Burning Books Read online

  Despite all my precautions, two weeks after the security system was installed, I woke to find my hands tied loosely to my bed frame with a length of blood-red silk, loose enough I could easily free myself. His message was clear: I was at his mercy, and he could take me any time he chose.

  “How extraordinary. Is there more?” He craned his neck over her shoulder to look at the pages. His cheek brushed against hers, rough with stubble.

  “That’s the end.” Her calm voice belied the chaotic state of her thoughts, which were darting every which way into possibilities both indecent and thrilling.

  He drew back just enough to look at her and whispered, “Molly, breathe.”

  Her face flamed again. His eyes watched with fascination the tide of color rising and falling in her cheeks, bounced to her lips, then met her gaze again.

  “Now let’s watch it burn.”

  Couldn’t he see she was already burning?

  The scrape of chair legs on the wood floor brought her to her senses. He had moved his chair a couple of feet away and set the stockpot on the floor between them and was now refilling their wine glasses.

  “If this book really burns, I think I’ll be too excited to pour the wine.” He sat back down. “What do you have to do?”

  “Last time, all I did was turn to the back where my name was printed and read it out loud.” Although her fingers gripped the loose endpaper, she couldn’t make them turn the page.

  “Are you scared?”

  “Yes.”

  Cary didn’t ask why. Although she was undeniably the dominant twin, anyone could clearly see she was driven by the needs of her brother and the effect the world had upon him. He reached across the space between them, closing his fingers over hers.

  “Molly, Magnus is ruled by emotion. Fear, anxiety, anger—even affection, although he may have an odd way of showing it, considering his social-distance issues. But you can’t let his fear of these books make your decision for you. Neither can you let my enthusiasm affect you. If you feel you need to read them, then you should read them.”

  “What if he’s right? What if the books, or the magic in them, are bringing darkness?”

  “Then we’ll deal with the darkness. You have to remember, though, that Magnus’s interpretation of darkness could be vastly different from ours, and could actually mean something psychological rather than physical.”

  Ah, yes. How could she have forgotten Cary was a psychiatrist? Broken down in those terms, the encroaching darkness Magnus had prophesied seemed much less ominous.

  He released her hands. Her finger flipped the page. She glanced at the glued endpaper where her name was printed and looked at him as she read. “Molly McKinley.”

  “Whoa!” Excitement erased the skeptical anticipation that had held his expression seconds before as orange and yellow froth erupted from the paper, heatless flames that bubbled over the pages and engulfed the entire book.

  Molly held the book until the paper scorched and curled, then dropped it into the stockpot. She held her hands out to him: no redness from the heat, no burns from the flames, no smudges from the ash.

  They watched the book burn until it was ash, then watched the ash burn until it was gone. He scraped a finger along the bottom of the pot and held it up for her to see: clean.

  “The ash from the summary is gone, too. And the pot is cold.”

  Her phone rang. It had sunk to the very bottom of her purse, tossed in haphazardly and without a care after she pulled into Cary’s driveway. She pawed her wallet out of the way and fished out the phone, untangled it from a fleece headband, and peeked at the display as she answered.

  “Annis?” She held the phone away from her ear as a rending scream and the crash of breaking glass in the background drowned out her housekeeper’s words. Oh, God. Magnus. “I can’t hear you. What happened? What’s going on?”

  Through a break in the screams, Annis frantically babbled, “Come home quick! Now! He’s gone crazy, Magnus has!”

  ∞5∞

  The calm, eerie quiet of the house convinced Molly that she should have let Cary Welch accompany her home. She had barely talked him out of it.

  “He could be in a dangerous state of mind.”

  “I know how to handle him. Besides, your children are here, and your sitter probably needs to get home.”

  She left him standing in the driveway under his huge umbrella, taking nothing with her but his courtly kiss on the back of her hand and his alarm, which rode shotgun with such a palpable presence that she half expected to see it huddled in the passenger seat, chewing its nails and twitching anxiously.

