The Book Thing Read Free Page B

she was going to do and walked up the driveway without waiting for his reply, which she supposed would urge caution, or tell her to call the police. But it was only a box of books from a children’s bookstore. How high could the stakes be?
    She knocked on the stable door. Minutes passed. She knocked again.
    “I saw you,” she said to the dusk, to herself, possibly to the man inside. “I know you’re in there.”
    Another minute or so passed, a very long time to stand outside as darkness encroached and the cold deepened. But, eventually, the door was rolled open.
    “I don’t know you,” Walking Man said in the flat affect of a child.
    “My name is Tess Monaghan and I sort of know you. You’re the—”
    She stopped herself just in time. Walking Man didn’t know he was Walking Man. She realized, somewhat belatedly, that he had not boiled his existence down to one quirk. Whoever he was, he didn’t define himself as Walking Man. He had a life, a history. Perhaps a sad and gloomy one, based on these surroundings and his compulsive, constant hiking, but he was not, in his head or mirror, a man who did nothing but walk around North Baltimore.
    Or was he?
    “I’ve seen you around. I don’t live far from here. We’re practically neighbors.”
    He stared at her oddly, said nothing. His arm was braced against the frame of the door—she could not enter without pushing past him. She sensed he wouldn’t like that kind of contact, that he was not used to being touched. She remembered how quickly he had whirled around the day she rolled her stroller up on his heels. But unlike most people, who would turn toward the person who had jostled them, he moved away.
    “May I come in?”
    He dropped his arm and she took that as an invitation—and also as a sign that he believed himself to have nothing to fear. He wasn’t acting like someone who felt guilty, or in the wrong. Then again, he didn’t know that she had followed the books here.
    The juice-stained box sat on a work table, illuminated by an overhead light strung from the ceiling on a long cable. Tess walked over to the box, careful not to turn her back to Walking Man, wishing she had a name for him other than Walking Man, but he had not offered his name when she gave hers.
    “May I?” she said, indicating the box, picking up a box cutter next to it, but only because she didn’t want him to be able to pick it up.
    “It’s mine,” he said.
    She looked at the label. The address was for this house. Cover, should the ruse be discovered? “William Kemper. Is that you?”
    “Yes.” His manner was odd, off. Then again, she was the one who had shown up at his home and demanded to inspect a box addressed to him. Perhaps he thought she was just another quirky Baltimorean. Perhaps he had a reductive name for her, too. Nosy Woman.
    “Why don’t you open it?”
    He stepped forward and did. There were at least a dozen books, all picture books, all clearly new. He inspected them carefully.
    “These are pretty good,” he said.
    “Good for what?”
    He looked at her as if she were quite daft. “My work.”
    “What do you do?”
    “Create.”
    “The man who brought you the books …”
    “My younger brother, Tate. He brings me books. He says he knows a place that gives them away free.”
    “These look brand-new.”
    He shrugged, uninterested in the observation.
    Tess tried again. “Why does your brother bring you books?”
    “He said it was better for him to bring them, than for me to get them myself.”
    Tess again remembered bumping into Walking Man on Twenty-Fifth Street, the hard thwack of his knapsack, so solid it almost left a bruise.
    “But you still sometimes get them for yourself, don’t you?”
    It took him a while to formulate a reply. A dishonest person would have been thinking up a lie all along. An average person would have been considering the pros and cons of lying. William Kemper was just very deliberate with his words.
    “Sometimes. Only when they