Page 61 of The Bookshop of Forbidden Books

“That’s what I think.”

“Which makes him a suspect with a real motive. He had every reason to stay quiet about the room. Once you were in prison, the place was his for the taking. Did he do that?”

“I don’t know, actually. I haven’t had the strength to go back down there yet. It’s stupid, I know.”

“It’s not stupid,” Anna reassured him. “Acknowledging a wound isn’t a sign of weakness.”

“Even if we’re right about this, why would he kill Salinas?”

“To frame you again. To send you back to prison – for good this time. Then the state seizes the bookshop and auctions it off. He buys it cheap. A sweet deal for him.”

Mitch frowned. Anna’s theory made him uneasy.

The last glimmers of daylight were fading by the time they pulled in, in front of Anna’s home. They ate dinner in heavy silence. Anxious and exhausted, Mitch avoided Anna’s eyes. Even though he wasn’t entirely convinced the antique dealer was guilty, he’d now been forced to seriously consider the possibility that someone had tried to destroy him for their own gain.

Lying in bed beside Anna, he waited until she was asleep before resting his hand on her belly, as if clinging to her to keep himself from falling apart. As soon as he closed his eyes, faces paraded before him: Verner, Madame Ateltow, her bookseller, Madame Bergol, Mathilde…

There was only one way to know the truth: he needed to find the courage to enter the forbidden bookshop.

At midnight, sleep finally claimed him beneath a sky full of stars.

Chapter 24

The Blue Notebook

Mitch awoke to the sound of Anna singing in the kitchen, the smell of toast drifting through the house. He went downstairs to join her.

She could read him like a book. Immediately she sensed that their conversation from the previous day was still looping in his head. She acted as if nothing were wrong, kissed him, poured him coffee, kissed him again, and announced that she had something important to talk to him about. Realizing she wouldn’t get a word out of him on an empty stomach, she urged him to sit, whipped up scrambled eggs, and started pacing while he ate.

“Do you have any enemies?” she asked – as casually as if she were asking whether he liked the eggs.

“I don’t think so, no.”

“Usually that’s the kind of thing you know,” she said pointedly. “Aside from Mathilde, who did you spend time with back then?”

“The only people I saw regularly were customers in my bookshop.”

“Which ones?”

“Verner and Madame Ateltow – the ones you met in my back room. But it’s hard to imagine either of them killing anyone.”

“Did they visit you while you were in prison?”

Mitch’s silence was all the answer she needed.

“So you don’t know them that well. Who else?”

“Madame Bergol. Harmless old lady.”

“Old ladies are never harmless,” Anna said. “They were young once, and they remember.”

“Neither she nor the others would’ve had any reason to kill Salinas.”

“Who’s to say this charming old lady, or one of your other friends”— she spat the word out like poison – “didn’t have a run-in with him? I have another theory besides the antique-dealer one.”

Mitch frowned. He didn’t like people jumping to conclusions. Rumours were like stains – once they spread, they stuck. Tell people your butcher’s an assassin who chops up his victims and no one’s meat will ever taste the same, whether it’s true or not. But Anna was unstoppable.

“Let’s take your former teacher, for example,” she insisted. “Say she had some legal trouble. She cuts a deal with the prosecutor. Trades a tip in a juicier case than her own.”