Peril in Paperback: A Bibliophile Mystery

sat at the library reading table, flipping through my portfolio of leather and cloth I’d brought with me for making or repairing book bindings. While searching the wine cellar earlier, I had come up with a brilliant idea for another birthday gift for Grace. I had brought her a set of bookends that I knew she would like. They were shaped like large brass pinecones, soapropos when you lived on the edge of a forest, I had thought. But the sad fact was, bookends would get lost in this giant house of books. So now I had an even better idea. I was going to construct a book box for her manuscript.
    I cleared one end of the reading table and laid out my tools.
    “What are you doing?”
    I looked up and saw Nathan standing a foot behind me. I explained my plan and he decided to watch what I was doing.
    “This’ll take a while,” I cautioned. “If you feel like dozing off, I won’t be insulted if you leave.”
    “Fair enough, but I doubt I will.” He pulled a chair closer. “It’s always good to learn a new skill. Something to impress the girls back home.”
    I laughed. He was good-looking enough that all he had to do was walk into a room and he would impress plenty of girls. But I didn’t say so, for fear he would think I was making a move on him.
    I found a beautiful pale Japanese rice cloth with fragile cherry blossom limbs dotted with red flowers and buds. I measured it out and was happy I had enough material for what I had in mind.
    “The steps for making this box are similar to making a book cover. Except that once you’ve covered the boards and spine as you would a book, you make two three-walled boxes and paste them onto each cover. One side is slightly smaller than the other, so they fit inside one another, forming the box. So when you close the book, the two boxes envelope the manuscript completely.”
    I simulated the box closing with my hands.
    “Makes sense,” he said. “I’m just missing the artistic ability to carry it off.”
    “Well, watch what I do and maybe you’ll get the hang of it.”
    I showed him how to measure the size and shape ofeach piece, and then I cut them all from the heavy pieces of board I always brought with me. After everything was cut, I laid the pieces out in place on the table.
    “The tricky part is in cutting the cloth to fit the walls. When you’re making a flat book it’s a lot more straightforward. But because we’re constructing walls for this box there are lots of angles and edges. The cloth has to bend around the curves and the measurements have to be precise.”
    I continued to work, stopping occasionally to explain a particularly intricate step, such as creating the matching dust strip that was fitted over the spine. We used the same glass-topped table to press each side of the box, but we didn’t have weights for the dust strip, so Nathan ran to the kitchen and brought back a heavy iron trivet to use. It worked just fine.
    After two hours, the box was finished. I slipped the manuscript inside and folded the two sides together. And felt complete satisfaction at hearing the whisper of cloth against cloth.
    “Fantastic,” Nathan said.
    “Thanks. I’m kind of thrilled that it worked out.” Then I looked around at the mess I’d made and sighed. “And I just realized I’m exhausted.”
    “You probably have time to take a nap before dinner.”
    “I might do that,” I admitted, and began the task of cleaning off the table and packing up my tools.
    Dinner that night was a low-key affair. Stephen Fowler had insisted on dining alone in his room—until Gabriel suggested he would be safer if he was with the rest of us.
    Even though it was probably true, I kind of wished Gabriel had let him go. Fowler’s presence put even more of a damper on the evening than usual. Whatever frivolity we might have been tempted to enjoy on the occasion of Grace’s birthday eve was effectively snuffed out by the obnoxious lawyer’s gripes and groans.
    They were accompanied by much eye rolling from the rest of us.
    Fowler’s snorts were bad enough, but we were also being treated to even more of Madge’s unsubtle sniffs of disapproval this evening. I finally turned to Nathan for some work-related yet civilized dinner conversation. “If you’re available, maybe you could show me that catalog program tomorrow.”
    He gritted his teeth in a grimace, but switched to a smile so fast, I thought I’d imagined it.
    “Sure thing,” he said, but that halfhearted attempt at a