Burning Books Read online

  “I get weary of being so difficult.”

  “Oh, Magnus.” Her heart wrenched. “You’re not always difficult.”

  “I am.” He looked up from the book, pinning her with tortured eyes. “Even when it’s a good day, I am difficult in here.” He touched his forehead. “I’m weary of having thoughts in my head that I don’t know where they came from or why. Sometimes, Molly, I am just plain weary, period.”

  Oh, to be able to run to him and fling her arms around him and comfort him. But Magnus didn’t like to be touched unless he initiated it, and the impenetrable wall between them, present since birth, did not allow for that kind of intimacy. All things considered, she’d been shafted where twinhood was concerned.

  As though having read her mind, he said, “You deserve a better twin.”

  “I like you just fine.” She kept her voice brisk; he had no patience for mushy sentimentality. “You’re my brother; I love you, Magnus.”

  A tiny smile curled his mouth—a sad, wasted smile that signaled an oncoming mental hurricane. That was okay; they’d weathered them before.

  “Maybe you can make sense of this.” He held the book up to the lamplight to see the words better. “I do this of my own free will. Magnus McKinley.”

  The book burst into flame.

  ∞2∞

  Molly screamed, jumping up from her chair as the flames appeared to engulf his hands. Then he dropped the burning book into a hammered copper dish on the coffee table, staring at his hands in disbelief.

  “The flames weren’t hot.”

  The pages burned fiercely for only seconds, until nothing remained but ash. A knot of anxiety clenched in her chest as a flare of fire claimed even the ash. Magnus’s face turned a greenish hue; oh Lord, he was going to vomit into the bowl. The last spark faded.

  Molly stared at the bowl until Magnus sat back down. Then she gave herself a little shake, reclaimed her chair, and said, “What were we talking about?”

  “Ah . . .” His forehead scrunched as he struggled to remember. “Oh, we were talking about the books you found in that shop, the ones with your names in them.”

  Her confusion cleared. “Oh yes. I lost my train of thought for a moment. It’s really a shame we couldn’t find any with your name.”

  He waved away her regret. “That’s more your kind of thing. I’m going to turn in; I’m not feeling very well.”

  “I’ll send Annis up with some more tea.”

  She raised her cheek for his good-night kiss, but he gave her only a perfunctory hug with as minimal bodily contact as he could manage. Ah, Magnus. Affection warred with anxiety for dominance as she watched him hurry from the room. Now what had she been doing?

  Oh yes—the books. She plucked from the top of the stack the volume with the gold 1 on the spine, opened the cover, and began to read.

  Someone was watching me. I could feel eyes on me all the time—as I walked from the house to the car and back again, as I browsed through shops, as I ate lunch at the little café around the corner. I could never see him. I just always had this sensation of being observed. A secret admirer, perhaps too shy to approach. It gave me a warm feeling to know that someone watched over me, that someone cared. It was so lonely growing up in my house sometimes, with my father always gone and my mother always busy, and—well, there really was no one else, was there? So my secret watcher, he was like my friend, right? An unseen friend, holding danger and loneliness at bay. Who wouldn’t like feeling wanted and protected?

  Molly set aside the book when the crash of breaking china sounded from the hallway above, followed by shouting, stomping footsteps, and a slamming door. Annis huffed down the stairs, not pausing to clean up the contents of the tea tray Magnus had knocked from her hands.

  “I don’t think I can take much more o’ this, Molly. He’s mad, he is.” Thirty years in America hadn’t erased her English accent.

  “I’m so sorry. He didn’t hurt you?”

  Annis’s scowl softened. “He’d never. But he’s bloody rude, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “I thought he was seeing a psychiatrist.”

  He was: every other week, as well as group therapy every Wednesday night. The word Asperger’s had been thrown around in more than one conversation before her parents’ deaths, but Magnus’s psychiatrist had dismissed their armchair diagnosis.

