Chapter Four
When the library phone rang at the end of the school day, Merritt Pryor knew it would be her mother, Kathleen, checking in
to see how substituting had gone. The day before, Kathleen had texted her daughter regularly, because she was bored at home
and hated being away from school. So Merritt had sent back occasional updates about particular class visits, a few questions
about the online catalog, and some small bits of juicy schoolroom gossip. (Mr. Llewellyn tried to print out invitations for a Halloween party to which no faculty or staff were invited and had been
found out when the copier jammed; a fourth grader got stuck in a bathroom stall with his shoes two stalls over.) But today her mother’s texts went ignored. She had been busy. Very busy.
“You didn’t text me back,” Kathleen said, her voice full of feigned offense.
“I know, I’m sorry,” Merritt said, moving her belongings from the checkout desk into a public radio tote. “I’ll be home in
a few minutes.”
“I was hoping you’d pick up some things for dinner on the way.”
“Of course,” Merritt said, and then listened as her mother went over the qualities of the savoy cabbage she should look for
and the brand of lentils she preferred. She was about to hang up when the question jumped out of Merritt’s mouth.
“Mom, do you know Whit Longacre?”
Now and then since he left, Merritt had been trying to remember what she knew about the man.
She had been aware of his existence, in the way she knew that Dolly Parton once had a very nice husband somewhere in the background.
She knew that Helen Albright Longacre was married to a mystery writer, but that his books were more literary and experimental than your standard Agatha Christies.
When Kathleen mentioned to Merritt that the Longacre child had arrived at the Foothills School, Whit’s name, of course, had come up again, but Merritt had only been interested in the undisputed star of the bestseller lists.
What was Helen Albright Longacre like? Was she “normal”?
Did she ever drop any writing tips? Kathleen had only said, again and again, that the woman was generous but private about her work.
And then she was gone, and while the world grieved the loss of an author, the Foothills School grieved the loss of a community member. Helen.
Eventually, there’d been the press release from her publisher assuring the public that the final book in her beloved series
was soon to be ready for publication, thanks to the careful stewardship of her husband, in whose capable hands she’d left
the completion of the work. Merritt hadn’t cared who polished up the manuscript, as long as it eventually saw the light of
day and brought a story she had loved to a close.
Then today Whit had come into the library and ignited Merritt’s interest, though she spent most of the day absorbed in The Door in the Garden Wall for what was probably the fourth time.
She loved the Greenwood Castle books, unabashedly.
It had been this series that convinced her to get an MFA specializing in creative writing.
She had read them all in a heady sprint, here in this very town, sitting by her parents’ fireplace when she wasn’t in her father’s hospital room, and they had been a lifeline for her, a rope dangling into the cavern of post-college life.
Her father was dying, and her future was a cloudy, terrifying mystery, but what if, she had wondered, she could make something like this?
And then, years later, she had dropped out of the MFA program before eventually landing here, living with her mother in
a town where she knew no one, subbing and working part-time. But at least today she had gotten to read this book again.
And this read-through was different. This read-through had handwritten notes. From the author. Notes about which characters had different names at first and side stories she had mapped out and then abandoned. There
was a recipe for the signature cake that appeared at every feast. (Merritt took a picture on her phone.) A handful of magical
symbols described in the text were drawn in detail, and there was a pretty decent sketch of the main character’s famous amulet
on one of the endpapers. It was an encyclopedia of wonderment.
“Oh, that poor man,” Kathleen said now. “To lose your wife so young, and then with poor Annie, too.”
“Annie?”
“His daughter. Third-grader?”
“Oh, yes,” Merritt said, pretending to know which child she was talking about, and then something shifted between her ribs.
Oh. She had spent the day delighted by what she was having the chance to read, never once slowing to acknowledge how this
book had landed in her lap: a student at this school had lost her mother, and now her father had delivered a rare artifact,
all in memory of the late woman.
“Merritt, it was so sad when she died. Annie was just about to start second grade, and the two years before had been this big thing, of course, because of who her mom was, and we’d all heard so much about her, but then she turned out to be so lovely and funny and down to earth, and she was so giving with her time and money.
