A book in the Bernie Rhodenbarr series

It was a slow day at Barnegat Books, but then most of them are. Antiquarian booksellers, after all, do not dream of retiring to the slow and simple life. They are already leading it.

This particular day had two high points, and as luck would have it they both came at once. A woman read me a poem and a man tried to sell me a book. The poem was “Smith, of the Third Oregon, Dies,” by Mary Carolyn Davies, and the woman who read it was a slender and fresh-faced creature with large long-lashed brown eyes and a way of cocking her head that she must have learned from a feathered friend. Her hands-small and well formed, unringed fingers, unpolished nails-held a copy of Ms. Davies’ first book, Drums in Our Street, which the Macmillan Company had seen fit to publish in 1918. And she read to me.

“Autumn in Oregon -I’ll never see

Those hills again, a blur of blue and rain

Across the old Willamette. I’ll not stir

A pheasant as I walk, and hear it whirr

Above my head, an indolent, trusting thing…”

I’m rather an indolent, trusting thing myself, but all the same I cast a cold eye on the Philosophy amp; Religion section, where my most recent visitor had stationed himself. He was a hulking sort, late twenties or early thirties, wearing low Frye boots and button-fly Levi’s and a brown wide-wale corduroy jacket over a darker brown flannel shirt. Horn-rimmed glasses. Leather elbow patches on the jacket. A beard that had been carefully trimmed. A headful of lank brown hair that had not.