  “Autism is not your brother’s issue,” he’d said as recently as last month. But before she could ask what the issue was, he’d been interrupted by a phone call. She reminded herself before every appointment to ask again but always seemed to forget once she was there.

  “Ah, well.” Annis softened even further, despite the hard tread of agitated feet pacing back and forth above them that made the floorboards creak. “Perhaps the solar storm affected him in a different way from most other people, poor lad.”

  Annis’s generous disposition could not hide the fact that Magnus had been difficult all his life, long before the solar superstorm that had fuzzed a year from the memories of the entire population on earth. The car accident that killed Molly and Magnus’s parents was thought to be the result of the coronal mass ejection that hit the planet just as they were taking Molly back to university. Hard to keep a car on the road when your brain was short-circuiting.

  Molly remembered nothing of the accident; nothing, in fact of the several months preceding and following it. Just suddenly, she had awakened one day and was shocked to find that her parents were buried in the local graveyard, and her body bore the healing scars from the accident that had taken their lives.

  “I wish it were just the solar storm that caused him to be like this. It would be much easier to blame a freak natural occurrence than it is to accept whatever is really wrong with him.”

  “Ah, but mental illness could be considered a freak natural occurrence as well, couldn’t it?”

  “I suppose it could.”

  Annis hustled off to the kitchen. Molly didn’t stop her, although the confession hovered on her tongue as it so often did: The solar storm had caused no end of havoc—death, insanity, and memory loss—but Magnus had actually improved since the event, as though the inability to remember clearly that year of his life had laid to rest some of his inner demons.

  His footsteps ceased. The floorboards fell silent. When the noise didn’t start up again, Molly opened the book again.

  I’m naïve. I know I am. I grew up too sheltered, in a neighborhood of tasteful brick mansions a respectable distance from one another, manicured lawns and immaculate gardens. Not too ostentatious, but enough to impress and inspire envy. I had it all, right? Yeah, sure. I had everything—except friends who liked me for who I am. I had yet to have a suitor—are they still called suitors? I find it a very old-fashioned word, but my parents use it. It suits the purpose, I guess, so I’ll use it. I had yet to have a suitor who didn’t show up in a suit and tie, shoes polished to an obscene shine, and who didn’t arrive half an hour early so he had a chance to schmooze the boss.

  Oh, that lifestyle was familiar. Her own parents each came to their marriage with a level of affluence that, while not overly impressive by itself, when combined vaulted them into the realm of the moderately wealthy. She herself lived in one of those brick houses, although it wasn’t precisely what she would call a mansion. The fake friends were familiar, however, as were the young businessmen she’d dated who arrived in suits, reeking of ambition and Tom Ford Oud Wood that must have set them back a few hundred bucks and which, she was certain, was not meant for the sole purpose of tantalizing her nose.

  So I didn’t mind the wildflowers left on my car windshield—wildflowers for a rich girl. Who but someone with a lot of nerve would ever even think of it? So my secret admirer didn’t care about impressing. He cared about what I liked. It was no hard task if he were watching me to discover I preferred the wild, untamed beauty of the cottage garden at my tiny little house to the prissy cultivars in the formal beds of the famil
y abode.

  Alarm bells rang in her head. Secret admirer, this unnamed narrator called him. Molly had another word for someone who followed you around, observing you from around corners and behind shrubs, never seen, never acknowledging, but always there: stalker.

  I watched for him. I watched diligently, but I never saw him. He was good at staying hidden. I suspected he was from a lower-class neighborhood and therefore didn’t want to be seen in mine for fear of being removed. And I was flattered enough to keep my mouth shut. Why ruin a good thing? He was the only man who showed up with a daisy rather than an expensive bouquet. He knew me. He had taken the time to get to know what I liked.

  And soon it wasn’t just daisies he left on my car. Or on the doorstep. Or in places he knew I would be at certain times. Pretty rocks from the sea, polished like glass—did he somehow know I had a huge glass jar filled with sea glass? Whole sand dollars, dried and cleaned. A turtle made from large glass balls. A Skinny Cinnamon Dolce latte from Starbucks.

