Due October 3rd

When Gus Bardo came to open the store on Saturday morning, an apple crate sat on the step of Bardo’s Books & Stationery with a black cat sitting on top. The cat watched him come up the sidewalk. When he reached out, the cat jumped down and walked toward the alley. It stopped at the corner of the building, looked back at him, then went on.

The crate was full of wet books that smelled like the lake. There was no note. Gus looked up and down West Main, but the street was empty. Fog came in off the water during the night, and he couldn’t see as far as the ferry docks.

He carried the crate inside and set it on the counter. Behind him, the bell over the door rang once, though he had already pulled the door shut. He told himself the wind had done it. He turned on the lights and started going through the books. Most of it was junk. Near the bottom, he found an old copy of Treasure Island bound in green cloth. Everything around it was soaked, but Treasure Island was dry.

He found a card tucked into a paper pocket inside the front cover. It was a library card, the old kind ruled in blue, with North Haven Public Library printed across the top. Only one line had been filled in, by hand, in brown ink.

E. Bardo. Due Oct 3, 1926.

Gus checked the date on his phone. It was October 3.

“Well, that’s odd,” he said.

The book had no library stamp and no call number. He slid the card back into its pocket, put the book on the shelf behind the register, and went into the back room to start the coffee.

When he came back, he noticed the round mirror over the history shelves had a crack straight across the middle. He hadn’t heard it break. Treasure Island wasn’t on the shelf anymore. It was lying on the counter, and the card was out of its pocket, resting face up on the cover.

E. Bardo. Due Oct 3, 1926.

He picked up the card. This time it was damp, but the brown ink hadn’t run. He stood there holding it and tried to remember moving the book. He knew he had put it on the shelf.

Nobody came in until ten, and then it was Mairenn. The bell didn’t ring for her. She stopped inside the door and pushed back the hood of her jacket. She was a small woman with dark hair that fell past her waist, and Gus knew her the way everybody on the island knew her. She read cards and spoke to the dead in the front room of her house, which sat alone on the East end of the island. She only ventured into town when she needed supplies, which was once a month. Gus didn’t believe in it, but he liked her.

“Your bell’s broken,” Mairenn said.

“It rang about an hour ago with nobody here.”

She looked at him for a moment and didn’t smile. “I came for a box of envelopes,” she said. Then she saw the card on the counter. She laid both hands flat on the wood and stood still without speaking. Gus waited.

“Something’s not right,” she said.

“The other books are soaked, and that one’s dry. And the card won’t stay in it. I put the book on the shelf back there, and when I turned around, it was on the counter again.”

“It’s due today.”

“It was due today a hundred years ago.”

She reached out and touched the edge of the card with one finger, then quickly pulled her hand back.

“It’s cold,” she said. “Lake cold. There’s a girl with it. She’s young. She has her hair pinned up under a hat, and she’s wearing a long coat that’s too big for her. It’s her brother’s coat.” Mairenn closed her eyes. “She’s waiting for somebody.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know yet.” She opened her eyes. “She keeps saying a name. It sounds like August.”

The skin on the back of Gus’s neck went tight.

“My name is Augustus,” he said. “Nobody calls me that. Only my mother used it when I was in trouble.”

“Were you named for someone?”

“My grandfather’s uncle. He went out on a boat when he was young and didn’t come back. That’s all anybody ever told me about him.”

Mairenn put her hands in her pockets.

“Put the card back in the book,” she said. “Put the book in a drawer and lock it, and don’t go looking for her.”

“It’s a library card.”

“It’s a library card that came out of the lake on the day it was due, and a dead girl is holding on to it. When I see something like this, I tell people to leave it alone. The ones who listen are fine.”

“What about the ones who don’t?”

She didn’t answer. She took a box of envelopes from the rack, paid for it, and pulled her hood up at the door.

“Don’t go to the library,” she said.

“I never said anything about the library.”

“You were thinking it.”

Gus put the card back in its pocket and locked the book in the drawer under the register. He tried to work, but he kept looking at the drawer. At eleven-thirty he opened it to make change, and the book was gone.

He found it on the front step in the fog, in the same spot where the crate had been. It was dry, and the card was sticking out of it. He picked it up and held it against his chest for a moment. Whoever E. Bardo was, she belonged to his family. He turned the sign on the door to CLOSED, locked up, and walked up West Main to the library with the book under his arm.

