The Book Club

Chapter 21

But the time we'd reached the bus depot in San Bernardino, the afternoon rush to get home had already begun. We had to fight against the traffic to get back to Isobel's apartment and where we'd started early that morning. Her car in the shop, and with neither Priscilla or I with wheels of our own, we would have to walk down to the last place Priscilla had met with who we now all knew was Mr. Abernathy. Priscilla was withdrawn on the trip home and she confessed to me while Isobel was in the bathroom, that she'd known all along who the man in the diner had been. He'd confessed it to her when he'd pointed them to Vancouver but admitted that he couldn't get involved. Vancouver had left Isobel and Priscilla with no leads, but it had gotten me involved. I still hadn't decided if that was a good thing.

The hidden copy and my eventual addition to the group drew the attention of Carl, who'd acquired his copy of the book through his father, who'd acquired it himself sometime in the early eighties after his wife died. From this information and the note in the back of his copy, we were able to determine that Abernathy, E.P.'s lawyer that he'd hired after Henry's death in 1952, had owned and altered Carl's copy. Abernathy had kept himself in seclusion since the late eighties to early nineties, or at least since after E.P.'s death, and Mr. Eisling, his colleague, had taken over much of the handling of E.P.'s affairs. It was believed that E.P. had started to lose faith in the lawyer who had taken care of him for nearly twenty-five years. Perhaps he simply realized that Abernathy had broken his trust and read A Collection of Sorrow.

"We should at least look him up. See where he lives," Priscilla said. "It could have been a false lead, him getting off the bus where he did. Maybe he doesn't even live—"

"Even if he's in the White Pages," Isobel started.

"No one uses the White Pages anymore," I reminded her. "It's all online. People Finder. Or something like that."

"What would you know about what people use and what they don't use, Paul?" Isobel snapped. She still hadn't really warmed up to me and she did nothing to hide her contempt for me. "You were, up until a few weeks ago, homeless? And I'm sure your mother wouldn't even think to use the White Pages or People Finder to look for you."

The last comment stung a little bit and I honestly wasn't sure why Isobel was so cold to me lately. I spent a lot of time with Priscilla when I wasn't working at the diner, and I thought that maybe the old lady was a bit jealous.

"Even if he's in the White Pages or in People Finder, he's probably moved on. He doesn't want to be found. The odds of him talking to us again? Slim."

"Found him," Priscilla announced from behind her laptop screen. While we argued over how to find the lawyer again, Priscilla typed in a search and found Abernathy's son, who lived just a few blocks north of where she said she'd last seen the old man. "Seems like he lives with his son. There's a D. Abernathy and an H. Abernathy, plus a J. Abernathy and a couple of L. Abernathy's. Wife and kids, I guess?"

"So now what?" I asked. "Abernathy came to you guys first and then disappeared. He's an old man, right? Maybe he's off his rocker, sent you on a goose chase."

"He's barely in his eighties, if he's that," Isobel said, sounding a little defensive. She herself was a touch south of fifty but was showing more age in her face than the years she had.

"We'll regroup tomorrow. I need to check the boards," Isobel said with a sigh. She rubbed the bridge of her nose and squeezed her eyes closed. "Just when you think you're getting somewhere..."

Priscilla opened her mouth to respond but snapped it shut. Even the woman who'd known Isobel the longest had no worthy words of support. She shrugged to me instead.

"I've got the late shift at Olly's, anyway," I said. It was true and it was likely going to be a busy night with the winter formal high school crowd coming in for late-night waffles, so that meant overly-good tips from dumb kids who didn't know the right math. "I'll see you later. Sorry it didn't go well, Isobel."

Isobel waved a hand over her shoulder at me as she sat down at her new iMac that Priscilla had helped her pick out just a few days before our trip. The library didn't pay well but Isobel had needed a new computer that could keep up with her researching needs. Priscilla had helped her out with the costs with some of the monthly stipend she received from back home. How Priscilla managed to stay in touch with her family, research the crazy story and trajectory of the book, and stay in the States with a student visa while working on her graduate degree, I couldn't figure out. Sometimes I had trouble remembering to get to one of my two or three shifts of the week on time.

As I left Isobel's apartment, it occurred to me that Priscilla was probably the most overworked and under-appreciated person I knew. Granted, I didn't actually know many people, and I'd barely thought to say goodbye to the people I did know in any place I'd ever called home, but I couldn't think of another person who I'd known to work so hard for something that wasn't exactly an award waiting for her at the end of her journey. Priscilla stayed behind, giving me a simple nod as I closed the door behind me on the two women most obsessed with the book that had drawn so many strange characters in both reality and fiction together.

I thought of the book itself as I walked down to Olly's. The afternoon was cool and breezy and I realized that without the book in my life, instead of walking down the sidewalk with shorts and the hoodie I didn't even need, I'd be shivering in a transient camp with George and the others, probably waiting to freeze to death.

That the book contained two feuding witches and I had surrounded myself with two women who kept secrets from one another and, at times, might have been acting out scenes directly from the novel was not lost on me. I myself occasionally found a similar connection to E.P.'s main character and wondered if I had begun to live my life as an imitation of this man or if, somehow, E.P. had managed to capture my very essence thirty years before I was even born.

I nodded to the hostess and the counter clerk as I made my way through the diner and into the back room near the kitchen. I stowed my hoodie, the book still in the main pocket along with a few other meager belongings, in the cabinet above the hand sink and pulled an apron down from the stack. There was a crowd of kids in the main dining room and it looked like most were just setting down to their pre-dance meals, so I cleaned up what I could from the tables left behind by the previous shift. The afternoon and evening carried on smoothly, and although we were pooling tips, I ended up with a fair share for the night. With a solid twenty bucks in my pocket and another twenty to collect in wages at the end of the week, I was feeling pretty great as I walked back to Priscilla's, my home for the night. The book bounced in my hoodie pocket but I honestly hadn't put one thought toward it for the entire shift.

Priscilla's apartment, a small studio on the third floor of an ancient open building, was quiet when I got back. She'd given me a key, very trusting of the man she'd known only for a few weeks, and I let myself in as quietly as I could. She'd left the light above the oven on and the light cascaded onto a lidded pot with boxed macaroni and cheese inside. There was a note on lined paper torn from a notebook taped to the glass lid and there was a printed map folded inside. I peeled off the note and poked the food with the wooden spoon Priscilla had left on the stovetop.

"Meet me here when you get off work. Eat something. We've got digging to do," I read the note aloud. I read the last part a few times, just in case I'd missed something.

I ate a few spoonfuls of mac 'n cheese and chewed on the cold, congealed texture as I read over the map she'd left. I could walk there in about fifteen minutes, according to the estimations the printout offered and it was just after ten. A piece of macaroni caught in my throat and I coughed violently as I read over the tiny print at the top that described what was located at the destination. Once I recovered, I looked around the otherwise dark apartment as if Priscilla were going to jump out from behind her couch to shout, "Gotcha!" She wasn't there, like I hoped.

I hoped next that Priscilla had brought a shovel for me as well, because there was no way I was digging for anything in a cemetery by hand.