The Fly Leaf

Beatrice thanked the search committee and hurried out of the room, leaving behind two very fine cut-away book models and her presentation binder. She grabbed her coat from reception and bolted down the marble stairs and out onto the university quad. Pausing for a moment to remember where she had parked, Beatrice was interrupted by a horde of approaching students that compelled her down a path away from library and out to the street.

She slumped against a building. The interview had been an absolute disaster. Beatrice had stammered, misspoken, and failed to bring sufficient examples of her book conservation work. She had seen the committee members’ furrowed brows, their awkward shifting in their seats. Her heart was pounding with shame. She would walk it off, calm down, and leave as soon as she located her car.

As she walked down the town’s Main Street, it began to pour. Beatrice flattened herself against the wall and hurried over to the awning toward the end of the block. A man exited the shop and Beatrice caught a glimpse of the dim, murky interior; it seemed to be some kind of antique store. She let herself in. An old woman or man with flat, yellow-gray hair stooping behind an enormous desk acknowledged her by staring. Beatrice gave a half-wave and, after a polite glance around the front room, began wading through the goat trails of old objects.

She found herself in room filled to the ceiling with old books piled on the floor like stalagmites, and behind them, shelves stuffed with books in gold-tooled bindings and paperback alike. Heaped in a sorry arrangement beneath a sign that read “$10” was a group of especially careworn books. Beatrice picked one up (Birds of America by T.G. Tremblay) and opened the cover, which revealed itself to be detached from the textblock. She sighed. It would make a good souvenir, and could become a project for demonstrating her competence in book conservation. What a waste this trip had been, she thought, placing the book on the shopkeeper’s counter.

“This is ten dollars, right?” she asked.

“No, it’s ten dollars for the whole stack!” replied the old person.

“How much for just one?”

“I can’t sell you just one. You have to take all of them. You see, it says right here.” They held up a small black book with an inscription on the fly leaf.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize. I’m afraid I can’t take them all.”

The old person sprung to life. “Sure you can! I’ll put them in tote bags for you. Tell you what. I’ll make it eight dollars.”

The person disappeared down the goat trails and returned shortly with the books piled up in a rusted antique wagon. They began dredging out cloth tote bags from under the desk and placing books in them, four to six at a time.

“You parked nearby?”

Beatrice blinked, alarmed at the number of books she was acquiring.

“Yes,” she said, “Let me bring the car around."

The rain had slowed to a drizzle as she ducked out of the store and, with clarity, retraced her steps to the college library and beyond it, to the visitor lot. She drove back to Main Street and parked in front of the antique store.

The old person was perched under the awning with the wagon filled with books in tote bags.

“Thank you,” said Beatrice, placing them in the trunk of her rental car. She handed the old person a ten dollar bill and immediately set off for home.

—-

Beatrice deposited the four heavy tote bags on the floor in her apartment. She shed her interview clothing and ate cold leftovers while peering out her window at the city below. She was jobless for the moment, having been laid off from a non-profit book and paper conservation studio. Having only been hired by the organization four months prior, it was a situation of last-one-in, first-one-out. It couldn’t be helped.

She sat down on the floor by the tote bags and began pulling out the books. The old person had foisted twenty-five books on her in total, each of them less remarkable than the next. She picked one up and examined it more closely. It appeared to be late nineteenth-century case-bound ledger with a detached spine. She flipped through the cotton rag laid paper signatures covered in foxing and tidelines, and noted the haloing around passages of iron gall ink.

Reaching into the last tote bag, Beatrice pulled out the small black notebook that the shopkeeper had brandished at her. She ran her hand over the pebbled leather cover. Though it had some wear, it looked quite modern, possibly only ten or twenty years old. She opened up to the first page and read the inscription, written in bubbly cursive:

“Must take all 25 books or will be cursed.”

Beatrice rolled her eyes, annoyed to have been taken in by such an overt ruse to unload so many unwanted books. She continued flipping through, finding all of the pages to be blank save one toward the back of the book, which read: “EM DNIBNU,” in the same hand.

Beatrice puzzled over the word, spelling out possible acronyms and searching for its meaning online, but found nothing. She rewrote it vertically and horizontally in the margins on the adjacent page, until the meaning jumped out at her: the word spelled “UNBIND ME,” backwards.

Gripped by curiosity and having little to gain or lose by investigating, Beatrice brought the book to her desk, pulled out her tools, and set to work unbinding the notebook. She laid the book flat and ran a utility knife down the gutter between the endpapers and textblock at the front and back. Pulling out the textblock (after admiring the modern Coptic-style binding), she noticed a small sheet of paper tucked under the endpapers, along with a one-hundred-dollar bill. The paper, inscribed in an old-fashioned hand on aged paper, read:


“Above the tail and below the head

Pasted down and bound in case

Sleeps my treasure locked in thread

Safe from kin who would disgrace.

Consider this riddle my gift and curse;

For he who solves, a pretty purse.

G. Hertzberg, 1926”

Beatrice stood up with excitement, looking from the one-hundred-dollar bill to the riddle. She Googled “G. Hertzberg” but then quickly abandoned it for another book, which she began to carefully dissect like the notebook, but then stopped and poured herself a glass of wine. Could there really be money hidden in the books? she wondered. It immediately occurred to her that the money was probably counterfeit. She examined the bill and saw that it was dated 1925 and contained a small, strange portrait of Benjamin Franklin. It was probably fake. However, she thought, she could pick up one of those counterfeit markers and know for sure. Returning to her bench, Beatrice continued to open the book (evidence of silverfish grazing; cotton wove paper, deckle edges), letting out a gasp when she she pulled out eight one-hundred-dollar bills with her precision tweezers. It was all too much. She began on the next book, taking care to photodocument the condition prior to and during the extraction of eight more one-hundred-dollar bills.

Working through the night, Beatrice excavated each book, each time finding another eight hundred dollars carefully flattened and tucked behind the spine or beneath the endpages. On the twenty-fifth book, which was in much better condition than the others, and, in fact, looked recently restored, Beatrice extracted seven hundred-dollar bills and a final note. It was written on lined notebook paper in the same bubbly, modern handwriting as the the notebook, in what looked ink from a teal gel pen.

“Rumors of my great-great uncle’s hidden money have torn my family apart. I found the treasure, and want to finally break the curse. I hope this does not mean that I am passing the curse on to you. You are probably a bookbinder, if you found this, and you probably don’t make much money. My family has plenty, so I want you to have this. I think my uncle would have liked the thought of you recovering his fortune, whoever you are. Use it well. Don’t look for me.”


Beatrice stood up from her desk and washed her hands and put on the kettle for tea. She could rest. She would do good work.