Chapter Five:  The Accidental Customer

Localad heard the engine's last unhappy cough from behind the counter and looked up in time to see a man in an expensive linen jacket get out, slam the door with more force than the situation required, and stand on the curb with his phone held up to the sky like he was trying to bribe it into finding a signal.

Meridian Cove's cell coverage was, charitably patchy at best and did not respond to threats, prayer or premium contracts. It had principles. Localad watched the man pace a slow circle, phone still raised, cursing in a way that carried faintly through the glass, and felt the specific, mild amusement of a local watching a tourist discover the town's one true inconvenience.

The stranger paced, swore and finally entered the shop. The cracked bell above the door, performed its teaspoon elegy.

“Do you have a landline?”

The man was, Localad would learn shortly, named Desmond Ferris, and he was not, in fact, a tourist. He was a film producer three years off an Academy nomination for a war drama that had made a great deal of money and slightly less critical noise, currently on his way to a coastal house he was renting for the weekend to have a very expensive, very private argument with his second wife about their marriage’s lack of a future, and he had only chosen this stretch of highway because his GPS had promised him it was scenic and had said nothing whatsoever about bad cell service.

None of this was visible to Localad from behind the counter. What was visible though, was a man growing steadily more agitated, glancing at his watch, and finally, apparently out of options, pushing open the door of Harbour Page with enough irritation that the cracked bell made its spoon-drawer sound twice.

"Do you have a landline," Desmond repeated. It wasn't really a question.

"We do have an object that believes it is one." Localad said, and gestured to the old black bakelite rotary phone near Crime that sat, mostly ornamental, on a shelf by the mystery section.

The man stared at it for a minute. “Does it work?”

“On clear days it does.”

Desmond crossed the shop, dialled, and had a short, clipped conversation with what turned out to be a towing service in the next county, who informed him that someone could be out within the hour, possibly ninety minutes, depending on traffic that did not, as far as Localad knew, exist in Meridian Cove in any meaningful quantity.

"An hour," Desmond informed whoever was listening, hanging up, and looked around the shop for the first time as something other than a room containing a phone.

“An hour,” he repeated. “There isn’t any traffic.”

“There may be a tractor,” Localad offered.

His eyes moved over the shelves with the fast, assessing look of a man used to sizing up rooms for what they could offer him, and landed, eventually, on the counter, where Localad had set down his coffee, his invoices, and, because he had been reading it on his lunch break, his own single printed copy of Purradise.

"You've got an hour to kill," Localad offered, mostly to be polite. "We've got coffee. It's not great, but it's coffee." Harbour & Page was not designed to impress. It had no café, loyalty app or table labelled BOOKTOK MADE ME BUY IT. It possessed books, chairs, dust, an unreliable radiator and a smell compounded from paper, rain and generations of people briefly becoming someone else.

The shop regarded Desmond with suspicion.

Desmond didn't answer right away. He was looking at the book beside the register.

It wasn't much to look at, from the outside—the matte black cover, the plain serif title, nothing that would have caught the eye of a browsing customer among the shop's other stock. But something about it—the lack of a barcode, maybe, or the total absence of any publisher's logo on the spine, or simply the fact that it looked handmade in a way that mass-produced novels didn't—made Desmond reach out and pick it up before he'd fully decided to.

"This isn't for sale?" he asked. Another not-quite-question.

"No," Localad said. "That one's mine."

"You wrote it?"

Localad felt the particular, exposed discomfort of having a private thing noticed by a stranger. He experienced the immediate regret of a snail whose shell has been noticed.

"It's not published. It's just—a copy I had made. For myself."

Desmond turned it over, read the plain back cover, which had nothing on it but the title and Localad's name, no summary, no blurb, because Localad hadn't thought to write one and hadn't imagined he'd need it.

Desmond picked it up. “Purradise?”

“There are reasons for the spelling.”

“I assumed, either reasons or cats.”

Then, without asking permission, he opened the front cover and read the first page, standing at the counter, one hand still holding his dead phone.

Localad watched him read it and felt the strange vertigo of watching someone's face while they encountered something you'd made. Desmond's face was professionally trained. Years of meetings had taught it to display enthusiasm, concern and total commitment without allowing any of those conditions to enter the bloodstream. His expression didn't do anything dramatic. He wasn't a man given to visible reactions; twenty years in rooms with actors had trained that out of him. But his eyes moved down the page at a speed that suggested he wasn't skimming, and when he reached the bottom of it, he turned to the next one without looking up. And then the next.

"You've got an hour," Localad said again, mostly to break the silence, which had started to feel strange.

"Do you mind," Desmond asked, still not looking up, already halfway into the third page, "if I sit?"

He sat in the reading chair by the window that Localad kept for exactly this purpose, though usually for retirees killing time before the ferry, and he read. Localad, uncertain what else to do, went back to his invoices, glancing up every so often to find Desmond exactly where he'd left him, turning pages at a steady, absorbed pace, the dead phone abandoned on the arm of the chair.

The tow truck arrived fifty-five minutes later.

Desmond did not look up.

The driver came inside. The door bell complained. Mrs. Alvarez, who had entered ten minutes earlier and understood instantly that something interesting was happening, pretended to examine gardening books upside down.

“Mr. Ferris?” called the driver.

"Sorry—yes. One second." Desmond marked his place with a receipt from his pocket and stood, and for a moment Localad thought that would be the end of it, a strange half-hour with a stranger who happened to be a reader, a story he'd tell Marjory later as a curiosity.

Instead, Desmond held up the book.

"Can I take this with me?" he asked.

Localad looked at the book. It was his only copy. His one physical proof. A twenty-year made object.

“No,” said every sensible part of him.

“Yes,” said Localad.

Mrs. Alvarez dropped a book.

Desmond gave him a business card.

“I’ll return it.”

“People say that about books.”

“I mean it.”

“That’s what people say before not returning books.”

Desmond held Purradise against his chest. Something had shifted in him. Not goodness, exactly. Goodness was still several developments away. But appetite had become attention.

“I don’t usually take things,” he said.

Mrs. Alvarez made a sound that expressed the local view of Hollywood.

Desmond left with the book.

Localad stood bemused in the doorway as the tow truck disappeared around the coast road. Harbour & Page’s bell moved gently in the sea breeze and it sounded, for once, almost like a warning of things to come.

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