  This attention to my favorite things made me reckless. I placed myself in locations and situations where he could easily come meet me face-to-face, where we could have that Skinny Cinnamon Dolce latte together, where I could assure myself he wasn’t doused in cologne he couldn’t afford and that his only ambition was to spend time getting to know me.

  He didn’t show his face, although I could feel him watching me. I had made myself available, but he declined to join me. Was he disfigured, then? Or simply unattractive and embarrassed that he was courting me? Did he think my parents would disapprove? Does anyone really even care about parental approval these days, anyway? The worst that would happen if I became involved with someone they didn’t like is, I might be written out of the will. The money, a modest inheritance, I didn’t care about. Their love, I would always have. The , (here, the word was smeared so much Molly couldn’t make it out) though—I could never leave them, and they would be the price I’d pay for a new start.

  Molly made a face. Love? That wasn’t love; that was the Stockholm syndrome, or something very near it. And what did her dimwitted narrator regret leaving behind? The word was blurred so much, it had nearly been obliterated from the page. She held the book closer to the light and took a magnifying glass from the drawer of the accent table. The fibers of the paper were unbroken, and the ink showed no sign of smudging.

  I resolved to meet my suitor, regardless of his shyness. I watched from my windows, but he was too wary to be caught that way. He must have seen me, for the flowers and coffees and presents stopped for a while. I hid in my garden in the early morning, hoping to catch sight of him, only to wind up late for work after finding a clutch of sea glass on my back doormat on the opposite side of the house. Once I even slept in my car, thinking I’d wake up if someone approached it. I woke when the sun was high—late for work again—to find the windshield covered in asters and daisies and petals from the spent peony blooms in my garden. I’d missed him again. He knew my routines, how to avoid me. He probably even watched me set up my traps. I wonder if it amused him, or if he was delighted I was playing back. I looked forward to this strange repartee, looked forward to it like I’d never anticipated anything before. I began leaving gifts for him, things I thought he might like even though I knew nothing about him. And after a while, he began accepting them.

  Molly read the last sentence twice, blinked in disbelief, and closed the book. She now knew its title and author, even if they weren’t printed in the books: How I Seduced My Creepy Stalker, penned by Idiot Woman.

  ∞

  The night passed without Magnus’s expected emotional hurricane. Since he seemed so pleased that his black mood hadn’t spilled out over the house, Molly took him to breakfast. Afterward, he begged off a ride home.

  “I’m going to bum around some antique shops and maybe get a coffee or something. I’ll take the transit home.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Magnus. The nearest transit stop is half a mile from the house. Go do your thing, and text me when you’re ready to go home. I’ll browse some bookshops or something. I need to read the CliffsNotes for that atrocious book Genevieve selected for the book club; I can’t make my way past the third chapter, and we’re meeting tomorrow night.”

  “Just tell her it’s an awful book, and you didn’t waste your time with it.”

  “Sure, if I want to hear about it for the rest of my life.”

  “Quit the book club, then. You don’t like any of them. Except Lydia.”

  “Lynda,” she corrected, “and I do like them. Why would you think I don’t?”

  “Because you don’t. I can tell.”

  Molly digested this silently. Infrequently, her self-absorbed brother noticed things that Molly herself never saw—or refused to acknowledge. It was true she didn’t like most of the other women in her book club, although at one time she must have seen something appealing in them. Lynda and Joyce were the only ones with true personality; the others were simply tired clichés of upper-class girls, carbon copies of one another punched from stiff and boring cardboard.

  “Text me when you’re ready.”

  He smiled sourly. “Stop coddling, Molly.”

  She stuck her tongue out; she hated the word mollycoddling, which was why Magnus frequently needled her with it.

  “Fine. Make your own way home. But if you miss the last bus and have to walk home in the rain, don’t blame me.”