  From the entry, everything seemed fine: no signs of an epic psychological breakdown, no evidence of a struggle. She tossed her coat toward the coat tree, vaguely aware that it missed and thumped to the floor. The scrape of sharp edges on tile drew her to the kitchen. Nothing amiss. Molly couldn’t count how many times the acoustics in the sitting room had misdirected her; the cathedral ceilings threw sound as well as the most skilled ventriloquist.

  Then Annis popped up from behind the center island like a frazzled jack-in-the-box. Startled, Molly yelled—“Aaaahhh!”—which frightened the already petrified housekeeper into a high-pitched shriek reminiscent of a teakettle.

  “Jaysus, Mary, and Joseph!” Sounding every bit an Irish nun rather than a British housekeeper, Annis made the sign of the cross, closed her eyes, and leaned weakly against the island.

  “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think anyone was in here.” Molly dumped her purse on the counter and came around the island, just as Annis cautioned, “Be careful, Molly. There’s broken glass everywhere.”

  She stopped, her boot crunching a shard of curved glass. Almost afraid to ask, she nevertheless forced out the words: “What did he break?”

  Annis pointed silently to a leaded-glass cupboard door, behind which her mother’s vintage Waterford stemware glinted in the light and threw rainbows around the room. Usually. Reluctantly, her eyes traveled to the floor where the remains of what looked like a hock glass threw prisms from its diamond and wedge cuts.

  “All of it?” Molly whispered, horrified. She peered over the edge of the island. Most of the shattered crystal had been swept away. The light caught on slivers and pieces so small, the broom had missed them.

  “Just the ship’s decanter and the punch set are left. And the candy dish in the sitting room.”

  The candy dish, actually a compote bowl, sat mostly unnoticed on the bookshelf, piled with the Werther’s butterscotch candy Magnus favored. The wine goblets, champagne flutes, port glasses, napkin rings . . . all of it, swept up in fragments and dumped in the garbage.

  Numbly, she said, “They’re just glasses. Just . . . things.”

  “Your mum would be horrified, she would.”

  She would. Eloise McKinley would have forgiven Magnus almost anything, but this—the destruction of her cherished wedding gifts—would have been too much.

  “I was giving it the monthly cleaning when he just went crazy. Something must be done, Molly. He’s going to hurt someone someday.”

  “I know. I’ll call his doctor tomorrow and make an appointment.”

  Annis shook her head, clucking her tongue. “You’d be better off living away from him. Why you came back, I’ll never understand.”

  Molly looked up sharply. “What do you mean, I came back? From where?”

  The housekeeper’s brow scrunched. A lock of greying brown hair fell into her eye, and she brushed it away impatiently. “Oh, away. University, I guess. It’s . . . it’s . . .” She waved a hand in the air as though trying to grasp the memory. “It’s gone. I don’t remember now. It was there for just a second, wasn’t it.”

  Shaking her head and muttering about old age and failing memory, Annis set about sweeping up the last of the crystal shards. “Best not go barefoot awhile, Molly. There’ll be slivers for days, no matter how much I hoover the floor.”

  Molly stepped back and tapped her boot against the
corner of the island to dislodge any clinging glass. “Where is he?”

  “He left, didn’t he. Went screeching down the driveway like a maniac.” She sent Molly a censuring look. “The neighbors called,” she said ominously.

  That was nothing new. The neighbors called at least three times a year. Occasionally, they were concerned for Molly’s and Annis’s welfare, but mostly they just wanted to complain about the wild, discomfiting creature who lived in their midst. They’d called the police twice in the last three years, necessitating a lot of meetings and releases of information for the authorities to talk to Magnus’s doctors, and causing a loss of felicitous feelings all around. Ordinarily, Molly soothed them as best she could, but someday soothing wouldn’t be enough.

  “I’ll call them tomorrow.” She’d call everyone tomorrow, just to cover all bases, because only God knew who Magnus had offended this time. The uncharacteristic, uncharitable thought twisted her mouth into a grimace.

  “They said if they didn’t hear from you tonight that everything’s all right and you’ll control your brother, they’d call the police.”

  Blast them. Couldn’t they see that Magnus was ill, not right in the head?

