Welcome! I'm delighted you're here. As a thank-you for visiting, I'd like to share one of my favorite Bangor Ghost Cycle stories. I hope you enjoy it.

A Kind Word

A Bangor Ghost Cycle Story

Tolman's Book Shop had been on Central Street since before the fire, and it had opinions about where things belonged.

Not loudly. A shop that has held books for a hundred and thirty years does not need to raise its voice. But the spines sat flush on their shelves, and the alphabet ran true from Abbott to Zola, and when Dot Ferland's memoir came in — nine copies, face out, the front table, a small card in Ruth Tolman's handwriting reading Local Author — the shop had been pleased. You could feel it in the way the floorboards quit complaining.

That lasted four days.

On the fifth morning Ruth found the nine copies in Gardening.

❧

"Alarm was set," she said. "Alarm was set both nights. I checked the panel, I checked the log, I checked it twice because I didn't believe it the first time. Nobody came in."

Matilda Hamlin wrote alarm log — clean in her notebook and did not write the rest of what she was thinking, which was that this was the third call this month she'd taken that would end with her calling Malcolm.

"Anything taken?"

"That's the thing." Ruth folded her arms. "Nothing's taken. Nothing's damaged. It's just — moved. And not thrown around, either. Somebody shelved them. Alphabetical, in with the perennials, right where they'd go if Dot's book was about hostas."

Matilda looked at the front table. Nine copies, face out again, Ruth having put them back that morning. A Full House: Forty Years Backstage in Bangor. On the cover, a woman in her seventies stood in a scene shop with her arms crossed and her chin up.

"Who's Dot Ferland?"

"Stage manager. Penobscot Theatre, most of it. She's eighty-one and she still runs the room when she walks into it." Ruth's mouth twitched. "Book's good. That's not usually true."

❧

Malcolm Fenn came in at four in the afternoon with his collar up and his hands in his pockets and the expression of a man who has been asked to look at something and intends to be disappointed by it.

"Well, hello," Ruth said, and came around the counter, and got down to a proper greeting with both hands behind Strindberg's ears. Strindberg accepted this as his due and went to the spot by the register that had been his since the first time Malcolm brought him in.

"Ruth."

"Malcolm."

"Gardening," Malcolm said.

"Gardening," Ruth agreed.

"Twice."

"Three times now. This morning it was Automotive."

Malcolm went and stood at the front table without touching anything. The shop was warm. It smelled the way they all smell — paper going slowly acid, dust that has been dusted for a century and stayed anyway.

He looked at Dot Ferland's face on the cover for a while.

"She sent me one," he said. "Signed. I haven't opened it."

"Why not?"

"Because I know what's in it." He picked up a copy at last, and turned to the back, and found the index, because Malcolm Fenn had never in his life read a book front to back if there was an index. His finger stopped.

Fenn, Malcolm — 211, 213–215, 288.

He turned to 213 and read four lines and put the book down like it had gone warm in his hand.

"What does it say?" Matilda asked.

"Nothing."

"Malcolm."

"It says that I was fair."

❧

Ruth let Malcolm and Matilda in at eleven, already in her coat, and put the keys in Malcolm's hand without saying anything about it.

"Lock the Central Street door behind you. The back one sticks." She looked at the front table on her way out, the nine copies face out, the card in her own handwriting. "That table belongs to Dot Ferland. Help it stay that way."

Then she was gone, and the bell over the door went still, and it was the two of them.

He knew before they turned the lights off. Matilda could see him knowing.

They sat in the dark on two of Ruth's ladderback chairs with the front table between them and the streetlight coming green through the window glass, and at twenty past eleven the shop went quiet in a way that a shop that is already quiet should not be able to manage.

Then a copy of A Full House stood up on its edge, turned itself spine-out, and slid backward into the stack.

"There," said Malcolm, not loudly. "Stop that."

Everything stopped.

"You've made your point, and it's a small one, and you've made it four times. Come out."

The air over the front table thickened the way water thickens before it boils. A man came together out of it in pieces — a jacket first, then a face, thin and long-jawed and about fifty, wearing the aggrieved patience of someone who has been rehearsing a conversation for twenty years.

Matilda had seen this many times now. It had not begun to be ordinary.

"Ellis Pruitt," Malcolm said.

"You remember."

"I remember the book."

"That's not the same thing." Pruitt's hands were in fists and he seemed not to know it. "You reviewed a novel in nineteen ninety-four. Four hundred words. Bangor Daily News, a Sunday, below the fold. And I want you to say the sentence."

"I don't recall the sentence."

"You said it had the shape of a novel and the weight of a pamphlet."

Malcolm was silent.

"I wrote three more," Pruitt said. "Nobody would take them. Not because of you — I'm not a fool, I know how it works — but I could never get past a Sunday and four hundred words. Every time I sat down I heard it. And then I died in the back room of this shop in two thousand and three, stocking a shelf, forty-six years old, and I have been here since, and it has been fine." He gestured at the front table with real violence. "It has been fine. Until she says you were fair."

❧

Malcolm sat back.

"You want an apology," he said. "I want it taken back."

"I can't take it back. It was true." He said it without heat, which was somehow worse. "And I'll tell you the part you've had twenty years to work out and haven't, so listen. Do you know how many books came across my desk in nineteen ninety-four?"

Pruitt said nothing.

"Nor do I. Hundreds. And do you know how many I wrote about?" He held up a hand, fingers spread. "That week? Two. I reviewed you, Ellis. Out of all of it, I gave you four hundred words on a Sunday, in the paper, under my name, where anyone could see it."

"You buried me."

"I noticed you." Malcolm leaned forward. "You rose to the level of my attention. Do you understand what a small club that is? I have gone to hundreds of openings in this town and said nothing at all about most of them, and saying nothing is what I do to work that isn't worth the ink. Silence is the review, Ellis. Silence is what I gave the ones who didn't matter."

The shop had gone very still.

"You think the cruelty was the point," Malcolm said. "The cruelty was never the point. The cruelty was just how I write."

Pruitt's mouth moved without anything coming out of it.

"She's right, by the way," Malcolm said. "Dot. I was fair. I was fair and I was unkind, and those aren't opposites, and I've had thirty years to be sorry about the second one and I'm not sure I've managed it." He stood up, stiffly, and put his hand flat on the stack of nine copies. "But you can leave her book alone. She earned that table."

❧

There was a long moment in which nothing happened.

Then, one at a time, in the dark, the nine copies turned themselves face out.

The last one Pruitt set down himself, square to the edge of the table, exactly parallel, the way a man shelves things when he has worked in a bookshop and it is the last skill he has left.

"Four hundred words," he said.

"Four hundred words," Malcolm agreed. "Below the fold."

"Below the fold." Pruitt almost smiled. "That's not nothing, is it?"

"It was never nothing."

And the shop, which had been holding itself in a way neither of them had noticed until it stopped, let out its breath. The floorboards settled. Somewhere in Poetry a spine slid a quarter inch to true.

❧

Ruth Tolman opened at nine and found the front table exactly as she'd left it, and a copy of Ellis Pruitt's only novel — which had been in the back room in a box since 2003, which she would have sworn she'd never unpacked — standing face out at the end of the row, with a small card beside it in handwriting that was not hers.

Local Author.

She left it there.

It sold on Thursday.

 ❧

Thank you for reading.

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Thanks again for spending some time in my corner of Maine.

— Frank Booker