The Poe Baxter Books Series Box Set - volume 1

Chapter 1-2

Breakfast in our tummies, our bags in our rooms, and our hostess cooing over Butterball in the front parlor, we set off to our first meeting of the day. As we walked toward the center of town and the National Library of Scotland, Beattie finally deemed me ready to hear our work itinerary. Apparently, our vacation one was still top secret, to my continued annoyance.

“The foremost expert in Scottish folklore is meeting us today at 1:30. He has some insights about the book we’re looking to procure from our meeting on Monday.” She looked at me out of the corner of her eye. “Plus, he is single, as best I can tell, and quite your type.” I tried not to look a little pleased, but given that my best friend knew just how abominable my dating experience had been in the past three years, I knew she wouldn’t buy it if I tried to play it totally cool about an attractive, bookish man.

“Oh yeah?” I said with a strained attempt at casualness. “He’s not your type?”

“Nope, not a beard or tattoo in sight.” She grimaced. “Too uptight and brainy for me. So that means just perfect for you.”

I could have argued, but she wasn’t wrong. “So he knows about the Sea Monster Chronicles, then.” I had spent a fair bit of my time in the past two days looking up the various sea monster tales of Scotland and had been delighted to learn that they were thought to be a kind of dragon by some. Even old Nessie had some stories that linked her to fire breath. The laws of nature caused me to struggle with the idea of underwater animals breathing fire, but then again, I didn’t understand how fish glowed in the dark, either, so I couldn’t question much.

Beattie nodded. “He’s done a fair amount of study about the lore, and while he has moved far past the point of believing in such animals, he does know a great deal about the people who created the legends. He told Fitz that this was the most extensive collection of medieval tales he’d ever come across and even hinted that he hoped the National Library might buy it.”

I winced. “Oh no.” I was suddenly even more nervous. “I don’t want to be poaching national treasures from anyone, least of all a hot librarian.”

Beattie shook her head. “Fitz made it clear that we were procuring the book for a Scottish patron who wanted to donate the book to the Library in honor of his father, a well-regarded Scottish paleontologist.”

I sighed. “So the Library will get the book but not have to buy it.”

“Exactly,” Beattie said with a grin. “Your uncle is famous in this industry for a reason.”

She wasn’t wrong. Uncle Fitz got commissions to find books all over the world, mostly for wealthy book collectors who wanted to add to their private libraries. But he was very discriminating in his choice of clients, so I should have known he would never be involved in anything that would be regarded as foul play by anyone in the business.

Uncle Fitz had two rules:

1.Books belong, when possible, to the public in some form.

2.Books should stay in their home country as much as possible.

I knew he occasionally broke these rules when necessary, say when a book was in danger of being destroyed or lost and the only safe home he could find for it was in a country not of its origin. But by and large, he was devoutly faithful to his policies. It was one reason I was eager to work with him.

As we approached the Library, I squashed the little bit of disappointment I felt at seeing the building. I’d been hoping for Scottish architecture with spires and arches, but instead, the building looked remarkably like the classic Greek architecture on which buildings in our own nation’s capital had been fashioned. All clean lines and bare sandstone.

When we went inside, however, all my disappointment faded away as I looked at the illuminated manuscripts displayed in glass cases in the lobby. Each swirl and icon on the pages was hand-drawn, and I could have stayed to try to decipher the text all day.

But fortunately, or unfortunately, as the case may be, my fascination with the manuscripts before me was interrupted when a very handsome, delightfully nerdy man in tweed and horn-rimmed glasses asked if I was Poe Baxter.

I stammered for a minute as I looked at him, and Beattie had to answer for me. “Yes, this Poe. I’m Beattie. Thank you for seeing us, Mr. Anderson.”

“Adaire, please. Nice to meet you both,” Adaire said in an accent that was definitely Scottish but also not quite the brogue I expected from my extensive experience with Scottish dialect derived exclusively from watching Outlander.

I finally put out my hand to shake his and pulled my face into a smile that I hoped seemed friendly and not like a creepy American stalker person. “Yes, thank you for seeing us.”

“Are you a scholar of illuminated manuscripts as well as folklore, Ms. Baxter?” he asked as he pointed at the glass case I had been staring at.

