A Drawing of Murder by Penny Brooke

Author:Penny Brooke [Brooke, Penny]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Back in my office at the shop, I turned my focus to the website. I clicked on the section at the top that was titled “About Us,” and I told potential viewers the story of my gran. One day at the beach she had finished reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, and she found herself without another book to grab. She had decided then and there it was a crime for there not to be a bookshop located nearby. Our lovely stretches of white sand and gorgeous water were too much of a bookworm’s paradise for the town to go without.

I wrote about the beloved summers I’d spent as her helper at the store while Judy Blume and Charlotte Brontë did their part to help me navigate my childhood and the tricky teenage years.

“Make it personal,” Kate had emphasized. “The Seabreeze isn’t any bookshop; it’s a place with heart, so make sure that comes across.”

I had found a photograph of Gran and me setting up a display for a summer reading program. Lyle, Lyle the Crocodile was smiling from the cover of one of the selections, and Amelia Bedelia too. It took me back to that sense of freedom and anticipation of early summers on the beach when June, July, and August still stretched lazily ahead.

As excited as I was about the project, though, I couldn’t concentrate. My mind was stuck on my final memory of Candace in the store, her face lit up with laughter as Gatsby ran to greet her. I could not stop puzzling over the jumble of odd facts that refused to tell a story that made any kind of sense: the search for a criminal attorney before Candace died, Kate’s apparent need to get away, the drowning boy, the angry uncle, the much-sought-after regal lion. Which clues were important? Or were they all just odds and ends of a family’s life, unrelated to the murder? Everybody’s family history could be messy if you looked close enough.

I placed the photograph of me and Gran into the dummy site and remembered something she had told me long ago. My friends had planned a last-minute bonfire when I was fourteen, and a certain boy was almost sure to be there—a Justin-Bieber lookalike who had returned my shy smiles in a way that made me think that might be the summer of my first great romance. And yet…I had picked up The Yearling for the first time that year, and as the story took some devastating turns, I couldn’t bring myself to put the book away until I knew the end.

The bonfire or the book? And if I picked the book, did that qualify me as a helpless nerd?

Gran—who could read my mind in a way that was sometimes scary—had some advice for me. “Sometimes when a story calls to you,” she said, “you have to push through to the end. And when you finish the last chapter, the beach will still be out there. And so will the boy.

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