Free The Cracked Spine by Paige Shelton Page A

actor and a university student. I believe he had some classes today, but I have a difficult time keeping up with the lad.”
    â€œHe sounds busy.”
    â€œI think so.”
    We retraced the path up the balcony steps, over to the other side (I tried very hard not to let the idea of “the dark side” solidify in my mind, but I didn’t think I was successful), and down to the middle dingier, darker hallway. Rosie didn’t even acknowledge the upstairs offices before she’d flipped the switch that lit the naked bulb.
    When she reached the red door I felt like the explorers who’d opened King Tut’s tomb must have felt. Anticipation mixed with concern that the other side would be a bust.
    With the drama I’d silently inspirited in my own mind, Rosie pulled a loaded key ring out of her pocket and flipped it a couple of times in her hand to sift for the appropriate key: it was oversized, turquoise blue, and had an old-fashioned curlicue endpiece.
    Deftly, she inserted the key and turned it three times to the left before the lock loosened with a metallic slide and thunk; the noise was loud and attached to mechanisms that belonged on something more important than an ordinary old door. She pushed and reached around to a switch on the wall. A flip sounded and the room became illuminated.
    â€œFrom what I heard about yer résumé, lass, this place is going tae feel like a wee bit of home.”
    I followed her inside.
    I blinked a million or so times as I looked around and tried to digest all the things that were in the room. Or at least digest a few of them. There were so many.
    The warehouse was not big, but it was tall in that it took up the entire back corner of the building. There was no second floor over this part, and two very small, high-up windows gave the room a sliver of natural light. The rest of the light came from three brass chandelier-like fixtures on the ceiling, and though the light seemed somewhat dim, it somehow managed to illuminate the entire room. Or more precisely, illuminate all the things on the shelves in the room.
    An old, large, wooden desk filled the center of the space. Next to the desk was a modern worktable with a light panel over its top, just like one I’d used back at the museum in Wichita. The worktable top was clear of clutter, but the desktop held a few messy piles of paper.
    The walls were lined with black-painted steel shelves. One wall of shelves was filled with books—so many books. They were stacked willy-nilly and off-kilter, even worse than the books out front.
    They cried out, begged to be straightened and organized, but I shut them out. For now. I’d get to them soon enough.
    The other shelves were jam-packed too, but not with books. At first glance, I noticed an antique tube radio, a golden Pharaoh head (just like Tut’s tomb—I realized the appropriateness of my earlier thought), an ornate mirror, a gilded and jeweled box, a whole shelf just for medieval weapons, bottles filled with liquid or powder or just empty … So many, many things. More things than I’d ever seen stored on the museum archive or storage shelves. Or perhaps it was that everything here was in total disarray. There was a preciseness to the shelves at a museum. There was the opposite of preciseness here.
    â€œI don’t understand,” I said. Between the auction for a portrait and the inventory in this room, had I misinterpreted the nonanswers to my non-asked questions? Had my mind created the “bookshop” part of the answers? No, wait, the sign out front had said, “Book Purveyors,” not museum or “Purveyors of Every Sort of Thing Under the Sun.”
    â€œThis is Edwin’s collection. Books are his first passion, but he loves things: old, valuable things. This is where he keeps some of them and then sometimes sells them, sometimes uses them tae barter.”
    â€œI still don’t understand,” I said.