I blushed. He had called me a scholar, a title I was never afforded as a community college professor, I was flattered but shook my head. “Far from it. I find the art to be fascinating, though, and the little I know about the practice of creating the illuminations is intriguing, too. Although I’ll admit, I learned most of that from Umberto Eco.”

“Ah, The Name of the Rose,” he said with a smile. “An excellent mystery.” He blushed a little when he met my gaze. “Would you like more time here?” He glanced from me to Beattie.

I shook my head as I looked at my best friend, who had a knowing grin on her face that made me kind of want to punch her in the arm. “We can always come back. We want to respect your time.” I smiled at him. “Plus, I’m so eager to see what you have to share.”

He nodded, and Beattie and I trailed behind him as he took us to the back of the lobby and led us through an arched, wooden door. I was a sucker for a secret passageway, and this entrance very much felt like it could be one.

Unfortunately, that illusion dissolved a bit when the doorway opened onto a very typical corridor with doors on each side. What wasn’t typical, however, was that the walls were covered in famous paintings, including a study for Da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks, one of my favorite paintings of all time. Without thinking, I stopped cold and stared at the woman’s face and felt tears prick the back of my eyes.

Beattie stepped beside me and smiled. “She looks so wise and a bit tired.”

I sighed. “Yes, it’s why I love the final painting. Da Vinci seemed to understand the weariness that comes from motherhood, even for the Virgin Mary.”

Adaire turned back to us. “We hang some of the pieces that the National Gallery can’t display.” He gestured around the walls. “Everything is climate-controlled here, so it’s a good place for them. Plus, at least some people get to enjoy them instead of them living in storage for years at a time.”

“It is a sort of aesthetic tragedy that so much great art sits in back rooms,” Beattie said as we began to walk again. “Maybe we could take over a few superstores and turn them into museums.”

That was a good idea, in my opinion, but I didn’t have much time to think about it because Adaire led us through another door on the right side of the hall. The allure of magic was around us again as we stepped into the wood-walled office. The walls were lined with bookshelves full of titles, and the large wooden desk was clear and polished, with just a laptop on it. The space seemed the opposite of my uncle’s store, but somehow, it felt just as vibrant, just as full of stories and their people.

As he took a seat behind his desk, he pointed to two wing-backed chairs in front of him, and Beattie and I sat down. The chairs were immensely comfortable, and I felt even more at home in this space as I noticed a small toy rabbit on the corner of a shelf behind Adaire’s head. A man who could display a stuffed animal amongst all this heady, bookish stuff was my kind of man. I blushed at my own thoughts.

“Well, let’s begin here,” Adaire said as he pulled a slim folder from the shelf behind him. “This is the provenance, as best we can tell, for the book you are hoping to acquire.” He spun the folder in my direction and slid it across the desk to me.

I leaned forward, opened the file, and stared at the image of the book at the top of the page. Definitely the same book. As I began to read, I found my pulse quickening. Apparently, the book had been handmade in Inverness in 1340 by a man named Angus Duncan. Duncan operated a small book bindery that supplied tomes to the clan chiefs of Scotland. Each book was one of a kind, the paper in front of me said, and each was immensely valuable because of its age and craftsmanship.

“The book contains all the seanchas about water monsters known at the time,” I read. “Seanchas?” I asked Adaire. “Related to séances?”

“In a way, maybe,” he said with a smile. “It’s the Gaelic word for lore. I’ve always wondered how the term relates to the word science myself.”

Beattie cleared her throat next to me, her not-so-secret way of signaling to me that we were about to go far off track. She knew that I could deep dive into etymology quite quickly if allowed. I glanced over at her and nodded, then flipped the page.

There, I saw a long list of names, beginning with Angus Duncan and moving through a whole slew of men up until 2019. The name listed there was Seamus Stovall, the man who currently owned the book. My uncle had told me a bit about Stovall, and while he sounded intriguing, he also sounded like a lot of wealthy white guys—very convinced that he had earned everything he had and, thus, required to be paid top dollar for it.

Still, my uncle and I shared the same biases about the world, so I thought it wise to get Adaire’s perspective on the current owner. “Tell me what you know about Stovall?”

Adaire rolled his eyes. “The word eccentric was probably coined for him. He has one of those mustaches that he waxes into curls at the end and then plays with as if they’re his embodied talisman of good fortune.”

