He sat in his chair, which had yet to acquire the old Elm smell, and rolled the awl between his palms. It was Daphne’s parting gift. The point was so fine that if he stared directly upon it, letting it tease his eyelashes, he could scarcely recall it from thin air.

He looked to the mantle. It held side by side the blue ribbon book and the green rabbit book, microliths of a happy age.

He had fixed the printed ones, unstitching their pages of worming poetry, and left them wild and blank, if eviscerated. He separated the book covers from the loose pile of verses and punched the awl through them again and again, ravaging the stack to shreds.

Greenwich propped his feet on the aluminum table, the soles of his loafers scoured to fibers. Any day, an argyle-clad toe would waggle its way through and see the greenish cast of the fluorescent tube lights, which were woefully speckled with slow-roasting horseflies.

The brother seemed right enough. Presently he needed a tissue and a Xanax, but in terms of character he didn’t strike Greenwich as the flat-eyed, murdering kind. Rolling the word like wine over his tongue—murder—Greenwich regarded the brother.

He had the slick-faced sensitivity of the Tin Man and the same wobbling voice in which some women might imagine compassion and fall slowly, then inescapably, in love. In another room, Greenwich would have pegged him for an accountant, perhaps a retailer ferreting up and down the stockroom stairs, harassed by customer complaints and self-loathing and showing it all in the slope of his shoulders and the distension over his wrinkled patent leather belt. The man’s brow held similar crinkles of worry or bookishness, maybe that compassion.

And he had gutted his sister with an awl. 

Greenwich mulled over the incongruity of the crime and the man, whose talent it seemed was catching the coffee stirrer at every attempt to sip. Holding the cup in two hands, Wendel would lower his open mouth and stretch it this way and that to avoid the stirrer. He’d catch it anyway, bob back up to reevaluate, and do it all again.

Greenwich watched this routine in wry humor. The coffee was Mulligan’s batch, bemoaned and usually tossed for the scalding grit it was. The patrol officers dubbed it, as tastelessly as it was tasteless, Charred Bean Water Torture. But Wendel went about it with the relentless cheer of a Christmas elf. Such industry would credit the laundry at Irma County, but Greenwich wouldn’t have put him in line with the usual steamfaced perps, guys who might just tumble-dry the man free of his crinkles.

Greenwich scratched his nose. “I’d like to learn more about you, Mr. Graham. Why you did what you did. There could be some closure in it for both of us.”

“You’ve got my statement,” Wendel said. He jutted his chin at the folder splayed across Greenwich’s chest like a flimsy, brown bodice. “And you’ve got my book.”

“Let’s talk about that,” Greenwich said, taking a plastic baggie from inside his coat and shaking the contents onto the table.

It had the pocket dimensions and chocolate leather shell of a prayer book. Somewhere between hard- and softcover, it flattered the touch with sinking impressions that vanished when the hand shifted, as if keeping these impressions among its cache of secrets. The homemade pages were veined and speckled, nicer than regular ruled paper, but less convenient; their craggy surface put hairline fractures in the owner’s otherwise flawless penmanship. Greenwich had not lain eyes on a more elegant confession, rendered with the graceful curvature of swan’s necks. Staring at the rows of script, he saw not a madman’s mind, but the rolling back of Miller’s Pond on a Sunday morning. The centerfold revealed blue ribbon stitching.

Wendel forgot the coffee when he saw the book. His cuffs squeaked the table as he reached for it.

Greenwich slid him the book. It was not the only one in Evidence, but this one had been photocopied. One perp in the nineties had tried to reclaim a forged suicide note by stuffing it, baggie and all, down the hatch. But the bookmaker’s brother posed little danger of such a maneuver. He handled the book with as a mother would her child, thumbing the pages as if soothing their corrugation.

Greenwich appraised the laxity of his face and found it a medley of doting and hoarding, love and jealousy. Greenwich had seen the same in archivists, tots, Italian nuns. Those who kept treasure.

The book was not the stack of its pages or the promise of their hiss. It was a totem.

Of what, Greenwich would make a point to discover.

Daphne stayed in the crook of Elm Street, where soap shop and greasy spoon competed to own the noses of passersby and to stunt those of tenants in the flats above. That’s where it came from, the homey and strange mixture of lavender and fried cod that set in the jersey of her skirts.

Daphne lived with her brother, whose work made him largely scarce. She knew little about his occupation, only that it paid for the flat and her lavender-and-cod jersey. She kept house in turn, ironing dust ruffles and rotating desserts from mother’s cookbook.

Sometimes she chattered to herself, when Wendel was out, to suppress the bohemian pride that swelled and smarted at her contribution. Her housewifery. But it was those sensibilities that compelled her to her craft without making her any good at it, any profitable good, so there. Dust ruffles and tarts. Wendel adored her for it, which somewhat padded the indignity. And between cleaning and cooking she got to do what she loved: bookmaking.