The library was warm and smelled like floor wax. Clara Gordon sat at the front desk with her reading glasses on a cord around her neck.

“You closed the store on a Saturday,” she said.

“I need to look something up.”

He set the book on the desk and laid the card beside it. Clara put on her glasses and studied it.

“This is ours,” she said. “It’s one of our old circulation cards. We used these until about 1950. But the book isn’t ours. Somebody took the card out of one of our books and put it in this one.”

“Can you tell which book?”

“Maybe.” She looked at him over her glasses. “Why does it matter to you?”

Gus looked down at the card. It was damp again, and a small ring of water had spread under it on the blotter. Clara saw it too. She looked at the water for a long moment and then up at Gus.

“The circulation ledgers are in the basement,” she said. “Come on.”

In the basement, Clara pulled a chain to turn on the bulb. She ran her finger along a row of tall green ledgers until she found the one marked 1926, then laid it open on a table and turned the pages.

“Here,” she said.

The entry was on a page dated October 2, 1926. It read Bardo, Eleanor, followed by a title and a call number. The title wasn’t Treasure Island. It was a book of poems. The return column beside it was blank.

“She never brought it back,” Clara said.

“Then it shouldn’t be here.”

“No, it shouldn’t.” She copied the call number onto a slip of paper. “Let’s go look anyway.”

Upstairs, she led him to the poetry shelves in the back corner of the main room. She ran her finger along the spines and stopped at a thin book with a faded blue cover. When she opened it, the card pocket inside the front cover was empty.

“It’s on the shelf,” she said, “but there’s no record of it ever coming back.” She held it out to him. “Your card goes in there.”

Gus took the book and slid the card into the empty pocket. As soon as it was in, the book fell open in his hands to a page near the back. A sheet of writing paper had been folded in thirds and pressed between the leaves.

He unfolded it. The paper was thin and yellow, and the brown ink slanted hard to the right.

October 3, 1926

Augustus,

I took the book you liked so you would have something to read when you get off the boat. I know you said you would come home on the third. Mother says the lake is too rough this late, and the boat won’t run, but you said the third, and you never once lied to me. I will wait for you at the end of the dock tonight. I have your coat. I’ll wear it so you can see me.

If you don’t come, I’ll keep waiting. You know I will.

Your sister, Nell

Gus read it twice. The second time the words blurred, and he had to stop and start over. He handed the letter to Clara. She read it and set it down on the shelf.

“Eleanor Bardo,” she said. “Nell.”

“I’ve never heard of her. Nobody in my family ever said her name.”

“Wait here.”

Clara went into the back office. The book had been warm when she handed it to him. Now it had gone cold in his hands. She returned with a binder of old newspaper pages and opened it on a study table to October 1926.

A short item said that Miss Eleanor Bardo, nineteen, of the Bardo farm, was believed drowned off the end of the ferry dock on the evening of October 3. She had gone down to meet the boat, but the boat hadn’t run that night because of the weather. A man’s coat was found on the dock in the morning. Her body was never recovered.

A second item, dated two weeks later, said the freighter Lucia Gray had gone down in a gale on Lake Superior on the night of October 2 with all hands. Augustus Bardo, twenty-two, of North Haven, was listed among the missing.

Gus read them both and sat down hard in the chair at the study table.

“He was already dead,” he said. “He died the night before she wrote that.”

“She didn’t know.”

“And she went out on the dock to wait for him.” He pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes. “She was nineteen.”

“She’s still waiting,” Clara said. She took off her glasses and let them hang on the cord.

“Mairenn told me not to come here,” Gus said. “I’m named for her brother.”

“Mairenn was right about my mother’s ring,” Clara said. “I don’t go to her, but I don’t argue with her either. Gus, leave the book here with the letter. I’ll put them both in the archive room and lock the door. You go home.”

He looked at the letter on the shelf. I will wait for you at the end of the dock tonight. He thought about a girl in her brother’s coat, standing in the cold and watching the water for a boat that never came. He couldn’t leave her out there.

He folded the letter back inside the book, tucked it under his arm, and was out the front door before Clara could get around the desk. She called his name from the steps, but he didn’t turn around.

The streetlights had come on by the time he walked down West Main toward the water. When he passed the coffee shop, the black cat stepped out of a doorway and fell in beside him. It kept pace with him for half a block. Then it sat down on the curb and watched him go.

