The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy Page 4

  Well, of course, Annapurna could not manage that as the calls upon her duty made her appearance anywhere other than in the public library impossible and she told Mildred this, careful to enunciate in such a way that the maddening woman could read her lips.

  “No. Problem.” Mildred squinted at her calendar. It appeared that she needed proper spectacles in addition to new batteries for her hearing aid, Annapurna thought. “What. Time. Do. You. Clear. Out. Of. This. Place? Listen. We. Can. Meet. For. Wine. I. Like. Wine. Do. You? Because. Over. On. First. Street …”

  “Yes, yes, all right,” Annapurna said. What else, at this point, could she do? It was becoming each moment more obvious that the only way she would rid herself of the woman was to consent to wine, coffee, greasy cheeseburgers, milk shakes, to anything just to see her ample posterior exit the library door.

  So it was that Annapurna met Mildred Banfry for a glass of wine at the suitably darkened First Street Langley Tasting Room, which overlooked Saratoga Passage where the deep and gleaming waters were—at this season of the year—playing host to the occasional migrating gray whale on its way to Alaska. Good fortune was, for once, with Annapurna. Aside from herself and Mildred Banfry, there was no one inside the wine bar save for the anxious owner, a man eager for custom, and who can blame him since at this time of year—gray whales be damned for the little they did to encourage tourism—every owner of every business in town was consumed with the worry of going under.

  Thus, he was fully determined to accommodate Mildred Banfry and Annapurna, such determination displayed by a tendency to hover, which would not do. Mildred dismissed him by purchasing an entire bottle of wine for them to consume, by saying yes to a plate of cheese and crackers, and further yes to a dish of olives. Unbeknownst to Annapurna at the moment, Mildred would also say yes to handing over the not insignificant bill to her companion— Mildred having a taste for Tempranillo which was not inexpensive—but that was to come.

  “So …” was Mildred’s prefatory statement, soon to be accompanied by “Tell all,” and the single blessing contained within these three words was attached to their volume. Mildred Banfry on this day of days had danced attendance upon Annapurna with hearing aids in place. So her voice was normal, and Annapurna was comforted by the knowledge that whatever she said could remain between the two of them as long as Mildred swore to secrecy.

  Such swearing, as things turned out, meant very little to Mildred Banfry although she made no mention of the fact. She swore quite happily with the words “Naturally, naturally, what do you take me for, for heaven’s sake? I don’t go around betraying confidences thank you very much,” which certainly seemed to indicate that Annapurna’s forthcoming words would be held close to Mildred Banfry’s heart. But unbeknownst to Annapurna, there were larger forces at work in Mildred that precluded her actually possessing any true sincerity when it came to oath-making in this particular situation. Nonetheless, she said her piece of reassurance to Annapurna and went on to declare herself merely curious, a woman seeking to slake the thirst of her desire for information. And this part was actually and wholly true. Mildred had no immediate intention of doing anything with what she learned.

  So Annapurna explained her modest talent, doing everything she could to downplay it. She called it “just a game I used to engage in with my friends from school” and she made very light of the efficacy of those welcome me declarations that propelled her associates into a literary world they would only otherwise have experienced in imagination.

  “D’you mean to tell me this actually works?” Mildred asked her at the culmination of Annapurna’s explanation, which she kept as brief as humanly possible. “D’you mean I could … Any scene in any book and you can do this? What about … say … a play? Something by … I don’t know … Shakespeare maybe … What about Tennessee Williams? ‘Stella!’ and all that. Does your victim—”

  “Please!” Annapurna cut in. Never had she come remotely close to considering her literary travelers victims of anything other than their own desires to experience what life could be between the pages of their favorite tomes.

  “Sorry,” Mildred said hastily. “So your … patient …”

  “I’m not a doctor. They’re … I suppose we could call them clients. They were clients.”

  “Did they pay you?”