Wendel talked her into it.

They had grown up visiting old houses. Their father was a historian of local renown and sundry concentration. One year he studied architecture, the next winemaking, and so on. He was a lover of knowledge and people and hit his stride on circuit. He didn’t publish. He cared for the faces and questions of the locals. He accepted grants—pittances—for his research and served as a consultant on the news. Once on a case, since gone cold. His expertise put him in touch with novelists and film scouts who wanted the lay of the salt marshes, the spruce farms, the rustic rock walls and secret cellars. His unruly retinue, Wendel and Daphne followed him house to house. They would disregard the Staff Only signs and scamper under velvet ropes, to the delight or disdain of the bored attendants who had been forewarned of the boy with high socks and the girl with the blue ribbon.

While every house had its secret joys, they always wound up at the study. A wall of dusty volumes never failed to bring Daphne to a screeching halt and her brother, behind her, would have to endure it.

Daphne could stand there until her knees creaked, squinting sideways at the scudding gold text of medieval spines. She spied almanacs, ledgers and records. A collector’s copy of Dickens, a first edition Dostoyevsky. Daphne adored the sweet must of yellow pages and philosophy.

“I wish I had them,” she said one day, cutting short her and her brother’s game of tag.

Wendel, who had just caught up, rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you make your own.”

She would, she decided. Eventually.

Bookmaking required tools beyond the family toolbox. Foremost, the paper: heavy sheets that either carelessly or artistically incorporated colored fibers and linty pits. Then, needle and thread. Knife and cutting board. Ruler and foam brush. Glue and cardboard. These could be scrounged from a basement or attic (there was little useful between) but those that truly made a book were not to be chanced upon: the bone folder, book board (for graduates of cardboard), book cloth and awl.

Daphne sold lemonade to pay for her tools. She squeezed it herself and did well off the cyclists who frequented the dirt lane by the house. But someone complained, as someone must, and Daphne could no longer pitch her table. She hadn’t enough money to pay for the paper, and she wasn’t old enough to get a job in town.

So Wendel got one.

He bagged groceries, and on the second Friday spoiled his sister with rolls and rolls of pulpy paper. He doted until it embarrassed Daphne. She asked him to promise not to spend any more on her account.

But he swore she was worth the trouble. Bagging was thankless work, but for Daphne he’d do it singing. For Daphne he would sift the sewers. Nothing must discourage Daphne’s happiness. He was its guarantor.

Such motivation set him above the other baggers, pimpled ninth graders who couldn’t be bothered to figure eggs and oranges right way up. No egg ever cracked by Wendel’s hand.

Good as her word, Daphne honed her craft. She experimented with sizes and materials, making pages of plant leaves and covers of sailcloth. She marbled and watermarked, pressed shells and bugs into covers, cut shallows for stashing between pages. She made books that were perfect and whole and alive in themselves, to be read, if need be, in their materiality. For Daphne’s books were themselves the story.

She hated the written word—a garnish, a blot. She did not subject her books to its vandalism. The architecture, the page, deserved better. It deserved to be loved for the hiss of its passing, its skin and its scent, not for the words that crowded and scratched it in runes of unhappiness, somebody else’s, that rattled and screamed from the other side of the ink. The book was itself, its own naked flesh, pure and possible before the trespassing pen. Like the books in the studies, all those backs turned and waiting, the meaning was the thing itself and its unyielding mystery.

She sold a couple at a time, more often at Christmas to parents of friends who knew her and sympathized. They did not make a habit of indulging her. A book without text, or the option for text, was clutter.

Daphne had yet to dent a stranger’s pocket, but by the time she had exhausted her acquaintances she was old enough to work at the grocery with Wendel. They exchanged glances and giggles over customers’ bags as if the contents were curios like those of the houses they used to visit. They hadn’t toured in a while, but they found they could divine as much of a man from his vegetable selection, or lack thereof, as from his furniture.

Wendel went to university, Daphne in tow, and they took up the flat on Elm. They resided longer there than in their childhood home. It showed in the wear of the siblings’ objects, which grew threadbare but were sentimentally maintained. They could have afforded a new dishrag, a nicer carpet, an uneven lampshade, but they really only cared about the books.

Daphne gained skill and confidence and over the years produced pretty little keepsakes that sold at Market Square and landed her a teaching appointment Thursday mornings at the craft store.

Wendel did his part. If she was creator, he was caretaker. He dusted the cloth jackets and oiled the leather ones, manning the window blinds during the sun’s trajectory so as to preserve the books’ coloration. He favored the orange accordion. It stood no taller than a coaster square on end and had a green rabbit embroidered on the cover. Daphne had stamped the inside just for him.

In fact, she had started making all sorts of concessions to print.

