Top Shelf (Seacroft Stories Book 1) Read online

  TOP SHELF

  A SEACROFT NOVEL

  ALLISON TEMPLE

  CONTENTS

  Top Shelf

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Thank You

  About the Author

  Also By Allison Temple

  Top Shelf

  Martin is a ghost. Well, not really, but he might as well be. Job gone, home gone, self-respect gone, and no one even seems to notice. The only person who really sees him is Seb, the artist who lives above the used bookstore.

  Seb haunts the edges of Seacroft in search of beauty. He knows how to excavate the hidden value in abandoned things—whether it's in the pages of forgotten books or in Martin's stuttering attempts to rebuild his life—and transform them into works of art.

  Two lost souls, Seb and Martin discover the strength they need to face eccentric townies and their dysfunctional families together. But as friendship sparks toward something more, neither man wants to risk what they’ve only just found. It takes two to fall in love, but it will take the whole community to bring their beauty to life.

  Copyright © 2019 by Allison Temple

  Top Shelf

  All rights reserved. ISBN 978-1-7753144-0-0

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Design: Cate Ashwood Designs

  Editing and Proofreading: LesCourt Author Services

  Created with Vellum

  For Nana

  Acknowledgments

  This book baby took a long time in coming. I feel like I was pregnant for two years, and then the labour and delivery all happened in a rush. If I have forgotten anyone, I blame the mommy brain.

  Ana. You read Seb and Martin before anyone else and told me it was good even when it wasn’t.

  Russ. You always ask me how the book is going.

  Jill. You told me this book is more compelling than Toto’s Africa, and I am clinging to that.

  Elle. You let me pick your brain from halfway around the world.

  Dorothy, Sophia, and Blanche. The list is too long. You know why.

  You. You’re reading this, and that is the most amazing thing.

  For news on future releases, join the A-List, my monthly newsletter.

  1

  T he exterior of Martin’s new workplace did not inspire confidence. Dog Ears Book Shop was a two-story brick building on Seacroft’s main street. The sign out front was painted in large black and white spots that were probably meant to look like a Dalmatian, but actually looked more like a cow. The ‘Help Wanted’ sign was still in the window. If that was an indication of his new employer’s faith in his abilities, Martin’s career in bookselling would be short.

  He’d been told to be here by eight-thirty, and he was early. There was a diner next door, and he’d popped in to grab a tea to go. That had been ten minutes ago, and now the bookshop’s locked storefront staring back at him made him worry. What if he’d made the job offer up? What if this was just another punch line on the cruel practical joke that was his life lately? Not being able to hold down an obscure academic position was one thing. Not being good enough to work at a lonely used bookstore in a sleepy seaside community was another issue completely. His thesis supervisor had always said life was not a pony farm, but Martin didn’t even want the whole farm anymore. A seat at the trough would do.

  A dark sedan pulled up to the curb. Martin hunched into his tea, avoiding eye contact with the driver. They didn’t need to see him like this.

  “Thanks, Mom!” A teenage girl with hair like coiled springs got out of the passenger side. She leaned in and spoke to the driver for a minute, before slamming the door and waving as the car pulled away. She smiled when she spotted Martin.

  “Are you the new guy?” She hiked her backpack up on her shoulders. Martin nodded, and her smile spread. “Doctor Lindsey, I presume!” She stuck out her hand for him to shake. He juggled his tea and his bike helmet before reaching for her.

  “It’s just Martin,” he said.

  “I’m Cassidy. Mrs. Green said you’d be starting today. I’m supposed to show you the ropes.” She pulled a ring of keys out of her backpack and stepped around him to the door. She appeared to be younger than any of his former students had been. It said a lot that someone who didn’t even have a high school diploma would be training him.

  “Have you worked here long?” he asked as she fumbled with the lock. She jammed her hip against the doorframe, and then rattled the doorknob before twisting the key. The heavy old door swung open on groaning hinges that shattered the quiet Saturday morning. A jogger running by turned as he passed. Martin ducked his head while Cassidy waved.

  “Since I was in tenth grade. I started working after school, and then Mrs. Green let me work full time over the summers. Now that I’m back at school, I’ll mostly be here in the afternoons and on Saturdays.” She walked in and flicked a switch by the door. Ancient strings of incandescent lights flared to life. Martin’s next question caught in his throat as the bookstore loomed in front of him.

  He’d been in once before, when he dropped off his resume, but he hadn’t bothered to stay. It might have even been Cassidy he’d handed his CV to for all he knew. It had taken him two tries to walk through the front door, and then he’d finally run in, thrust the paper at the person behind the cash, and fled. It had been embarrassing, but getting this far was an improvement from the trajectory his life had taken in recent months. His doctor had said he should be proud.

