The bookstore suddenly seemed darker. Morning light was coming in through the glass front door and the big display window, but it was as if a cloud had passed over the sun. The shop was gloomier than it should have been, and though he was embarrassed to admit it, there were goosebumps on his arms, and he wished the lights were on.

Turning, he noticed for the first time that the center bookshelf opposite the wall, smack dab in the center of the Theater/TV/Film section, was completely empty.

Someone had stolen an entire shelf full of books.

How had he not seen that immediately? Too distracted by the shadow, apparently. He touched nothing, in case there were fingerprints, but he moved forward and looked more closely at the empty bookshelf, trying to recall the titles that had been there. Who could it have been? he wondered. Gary? Did Gary still have a key? Kyle wasn’t sure, but he decided that later this morning he was going to go next door to the bank and demand that Gary turn over everything he had.

Maybe it had been Rollie Brown, stealing stock for his own bookstore. Or maybe Gary, working for the bank that had given Rollie his loan, had done it to help Kyle’s rival.

The Art of Alfred Hitchcock. The title suddenly came to him, and in his mind’s eye, he could see its gray spine on the shelf. A gray spine with the word “Hitchcock” spelled out in red. Next to that had been the oversized book The Lost Encyclopedia about the TV show Lost. He remembered that the cover photo had wrapped around the spine, the title spelled out in white letters against a blue sky.

He needed to write down everything he remembered. The sheriff’s department would want to know.

Kyle walked to the front counter and took out a pad of paper and a pen, writing down the titles of the two books, and another one he suddenly remembered: W.C. Fields, His Follies and Fortunes.

He looked out the window. What had always been a cute old-fashioned downtown now seemed to him to have an air of menace. It was definitely more crowded than it had been in a long time, but there was something unsavory about much of the foot traffic. The people using the sidewalk these days were not the elderly couples or young women pushing strollers whom he might have seen in the past. A man walked by, a man with a shaved head, wearing a muscle shirt that showed off his tattooed arms, who looked as though he might have just been released from prison.

A lot of them looked like him.

And it was all because of the bank.