Chapter One
Twenty Three Years Overdue
The radiator in the Birchwell Public Library had two settings, off and tropical, and on the second Tuesday of October it had chosen tropical. Nora Bexley propped the front door open with the dictionary stand, apologised silently to the dictionary, and stood a moment on the granite step to let the cold morning do what the thermostat would not.
Maple Street was doing its October best. The sugar maples along the green had turned the colour of things you are not supposed to eat before noon, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and wet leaves and the cinnamon doughnuts that Hartley's General started frying at seven. Two pickup trucks idled outside the feed store. Somewhere behind the church, a dog was informing the town of something urgent.
Eleven years of Tuesdays, and the sight of the street still worked on her like the first page of a good book. Nora finished her coffee, went back inside, and began the opening ritual. Lights on in the reading room. Returns bin unlocked. The wooden step stool nudged back to the children's corner, where it spent every night migrating away from, as though it had somewhere better to be.
She was stamping the date cards for the week when the door opened and a man she had never seen before came in with a book she had never seen before, which in a town of two thousand people made it an unusual morning twice over.
