Page 51 of Winter Nights at the Bay Bookshop
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LILY
I arrived at Bay Books at half seven on Saturday morning. After a bitterly cold start to the week, the wind had dropped and the temperature had risen. With sunshine forecast for today, I knew we’d be in for a busy one and wanted to get as much admin done as possible before opening.
I hadn’t confirmed a date for Lars to start working weekends and wondered if that had been a mistake. If it was as busy today as I suspected it might be, lunchtime in particular would be tight with just Alec, Flo and me in.
The first half an hour was as dead as a Monday morning, which wasn’t normal. We hadn’t had a single customer and, while that meant Alec and I had been able to unpack and check the delivery – a task which could drag on until mid-afternoon on a Saturday – it unnerved me.
‘Makes you wonder what they know that we don’t,’ Alec said, joining me by the window where I was frowning at how eerily quiet Castle Street was for a Saturday.
‘I’m stunned by how dead it is. Nice days like this usually bring them rushing out.’
By the time Flo arrived ready for her ten o’clock start, we’d had three customers but only one of them had bought anything. She expressed surprise at the shop being empty before she went downstairs to drop her bag and coat off and make a round of drinks but, when she returned, we’d been inundated with customers as though a coachload had arrived and dropped them off right outside the door.
‘How long was I down there?’ she whispered as she joined me at the till.
We didn’t have the space for two tills but we had a handheld device connecting to the system on which we could take card payments when there was a big queue like now. Flo took payments on that while Alec remained on the shop floor, responding to customer queries between tidying and restocking.
It took until half eleven for us to clear the queue, at which point a woman I didn’t recognise approached the till. She had a face like thunder and I braced myself for a complaint.
‘Are you the manager?’ she asked, a sharp edge to her tone.
My stomach lurched as I hated confrontations, but I’d never let a customer see my fear, so I smiled and said brightly, ‘Yes. I’m Lily. How can I help?’
‘You need to see this.’ She turned and marched towards the children’s section.
I left Flo to cover the till and followed the customer, dreading to know what I was going to find.
‘They’renotmine.’ She pointed to a young boy and girl sitting on the floor with a selection of picture books from the Bookmas tree strewn round them. As I got closer, my stomach plummeted to the floor. The children weren’t reading the books. They were scribbling all over them. My precious, beautiful books! I glanced round the section but all the adults appeared to be accompanied by other children.
‘I’ve already asked,’ the woman said. ‘No idea who they’re with. I asked the pair of them to stop but they refused in words children their age shouldn’t know.’
The girl reached for another book from the tree and I dived towards her.
‘Let’s just leave this on the tree, shall we?’ I said, my voice playful as I eased the book from her hand.
‘I want to colour,’ she cried, trying to snatch it back from me.
‘That’s lovely, but we colour in colouring books, not story books.’
The boy glared at me and, in an act of clear defiance, grabbed another book and angrily scribbled across one of the pages. If they’d been toddlers, I could have understood the destruction but they looked about the same age as Cassie’s daughter Hallie – six years old – so they really should have known better. Spotting the barcode labels attached to the ends of the pens, I realised they’d liberated them from our stationery section.
‘I own this shop and I need you to give me those pens,’ I said, my voice firmer as I crouched down beside them.
The girl pouted but she handed hers over. The boy responded by scribbling on yet another page.
‘Those books don’t belong to you, do they?’ My voice was even firmer now. ‘Fun’s over.’ I held my hand out. ‘Please give me the pen.’
‘No!’
He held the pen out of my reach but relinquished his hold on the book. Spotting my chance, I snatched the book from his lap and swiftly gathered the others off the floor. The customer who’d alerted me to the problem came to my aid, standing in front of the Bookmas tree, blocking the children from grabbing any more books.
The girl stayed on the floor, arms folded, looking down and I sensed that she knew she’d done something very wrong, but the boy leapt to his feet and turned to face me, a look of disgust on his face.
‘Give me my books back!’ he cried.
‘They’re not your books,’ I responded, keeping my voice low, conscious of the hushed atmosphere and the customers watching the interaction. ‘They belong to the shop.’