She printed and bound compilations for local wordsmiths and sold them as souvenirs at the Sunday morning readings. The exposure, she told herself, would catch somebody’s eye and earn her the money or popularity to support her true passion, the true books. Then she would be known for her art, not her containment of what barely passed for it.

The poems she handled were not all bad eggs. Most were hogwash, but a scant few she admired not solely for their sparseness on the page. Some words were worth their booking, she admitted. Some poets deserved her handiwork.

One did not. One was, beyond a dithering doubt, the Homer of hogwash.

He signed his verses “Mister Y” but his name—Uriel Feldspar—somehow outdid the alias. His words crammed and welted the page. They vied for meaning but fell flat and sore as a two-by-four. Even his short verses made Daphne squirm (“homeward i hasten / to mother’s earth / where i birth / Myself”), which he took to be impact and connection.

He commissioned her talents for all his collections, each more hastily compiled than the last. His poems mortified her almost as much as his courtship, which she found clumsy and tedious. But the man captured her sympathy. He proved to be earnest and charming, the inverse of his cloying persona, and altogether more than his words.

She would marry him for it.

Daphne was so absorbed in her fortunes, professional and romantic, that she forgot all about Wendel, who supported her through it all. But he noticed the shift in the household on Elm. Something absent and rankled, something compromised. It showed in Daphne’s work.

Not her bookmaking. She used tighter stitches, gold leaf paper, leather burnt in patterns. She was growing talent, unfolding into a fine bookmaker. But the housekeeping suffered for her distraction and poor Wendel went down a belt hole in the absence of her tarts. She, too, tended toward absence, leaving Wendel to eat by the cone of light over the kitchen counter. Afterward he nosed through her workshop, handling the newer creations she had yet to tell him about.

After a reading with Feldspar and the hours he kept her afterward, no doubt bouncing from pub to pub, she would drift off to bed, too spent for conversation. Wendel forgave her sparse company, but his caretaking sensibilities began to strain.

He could no longer doctor the rotten truth: Daphne had grown careless. Wendel slouched and sulked under the realization. He kicked imaginary tumbleweed from rug to rug. In daytime stupor he dreamed of ink on the page, molesting the sacred silence, while the sun came unchecked through the blinds.

Daphne relieved him one day by sitting down and showing him her process. He knew the basic steps from a lifetime of watching her perform them, but she accepted his questions this time and put him to work as a way of apology for her distance. She had never inducted him into her craft, and he was exhilarated to be even an amateur bookmaker by her guiding hand, admitted to her hitherto private guild.

He measured and cut and measured again. With enough pages done, Daphne handed him the awl. She showed him how to punch the paper without splitting it. She had brought mulled wine from the market and didn’t mind wasting a sheet of green marble with practice punches. Wendel made a straight, clean row and got a little full of himself until Daphne seized the awl, splayed his hand and whipped up the fiercest game of pinfinger Wendel had ever seen. Her laughter smelled of orange and cinnamon. Wendel was calm in it, unflinching.

Apart from that night, Daphne’s presence on Elm grew scarce and, when she did come, intolerable. She hummed as she printed the Mister Y verses, sometimes singing the words and filling her brother’s head with her beau’s tawdry romanticisms.

And she wore shoes. Not house slippers, but heels of red satin. Uriel bought them for their salsa nights, but the shoes were not made for dancing. Daphne wore them to break them in. They pinched and blistered, making holes in the rugs and rolling her ankles. She clacked up and down the hall and grit her teeth for the pain. As the day wore on and her feet swelled, she retired to her workshop chair and spent the evening in its wooden arms instead of walking the neighborhood as she used to.

Wendel did not like to see her in pain and could not, no matter how hard he puzzled, figure why she allowed Uriel to encroach upon life at Elm. Wendel wished he could read through her hard, shiny forehead and understand her attraction to him.

The changes had started with the printing. A confusion or aftershock might understandably follow her…well, her prostitution of the craft.

Then she asked her brother the unthinkable.

On the first day of Advent she asked him to fill her a book. She and Uriel had gotten engaged and she wanted a present, a part of Wendel to carry with her.

The book was bound in chocolate leather with parchment pages and blue ribbon binding the centerfold. The workmanship was flawless, but he knew what it was. A notebook.

Wendel buckled with the immensity of the task. He could hardly handle pen and book at the same time. Any mark he made upon her work was a blemish. A blasphemy. He decided to write his favorite recollections of her and the houses of their childhood, but it read too contrived, dressed for the occasion and unlike the truth. He drafted on regular paper until he got it right; then he practiced his handwriting and lined the pages with pencil before copying the text. But the veined and pulped paper took none of the ink. When it did, his lines wobbled and skipped over the texture. The result was chicken scratch. He ripped the page out.

