here?”

Mr. Bell nods and points to a sign by the cash register. “It’s our policy. Twenty-five percent cash, thirty percent store credit. You can take them elsewhere if you’d like.”

Pinkie’s toes are working up quite a sweat. He mumbles, “You’re the only game in town, and you know it. Gimme the cash.”

Mr. Bell takes out a calculator, but before he starts punching in numbers I say, “Mr. Bell? I’m sorry to interrupt. I was just hoping my grandmother’s book came in?”

He blinks at me like he didn’t realize I was there. “It has, Sammy. Let me finish up here, okay? I’ll only be a minute.”

I stand back, waiting and wondering why Pinkie’s so uptight about getting rid of a few old books, when the back of my brain starts twitching a little. And while Mr. Bell’s counting out Pinkie’s money, I go up to the stacks of books and start reading the titles. And it doesn’t take a genius to figure that these are not books Mr. Pinkie Ring would be reading himself. There are romance books and gardening books and a ton of books on
doll
collecting.

Pinkie’s toes finally get their way. He’s out the door and down the street before his wallet’s even back in his hip pocket.

I say, “He sure seemed nervous.”

Mr. Bell rolls his eyes. “Customers like that I can do without.”

“These don’t seem like books he would read.”

“That they don’t.”

For a second there everything seemed to be in slow motion. The ceiling fan, the register closing—the whole place felt like a dream. “What if they were
stolen?
”

Mr. Bell laughs. “Then he went through a lot of trouble for nothing! There’s no money in used books.”

He pulls out Grams’ book from behind the counter and says, “So what kind of business is your grandmother thinking about starting?”

At first I don’t know what he’s talking about. Then I notice the title of the book she’d ordered:
Establishing a Mail Order Business
. “I don’t know!”

I must have looked shocked, because Mr. Bell laughs and says, “People are full of little surprises, aren’t they?”

I laugh and say, “You’ve got that right!” and head out the door and across the street. And I’ve pounded up two and a half flights of fire escape stairs when I feel this thought kind of chasing behind me. And when I get to the third-floor landing, it tackles me—boom!

When I can move again, I don’t keep heading up the stairs. I do a U-turn and pound back down. And when I’m at the bottom, I take Grams’ book, stuff it in my backpack, and tuck the pack behind some bushes along the building.
Then I start running. And I keep right on running until I’m at Chauncy’s doorstep.

I don’t try any of the SOS stuff—I just start pounding. Pounding and yelling, “Chauncy! Answer the door! I’ve got to ask you something! Chauncy! Hey, Chauncy! I’m not going away! Answer the door!” Finally he does.

I’m expecting him to look mad or irritated or impatient or
something
, but all he looks is tired. Real tired. Like he’s been up for three days without any sleep. And when I ask, “Can I come in?” he just sighs and nods and leads me down the hall.

He sits down in the chair I found him in on Halloween, looking just about as alive as he had that night, and points to the chair next to him.

Well sitting’s about the
last
thing I want to do. I’ve got all this blood pumping through me from running, but on top of that, I can’t stop moving because the more I think about what I want to ask him, the more I’m sure that I don’t
have
to ask him. I’m right.

I walk around looking back and forth from him to the bookcases. “Chauncy, do you own any rare and valuable books?”

He studies me a minute, then nods.

I come in a few steps. “Are you missing any?”

He gives me a puzzled look, but then shakes his head.

“Are you
sure?
”

He sits up a bit and turns sideways to look at a bookcase with glass doors. Then he faces me again and says, “I’m … sure.”

I go racing over to the bookcase and, sure enough, it’s
packed. I open the doors and after a minute I say, “Chauncy! Come here.” And while he’s walking over I read out, “
Secrets of Southern Cooking, Revisiting Vietnam, The Candy Cane Chronicles.…
These may
look
old, but they sure don’t look too valuable!”

Chauncy LeBard doesn’t have much color in his cheeks to begin with, so when I turn to look at him staring at his bookcase, what I see is a ghost. He says “No!” and before you know it he’s pawing through the books, pulling out the ones I found plus two more. When he’s done he stands there shaking. “They’re … gone!”

I sit him down because he looks like he’s about to faint. “Who knew you had them, and how much were they worth?”

He sits there a minute and then gets his buzz box. “I don’t know who knew. They’ve been in the family for years. They were my mother’s pride and joy! I never even thought—” All of a sudden he starts crying, and I can barely understand him when he says, “I should’ve put them in a safe-deposit box.”

I didn’t know what to do, so I kind of stood there like an idiot watching him cry. Finally I put my hand on his shoulder and ask, “Were they worth a lot?”

He wipes his eyes and nods.

“A thousand?
Five
thousand?”

He kind of shudders. “Closer to a hundred. Maybe one fifty.”

“Thousand?”

Sure enough, he nods.

Then I remember that Douglas LeBard cut off his wife
when she mentioned an appraiser. “Were they appraised after your mother died?”

“Right before.”

“Do you know the names of the books?”

He closes his eyes and puts a hand on his forehead. “There was a
Tales
by Poe …”

I jump up and get a pen and some paper. “Wait, wait, wait … Okay,
Tales
by Poe?”

“Yes, there were two by Edgar Allan Poe.
Tales
and
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems
.”

I write this down as best I can. “What did they look like?”

“
Tales
had buff wraps, and the other had blue boards.”

“Wait a minute. Wraps? Boards? What are those?”

“Wraps are dust jackets; boards are the hard cover of a book.”

I let this sink in and then say, “So one had a kind of skin-colored cover, and the other was a blue book?”

