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Hank and I were having our morning coffee, a muscular beverage appropriately named Louis Cyr, “Canada’s Strongest Coffee.”
“I’ve been going through the files and guess what? Our next case, if you count a couple of no-decisions, will be number fifty.”
“Is that good or bad?” pondered Hank.
“Good for business, bad for Blandsville. We deal only with the minor, offbeat stuff. Imagine the robberies, assaults, arsons, even murders the police face.”
At that moment there was a knock at the door. We looked at each other and said simultaneously: “Number fifty?”
A middle-aged couple entered. She was beautiful, he was handsome and we soon realized, they were both very intelligent and articulate. Their children would likely be Rhodes scholars and Nobel Prize winners. Their names were Win (for Winifrey) and Jo Manley and they ran the Craigellachie Used Books store on the edge of town. I love books so I have avoided the store, fearing I would buy more for the already jammed shelves in my office and house.
“I’m curious,” I said, “Why did you name your store for the place where Lord Strathcona drove the last spike in the trans-Canada railway?”
“You know your Canadian history,” said Jo.
“No. It’s just a very unusual name.”
“We come from a Scottish background, so we chose a Scottish name,” explained Win. I had thought the word came from some First Nations language, but I kept my ignorance concealed.
“What is your problem? Not mice, I hope.”
They assured me that it was not: “Not with our Tank.” I had heard of an elephant gun to kill a fly, but a tank to deter mice… I learned, however, that Tank was their cat. When they got him as a three-month-old kitten, they kept the name his original owners had given him because of its amusing incongruity, but he had grown into his name and was now the terror of all the mice, chipmunks, squirrels, birds, and snakes in the neighbourhood, and any fauna smaller than a Saint Bernard or a Great Dane.
“Our problem,” said Jo, “is theft, specifically chapbooks of poetry by a local unknown named Gar Mills. He has three volumes: Serious Sonnettes, Sappho’s Husband, and Lime-ricky Shots, and we’ve never sold any. We keep a pile on the counter by the cash register and every week or two they disappear. Gar immediately replaces them. A couple of other stores have had the same experience.”
“Evidently,” I deduced,” some people want Mills’s poetry, but don’t want to pay for it.”
I regard bookstores and libraries as essential services, although most politicians don’t, so I agreed to take the case and I planned to waive my fee even if I caught the thief.
That afternoon I visited Craigellachie, leaving my credit cards and most of my cash at home. In my mind the hymn “Yield Not to Temptation” kept repeating itself. The bookstore was a large wooden building behind the Manley’s house, perhaps originally intended for chickens. Inside, every shelf was jammed with books, arranged by subject like a library: fiction, alphabetically by author; biography, alphabetically by subject; history by country; science; poetry. Near the entrance was a counter with a cash register and a blank space where, I assumed, Mills’ books had been piled.