Next he tried with a fountain pen. It hemorrhaged through that page and the next. Two more gone. He tried with pencil. It smudged into a graphite cloud. He tried typed office paper, cut and taped onto the parchment, but the tape showed his fingerprints like evidence of assault.

He had ripped half the pages, loosed the stitching, and damaged the book before settling Christmas Eve for a beaten and caved shade of the original, which he slipped down the toe of her stocking and hoped would go forgotten.

Wendel’s torment wasn’t lost on Daphne. She saw him haunting the hall in the dead of night and thumbed the awl on the edge of the table, just shy of rolling off. What are you doing? she asked him. He told her he couldn’t sleep. She smiled. She could punch his eyelids and sew them shut, she said wryly. Ribbon or twine?

On Christmas Day, they knelt over the evergreen needles and emptied their stockings. Daphne opened the chocolate book with some confusion. Wendel blushed madly and explained his difficulty, hoping in the adolescent vestige of his brain that she would laugh away his failure and tell him it was all a test. He passed!

Instead, Daphne seemed all sorts of things. Not impenetrable this time, but astonished and touched and ill satisfied.

With a sinking heart, Wendel gave her the pages he had drafted. She would see them and know the impossibility of her assignment.

She raised an eyebrow at some passages. Laughed at others.

Wendel excused himself.

But Daphne clutched the pages to her chest, smiling in earnestness, or consolation, and thanked him.

The blue ribbon book from which they were torn lay facedown on the rug. When she got up, rolling and clacking, she forgot it there. Wendel didn’t like that. Nor did he appreciate the present in his stocking.

It was a small book in orange cloth with a green rabbit on the cover. It fell somewhere between hard- and softcover, yielding to the fingers and respringing in their removal, as if entertaining a confession only to spurn it, an untrustworthy receptacle. Daphne achieved such an affect by padding a sliver of cardboard in torn cotton. It was one of her earliest innovations. Wendel felt honored by a work so true to her heart, the original one, anyway.

In advance of the wedding Daphne prepared to move out of Elm. Shortly after the New Year she and Uriel would take up residence a few blocks down. Wendel watched the workshop and bedroom thin of her belongings until one morning the flat was empty, save for the sawdust smell of silent houses. The only indication of her living there was, strangely, the parlor chair, Wendel’s favorite, where he would lounge after dinner and listen to the rasp of folding paper. He found it reupholstered on the morning of Daphne’s departure.

During her final days at Elm, Daphne started a new project. She had restored Wendel’s Christmas book on impulse, hating to waste her effort and Wendel’s. She wanted it as a sign of their frustrated yet worthy collaboration. But her new project was something more ambitious. If she couldn’t have Wendel’s thoughts, she would have to settle for Wendel. Botanists did it. That is, they preserved their specimen dried and flat between pages. They did not content themselves with black and white photographs and lifeless description.

Neither would Daphne.

She made the paper from tissues and hairs, an eyelash plucked from his cheek and a sprinkle of fingernails from the trashcan. She blessed the mixture with a spritz of cologne and got out of it all several sheets of faded pink color, thanks to some wintertime bloody noses. She sewed them with thread that she had loosed from his suits and bound them in the chocolate leather of the parlor chair, where Wendel had unwittingly scented and stained it with gel and scalp oil.

She asked no text of him. The book sufficed. She held it and held him, no matter where she lived.

Daphne married Uriel Feldspar, a.k.a. Mister Y, and did not pine for Wendel as he did for her. She had the book, which she kept with the blue ribbon book in a locked box on the mantle. When she missed him she would limp into the living room, crack the lid and fondle the sibling pages.

Uriel wondered what his wife kept in the box. He searched for the key while she was out teaching and found it, after weeks of searching, in the back of her nightstand drawer.

Daphne came home that afternoon and found him frowning into the lockbox. Lifting Wendel’s book into the light, he fingered the pages, sniffed and grimaced.

He heard her clacking behind him and opened his mouth in question. What came out was a cry as Daphne threw him against the mantle, caving his chest on the ledge. She shrieked and kicked him until he bucked her into the wall, where she bumped her head and marked the wallpaper. She saw what was done and yelled blasphemy before sinking onto the floor. The box lay fallen beside her, two unhinged halves, while both books splayed in a puff of lavender and cod and the dust of a most beloved brother.

Greenwich zipped through the paperwork, glancing every so often to the holding cell. The bookmaker’s brother sat knees up and tearful on the end of the bench. The detective sympathized, to the extent that he could.

Showing the photos had been cruel. Necessities of justice tended to be. And if he hadn’t in fact murdered his sister, then the sight of her—Greenwich thought wryly—might have tipped him over the edge. The grief wouldn’t sit with the oddness, and a botched man would fall on botching others if only to find companionship in all the botching. Greenwich shook his head, staring hard at the holding cell. That man in there was a guilty one.