« Nameless »

by Sam Starbuck

Chapter ONE

IT IS A natural human urge to settle in certain formations, which can be repeated in a village of six hundred even more easily than a city of five million. The village is merely the city stripped to its basic component parts, after all: places to gather, places to buy and sell, places to live, places to play. The church, the shops, the houses, the park. Low Ferry's major road was a two-lane blacktop lined with storefronts, the only reliably-plowed street in the winter. During the summer the cheap asphalt sometimes melted and stuck to people's shoes. My bookstore, and my little apartment above it, stood midway down the road in the heart of our bustling retail district: Dusk Books, the hardware store, the cafe, a general-goods store with a grocer's built into one side of it, and two antique stores that only opened for the tourist season. There were a few old boarded-up buildings to the south, as well, evidence that some folks had gone bust and moved on and nobody new was filling their place. We had a school and a church at the north end of the street, and most people seemed to feel we didn't need much more.

The first week in September that year saw the heat of summer not yet faded in Chicago, which was where our television signal and our official weather reports came from. In Low Ferry on the other hand, far from Lake Michigan and with wider, clearer skies, we could see autumn closing in and an especially brutal, cold winter hard on its heels.

Across the street from my shop, the cafe was stacking cartons of flour in airtight containers and freezing basins of butter and meat for when the roads washed out late in the year. For much the same reason, I was stocking my shelves with new books, tight bound and good smelling, to fill the days when the television signals would slack and die and the impassable roads meant no trips to the nearest movie theater, three towns over and across the river.

We were in that transition time, when we put the heat on at night but left the windows open during the day, and through mine I could half-hear music from the radio in the cafe across the street. Over that came the occasional sound of a car driving past and, eventually, footsteps on my gravel walk.

I glanced up from my unpacking, looked out the window, and sang out:

"L'amour est un oiseau rebelle

que nul ne peut apprivoiser,

et c'est bien en vain qu'on l'appelle,

s'il lui convient de refuser."

Carmen, the victim of my serenade, laughed and pushed open the glass door into the shop.

"Don't sell your business," she advised, wandering over to my counter. She had her daughter deftly propped on one hip and began digging in her pocket with her other hand, first the front of her apron and then the jeans underneath.

"A man can dream, Carmen," I said, leaning on the counter. "I think I should get points for effort. Not to mention remembering anything about the opera at all."

"You were off-key. And I think you learned all you know about opera from children's cartoons."

"Better than knowing nothing about it," I said. "What can I do for you today? Book for the squirt? New shipment came in but the magazines won't be delivered until next week."

Carmen finally gave up and set Clara down near the low rack of children's books so she could ransack her other pockets. Clara immediately located one about dinosaurs and began mauling it.

"I need some change," she said, producing two wrinkled twenty-dollar bills. "We're running low at the cafe and the bank's closed because Nolan's all alone over there and the man has to eat lunch sometime."

"Sandra and Michael still off sick?" I asked.

"Yeah, poor kids."

"Don't pity them too much. No bets on how they both came down with it at the same time."

"Really? Sandra and Michael?" she inquired.

"Well, I heard it from Cassie who got it from Nolan's little sister who says she saw them necking in the safety-deposit vault, but you know Sandra's parents don't think much of Michael. At least that's what Jacob says. So I suspect they're keeping it a secret."

"You know everything," she said, while I counted out ones and fives for her.

"People tell me things." I shrugged and stuffed her change in an envelope. "You keeping Clara at the cafe today?"

"Actually, I was just about to deliver her to Paula."

"Paula?" I asked. "Really? You know they don't childproof hardware stores."

"Well, my regular babysitter's back in school now, she can't take Clara until three-thirty. They don't let her wander around the bulk nail bins, and Paula calls it even if I bring her dinner. Unless you want to – "

"Love you like a sister, not going to babysit your hurricane," I said hurriedly.

"Then you don't get to judge Paula," she replied. "Thanks for the change. Gotta get back – lunch rush is on. Clara!"

Clara looked up from the book she was mangling and reached out for her mother. Carmen, who will never be lauded for her observational skills, took her hand and led her out the door, down the porch steps and across the gravel, book still dragging from Clara's other hand.

I was considering closing up and getting lunch myself when I caught movement through the window. A stranger was standing on the pavement outside, studying the sign that hung off the front porch, arm cocked so that his fingers rested against the back of his neck, shifting from foot to foot.

He was a tall man, hardly old enough to have left off being a tall boy, in a battered tan jacket and blue-jeans. I probably wouldn't have noticed him if we'd passed on the street – we get a lot of tourists in the village, right up until mid-October or so. As it was, with him studying my shop and me studying him, I got a pretty good look. Hair the same pale tan as his jacket, a little gangly, perhaps not quite fully grown into his body, a spine stiff with tension. A nice face but not particularly unique: firm features, ordinary chin and nose, wide eyes.