Ophelia walked down the street, toward the Hannafords on the West End. She carried the clothes in a plastic shopping bag tucked into an Bean tote.  A quick glance around to confirm that no-one was watching, Ophelia dashed across the road and turned the tote over, the contents emptied into the bin over a solid bed of compost, vegetables and coffee mostly, with some matcha.  Another glance around, and Ophelia was on her merry way to Hannafords, despite the fact that she always patronised the Market Basket in the North End, near the Durgin Square shopping plaza. 

One particular disappointment the Thawnes endured was that of illegal usage of their bins and in-town parking.  As a result, Mr. Thawne had installed a security camera just under the eaves of the high wooden back stoop, one with a live feed on a small, black and white television tucked into the left-hand cabinet by the sink.  They never actually used it, simply had a camera for show.

Eli was in one of the best bookshops he knew of.

The best bookstores were the ones that were on the second floor, up a broad flight of stairs with rubberised treads, and the walls and handrails painted three different colours of glossy oil paint. There was, usually, at the the top, a shelf of 'selected' books, and a crate of last-ditch-price-please-buy books, usually two or three dollars. Just next to the shelf was the door, and you would step through into a warren of shelves and tables, but the books would have escaped to the floor and the chairs, spilled out into the room. A low, broad shelf would be covered with cassette tapes and cds of music, obscure jazz artists and operas, and baskets of postcards and local poets, priced for pennies. The check out counter would have someone behind it, usually seated, traditionally a woman, anywhere between the ages of nineteen and eighty, who knitted. They would have rare books on a little shelf in their eye-line, to be sure you can't pinch them, and the regional history books were wrapped in cellophane next to Victorian tomes with titles such as 'Le Morte d'Arthur', or 'The Crystal Tree'.

The next best bookshops were the kind in side-streets and back-alleys, that had taken over the first floor of an old townhouse, or an entire flat. They would be run by an older man, either a bachelor or divorced, who specialised in something esoteric such as little-known beat poets, or seventeenth century rare cloth bound volumes on theosophy or boxed sets of Zane Grey novels. The book-club paperbacks would be on a library cart on the sidewalk under the eaves, and a cat, usually a grey Persian, would be asleep on an embroidered cushion jammed into the seat of a leather club chair. Whether the cat was grey from age, or from dust, one was never sure.

The third best kind of bookshop was the clean, modern kind, that sold used books and would special order either used or new for you. They would host readings by local poets, and either repaired typewriters, or sold vinyl L.P.s, usually the latest indie-folk groups. They could be found anywhere, but the building would be a blank slate, a bank one day, hairdresser's the next.

If these three types, the former two would have handwritten signs, colourful and artistic, with doodles, puns, and warnings in iambic pentameter about the importance of clean hands, or how to steal one book would destroy the infrastructure of the free world for all eternity. The later would have neatly typed notices, on the owner's Remington Royal, witty, and blandly humorous like most modern book-club novels.

The worst sort of bookstore was the big box chain, that sold cheap record players and lattes alongside paperback reprints of airport novels and overpriced copies of the classics, glossy covers draped with a still from the latest film adaptation. One does not speak of these monstrosities, with the tawdry and sordid carnage that lays within.

Eli would State his views about bookshops loudly, most often in the fourth form, the big box chain, after an employee would attempt to sell him the latest graphic novel. Perhaps this was due to Eli's propensity to wear jeans that were more rip than denim, but it was mostly because Eli hadn't been able to find a book he wanted at any of the other shops, and, in a last ditch effort, he was forced to special order it through book warehouse with a coffee shop.  At this point, all Eli had wanted was a copy of a murder mystery novel written by the grand niece of Jane Austen, a woman with the surname of Austen-Leigh.

However, he was eventually persuaded to leave.  At the moment, he was in a small shop in a side street off of Ceres Street, carved out of the first floor left of a double house.  A long haired grey Persian cat lolled on the frayed stair carpet, and rare editions of poetry and Bildungsroman classics were on display behind the glass doors of a Sears Roebuck & Co. china cabinet.  The books had rather slipped off the shelves, and slumped over the shop floor in stacks that would have made Dr. Seuss jealous. 

A paperback copy of May Sarton's Journal Of A Solitude lay on a spindle-back chair, an old business card for a bookmark.

'What's this?' He studied the bookmark, a business card for Frederick Carmichael IV, Applied Economics.

'Oh, That book came from your friend, the girl, not the one who died, the other one.'

'Ophelia?'

'Yup. She brought a couple of boxes, didn't want much for them.'

'Can I see them?' Eli turned the card over. Nothing was written on it, and it was still stiff all the way round, not floppy at the exposed end like many bookmarks left for years. It marked out the entry for January 8th, which began - 'Yesterday was a strange, hurried, uncentered day; yet I did not have to go out, the sun shone.'

Eli read that line over and over. The bookseller heaved up the cellar stairs with a box of books, mostly paperbacks, but some hardcovers. A copy of Dashiel Hammet's The Thin Man, an incomplete Babysitters Club set, and the poems of Robinson Jeffers. Nothing of use or of interest.