One Book in the Grave Read Free Page A

head in confusion. “So what happened? You sold it to someone?”
    “No.” Reluctantly, I pushed the book away and stood. “No, I gave it away.”
    “Well, then there’s no problem.”
    I laughed, but the sound was empty. “Believe me—there’s a problem.”
    “I was afraid you’d say that,” he muttered, and began to pace back and forth between the conference table and his massive antique mahogany desk.
    Confused and unsure what to do, I leaned my hip against the table and glanced around the office, trying to distract myself by admiring Ian’s latest artwork. He still had the Diebenkorn painting of a woman drinking coffee prominently displayed behind his desk, but there were three miniature Rembrandt engravings on the wall closest to the door that I didn’t remember seeing before.
    As always when I visited Ian, I thought how nice it would be to borrow from the vast Covington collection to furnish one’s office. And if the artwork didn’t impress a visitor, one could always enjoy the incomparable view of the Golden Gate Bridge seen through the big picture window by the conference table. I turned and stared out at the wide expanse of the bay and tried to appreciate the amazing vista.
    “You want to tell me what happened?” Ian asked from close behind me.
    I sighed and slowly turned around. “It’s a long story. Are you ready to hear it?”
    He folded his arms across his chest. “I suppose I’ll have to.”
    I smiled. “Did Austin ever introduce you to Max Adams?”
    “Max? Sure. Didn’t he die a few years ago?”
    “It was almost three years ago,” I said. But thanks to the reappearance of
Beauty and the Beast
, I was reliving the day as if it were yesterday.
    I’d had a crush on Max Adams from the first day I’d laid eyes on him when I was ten years old. Max’s family had followed Avatar Robson Benedict—otherwise known as Guru Bob—to the Sonoma commune he’d established, just as my family had a few years earlier. So we all grew up together in Dharma. Max was my oldest brother Austin’s best friend until they each went away to different colleges.
    While at Stanford, Austin met Ian and brought him home for Thanksgiving dinner. That was how Ian and I met, way back when. I was long over Max by then and started dating Ian, who made me laugh and shared my love of books and art and Monty Python movies. Our relationship got serious for a minute or so when Ian proposed marriage, but it didn’t take long for us to realize we weren’t meant for each other. Happily, we’d remained close friends and book-world colleagues.
    Ian had recently proven correct my decision to end our engagement by coming out of the closet. But that was a whole other story.
    I walked around the table and over to the window. “You know about Guru Bob and how he first got Abraham to hire me as an apprentice, right?”
    “Of course. You were just a kid, right?” Ian said.
    “Right. So back then, it was—”
    “Wait a minute,” Ian interjected. “Do I need to hearthe entire history of the world or can you skip to the good parts?”
    “I promise I’ll keep it as short as I can. So, anyway, Guru Bob did the same thing for Max, asking Abraham to mentor him.”
    “I thought Max worked with paper.”
    “He did.” I gave Ian the abbreviated history. Max had been helping out Abraham Karastovsky at the same time I was working as his official apprentice. My little heart would go pitter-patter whenever Max came into the studio. I would dream of him and me bookbinding our way to our very own happily-ever-after.
    Sadly, though, Max didn’t care much for bookbinding; he was always more interested in the paper itself than in the binding procedures. So instead of helping with binding books, he began to experiment with all sorts of different papermaking techniques.
    “It was all good, because Max’s talent with paper fit right in with Guru Bob’s master plan for Dharma,” I said. “Guru Bob wanted to revive as many of the