  “Of course not!” Annapurna was aghast. She’d never thought of taking so much as a dime for the pleasures she had in childhood given to her friends. The book itself, the experience of the book, the act of encouraging her compatriots to read more, read often, and for God’s sake read something decent: these were Annapurna’s motivations although when she explained them to Mildred and received in return a look of what could only be called appalled incredulity it must be said that she did question the wisdom of her past generosity.

  Mildred said, “You could have made a mint, you know,” and then she added the six words that allowed Annapurna to see, like Lady Macbeth, the future in the instant: “You could still make a mint.”

  Of course, making money from her talent was at that moment still quite far from Annapurna’s mind. Indeed, the very thought of it was anathema to her. But she was soon to discover that Mildred Banfry did not mean making money as in becoming wealthy from one’s gifts. What she meant was more along the lines of spreading the wealth into areas severely in need of it.

  Thus did Annapurna learn that her companion of the wine, cheese, and olives raised funds for seventeen of the three hundred and fifty-two non-profits that existed on the south end of Whidbey Island. Suffice it to say that while Annapurna had been off on the mainland living her life, becoming Annapurna, and doing what she could to forget about Charbourne Hinton-Glover and the evil he had committed to crush her spirit, Whidbey Island had become the Land of Causes and wherever there was a structure needing to be saved, a forest wanting stewardship, an old growth tree needing protection, a farmer’s pasture insisting it be spared from the developer’s shovel, a child begging for a math tutor, a band looking for anyone willing to purchase instruments for its players, a brand new mother feeling out to sea with her babe, an after school program keeping teenagers off drugs and middle schoolers off the streets … There was a 501c looking for money to pay for it.

  “Think of what you could do for South Whidbey,” Mildred Banfry intoned. “Why we could easily have an entire festival dedicated to your book travels. You could become … My dear Annapurna, you could be the Rick Steves of the imagination!”

  Of course, the reader of this tale must not think Annapurna jumped upon the runaway train of Mildred Banfry’s monetary intentions as spoken that day in First Street Langley Tasting Room. She did not. The truth was that she required something of a lengthy layover at the train station of her own hesitation. The idea of once again embarking upon what had ultimately so blinded her to the evil that men do—the men in question being, of course, one Chadbourne Hinton-Glover—made her of necessity loath to muddy the waters of anyone’s ability to judge accurately the less admirable qualities of one’s fellows. But Mildred was not to be denied.

  “Think of the trees,” was her first point, which was quickly attended by the imperative to think of the land, think of the pastures, think of the young new mothers yearning to be free, thing of drug-using teenagers saved from the needle and skateboard riding preadolescents saved from heads broken on the uneven pavements of Second Street’s precipitous descent into town from Saratoga Road. “It is within your power to change all this,” was Mildred’s mighty declaration. “And anyway, you can always call a halt to it if things get out of hand. You did that when you were a kid, didn’t you?”

  Privately, of course, Mildred had no thought that things would come within a mile of getting out of hand as she was nothing if not an organizer nonpareil. For her part, privately Annapurna thought that there was, at the end of it all, very little chance that this was truly a money-making proposition. For in these days of a million-and-one diversions, most of which were electronic, how many peop
le actually knew enough about literature even to want to experience a scene in a book. Moreover, digital reading devices like eBooks wouldn’t work for what she had to offer readers. They had to be willing to dive into an actual book and—this was Mildred’s instantaneous genius at work—it would have to be something purchased from an independent bookstore—no Amazon.com for this venture, thank you very much—with receipt required as proof.

  This last bit was what convinced Annapurna since there was in Langley an independent bookstore operating on a shoestring. It had survived in the town an astonishing fifty years at this point, but every week there were more monetary dangers and internet threats that it had to overcome in order to remain in business. Thus it was that Annapurna agreed to Mildred Banfry’s plan. Thus it was that she found herself in very short order having to quit her job at the library in order to accommodate the scores of people who—much to her surprise—wished to be sent out upon “the journey of a lifetime,” as Mildred Banfry’s advertising named it. For Mildred Banfry, Annapurna discovered, was a marketing genius, and an interview with Monie Reardon Pillerton— accompanied by photos of Monie herself, her only marginally winsome offspring hanging heavily upon her, and her husband looking exceedingly out-to-sea about the presence of a journalist in his back yard— printed in the South Whidbey Record and then sent forth to entertain thousands upon the internet was all it took to launch their fund-raising business.

