Chapter Sixteen
Ephraim Beck’s Mystery Bookstore has operated in the same location for over one hundred years. It has not always been exclusively a mystery-book store. It has, on the other hand, always been owned by the Beck family. The Becks are something of a local myth in Quinsigamond — the bloodline cursed with the incurable affliction of bibliomania.
Ezekiel Beck, Ephraim’s grandfather, started the store around 1890, according to the myth, when his Victorian home was structurally threatened by the sheer weight of his library. He was a genuine book nut, manuscript mad, addicted to bound paper and ink. The floors of his house were buckling, the walls beginning to bulge. His wife warned of divorce and scandal. Zeke quit his growing law practice, moved the family to the second and third floors of the house, and set up shop on the first. His logic was that this would stabilize and maybe even reduce the number of volumes under his roof.
He did not physically alter the family home in any way. In some instances, he did not even bother to move furniture. The dining room, for instance, was turned into the philosophy section, and Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and the rest overran the tables, china cabinets, and buffet. The pantry was devoted to poetry, and Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, and Whitman lined the shelves that had housed sugar and flour and coffee. The small music alcove was crammed with theology. The front parlor loaded with contemporary fiction, a rolltop proprietor’s desk, and a tin-scrolled cash register.
Ephraim, the grandson and last of the bloodline, fifty years old now and still a bachelor, lives in three rooms on the second floor of the house. The top floor is used for storage. And the first floor, still outfitted in its original Victorian decor, houses an extensive and often idiosyncratic collection of mystery literature, from rare Poe first editions to fading pulp paperbacks. Ephraim switched to an exclusively mystery stock the week after his father died. He issues a catalogue twice a year that he mails to customers “as far away as Melbourne.”
Now, drinking a European tea spiked with a cheap rye, Ike studies Ephraim’s attire and attempts to calm himself. Whenever he’s rattled, Ike has found that an hour’s browse through the rooms of Ephraim’s home will settle him down, give him perspective. He has known Ephraim for almost ten years and he has recently given up on determining if his chronic manner of dress — black wool pants, threadbare white shirt with tiny turn-down collar, maroon suspenders, maroon bow tie, cowl-collared grey cardigan — is natural or an affectation, a manifestation of Ephraim’s idea of how an eccentric Yankee bookseller, feigning pennilessness, would dress. Now, when Ephraim lights up a bowlful of tobacco in one of his grandfather’s ancient, hand-carved pipes, Ike just smiles and takes in the pleasant smell of apples.