  Oddly enough, despite that frantic and hasty attempt at applying for a job, he still remembered the smell of the store as he walked in. It was something damp and forgotten, and the space held an incredible sense of age and weight.

  Heavy dark shelves of every height and width lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Books were stacked up and down, lengthways and sideways. Martin had read a lot in his life, and he had never seen so many books all in one place.

  “Welcome!” Cassidy held her arms out, as if she spoke for every title and every writer represented in the giant space. She glanced over her shoulder. “It’s kind of like the TARDIS, isn’t it?”

  “Bigger on the inside than the outside?”

  Cassidy’s smile grew. “You watch Doctor Who?”

  Martin shrugged, ignoring the little thrill in his chest at the normalcy of this conversation.

  “I missed the last few seasons,” he said. “It stopped being good after David Tennant left.”

  “I guess we’re not going to be friends after all.” Cassidy’s green eyes narrowed, but her smile didn’t fade.

>   Feeling a little braver, Martin stepped around a low table stacked with picture books and a sign that read ‘For When They Won’t F*ing Sleep.’ Beyond that, a bookshelf was labeled with ‘100 Ways to Cheat on Your Diet.’ Most of the titles below the sign were pastry cookbooks and European travelogues.

  “I made that one,” Cassidy said, as Martin examined the sign. It was done in chalk, the lettering alternating orange and green, with what looked like a steaming plate of spaghetti and a glass of wine nestled underneath it.

  “It’s very nice.”

  “Let me give you the tour. We won’t be open for another half hour.”

  The TARDIS reference turned out to be fairly apt. Every time they came to the end of a teetering row of bookshelves, Cassidy would turn and take him in a new direction. Somehow though, they never wound up at the front of the store again. Sometimes the shelves were broken up with ancient and overstuffed armchairs before the books continued. There didn’t seem to be any logic to the way they were organized. Instead of standard headings—fiction, non-fiction, travel, mystery—each section was labeled in the same cheeky blackboards as Martin had seen up front. ‘Pets.They’re Better Than Kids’ and ‘Old Dead Guys Say Famous Things.’

  “Wouldn’t it just be easier to organize them by genre?” he asked as they wound their way down another aisle.

  “Why? It’s more fun this way.” Cassidy seemed to know exactly where they were, despite the fact that Martin was hopelessly turned around. They passed a shelf labeled ‘Books To Read On Dark Nights.’

  “But how do people find what they’re looking for?”

  She glanced over her shoulder at him, and for all there had to be over ten years between them, Martin suddenly felt like a kid asking stupid questions of a weary parent.

  “Have you ever worked in a bookstore before? Mrs. Green said you had.”

  “In college.” It had been humiliating to have to put that little nugget of experience back on his resume.

  “When you go to buy a book, if you want a recommendation, do you ask for a contemporary mystery, written in the last two years, by an American writer?”

  “Yes?”

  Cassidy snorted. “Well, that’s not how most people work. Most people come in here, and they say they want something a little funny, a little sad. Something about families, but not something where someone dies. It’s easier if we organize them this way.”

  “But it doesn’t make any sense!”

  They passed a shelf called ‘We Didn’t Know Where Else To Put These.’

  “It will.” She turned another corner, and suddenly, they were back where they started. A cyclist went by, followed by a woman with a stroller. They didn’t so much as glance through the window. Martin felt like he’d been on a kind of quest that had lasted a thousand years, only to return home and find that no time had passed at all.

  “So the first thing to do is tidy up the kid’s section.” She pointed to the picture book table. “The Mommy and Me group will be here at nine-thirty.”

  “Mommy and me?”

  “Yes, and then the knitting circle will be here at noon.”

  “Knitting circle?” Martin checked around again. “Like people? Here? Knitting?”

  “Sure! Didn’t Mrs. Green tell you?”

  “Tell me about what?” Here it was. He’d expected a quiet day of recommending classics and wheezing on the layer of dust that coated everything. It had all seemed too easy, and now he would find out why.

  “Oh. Well. A used bookstore is only so popular. Most people just get their stuff online these days. So Mrs. Green figured out that if we get people to come for other things, they might stick around and buy a book or two. It’s Mommy and Me at nine-thirty, knitting circle at noon, and the feminist poetry circle at three on Saturdays.”

  That didn’t sound too bad.

  “Do I have to learn to knit?” He was pleased he could find humor over the increasing rattle of his heart.

  Cassidy laughed, curly hair bouncing on her shoulders. “It couldn’t hurt.”

  No, it was bad.

  * * *

  It turned out to be only moderately awful. The Mommy and Me group was the loudest. Eight moms and their little kids invaded just after the store opened. The chaos of a dozen small people flinging books about as they tried to find the perfect story must have been reflected on Martin’s face, because Cassidy sent him to the back with instructions on how to run the coffee maker.

  It took him a few attempts to find his way out of the stacks of books, and he tried to let himself into a locked closet, but eventually he found a little kitchen area.