  Ah. That would be why they wanted to involve the authorities. Right. She squeezed her fingers over her temple and snagged her purse off the counter, thanking Annis for cleaning up and apologizing for her brother. Yet again.

  She snagged a bottle of wine from the built-in wine rack by the refrigerator. Annis opened her mouth to ask if Molly wanted a glass and closed it just as quickly, glancing at the empty Waterford cupboard. There were other wine goblets, of course, but Molly didn’t stop to get one. The bottle had a hole in the top, and that was good enough for her.

  Her bedroom door closed and locked behind her, Molly uncorked the wine with a corkscrew she kept in her night-table drawer and took a fortifying swig. Her address book lay by her pillow, open to the neighbor’s entry—Annis’s not so subtle reminder to call the neighbors, just in case Molly decided to ignore the verbal message. Not enough wine in the world for this task, but she took another long pull from the bottle, set it aside, and dialed the number.

  Ten minutes later, she ended the politely nasty verbal skirmish in a manner that was sure to cool neighborly relations further.

  “I’m not quite certain what you think I can do about it. He has a mental disorder, and I’m fully aware that doesn’t mesh at all with your vision of suburban utopia, but he has every right to live here.”

  The expected response came in the equally expected chilly tone: “He doesn’t have the right to ramrod through the neighborhood like he’s at a demolition derby.”

  Molly reflected back to a mere hour ago when she’d been sitting in the kitchen of a certain charming anthropology professor, extremely intoxicated by a heady red wine, his fabulous eyes, and that killer smile, and thought, Fuck this.

  “Then next time call the police. I realize that doesn’t afford you the opportunity to try once again to make us feel inferior in every way possible, but that’s just too bad. Find the balls to call the cops, or stay off the road. Better yet, move.”

  Tomorrow she would likely be remorseful for her unkind outburst. Tonight, she raised the bottle and toasted herself. Twice. No mollycoddling here, thank you very much—she’d told the neighbors to sic the police on her brother next time. No smothering sister, either—she felt no urge to track down Magnus and lure him back under her watchful eye. What she most wanted was to beat him about the head and shoulders with the shards of their mother’s prized crystal.

  And when her cell phone chimed with an incoming text message, she resisted the impulse to read it for a full five minutes. That called for another toast. Maybe three.

  Half the bottle was gone when at last she checked her messages. Cary Welch, the notification on her lock screen informed her. Because she had, of course, entered his number in her contacts list. Purely as a precaution in case she lost his business card. Of course.

  She swiped a finger across the screen to unlock it and tapped the message.

  Are you all right?

  Right as fucking rain. The letters on the phone screen swam, much like the letters in her book had swum before they torched the summary. It seemed like a year ago that she’d watched the smoke from the burning paper curl its way toward his kitchen ceiling.

  She realized she’d slumped down on the bed, half lying on her address book. She grabbed at it, missed twice, finally snagged it, and tossed it on the floor. Holy crap—what wine had she taken from the kitchen? Squinting at the label, she managed to make out Pinot Noir. Clos Vougeot, no doubt, though she lacked the energy to puzzle out the squiggly lines that formed the name of the vineyard. Nothing like getting ripped—alone—on a $200 bottle of French wine. Her phone chimed again.

  This time he sent a picture: the narrow spine of a slender green book, embossed with a gold 3. How had he retrieved the next volume from his father so fast? She set the wine down and picked up the phone, pressing the little green phone icon that would bring his voice over the line.

  “Molly.” His voice caressed her. She closed her eyes.

  “He broke all my mother’s wedding crystal.”

  “I’m sorry.” She was, too. “Is he there?”

  “No. He was gone before I got here. Sped away.” A weary sigh slipped from her lips. “The neighbors called.”

  “I’m sure they were concerned for you and your housekeeper.”

  “I think I told them to fuck off.”

  He chuckled. “They’ll understand.”

  “They won’t. But I don’t care.” She shifted onto her back and opened her eyes. The ceiling swayed. The seductive urge to close her eyes and sleep was more appealing than ever. “I also think I’m drunk.”

