The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy (5 page)

“It's just a hypnotism thing,” Annapurna said to Mildred. And to get rid of her and her megaphone voice, she offered to meet the blasted woman for coffee “sometime in the future” to explain how it worked if she was interested. She declared it a hobby. She said she'd given it up long ago and had no intention of taking it up again but as Monie was her dearest friend and as she'd begged for old time's sake … Well, she assumed Mildred knew what she meant.

Her fatal words that late morning were, of course, “sometime in the future,” for Mildred Banfry was not a woman who let the future drift into
being
the future without firm plans. There and then at the checkout desk, she unearthed from
I've Been to Disneyland!
a tattered wall calendar from the Humane Society, which she opened at once to the appropriate month. “Let's. Just. See. What. We. Have,” was spoken at Mildred's accustomed sans hearing aid volume. “Next. Tuesday. Ten. A.M.”

Well, of course, Annapurna could not manage that as the calls upon her duty made her appearance anywhere other than in the public library impossible and she told Mildred this, careful to enunciate in such a way that the maddening woman could read her lips.

“No. Problem.” Mildred squinted at her calendar. It appeared that she needed proper spectacles in addition to new batteries for her hearing aid, Annapurna thought. “What. Time. Do. You. Clear. Out. Of. This. Place? Listen. We. Can. Meet. For. Wine. I. Like. Wine. Do. You? Because. Over. On. First. Street …”

“Yes, yes, all right,” Annapurna said. What else, at this point, could she do? It was becoming each moment more obvious that the only way she would rid herself of the woman was to consent to wine, coffee, greasy cheeseburgers, milk shakes, to
anything
just to see her ample posterior exit the library door.

So it was that Annapurna met Mildred Banfry for a glass of wine at the suitably darkened First Street Langley Tasting Room, which overlooked Saratoga Passage where the deep and gleaming waters were—at this season of the year—playing host to the occasional migrating gray whale on its way to Alaska. Good fortune was, for once, with Annapurna. Aside from herself and Mildred Banfry, there was no one inside the wine bar save for the anxious owner, a man eager for custom, and who can blame him since at this time of year—gray whales be damned for the little they did to encourage tourism—every owner of every business in town was consumed with the worry of going under.

Thus, he was fully determined to accommodate Mildred Banfry and Annapurna, such determination displayed by a tendency to hover, which would not do. Mildred dismissed him by purchasing an entire bottle of wine for them to consume, by saying yes to a plate of cheese and crackers, and further yes to a dish of olives. Unbeknownst to Annapurna at the moment, Mildred would also say yes to handing over the not insignificant bill to her companion— Mildred having a taste for Tempranillo which was not inexpensive—but that was to come.

“So …” was Mildred's prefatory statement, soon to be accompanied by “Tell all,” and the single blessing contained within these three words was attached to their volume. Mildred Banfry on this day of days had danced attendance upon Annapurna with hearing aids in place. So her voice was normal, and Annapurna was comforted by the knowledge that whatever she said could remain between the two of them as long as Mildred swore to secrecy.

Such swearing, as things turned out, meant very little to Mildred Banfry although she made no mention of the fact. She swore quite happily with the words “Naturally, naturally, what do you take me for, for heaven's sake? I don't go around betraying confidences thank you very much,” which certainly seemed to indicate that Annapurna's forthcoming words would be held close to Mildred Banfry's heart. But unbeknownst to Annapurna, there were larger forces at work in Mildred that precluded her actually possessing any true sincerity when it came to oath-making in this particular situation. Nonetheless, she said her piece of reassurance to Annapurna and went on to declare herself merely curious, a woman seeking to slake the thirst of her desire for information. And this part was actually and wholly true. Mildred had no
immediate
intention of doing anything with what she learned.

So Annapurna explained her modest talent, doing everything she could to downplay it. She called it “just a game I used to engage in with my friends from school” and she made very light of the efficacy of those
welcome me
declarations that propelled her associates into a literary world they would only otherwise have experienced in imagination.