“Wow. That’s a wonderful description,” Beattie said. “So he has a, uh, a strong sense of his self-worth?”

“That is kindly put,” Adaire said with a smile. “He is incredibly wealthy, and while he is also very generous with the small village he lives in, he’s a shrewd businessman. He knows the monetary worth of this book, and he will expect to be paid what he sees as his due.”

I squinted at Adaire. “Your choice of words seems very deliberate there. ‘What he sees as his due?’”

Adaire raised his eyebrows. “Caught that, did you? Well, as I see it, this book is a national treasure, one that no one person can really own. But Stovall and I disagree on this point.” He sighed. “It’s one reason I was not able to acquire the book directly for the Library.”

I nodded. “Well, I assure you our patron believes much as you do, and I look forward to returning the book to the public when we come back from the Highlands.” I tried to sound confident, but for my first buying experience, it was beginning to feel a bit beyond my depth. “Is there anything further you’d like to be sure we know about the book?”

Here, Adaire leaned forward and raised one eyebrow. “Now that you ask, there is a legend about the book itself.”

If my attention hadn’t already been captured for a number of reasons by this conversation, this sentence would have brought me in completely. As it was, I mirrored Adaire’s body language and leaned toward the desk. “A legend, you say?”

“A curse, really,” Adaire spoke more softly. “The stories have it that the person who has possession of the book begins to see monsters in every body of water.”

“Oh,” I said as I imagined how I would feel if I saw a sea monster in every lake. I decided I might be more fascinated than anything, so I wasn’t sure this story could actually be characterized as a curse. “Well, that would be disconcerting,” I said, trying to be tactful, “but seeing monsters is something some of us might enjoy.”

A glint of something between mirth and fear flashed through Adaire’s eyes. “Agreed, if we were talking about monsters in only the lochs and oceans, but rumor has it that every man who has owned this book sees monsters in every body of water he encounters.” He laid hard emphasis on the word every.

“Like in his bathtub?” Beattie said quietly.

“And watering trough and pitcher and sometimes every mirror as well.” Adaire’s voice had grown somber.

I let out a long breath. “That’s intense then and maybe maddening in the very literal sense of the word.” Seeing Nessie in the Loch was one thing. A monster in every reflective surface was another. “How does Stovall feel about this legend?”

“Now, I’m not implying anything at all about how you should go about your negotiations, you hear.” He looked at Beattie and me with a firm gaze. “I’m just sharing what I’ve heard as potential background information. I have no part in how you acquire this manuscript.”

I looked at Beattie, and we both looked back at Adaire and nodded. Message received, I thought.

He continued. “From what I’ve heard, Stovall has required his staff to cover all mirrors, has forbidden all standing water on his property, and makes his assistant do all internet work for him so that he doesn’t even inadvertently see images of water on the screen.” Adaire sat back and studied the two of us across from him. “From what I can gather, the previous owner’s family became so concerned with his talk of monsters that they had him committed to a hospital for mental health treatment.”

I stared at this man who had seemed, until this moment, quite reasonable and studied. “I want to be sure I’m understanding. You’re saying this”—I looked back at the list of names in front of me—“Davis MacDonald was diagnosed with a major condition that was directly caused by this book.”

Adaire shook his head and smiled. “Not exactly. I’m not saying that’s why he was diagnosed or even that he was diagnosed with anything. What I am saying is that he claimed to be seeing monsters everywhere, and that led his niece to send him for treatment.”

I whistled. “Alrighty then.”

“So”—Beattie turned to me—“what I’m thinking is that we need to talk to MacDonald’s niece to figure out exactly what they think happened with their dad. And then we can use that as leverage to help with our conversations with Mr. Stovall.”

I nodded. “I think that is an excellent idea, Beattie. I’m glad you came up with it.” I looked over at Adaire and winked. Then, we both blushed.

After exchanging numbers and making plans to follow up with Adaire after our trip to the Highlands, Beattie and I headed up to the castle for high tea. On the way there, I studied the beautiful old storefronts and tall houses along the road.

One particularly gorgeous building that was a pink stucco that would have been garish anywhere but in this stony, gray city caught my eye. As we strolled past, I studied the beautiful wooden door and then glanced up at the lintel. There, carved in stone, was a sea monster looking directly at me.