Stealing Gifts

By Mere Rain

Jarrell isn't happy about being a thief, but sometimes it's the only way he can make ends meet. Broke and alone at Thanksgiving, he breaks into an apartment in a wealthy neighborhood. He's only looking for cash, but when he spots an unfamiliar book by his favorite author, he impulsively takes the book as well. Reading it, he finds a letter used as a bookmark and realizes the recipient hasn't finished the book. He decides to return it and accidentally wakes the owner.

Edmond is a shy editor with no family. He's more excited to have someone to talk to about his favorite author than he is upset about being robbed. He has many more out-of-print books and is willing to lend them in exchange for company. Over a series of late-night discussions Jarrell and Edmond realize they have more in common than their shared love of obscure fantasy novels, including old griefs that they're both ready to let go of now that they have someone to lean on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mischief Corner Books
• Release date: Nov 26, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393641773

Book preview

Chapter One

Jarrell Jardine was a thief.

Not a super-smooth pickpocket or a planner of elaborate heists or a daring cat burglar who outwitted the police to snag the famous diamond from under their noses.

Just a guy who swiped loose cash to buy food. He only did it when he couldn't find honest work in time to keep a roof over his head, and he only took money. Electronics and new jewelry if he were really desperate, but he didn't like dealing with fences, didn't want to hang out with other criminals because they always had some great opportunity, some deal, some scam they wanted to bring him in on.

He tried to steal from people who could afford it, and never took the stuff that really hurt to lose, not personal things or art or anything that looked like it could be an heirloom.

He didn't steal very often, now that Uncle Moe wasn't around to talk him into it. Still, that was how he thought of himself: Jarrell Jardine, Thief. And every time he slipped over a windowsill or jimmied a lock he could hear his long-dead mother saying, My boy, a thief, with the look of vast disappointment that she had worn when he was six and swiped a chocolate bar from the corner store. It was the single thing he had stolen while she was alive.

But here it was Thanksgiving and he hadn't been able to pick up an hour's worth of work in a week, and was down to the coins he kept to take screws out with, so he had eaten the store-brand turkey and mashed potato microwavable dinner that he had gotten for the holiday and gone for a stroll down this nice street with its fancy old apartment buildings that mostly hadn't updated their security in decades.

And here was a man that he had just seen crossing a lighted third-floor window opening his front door and getting into a taxi.

Of course, it wasn't a sure thing that the man lived alone, but the odds were good. It was a holiday: families stuck together. It was already evening, so probably some rich guy going to pay a visit to his parents or other relatives who also lived in Manhattan.

Jarrell could have caught the door before it swung shut behind the man as he hurried to the car, but there was almost certainly a doorman who would want to know his business. Instead he walked around the building, counting windows, and turned into the alley. Around the back, up the fire escape. That's what he was good at. Jarrell was built like a gymnast, slim and flexible with strong shoulders and upper arms. A building like this would have units that ran all the way back and had multiple shared staircases instead of hallways. Almost no chance of running into a neighbor, unless they spotted him climbing up.

The window wasn't even locked.

He swung himself over the sill and looked around what was probably meant as a sitting room. The things in it had been fancy once but were now just old. Thick carpet with traffic patterns worn in, plushy velvet chairs with nice wood but lumpy and threadbare upholstery. Not updated in his lifetime. An old person's place. He hadn't thought the man he saw looked much older than him. Mid-twenties. Had he been visiting someone rather than living here himself? Grandparents, maybe?

Jarrell held still, listening, but didn't hear a sound except the ticking of the gold clock on the marble mantel and the faint noise of the street coming through the open window behind him. He wouldn't search the place, he decided. Just this room. There was a phone like something from an old movie, attached to the wall. Below the telephone was a small chest of drawers on skinny, curved legs. On the top of it were a notepad, pencil, and twelve dollars and sixty-five cents.

He pocketed the cash and opened the drawers. In the lower-left one he found three twenties and a subway card. He took them. Good enough. Get out, stay safe. He turned and headed directly for the window. As he passed the wing chair, clearly positioned for reading by the light of the lamp on the side table, the book there caught his eye.

Chancery. He was picking it up before his mind had registered the intention.

A.B. Chancery. But not Polychrome Country. Something called Into Evening Land.

He tucked the book into his jacket and left in such a hurry that he forgot to pull the window shut behind him.

---

He had still been hungry after his TV dinner—it was all he had eaten that day—but he forgot about looking for someplace to buy food on the way home. He used the stolen subway pass, huddling into the plastic seat and thinking about Polychrome Country. His mother's favorite book since she was a little girl, she had told him. She had read it to him first when he was too small to understand it completely, then again a year later, and then he had reread it for himself and asked, Isn't there another book, mama? The story isn't finished.

I don't know, Jarry, she admitted. He had just a few months earlier asked her to stop calling him Chipmunk. It seems to me like there should be more, but I've never found but this one by Mister or Miz Chancery. I asked at a couple libraries, too.

And there before them stretched in purple and plum, in lilac and lavender, the Evening Land. What kind of ending was that? The brothers and sister hadn't finished their quest nor found the way home to their own country.

Surely at least in stories for children everyone should get home in the end.

Back in his room—hardly a home, nothing of his but a few changes of clothes, a couple paperbacks, and a cheap old Walkman to block out the not-infrequent shouting in other units—he stripped out of his begrimed robbing outfit of dark jeans and black sweatshirt and pulled on the worn tee and sweats that he used as pajamas. The scratchy rental bedding was nothing he needed against his skin. He curled into the lumpy mattress, pulled the wadded polyester comforter around himself, and opened the book.

Grace Tillinghurst in cursive on the flyleaf—a childish hand, but more polished than the wobbly script in which his mother had written her name inside the cover of Polychrome Country. Her name had also been Grace. Her maiden name had even begun with a T, he was sure, although he couldn't remember it now. Not Tillinghurst.

Blinking away stupid incipient tears he flipped to the title page, which had a little black and white sketch of a horizon with a setting sun, and then to the first page.

DOWN, down into that shadowed geography, that land for which there are no maps.

Heart seizing, he read on.

---

A hundred and ninety-three pages and two hours later he came to an abrupt stop. Between two soft-worn pages was a sheet of stationary, folded in thirds. The paper was thin but not aged like the rest of the book. He opened it. It was dated ten days ago.

Dear Edmond,

I can hardly believe what an endeavor it has been tracking down these volumes. I no longer wonder that you were unable to obtain them in the States. If I had

I did make contact with a number of helpful book vendors, whose cards I am including should you have future obscure collection requirements.

If you ever make a visit to the British Isles in person do inform me.

Best wishes for the holidays.

Mother

That was an odd letter, wasn't it? The only time he had received a letter from his mother Jarrell had been at summer camp and desperately homesick. His mother's letter had said that she loved him very much and missed him, too, and that she hoped he was having fun and making friends and learning some things. She had told him that when he came home she would make his favorite dinner and take him to a movie and the library. Of course, he had been nine, so there was no comparison. Perhaps this was how women wrote to grown children. Coldly.

That wasn't Jarrell's concern, though. His trouble was that the letter had been used as a bookmark, a third of the way from the end. Which mostly likely meant that Edmond hadn't gotten to finish the book that he'd clearly gone to a lot of trouble to find.

Just a book. He knew that's what anyone he asked would say. Plenty more books in the world. Not that most of his