  Mildred christened it. She chose one word, Epic!, which was painted on the frosted glass door of an extremely costly four room suite directly across from the village’s chocolate and gelato shop in an enclave of buildings fashioned around a sweet little garden. This was in Second Street—quite a distance from the aforementioned descending hill—and one of the four rented rooms served as their waiting room while the other three allowed Annapurna to try her luck servicing the literary journeying of more than one individual at a time.

  People paid depending upon the length of travel they wished to have or the predetermined length of travel required by the scene of their choice. Obviously, the ballroom scene in which Mr. Elton shows his true character through his rejection of sweet but admittedly simple Harriet Smith took a bit more time than the dramatic revelation to his wife of the Scarlet Pimpernel’s true identity. Mildred was the person who determined the charges, mostly by leafing through the pages of the book in question to see how many words were involved in the scene desired. She’d bark, “It’s going to be $52.25,” or “This is a quickie, so $20 will do it,” and in one case from The Far Pavilions, “Are you sure? Damn longest battle scene I’ve ever looked at and it’ll cost you $625 to live through it if you’re really serious about it,” which was accepted with astonishing alacrity by a woman who’d fallen hard for the romance of the book but whose husband— and he was to be the traveler—hated every moment she spent reading instead of tending to his wants, which were plentiful.

  Need it even be said that business was brisk? For the first two months it was manageable and although Annapurna raced among clients welcoming them home into everything from Keep the Aspidistra Flying to the Illiad, she was able to maintain the happiness and satisfaction of her literary travelers.

  There were, as one could imagine of a former librarian, certain travelers wishing to journey into books that she firmly refused to accommodate. Fifty Shades of Grey topped her list and although Mildred Banfry begged her to reconsider—“We’ve had two hundred thirty nine phone calls on that one! See here, Anna-p (as she’d taken to calling her), do you really want to look a gift horse?”—Annapurna was immovable. Anything by Danielle Steele was rejected out of hand and anyone wishing to look upon the ludicrous albino monk in The da Vinci Code—“Do you know what an albino human actually looks like?” Annapurna demanded—was given the unceremonious boot.

  She was perfectly willing to make recommendations, however. Want a bit of wink-wink-nudge-nudge? Fine. Lady Chatterley and the groundskeeper would do you. Want to witness a stunning confrontation between hero and villain? Sign up for The Count of Monte Cristo and you’ll have what you need in the hallowed chambers of Epic! There would be only one vampire and Bram Stoker was his godlike creator. Want to see a wizard at work? Fine and dandy. Off you go to Oz.

  “I will not deal in trash,” was the line Annapurna drew in the sand. Mildred, knowing when she could step over that line and when she could not, submitted. She grumbled at first till she realized that “We do not deal in trash,” had a certain ring to it, an angle—if you will—that promised further marketing possibilities. The statement threw down a delicious gauntlet as far as Mildred was concerned. It invited controversy—isn’t one man’s trash another man’s treasure?—and, as Mildred knew, controversy, when handled correctly, sells.

  Soon enough—especially with carefully worded press releases distributed to carefully chosen media outlets—all of the major news networks from Seattle made the trek out to Whidbey Island. The national news, NPR, PBS, and—mirabile dictu—Anderson Cooper himself picked up on the story and hastily descended upon little Langley. Within very little time at all, every bed and breakfast in a twenty mile radius of Second Street was taking reservations one year in advance while the Inn at Langley—long ago listed as one of the ten most romantic places in America to kiss one’s beloved—had no difficulty at all filling its extremely pricey water-viewing rooms rain or shine. Coffee houses, cafes, the village pub, three wine tasting venues, and Langley’s two restaurants saw their cash registers fill quickly and so often that bank runs had to be made twice daily just to relieve the enterprises of cash. Gift shops, boutiques, and the village antiques store were regularly emptied of goods, and the four art galleries could not even keep up with the demand for what the island artists had found nearly impossible to sell for decades. “Business is booming” did not come remotely close to describing what happened to the village. The Gold Rush had been reborn on Whidbey Island.

