Book Deal by Les Standiford

the passage to the magazine room, was dusting the edge of the wood for fingerprints. Just a bunch of guys doing their work, Deal thought, images of hurricane cleanup flitting across his mind. Disaster strikes, and you carry on. “Being not the ones dead…” The words echoed in his mind. Some fragment from a poem Arch had quoted to him once, that much had never left him.
    “And you think it wasn’t robbery?” he tried again, gently.
    She glanced up at him as if he’d made an accusation. For a moment she seemed ready to snap at him. And then, suddenly, her expression shattered and she collapsed against his chest. “Oh, Deal,” she sobbed. “It was awful. It was terrible.”
    “I know,” he said, holding her tightly, patting her back. “I know.”
    The words came hesitantly at first, then began to pour. “I came in the back door,” she paused, gulping a breath. “…and when I found it unlocked I started to worry. And then when I walked in and saw the mess…I mean, if the door had been forced open I’d have thought, okay, someone broke in, in the night…” She stopped to look up at him. “But I knew Arch would never forget to lock that door, and I started walking through the rooms, calling his name, because his car was outside, and I had to crawl over those shelves to get into the front, and by that time I knew something terrible had happened…”
    “Janice,” Deal began, trying to soothe her, but she pulled away from him again, wiping at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I
have
to tell you this, Deal. All right? I have to
tell
you.”
    He put his hands up, nodding in reassurance, and she went on.
    “I saw the cash register open, and the cash box,” she said, “and the checks and credit card receipts scattered all over and I had to force myself to look behind the counter and he wasn’t there and I was saying ‘Thank God, thank God,’ but then I saw the front door was still locked and bolted, so I went back into the children’s section…”
    She faltered again and Deal reached out for her, but she held up her hand, gathering herself. When she turned to him again, her eyes were blazing. “They’d destroyed it, Deal. The children’s room. Ripped it apart. Not just the books. The displays, the artwork, the little tables and chairs. You wouldn’t believe what it looks like in there,”
    He shook his head helplessly. “Maybe it was kids…”
    “
Kids?
” she said incredulously. “Kids aren’t capable of doing what happened in there.” She paused. “Animals, maybe. Not kids.”
    “Janice, we don’t know what might have happened yet…”
    “I know what I saw, Deal. I know what I found upstairs. Do you know what that felt like? Walking up those stairs, knowing what I was going to find? If you’d seen what I’d seen. Oh, dear God,” she said, crumbling again. “Oh, Arch. Oh, poor, dear Arch…”
    He caught her in his arms, pulled her close, imagining despite himself what it must have been like, finding Arch there in the airless room. He’d had a glimpse as they’d brought the body out…it’d been like taking a blow, the one you never saw coming. Everything normal enough, but then suddenly your head is snapping back and there doesn’t seem to be any more oxygen in the air around you and you’re gulping and staggering, your legs full of sand…
    Another wave of lightheadedness swept over him and he had the sudden feeling he was clutching Janice against an awful gale, that the sidewalk beneath their feet was not a sidewalk at all, but the deck of some pitiful boat that could pitch them over at any instant. His hand went to the back of her neck, pressed her face close to his chest. He could smell her shampoo, the same woodsy scent she’d always used, could feel the dampness of her cheek on his shirt, the heat of her against him…he felt something giving way inside him, an immense longing swelling up, threatening to crush the wall he’d so painstakingly constructed over these