“D'you mean to tell me this actually works?” Mildred asked her at the culmination of Annapurna's explanation, which she kept as brief as humanly possible. “D'you mean I could …
Any
scene in any book and you can do this? What about … say … a play? Something by … I don't know … Shakespeare maybe … What about Tennessee Williams? ‘Stella!' and all that. Does your victim—”

“Please!” Annapurna cut in. Never had she come remotely close to considering her literary travelers victims of anything other than their own desires to experience what life could be between the pages of their favorite tomes.

“Sorry,” Mildred said hastily. “So your … patient …”

“I'm not a doctor. They're … I suppose we could call them clients. They were clients.”

“Did they pay you?”

“Of course not!” Annapurna was aghast. She'd never thought of taking so much as a dime for the pleasures she had in childhood given to her friends. The book itself, the experience of the book, the act of encouraging her compatriots to read more, read often, and for God's sake read something decent: these were Annapurna's motivations although when she explained them to Mildred and received in return a look of what could only be called appalled incredulity it must be said that she
did
question the wisdom of her past generosity.

Mildred said, “You could have made a mint, you know,” and then she added the six words that allowed Annapurna to see, like Lady Macbeth, the future in the instant: “You could still make a mint.”

Of course, making money from her talent was at that moment still quite far from Annapurna's mind. Indeed, the very thought of it was anathema to her. But she was soon to discover that Mildred Banfry did not mean making money as in becoming wealthy from one's gifts. What she meant was more along the lines of spreading the wealth into areas severely in need of it.

Thus did Annapurna learn that her companion of the wine, cheese, and olives raised funds for seventeen of the three hundred and fifty-two non-profits that existed on the south end of Whidbey Island. Suffice it to say that while Annapurna had been off on the mainland living her life, becoming Annapurna, and doing what she could to forget about Charbourne Hinton-Glover and the evil he had committed to crush her spirit, Whidbey Island had become the Land of Causes and wherever there was a structure needing to be saved, a forest wanting stewardship, an old growth tree needing protection, a farmer's pasture insisting it be spared from the developer's shovel, a child begging for a math tutor, a band looking for anyone willing to purchase instruments for its players, a brand new mother feeling out to sea with her babe, an after school program keeping teenagers off drugs and middle schoolers off the streets … There was a 501c looking for money to pay for it.

“Think of what you could
do
for South Whidbey,” Mildred Banfry intoned. “Why we could easily have an entire
festival
dedicated to your book travels. You could become … My dear Annapurna, you could be the Rick Steves of the imagination!”

Of course, the reader of this tale must not think Annapurna jumped upon the runaway train of Mildred Banfry's monetary intentions as spoken that day in First Street Langley Tasting Room. She did not. The truth was that she required something of a lengthy layover at the train station of her own hesitation. The idea of once again embarking upon what had ultimately so blinded her to the evil that men do—the men in question being, of course, one Chadbourne Hinton-Glover—made her of necessity loath to muddy the waters of
anyone's
ability to judge accurately the less admirable qualities of one's fellows. But Mildred was not to be denied.

“Think of the trees,” was her first point, which was quickly attended by the imperative to think of the land, think of the pastures, think of the young new mothers yearning to be free, thing of drug-using teenagers saved from the needle and skateboard riding preadolescents saved from heads broken on the uneven pavements of Second Street's precipitous descent into town from Saratoga Road. “It is within your power to change all this,” was Mildred's mighty declaration. “And anyway, you can
always
call a halt to it if things get out of hand. You did that when you were a kid, didn't you?”

Privately, of course, Mildred had no thought that things would come within a mile of getting out of hand as she was nothing if not an organizer nonpareil. For her part, privately Annapurna thought that there was, at the end of it all, very little chance that this was truly a money-making proposition. For in these days of a million-and-one diversions, most of which were electronic, how many people actually knew enough about literature even to
want
to experience a scene in a book. Moreover, digital reading devices like eBooks wouldn't work for what she had to offer readers. They had to be willing to dive into an
actual
book and—this was Mildred's instantaneous genius at work—it would have to be something purchased from an independent bookstore—no Amazon.com for this venture, thank you very much—with receipt required as proof.