He shrugs and nods as if to say, Close enough.

I write this all down and ask, “Okay, what else?”

“There was a Darwin—
On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection …
”

I sit up and say, “
Charles
Darwin?” because that’s all we’ve heard about for weeks in science.

He gives me a twitch of a smile. “Yes. It’s green cloth and a first London edition. There was also a copy of Hemingway’s first book,
Three Stories and Ten Poems
, and
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches
by Mark Twain. That one’s plum-colored, with a frog in the left corner of the cover.”

I don’t need to ask him “
Ernest
Hemingway?” because Miss Pilson’s dissected his stories for us in class and found hidden meanings where you know Ernest had never meant to hide anything. And since everyone’s heard of Mark Twain, all I said was, “Anything else?”

He thinks a minute and then shakes his head. “How did you know?”

So I tell him about the lady in red high heels who bought two big boxes of old-looking books from Bargain Books and what Mr. Bell had said about one old book looking like another.

“I could ask Mr. Bell if anyone has come in trying to sell some rare books.”

Chauncy shakes his head. “They wouldn’t go through Tommy. They’re too valuable.”

We stand around a minute, and then I say, “I think I ought to get the police to come over, don’t you?”

He sighs and nods.

“It’s on my way home. I’ll give them this list and tell them to come over, okay?”

So off I go, and I’m thinking that the first thing I’m going to do is call Grams from the station and let her know that I’m all right. Trouble is, I never got that far.

Where I got to was the end of Orange Street. Orange Street tees into Miller, and you can either walk a mile down Miller Street to a crosswalk, or half a block
up
Miller Street to the crosswalk at Cook. Of course, if you’re in a
car
you can also go straight, which will take you right up the driveway of the courthouse. But if you’re a pedestrian, that choice is illegal—it’s called jaywalking.

I jaywalked all right, only it was more like jay
running
, because Miller’s a pretty busy street. And I had just about made it over to the other side when a police car comes squealing out of the courthouse parking lot with its siren going and its lights flashing. It does a U-turn right in the middle of all this traffic on Miller, then comes bouncing up the handicapped ramp across the sidewalk and nosedives to a stop right in front of me.

Well, you’d better believe I thought something serious was going down. Until I saw that the driver was my hero Officer Borsch. That’s right, Santa Martina’s finest was wailing and flashing and tearing up the courthouse lawn so he could write the town’s most renowned jaywalker a ticket.

He gets out of his car with his pad and his pen ready, looking like a pit bull that’s just chewed through its leash, but before he can say anything, I go up to the passenger window and knock on it until Muscles rolls it down. Now you can tell that Muscles is not too happy about being parked on the courthouse lawn, but he shakes his head and says, “You need to work this out with him.”

I say, “I jaywalked because I was in a hurry to tell you what I discovered at Chauncy LeBard’s. Look at this. It’s a list of books that were stolen from him on Halloween. They’re what the Skeleton Man was after.”

“Some
books?
”

“They’re worth a hundred thousand dollars!”

Officer Borsch snaps, “What the devil are you doing, Keith? I’ve got a citation to write!”

Muscles flexes himself out of the car. “Hang on a
minute, Gil. She’s discovered some important evidence in that Bush House break-in. There are some books missing. She says they’re—”

Officer Borsch rolls his eyes. “Oh, give me a break! It’s
books
now? I’ve got more important things to do than listen to this.”

I couldn’t quite believe my ears when Muscles mumbles, “Yeah, like writing jaywalking citations.”

I guess Officer Borsch couldn’t quite believe his ears either, because he takes a step closer to Muscles, sticks his stomach out even farther than it already is, and says,
“What?”

Muscles throws his hands up in the air. “What’s
with
you, Gil? You act like this girl’s been spraying graffiti instead of trying to help us with this Bush House thing. You said yourself our Q and A with the brother was enlightening.
She’s
the one that gave us the idea, remember?”

Blood’s rising like a tide in Officer Borsch’s face. He takes a step closer and gives Muscles a quick two-handed shove on the chest. “You listen here, you overpumped pipsqueak—”

Muscles shoves him right back. “No,
you
listen, you bloated dinosaur. The books that got ripped off are worth over a hundred
thousand
dollars …” He looks at me like, Is that right? so I nod up and down real fast. He turns back to Borsch and yells, “You hear me? A hundred thousand dollars! You were looking for a motive.
There’s
your motive, bucko!”

The whole time Muscles is yelling at him Officer Borsch is getting redder and redder, and sweat’s starting to bead
up on his forehead. He yells back, “You’ve got a lot to learn about being a cop, buddy! I don’t know how a guy like you even got on the force!” While he’s yelling, he’s poking Muscles in the chest with his pudgy finger, and Muscles is standing there taking it, but you can tell that it won’t be long before Muscles decks him.

I jump in between them and say, “Hey! Hey, look what you guys are doing. You’re gonna cause an accident!” because traffic is stopped in both directions on both streets.

Muscles and Officer Borsch stare each other down for a minute, and then Officer Borsch gets back in the squad car. And after he’s backed out into traffic, Muscles sighs and says, “I’d like to hear the rest of the story, if you don’t mind.” He leads me into the courtyard of the courthouse, and I sit on a bench and tell him all about how someone had replaced Chauncy’s most valuable books with some random old books so that no one would know at a glance that anything was missing. Then, when I tell him how Douglas LeBard had interrupted his wife when she had said something about an appraiser, and that the books had been in the family for a long, long time, Muscles says, “Sounds like something the brother might want to get his hands on for more than one reason.”