  “You barely had any wine.”

  “I’ve had half a bottle of Pinot Noir since I came home.” She paused. “Cary, I don’t own any red lace.” It seemed important that he understand that. No red lace in her closet. She wasn’t the woman in their dreams.

  “Cinnamon brown is more your color, anyway.” What an odd thing to say. “Your blouse, Molly. You left it here. You can get it when you pick up the next book. Tomorrow?”

  “I wish . . .” She trailed off, drew a deep breath. “I wissshh . . .” Her eyes drifted closed. The phone fell from her fingers.

  She thought he whispered, “I wish I’d kissed you,” and she smiled. Her last conscious thought was she wished he had, too.

  ∞

  Wine hangovers were the worst. Lynda had assured her on more than one occasion that tequila hangovers were the epitome of hell, far beyond anything wine could do. Molly’s experience was that just the quick sniff of a cork of a heady red wine could spur a crippling headache and debilitating nausea. If she could move without either her head or her stomach being aware, she just might make it to the bottle of aspirin without exacerbating her misery.

  Inch by tedious inch, she raised herself up from the bed, opening her eyes only when she was upright. Magnus sat in the chair beside her bed, slumped forward, his elbows on his knees. Her first thought was that he looked even worse than she felt, and then her head shrieked in agony and her stomach heaved.

  “God.” Her hands seemed disconnected from the rest of her as they floated slowly up to wrap around her aching head. The throbbing abated slightly.

  “Wine is fine until the morn, and then you’ll rue the day you were born,” he intoned without humor, a rhyme their father had often recited to tease their mother.

  “What are you doing in here? I’m so mad at you, I can’t see straight. Get out.”

  “You can’t see straight because you drank a bottle of wine.”

  “Half a bottle. Get out.”

  “The bottle is empty. Unless you have a guest hiding under the bed, you drank the whole thing all by yourself.”

  “It doesn’t matter if I have a crowd of guests under my bed. Get out of my room. I’m furious with you.”

  He sta
red at his hands. “You want to do what you want to do, but you don’t want to accept that what you do impacts me. Yet you blame me for that impact.”

  Molly lowered her arms and snarled, “The only impact around here was Mother’s crystal all over the kitchen floor!” Stabbing pain rammed through her head. Even her eyeballs hurt. She groaned.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t believe that.”

  “I am sorry, whether you believe it or not.”

  “I don’t care. Get out of my room.” She flung her hand out, pointing imperiously at the door. Her stomach gave up its tenuous control over its contents, giving her only seconds to spring from bed to bathroom.

  When she crept back into the room, hunched over as though to protect her stomach from a blow, he was standing by the door but still hadn’t left. She crawled onto the bed and curled into a ball.

  “You’re breaking my mind, Molly. With each book, I feel it breaking more. I barely slept. I had . . . terrible dreams.” He whispered the last, as though to speak the words loudly would conjure those dreams into the waking world. “Please stop. Please. Before I completely lose my mind.”

  “Your mental state is your own problem.”

  It wasn’t true. It was her problem, too, and her anger with him could never totally erase her concern for him, even temporarily. But it was satisfying in an oddly guilty way to see him flinch.

  “I’ll let you be, then. I can stay at Cecily’s a few days to give you some breathing space.”

  “Magnus.”

  “I hope you feel better soon.”

  “Magnus, sit”—he slipped out of the room and closed the door behind him—“down.”

  Molly pulled her pillow over her head, blocking out the bright daylight and quieting the thunder in her head. She lacked the physical energy, as well as the emotional motivation, to go after him. The throbbing in her head was strangely lulling, pulling her toward slumber, diminishing the closer she came to unconsciousness. Her mind had retained the last view her eyes had taken in before closing—her room, tidy as always except for the address book on the floor by her desk, where she’d flung it last night. Bright sunlight splashed pale-yellow walls—she’d forgotten to close the drapes before she passed out. Her door lay wide open, a warm, yellow glow illuminating the ordinarily dim hallway: a summons that pulled her off the bed and out of her bedroom to investigate. To pry. To mollycoddle and smother.