This last bit was what convinced Annapurna since there was in Langley an independent bookstore operating on a shoestring. It had survived in the town an astonishing fifty years at this point, but every week there were more monetary dangers and internet threats that it had to overcome in order to remain in business. Thus it was that Annapurna agreed to Mildred Banfry's plan. Thus it was that she found herself in very short order having to quit her job at the library in order to accommodate the scores of people who—much to her surprise—wished to be sent out upon “the journey of a lifetime,” as Mildred Banfry's advertising named it. For Mildred Banfry, Annapurna discovered, was a marketing genius, and an interview with Monie Reardon Pillerton— accompanied by photos of Monie herself, her only marginally winsome offspring hanging heavily upon her, and her husband looking exceedingly out-to-sea about the presence of a journalist in his back yard— printed in the
South Whidbey Record
and then sent forth to entertain thousands upon the internet was all it took to launch their fund-raising business.

Mildred christened it. She chose one word,
Epic!
, which was painted on the frosted glass door of an extremely costly four room suite directly across from the village's chocolate and gelato shop in an enclave of buildings fashioned around a sweet little garden. This was in Second Street—quite a distance from the aforementioned descending hill—and one of the four rented rooms served as their waiting room while the other three allowed Annapurna to try her luck servicing the literary journeying of more than one individual at a time.

People paid depending upon the length of travel they wished to have or the predetermined length of travel required by the scene of their choice. Obviously, the ballroom scene in which Mr. Elton shows his true character through his rejection of sweet but admittedly simple Harriet Smith took a bit more time than the dramatic revelation to his wife of the Scarlet Pimpernel's true identity. Mildred was the person who determined the charges, mostly by leafing through the pages of the book in question to see how many words were involved in the scene desired. She'd bark, “It's going to be $52.25,” or “This is a quickie, so $20 will do it,” and in one case from
The Far Pavilions
, “Are you sure? Damn longest battle scene I've ever looked at and it'll cost you $625 to live through it if you're really serious about it,” which was accepted with astonishing alacrity by a woman who'd fallen hard for the romance of the book but whose husband— and he was to be the traveler—hated every moment she spent reading instead of tending to his wants, which were plentiful.

Need it even be said that business was brisk? For the first two months it was manageable and although Annapurna raced among clients welcoming them home into everything from
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
to the
Illiad
, she was able to maintain the happiness and satisfaction of her literary travelers.

There were, as one could imagine of a former librarian, certain travelers wishing to journey into books that she firmly refused to accommodate.
Fifty Shades of Grey
topped her list and although Mildred Banfry begged her to reconsider—“We've had two hundred thirty nine phone calls on that one! See here, Anna-p (as she'd taken to calling her), do you really want to look a gift horse?”—Annapurna was immovable. Anything by Danielle Steele was rejected out of hand and anyone wishing to look upon the ludicrous albino monk in
The da Vinci Code
—“Do you know what an albino human
actually
looks like?” Annapurna demanded—was given the unceremonious boot.

She was perfectly willing to make recommendations, however. Want a bit of wink-wink-nudge-nudge? Fine. Lady Chatterley and the groundskeeper would do you. Want to witness a stunning confrontation between hero and villain? Sign up for
The Count of Monte Cristo
and you'll have what you need in the hallowed chambers of Epic! There would be only one vampire and Bram Stoker was his godlike creator. Want to see a wizard at work? Fine and dandy. Off you go to Oz.

“I will not deal in trash,” was the line Annapurna drew in the sand. Mildred, knowing when she could step over that line and when she could not, submitted. She grumbled at first till she realized that “We do not deal in trash,” had a certain ring to it, an angle—if you will—that promised further marketing possibilities. The statement threw down a delicious gauntlet as far as Mildred was concerned. It invited controversy—isn't one man's trash another man's treasure?—and, as Mildred knew, controversy, when handled correctly, sells.