Chapter One
The Pavilion Key
The lawyer gave Micah Bell three things across a desk that smelled of coffee and condolences: a deed, a lease with eleven weeks left on it, and a brass key on a leather fob worn black by fifty years of one woman's pocket.
"The pavilion's yours till Labor Day, is the practical size of it," said the lawyer, gently, because everyone in Birchport was being gentle with him this week. "The town holds the lease after that, and the town, I'll tell you plainly because Lena would have, means to let it lapse. The machine's insured value is more than the operating income. There are collectors who'd take the horses." He slid the key across. "She knew all that. She wanted you to have the summer with it anyway. Her words in the will, and I quote: the boy should hold the key a while before he decides what it opens."
Micah walked down through the town he had grown up in and left at eighteen, past the fudge shops and the outfitters, to the lakeshore, where the carousel pavilion stood at the end of its little pier park as it had stood for a hundred years: a twelve sided wooden crown of a building, white and green, glass all around, with the lake glittering behind it and the flag on its cupola snapping in the morning wind off the water.