And then this diagnosis, and suddenly she was gone.
There were the news stories and things, of course, but poor little Annie and Mr. Longacre, I just think about how they were dealing with something really personal that was separate from all of that. ”
“That’s awful,” Merritt said, meaning it.
“Yes, truly. Why do you ask?”
“Well, he came by today,” Merritt explained, and then went on to tell her about the book.
“Oh my word!” Kathleen said, and Merritt could tell she was smiling. “That’s just wonderful.”
“It really is,” Merritt agreed, moving to turn out the various strands of twinkle lights. She told Kathleen about reading
it, and about the details she’d learned, and then somehow, as she locked the door to the library (leaving the book safely
inside), they landed back on Whit.
“How did he seem?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Merritt tried to remember as she moved down the hallway toward the front doors. He had looked a bit frumpy,
a bit sleepy perhaps, and certainly some people would have said his beard could use a trim, but she liked a beard, and anyway,
he looked like a parent, really, and maybe a writer.
“He looked like a writer.”
Kathleen laughed. “Yes, that sounds right. But you know what I mean. Did he seem sad? Mournful?”
Merritt waved at the last remaining office lady, noticing that the hair she’d thought was shower-wet that morning was actually
some sort of mousse situation. Interesting.
“He did not seem mournful,” she said, outside now. The landscape before her was still mostly green and misty, making only
the most implicit nods toward the approaching fall days. The air shared the pleasant coolness of a pillow’s underside, and
Merritt was thankful for her sweater. “Or maybe a little mournful. But mostly he seemed, I don’t know, a little odd, and a
little hesitant to say who he was, his relation to his wife. His beard looked a little scraggly, I guess.”
“His beard?” her mother said, surprised.
“Yes, his beard, but he didn’t look disheveled or anything like that. Just shy, or maybe sort of modest. He probably thought
I was a little odd though, too. I was on my hands and knees digging through the returns bin when he showed up—you really need
a sign about where to put oversized books, Mom, because—”
“There was a sign!” Kathleen interrupted. “I had to take it down because someone drew breasts on it, and my money is on Preston Benson, who is, I’m sorry to say, a little shit.”
Merritt smiled. “I’ll make you a new sign tomorrow.”
Merritt’s mother recovered quickly from her illness, primarily because the illness had actually been a minor eye surgery Kathleen
insisted on keeping quiet. Merritt, who’d once fielded questions about her scoliosis for a full two months of wearing a back
brace (in middle school, just imagine), understood: the Pryors were private people when it came to physical ailments and bodily
functions.
Now, though, it was back to business as usual, which in Merritt’s case was anything but.
She had moved to Whelk Harbor a month before with absolutely no prospects other than her mother’s insistence that Goodenough Books, the bookstore on Cork Street, would hire her because they would hire anyone who, like Merritt, was willing to be paid essentially nothing.
Kathleen had been right, thankfully, and today, on her way to work, Merritt was walking the brick-lined sidewalks of this absurdly appealing street, coffee tumbler in hand, earbuds in her ears, thinking that maybe this life detour wasn’t such a bad one.
Sure, it had meant the end of all her hopes and dreams, the absolute, unresuscitable demise of all her ambitions, but at least this street was cute.
And at least she finally had a reason to wear her deep indigo fall coat, which felt like something Little Red Riding Hood would have graduated into wearing as an adult.
The MFA program she’d dropped out of in Texas had been a good one, but there were no seasons there, only whiplash shifts from surface-of-the-sun hot to below-freezing temperatures.
The trees in Texas seemed to shed all their leaves at once, and on the rare occasion that it snowed, people acted as though Jesus himself was returning on his white horse to end the world as we knew it.
In Whelk Harbor, people knew how to drive on snowy roads.
Merritt walked through the windowed door of the bookstore, its charming bell tinkling overhead, and then made her way to the
back room, where a work apron and Huong waited for her. Ten years younger than Merritt and twenty times cooler, Huong had
just graduated from the college down the coast. She was staying with her parents and working at Goodenough Books while she