6 - Pages of Sin

hideous sea of dirt and rabbit feces.
    Now, that was one nasty episode. It left me with the sad awareness that bunnies are just not that cute.
    I shook off the visual and turned back to take a better look at the beautiful things Wanda had been hoarding—er, collecting, all these years.
    “I can’t believe Byron will leave all this stuff as it is,” I said.
    “Probably not.” Mom slid past me to check out one of the armoires. It looked old and French and very froufrou. She turned the old-fashioned key and pulled the wooden door open. Hanging inside was a full row of dresses. She pulled one out at random. “They still have their tags.”
    “Wow.” So Wanda collected clothing, too. “Do you think her sisters will want those?”
    “I have no idea.” Mom hung up the dress and closed the armoire door. “Byron’s got a cleaning service coming out next week to appraise and categorize everything he doesn’t want to keep. It will either be sold or thrown away or given to charity.”
    “He can’t throw this stuff away. Why not have a garage sale?”
    She made a face. “Not likely.”
    “Right,” I said, reminding myself that Byron’s wife had killed herself. Would he really want to draw attention to that fact? Having a yard sale would bring everyone in town over to rummage through the detritus of his wife’s sad life. “Probably not a good idea.”
    Mom pulled a small notepad and pen from her purse and began jotting something down.
    “What are you doing?” I asked.
    “I told Robson I would make a list of things we could use at the town hall. It’s all up to Byron, of course.” She pointed to the wall on the opposite side of the room. “There are your books.”
    “Yeah. Wow.” I had expected to see several large bookshelves full of books, but there were no shelves. Instead, many hundreds of books were stacked one on top of the other all the way up the wall, stretching well above my head. Some books were stacked directly on the floor; others were stacked on tea tables. Most of the stacks stood at least six feet high against the wall.
    “How tall was Wanda?” I asked, frowning at all those towers of books.
    “About your height,” Mom said.
    I shook my head. “She would have needed a library ladder to get to the top of those stacks.”
    Mom nodded, then wandered off to inspect the antique furniture, making notes as she went. Being my efficient, anal-retentive self, I started calculating, counting books to figure out how many there were. It took a minute, but I estimated about eighty books in the first stack. Then I counted the stacks themselves. There were twenty-six of them butted up against this wall alone, and although the stacks were uneven, that still meant that there were approximately . . . okay, here came the hard part, doing multiplication in my head. But the total I came up with was well over two thousand books.
    Two thousand books. It was overwhelming. I couldn’t take them all with me, of course, but I supposed I could start picking out the ones I wanted. But how? If I pulled one out, the entire stack might topple over. The movement could cause the next tower of books to fall, starting a chain reaction that could bring them all down in a chaotic heap, burying both me and my mother in a pile of pulp and leather.
    How had Wanda managed to keep all these high stacks in such neat rows? I guess it offered her something else to obsess over, but why didn’t she get some bookshelves? She had every other kind of furniture in this place. What if there was an earthquake? She would have been drowned in books.
    Since Wanda wasn’t around anymore, I took a moment to feel more sympathy for the books than for their owner. I couldn’t help it; I was a book person. And this stacking method was one of the worst ways to store good books.
    How many times in a book-repair class or at a book festival workshop had I decried this very thing? It was especially bad for leather-bound books whose covers, when pressed tightly together in stacks like these, would “sweat” against each other, causing water damage, sticking, tearing, and warping.
    I knelt down on the carpet and placed one of the packing boxes beside me. Then I stared up at all those books towering over me and wondered if this might be a bad way to accomplish the task. “I’m afraid if I remove one book, they’ll all fall down.”
    “We can always restack them,” Mom said easily, still taking notes on the other side of the room.
    That was