  With not so as much as a peck on her cheek, he veered away from the car and headed down a side street toward one of his favorite antique shops. He wasn’t an invalid, but letting him go off on his own unsupervised took monumental effort. Even now, the compulsion was strong to follow him, make sure no trouble found him, make sure he caused no catastrophes. Once, when they were teenagers, their parents had let him go downtown to the theater alone, only to be summoned to the police station when he’d been detained for causing a disturbance. Overwhelmed by some emotion triggered by the film, he’d tucked himself under the theater seat and screamed until the film had to be stopped and the authorities summoned.

  He’s a man now, Molly. You’ve got to let him go. If he gets picked up by the police for freaking out, that’s the price he’ll have to pay.

  She peered in the direction he’d gone, but he’d disappeared from sight already. Although she watched, a hand over her eyes to keep out the drizzling rain, he did not reappear. After a few minutes, her flesh prickled. The sensation of eyes crawling over her skin made her glance around surreptitiously. The city moved around her, not caring that Molly McKinley had a class-A case of the creeps, and likewise not giving up her unseen observer.

  A troubled frown creasing her brow, Molly got in her car, started the engine, and pulled out of her parking spot, ignoring the angry horn of the person she’d cut off. The sensation of eyes faded, and she berated herself as she aimed the car toward home.

  “Idiot. If you can’t read a simple story without it affecting your real life, you shouldn’t be reading anything at all. Now go get those CliffsNotes, or go home and read that loathsome book.”

  So she drove to Beemer Lane in Queen Anne and parked in front of the warehouse, which looked even more dilapidated than it had yesterday. The wind picked up a considerable pace during the night and must have blown the sign from its moorings, for the iron bracket was empty. No CliffsNotes would be found here, but maybe she could get some answers about the books she’d bought.

  Molly belted her coat more securely and crossed her arms over her chest to keep her scarf pinned as she dashed through the rain puddles collecting in the ruts decades of cars had carved into the blacktop. Her feet tried to shrink away from the icy water that seeped in through the zipper and soaked the foam insole. She squelched up the steps, grasped the knob, and mentally prepared herself for the strange experience that was Gerard’s Rare Books.

  She stopped short in the doorway, wind pelting the rain against the backs of her legs. The bookshop hummed with conversation as people shopped tasteful walnut-veneered she
lves of popular paperback novels, new hardback releases, and a section of tattered used books offered at discount prices.

  Elbowing her way through the unexpected throng of shoppers to the sales counter, she leaned between two customers making their purchases and caught a salesclerk’s eye.

  “Help you, ma’am?” she asked by rote, sounding bored. “Twelve fifty-nine,” she intoned to the man in front of her.

  “Yes. The older man who works here . . . I didn’t get his name, but is he working today?”

  The clerk’s bangs hitched up out of her eyes, giving the impression that she had raised her brows. “Older man?”

  “Yes, dressed very tastefully, very polite man. Early sixties, maybe.”

  The girl took her customer’s credit card, ran it, and handed him the slip with a pen. “No one like that works here, ma’am. Even the owner isn’t that old. Still old, though—maybe forty-five.”

  Just past thirty herself, Molly bit back a protest that forty-five wasn’t old, offered an apology to the customer for butting in, and withdrew from the counter. She stopped in the middle of the lobby, watching the buzz of activity. How could this shop have transformed overnight? Gone were the books wrapped in leather bindings, the secret Belgian-bound tomes, the Coptic-stitch specimens. Gone, even, were the questionable tomes Magnus had sworn were bound in human skin.

  Other patrons veered around her as she stared at the stacks, a bewildered island in a stream of confusion. A display of CliffsNotes capped the end of a row. She could just barely make out the title The Sound and the Fury. That bloody book. Sure, they were a book club that read classics, but one more Faulkner or Steinbeck or Hemingway, and she’d be institutionalized for depression long before Magnus.

  She bought the CliffsNotes, and as she paid for them, the salesclerk blew through her bangs, uncloaking startlingly green eyes, and said, “Not sure what man you mean, ma’am. Really, there’s no old guy working here. Sorry.”