  Naturally, there were difficulties associated with this level of success, especially as the hooha was related only to the talent, the endeavors, and the willingness to be exploited of a single woman. Additionally, the increase in traffic was not universally celebrated, and the elevation of noise was not embraced. The newly born need for reservations at eateries— even at the pizzeria!—was soon deplored. One could barely move through the aisles of the thrift shop, for heaven’s sake, because so many people “just wanted to take a bit of Langley home with me” and after having handed over up to—as we have seen—$625 to experience the great mother of all battle scenes in The Far Pavilions, some individuals were not left with the funds to purchase a souvenir more costly than a water glass sold at the thrift store.

  Hours at Epic! had to be extended to service the hordes. Interviews had to be granted to massage the egos of important journalists so as to promote positive stories which would, in turn, promote more business. YouTube videos, Twitter feeds, Facebook likes, Instagram selfies—“Here I am ready to set off to Pemberley!”—created a global sensation. Within ten months Annapurna began to feel much like the sorcerer’s apprentice, chopping wildly at those bucket-carrying brooms that were flooding the floors of his master’s workshop.

  For her part, Mildred began to have uneasy feelings about this venture she’d hit upon. Admittedly, it was a howling success. Every one of the 501c’s of which she was chief fundraiser was swimming in money. But despite the obdurate nature of her personality when she hit upon a surefire money-making idea as she’d done when she’d learned of Annapurna’s talents, she was not a heartless woman. She could see that Annapurna was looking rather rough around the edges as the months wore on. The calls upon the gifted woman’s time had become such that eating regularly scheduled nutritious meals had morphed into eating peanut M&M’s or not eating at all, while sleeping more than four hours a night was a thing of the past. As to such simple luxuries as moderately regular visits to the salon where her hair had once been cut … This was relegated to fond memory. Her presence was needed at Epic! to speed paying custom
ers on their journeys and that was that. Anything less and a riot could easily ensue. With only two policemen in town to deal with trouble, there was little choice but to keep on keeping on, as they say.

  It was Monie Reardon Pillerton who decided things had reached critical mass, this conclusion having been prompted one afternoon by her realization that only a ninety-minute wait would get her into the chocolate and gelato shop because of the hoards lined up outside. In that shop, the purchase of two scoops of coconut gelato in a sugar cone was the price Monie had agreed to pay her youngest two children for submitting themselves to a much-needed dental cleaning. The children’s subsequent howls of protest—in spite of her apologies and her sworn promise to drive seven miles to the nearest grocery store and purchase each of them a Dove bar— made her firm of purpose. Something had to be done and when the next day she also had a glimpse of poor, haggard Annapurna for the first time in three months, she swore she was the person to do it.

  She lay in wait the following morning. When she saw Mildred Banfry coming up the street from the direction of the post office, heading toward Epic! and another day of raking in the dough, she set upon her. She quickly and efficiently strong-armed that individual into the women’s rest room at Useless Bay Coffee House, and it must be said that Mildred— seeing what was coming and knowing, at heart, the truth of whatever Monie was about to say—didn’t raise a voice in protest. There was no “Unhand me, woman!” on her part because Monie Reardon Pillerton’s hissed words were, “It’s time you took a seriously long look at her, you cow.”

  Mildred took no offense although she didn’t embrace being called a cow. She knew that her referred to Annapurna and, as we have noted, she had already taken a look at Annapurna. Mildred had endured more than one sleepless night worrying about her Epic! partner, and she’d spent the great majority of those slumberless hours trying to work out what could be done to improve the conditions that were dominating Annapurna’s present life. She’d not gotten much further than Could someone else be taught this talent?, however. So she was more than willing not only to forgive the soubriquet with which she’d been addressed but also to exchange ideas on what could be done to get things back under control and to improve Annapurna’s health so that their business could continue to prosper albeit with a slightly scaled back nature.