  The coffee maker there might have been as old as the bookstore itself, and after he’d filled it with water and coffee grounds, nothing happened. He pressed the Start button a few times, but the coffee maker just sat there. He finally unplugged it, counted to twenty, and plugged it in again. It had always worked for the history department’s photocopier, and it appeared coffee makers operated on similar principles. A red light on the front flashed, and there was a faint smell like something burning, but then the machine finally gurgled to life.

  “I think your coffee maker is dying,” he said as he returned to the front of the store.

  Cassidy rolled her eyes. “Whatever you do, don’t mention the coffee maker to Mrs. Green.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a touchy subject. Just don’t.”

  The knitting circle was the nosiest group; they gossiped more than they knit. They were also notable because their membership included Mrs. Green, Martin’s new employer. Like she had at his interview, the first impression she made upon arrival was one of vibrant color. Bright clothes and brighter scarves fluttered from her body. A sparkling pink and blue butterfly clip accented her fine white hair.

  “Oh! Dr. Lindsey!” She clapped her hands, drawing his attention to the bright blue nail polish on her fingertips. “How are you doing this morning?”

  The three ladies who had already arrived with their bags of knitting perked up as she addressed him. The attention made him itchy.

  “Fine, thank you.” He glanced around for Cassidy. He’d been there three hours and already he knew she would be critical to him surviving this day.

  “Come and meet everyone.” Mrs. Green linked her arm through his and drew him forward. She introduced him as ‘Dr. Lindsey’ to each of the women who had gathered, and each shook his hand like they were meeting a foreign dignitary. Every handshake made Martin’s palm sweat a little more.

  “Are you a real doctor?” a woman asked.

  As opposed to an imaginary one?

  “I have a PhD in German history.”

  The knitting circle tittered and nodded. Nervous perspiration formed along Martin’s hairline, and he was grateful when Cassidy appeared through one of the stacks. She swooped in with a question for Mrs. Green about plans for an upcoming Halloween display, effectively diverting the spotlight off of him.

  “She likes the status of having you around,” Cassidy said, after the knitting circle had left.

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Green.”

  “I told her she didn’t need to call me Doctor at my interview.”

  “She’ll never call you Martin, trust me. It’s not glamorous enough.”

  He wasn’t glamorous. He was just Martin. Even when he’d finished his PhD, it had been uncomfortable when people had addressed him as ‘Doctor.’ The title had always felt borrowed, like sooner or later someone would remember that he shouldn’t be in the room and send him away.

  He’d been right about that, in the end.

  At four o’clock, after the poetry group left, the shop got quiet.

  “Did we actually sell any books today?” Martin asked.

  Cassidy nodded. “The mommies always buy a few. And I sold a couple more while you were eating your lunch. And these came in.” She thumped a palm on a banker’s box that sat on the counter. Martin lifted the lid. Inside was a selection of ancient cowboy novels.
The covers were worn around the edges and the pages were yellowed.

  “Will these sell?” He flipped the first one open. The copyright said 1962.

  “Probably not. But Mrs. Green has a policy that we don’t turn books down.”

  “But if you can’t sell them, what do you do?”

  “Well, some of them—” She was drowned out by the groan of hinges. A man in a blue polo shirt and wire-framed glasses came through the shop’s front door.

  “Hey Dad!” Cassidy hopped down from the stool she had been sitting on.

  “Ready to go?”

  “Let me get my bag.”

  She was leaving? Martin’s throat went tight. The shop was quiet, but she couldn’t be leaving, could she? It was his first day. Who left someone alone on their first day?

  Cassidy dropped her heavy ring of keys on the counter next to the cash.

  “You’ll be fine. The little key locks the register, and the big one locks the front door. Make sure you turn off the coffee maker and that’s pretty well all you have to do.”

  “Aren’t there—aren’t there—” He thought back to the years he had worked in the campus bookshop. “Don’t we need to cash out or something?”

  Cassidy waved her hand as she headed toward the door. It had seemed so ridiculous that he had been left in the charge of this girl, but now she was leaving him! He dug his fingernails into the old wood of the counter to keep from running after her.

  “Mrs. Green does all the accounting on Sundays. Just put all the receipts in the drawer and lock it up when you’re done!”

  The hinges shrieked once more as Cassidy’s father followed her out to the street, and Martin was left alone. The store, with its towering shelves, loomed over him. Despite his earlier anxiety at dealing with more than one person at a time, Cassidy and the various groups of locals had kept the place feeling busy all day. Now he was very aware of the empty silence.

  There were thousands of books and not a soul to talk to. The old building had a whole selection of creaks and pops that sounded intermittently. Each one made Martin flinch. He stared as people passed by on the street. Not one of them so much as paused to look through the window, and he was left with a strange sense of invisibility.