Side Street Mystery/Best Sellers Sheets & pages

It had been a busy day at the bookshop; lately they had been getting quite a lot of traffic because of something someone said on TikTok (mystery bookshop owner’s deaths) and what with Halloween around the corner ….

“I say we go with it,” Sheila had said raising an arched brow at the sudden addition of shoppers that walked through the shop’s antique double doors all with hiking backpacks 

And this was the sort of town where strange stories are glorified 

So Sheila picked one store window and Faun another and they decorated gruesomely using horror fiction books the store conveniently always carried. H. P. Loveceaft, Edgar Allen Poe, Mary Shelly, Bram Stoker ….but they might have got carried away with the extra special effects to bring the books to life

“Surprise! Fake blood!” Sheila pulled out of her giant handbag 

So the bookstore was busy and so was the street with curious onlookers hanging around.

“We really have caused a commotion,” Sheila remarked, looking natural and beautiful as a trans Elvira as she peered out the shop window, “look— they’re taking a group selfie in front of the store with two of them faking they’re dead!”

“Oh that recent news story,” Faun rolled her eyes and felt fed up about it, “they just want to sensationalize to get views and will stoop at making up stories ….”

Sheila turned from the window knowing this was a touchy subject. What with Grant …. and suspicions surrounding him

****

And it was later back st her place— the Victorian lavender grey house with the now slightly less overgrown front garden and her place behind it —when she thought she heard someone at the door. It was the middle of the night and she was in bed having a disturbing dream. A knock. 

Or was it in her dream?

And heading down the stairs she went through to the kitchen to look out the kitchen door window. But no. No one there.

Yet she heard it again. A knocking. 

But it was coming from upstairs she now realized. Faun went back up the stairs back to her bedroom and now heard it again. 

She smiled. Sat on the edge of the bed and knocked back. 

She heard through the wall,

“are you awake?”

“Well now I am!” she said back through the wall 

And for whatever reason her phone alerted a message as a text came from Grant:

<<come over>>

<<Im half asleep>> she replied 

<<bring your own pillow>>

***

he didn’t bother to put the light on but he did move over on his bed for her 

“Took you long enough,” he said but he opened his blanket to let her under and into the warmth of his bed cave 

“How long have you been back?” Faun asked but then forgot the question because whatever she’d arrived in was adeptly removed and tossed onto the floor and at the same time his mouth everywhere, demanding, kissing her 

And not a whoof out of King Leopold 

waar ben je gebleven?

Electra’s dictionary Noir/a coffee déjà vu

I suppose I must have got lost in thought staring into the vastness of the street, how fast things move— don’t they?

why must they?

Josef shocks me out of my fugue by appearing suddenly next to me. The Viking ambush again. But he holds a cup of coffee and offers it to me,

“sorry, it’s not instant, he’s dragged out the French press, but there’s honey in it, you see I remembered—and some of the almond milk I saw in there, but—no, Jörn made it for you.”

I don’t look at him right away. I feel guilty and smile and take the cup…. Folkmoot ….? I get that feeling again …. Like that time—the first time in Jörn’s kitchen; he handed me the cup and ….I felt it…. that sense of an overlay of ….lives…. Josef ….he was there —then ….that’s what ….it was that day at the barn house—I forgot I saw it then too

I shudder but manage to suppress it and sip the coffee and look up at Josef 

“We never had that conversation,” he tells me in that wise old voice which he exaggerates because he can’t resist the drama 

“Which one?” I ask him

“You have been angry at me,” he says this as if no time passed since he’d last said it

Had I forgotten? 

His eyes, when his twinkle, are not the same as Jörn’s —Josef has a more Father Christmas about his whereas Jörn’s twinkle is always —well, noir ….

“Because you pretended to like me and it was just to get me legally hitched to your son for your opera house,” I tell him this without any drama at all. I state it because this is what happened. 

I hear Jörn laugh from the coffee pot as he brings two more cups over to the table; he places one in front of Josef who has settled himself at —the head of the rectangular table. Of course. Folkmoot, I think ….

But blurt,

“Jörn, did Gerald tell you I was back?” turning to Jörn as he—presumptuously— sits beside me on the kitchen bench that parallels the full length picture window 

But now it is Josef who laughs and says,

“you think he needs a psychic to tell him you’re back when he’s an international spy?”

“I’m an ‘intelligence decipherer’ not a spy, papa —is that what you went by?” Jörn replies 

Josef laughs,

“I’m a respectable symphony conductor, that’s what it says on my tax papers….pass the socker.”