In a small community it's hard to keep Christmas gifts a secret. Carmen's boyfriend, in particular, was the talk of the town when he bought the one diamond ring in the little jewelery case at the department store, and asked me to make him a fake hollow book to hide it in when he gave it to her. I picked a copy of The Joy Of Cooking that had been gathering dust on the shelf since before I bought the shop. He thought that was pretty funny.
While I cut the middles out of pages and glued them together and sold books in-between tasks, the rest of the town was also paying a certain amount of attention to Sandra, of the infamous Bank Love Triangle, and what was being bought both by and for her. Nolan and Michael seemed to have declared some kind of cease-fire, but neither of them appeared to have been chosen or to have staked a permanent claim.
"Now, if she's buying a present for a boyfriend," Paula said to me one day in mid-December, "she's keeping it pretty general. She did buy a scarf yesterday."
"Nothing from the hardware store?" I asked.
"Don't tease."
"Well, what about Michael and Nolan? Either of them buying shiny toys a girl like Sandra would enjoy?" I asked.
"If they do, it wasn't in Low Ferry. Didn't Nolan ride up to Dubuque a little while ago for something-or-other?"
"Couldn't say," I said. "I know Michael went hunting last week, but it's not like he's going to give her an elk for Christmas."
"Did he shoot an elk?" She looked horrified. "Season ended in September!"
"Relax, Paula, I don't think he shot anything. Not really that surprising, this time of year," I said. "Hiya, kid," I called, as the boy entered the shop, eddies of snow following him inside.
"My cue to get back to work," Paula said. "Seeya, Christopher. Find out about that elk!"
"Elk?" Lucas asked, as he passed her on the way in. She gestured at me, and he gave me a confused look.
"Long story," I said. "Come in, defrost yourself. Buying today or just browsing?"
"Browsing," Lucas said, already hidden behind a shelf. "The boy wanted to come in – not that I didn't!" he added, leaning around briefly. The boy smirked at me.
"You buying?" I asked him.
"Maybe," he said, peering at the assortment of bookmarks in a little display on my counter.
"Christmas shopping?" I asked in a low voice.
"For Lucas," he whispered back.
"Get him this one," I said, pointing to a thin brass bookmark with a bent top that would clip over the edge of a page. He examined it, checked the price, and nodded. I put it quickly into a bag for him, took the cash he handed me, and passed him the change without so much as a jingle. Lucas was either indifferent to the silence from the front of the shop or studiously ignoring it because he knew exactly what we were up to.
"Lucas said he'd walk me far as the south junction towards home," he said, when we were finished. "Said you might want to come along."
"I can offer you dinner and a stiff drink of something," Lucas told me. He looked pale, and as anxious as he had the day I questioned him about the Harrison twins over lunch. I realized he was offering me the chance to hear a confession from him – those lies of omission he'd talked about. It didn't take me long to get my coat and turn the front-door sign to Closed.
The days are very short in winter, and darkness was already starting to creep up the horizon by the time we left the boy at his crossroads, heading south, and turned our own faces west. In a soft gray hat he'd bought in the village and the gray coat he'd bought with his masks, Lucas looked as though at any minute he might disappear into the snow and sky.
"You wanted to talk, I think," I said, as we walked.
"I wanted to," he agreed.
"Finding it kind of hard now?" I asked with a grin. He ducked his head.
"You..." he began, then stopped and started again. "You don't go to church."
"No," I said. "I like to sleep in."
"And you told Christopher the storyteller you don't believe in superstition," he continued.
"It's nothing he didn't know," I answered. "Nothing you didn’t know, come to think of it. I don't think people are fools to believe in it, particularly, but I don't."
"Would you believe in it if you saw it?" he asked.
I considered it, and took the coward's way out. "I don't think we can know how to answer that until we're faced with it."
"But you can't outright say that you'd always think it was a sham."
"Well, I like to think I have at least a little bit of an open mind. Why?"
He shrugged.
"You're not angry at me for being a skeptic, are you?" I asked. "You told me yourself that your help with the twins was a trick. I don't think you go to church, either, do you?"
"No, not usually," he agreed. He was walking with shoulders hunched and head down, watching our feet crunch through the frost on the road. "I'm trying to decide how to say things, that's all. I'm not good at saying things, you know that."
"I think you're fine at saying things."
"Not...not in ways most people understand, though," he said. "You're different."
"So you've said. And, well, thank you, but I don't know how true that is."
"It's just difficult to know where to start."
I put my hands in my pockets, idling along at the slow pace he'd set. "All right, that's fair. Can I tell you something that might help?"
"Sure, if you think it will."
"You know I used to live in Chicago."
"Sure."
"But I didn't own a bookstore there. I worked in business – I made a lot of money, actually," I said, remembering the sixty-hour weeks I had put in, hating every second of it. I sure did like the money though, and I'd liked what it bought me. "I wouldn't be able to keep Dusk Books if I hadn't. Most years I barely break even, after taxes."