“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?” Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, p. 268.
* * *
“I remember the young lady very well. What has this to do with me?”
The man made a notation in one column of a steno book and, looking up, tucked the pencil behind his ear. It was an old Col-Erase, a copy-editor’s pencil, one end blue and the other red. Detective Markle hadn’t seen one of those in years.
His mother had edited the personal ads and obituaries in their local paper for decades. “All those people, Joey, seeking and seeking, never looking at what’s right in front of them.” He had a sudden vision of her, looking up from her desk, the blue tip of her pencil resting pensively on her lower lip. She’d had a drawer full of pencils like that, in slim little boxes, a dozen per box. Markle wondered if this man had a similar stash, hauled off from some going-out-of-business sale. Or maybe someone was still making the things, a rolling river of them dropping neatly from a conveyor belt , robotic hands pressing the gummed flaps of the boxes closed.
Markle resurfaced, shook his head slightly. He glanced longingly at the wisps of stem rising from the man’s coffee cup. It had been a long night.
“Well sir, the girl’s mother said she comes in here quite a bit.”
“She does. After school mostly. Sometimes on the weekends.”
“A bookworm huh?”
The man didn’t seem to think the comment required a response. Markle glanced around. It was a tight little shop, with dusty towers of used books spilling from makeshift shelves, piled so high in front of the windows that the place felt like a basement. It wasn’t someplace you would guess a junior-high-school girl would frequent.
“When would you say you saw her last?”
“Oh, I don’t know, about a week and a half ago? If you give me a second I can tell you.” The man licked his finger and rifled through the pages of the steno book. “Here, June 12. She bought this. Cash, of course.”
Markle looked. Seattle on Ten Dollars a Day.
“Seattle’s pretty far from here.”
“It is.”
“Would you please call me? If you see her. Her folks are real worried.” He handed the man his card.
“I’ll do that.”
* * *
The man waited until the tinkling bell over the door was silent, then said “You can come out now.”
The toes of two scuffed sneakers could be seen behind the stacks.