Harbor Books: Part 1 - A Special Visitor

Chapter 1

It was late in the afternoon on the damp and drizzly Wednesday before last Halloween. It was possibly the foggiest day of that very foggy autumn in northwestern Washington State. I had taken the cash drawer and the day's mail up the circular stairs from the reading area in our shop, Harbor Books, to the office area just above. I was on my way back downstairs to help Ginger and Lolly close up. Those are the two high school kids who worked for us in the afternoons and on weekends when they could. Socks, the cat, wandered through with an unidentified something in her mouth.

Just then Tim showed up at the front door with a flashlight under his chin acting all Bela Lugosi, moaning loudly and rattling a big towing chain he'd had in his Land Rover. Of course, that made the girls scream which he loved almost as much as they did.

"Tim, you're going to make those two think you're flirting with them," I said to him later on. "You're not really a lot older than them in their eyes, most of the time."

"You're right. I'll be more careful. I just want them to have some fun around here."

"That's what I'm talking about. That's my job. I do the big sister thing with them and they'll get all the fun they need. They know we like them, Tim. You don't need to put any emphasis to it. It is work after all."

"Marty, I'm glad that you're my big sister, too," he said. You have to watch Tim sometimes to make sure he's being sincere. On this occasion he was. Tim is a free-lance master draftsman and can have a thick line of bullshit that he says he uses to keep his customers coming back. Actually it's just his personality. To be fair, Tim has picked up a number of lines of expertise in the building design business and has had a good bit of on-again-off-again consulting business for a number of years.

I smiled patiently at Tim because I'm actually younger than him by almost a year. Tim and I have been orphans since our early teens and on our own for over twenty years now. We had made it well enough to that point through sticking together, lucking out with teachers and people who've felt sorry for us, and also through some native talent and reasonably hard work, when we've felt like it.

We had inherited the Harbor Books building a little over three years previously from a long-lost uncle. We decided to quit our stupid jobs in Seattle and move up there to start the shop. Aside from being shop owners, Tim is a freelance draftsman, as I said, and I'm an experienced ex-bookkeeper. Our super creepy old Aunt Kitty called us over-gifted under-achievers. We called her Auntie Asshole, even to her face sometimes. She was our Mom's much older sister who took credit whenever anyone was listening for raising us after Mom and Dad died. Tim and I have had a feeling since we first walked in the door that Harbor Books, not just our little bookstore business, but as we have come to know the building as well, had somehow been taking care of the two of us.

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One of my favorite customers, an older lady by the name of Lois Trent, had been in a little earlier that afternoon and was going to drive herself the one hundred and forty miles from our place in picturesque Port Wilson to where she lived with her granddaughter, Sophie, in Olympia. Because of the lousy weather she was on my mind. She had been visiting family in Vancouver up in Canada and stopped in to buy each of our latest editions of regency romance as she did several times a year.

"Hiya, Mrs. Trent, It's great to see you! How have you been?" I said, coming around the counter to give her a hug. "What a day, huh? Did you find what you wanted?"

"Oh, yes, dear. Always do at your place. It's always so much fun to come to Harbor Books and to see you, too. I've been doing really well, how about you and that wonderful brother of yours?"

"We're both doing fine, thanks. Well, it's so fun to have you with us. You're a real bright spot in this dreary fog."

Then back around the counter and after scanning her purchases I said, "We seem to like the same things. I can't get enough of these Ramona O'Reilly books. Is Sophie here with you today?"