Mairenn was waiting at the bottom of West Main, where the street ran out at the ferry docks. She had her hood up and her hands in her pockets, and she looked like she had been standing there for a while.

“Clara called me,” she said. She looked at the book under his arm. “So you found her. She’s been trying to get somebody’s attention for a long time, every October, but nobody ever had the book until now. That cat has been with you since this morning. It’s a sign, Gus, and it’s the only one I can explain to you. Go home.”

“She’s just a girl.”

“She’s been standing at the end of that dock for a hundred years waiting for Augustus. She doesn’t know he’s dead, and she doesn’t know she is either.” Mairenn stepped closer. “If you go out there and she calls you by his name, don’t answer her. Whatever you do, don’t answer.”

“What happens if I do?”

“I don’t know. That’s what scares me.”

Gus looked past her at the dock. The far end of it disappeared into the fog. The last ferry had gone out at five, and he could hear the water slapping at the pilings underneath.

“I’ll walk out to the end and come right back,” he said.

“Gus.”

He walked past her onto the dock.

The boards were wet, and his shoes made a hollow sound on them. After forty steps he couldn’t see the shore. The lamps on the pilings made yellow circles in the fog, and he walked from one circle into the next. His heart was pounding, and he could feel it in his throat.

Someone was standing by the last piling at the end of the dock.

She was small, in a long dark coat that came down past her knees, and the sleeves hung over her hands. Her hair was pinned up under a hat. She stood facing the water with her back to him.

Gus stopped at the edge of the last circle of light and held up the book.

“I brought it back,” he said.

She turned around. Her face was young and pale, and she was smiling. The coat was soaked through, and water ran off the hem and dripped onto the boards around her shoes.

“Augustus,” she said. “You came.”

Mairenn had told him not to answer. He answered her anyway.

“I’m not Augustus,” he said. “I’m Gus. Gus Bardo. Augustus was my grandfather’s uncle, Nell. I’m family.”

She kept smiling at him as if she hadn’t heard. “You’re late,” she said. “Mother said the boat wouldn’t run.”

“It didn’t run.” He kept his voice low and held the blue book up so she could see the cover. “You took this out of the library for him on the second. You wrote him a letter and put it inside. I read it today.”

The smile left her face. She looked at the book and then at him, and he could see her looking for her brother in him and not finding him.

“Nell, Augustus isn’t coming home. His ship went down on Lake Superior the night before you wrote that letter. It was called the Lucia Gray, and nobody on it came back.” His throat closed, and he had to wait before he could go on. “You came out here that night to wait for him, and you went into the water. That was a hundred years ago tonight. You’ve been standing out here waiting ever since.”

She looked down at the coat. She lifted one arm and watched the water run out of the sleeve. Her chin shook, and for a moment she looked like what she was, a nineteen-year-old girl who was cold and scared.

“He said the third,” she said.

“I know he did. He meant it. He was trying to get home to you.”

“Then where is he?”

“He’s waiting for you on the other side,” Gus said. “He’s been waiting longer than you have. You don’t have to stand out here anymore. You can go to him now and rest.”

She looked at him for a long time. Then she looked past him, down the length of the dock toward the shore, and she raised her free hand a little, as if somebody back there had waved first. Gus turned around. There was nothing behind him but fog and the line of yellow lamps.

When he turned back, she was holding her hand out to him, palm up. He laid the book in it, and her fingers closed on the cover. They never touched his, but he felt the cold of them anyway.

“Tell the library I’m sorry it’s late,” she said.

The lamp on the last piling flickered and went dark. When it came back on, she was gone. The boards where she had stood were wet in the shape of her shoes, and the hem of her coat, and the blue book lay on the planks at the edge of the dock. Gus picked it up. It was dry. The card was in its pocket, but the letter was gone.

He stood there for a while before he could make himself move. Then he wiped his face with his sleeve and walked back toward shore. Mairenn was waiting at the foot of the dock where he had left her. She looked at his face and didn’t ask him anything.

“I answered her,” he said.

“I know. I heard you.” Behind him, the fog had started to lift off the water. “She’s gone. I can’t hear her anymore.”

“Is that good?”

“That’s good,” Mairenn said.

On Monday morning Gus carried the blue book up West Main to the library and set it on the front desk. Clara opened the cover and took out the card. She wrote Returned on it, and beside that she wrote the date, October 3. Then she walked the book back to the poetry shelf herself.

When Gus unlocked the store afterward, the bell over the door rang once, the way it always had.