Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
“Anthony, hi!”
Anthony looked up from his computer and saw… well, he saw what appeared to be a talking gift basket, although a moment later a woman with a wild head of curls that were more silver than blonde peeked around the enormous offering.
“I’m Mary from Country Corner Market, your meeting for this morning.” Anthony hastened to his feet and took the basket from the woman’s arms. “Thanks. Anyway, as I was saying, thanks for squeezing me in. As you see, I couldn’t resist putting together a little something to welcome you to town.”
“Little?” he echoed dubiously before he could think better of it. Then, remembering his manners, he said, “Sorry. What I meant to say there was ‘thank you, that’s so kind,’ but it came out all wrong.”
The woman laughed and patted his arm in a grandmotherly kind of way.
“Don’t you worry about it,” she reassured him.
“You moved here from a city, right? I’m a Magnolia Shore native, but my husband was born in New York City, and he has told me that our welcome wagon is ‘a little alarming’ to city folk.
” She made air quotes around the words, although her grin said she wasn’t really annoyed by them.
“I’ll admit that it’s a little different than what I’m used to,” he chuckled. “But very kind nonetheless.”
“Well, don’t get too excited,” she warned him. “I heard that you have a little girl, and my granddaughters have kept me informed on what’s cool amongst kids these days, so most if it isn’t for you.”
“In that case, double thank you,” he said. “Not only for the gesture but for giving me a chance to be the cool dad.”
For the next hour or so, Anthony went over the documents that Mary had sent to him the week prior, and which he’d reviewed in detail in the previous few days.
Her accounts were, he was pleased to note, mostly in order, although he had caught a few places where managerial tweaks would save the market a good chunk of change over time.
“You have no idea how much of a help this is,” Mary said gratefully when they had finished going over her information. “My husband is the one with the head for numbers, but he’s looking to take a step back for a little while before retiring fully.”
“But not you?” he asked.
Mary’s grin was full of energy. “Not me! I would just drive the poor man insane if I spent all my time puttering about the house. No, I’ve got some time left in me, yet.
Besides,” she went on, “I feel like there’s a great crew of ladies running businesses here in Magnolia Shore.
We’ve even got that nice Eleanor Ridley opening up her bookstore.
And, from where I’m sitting, she’s plenty young, but I do know she’s got a grown son, so this isn’t her first act. ”
The mention of women business owners had gotten Anthony thinking about Diana, the woman from the restaurant with whom he’d had such a delightful conversation.
He’d been tempted to ask for her phone number at the end of the night, but he’d balked at the last moment.
He was a widower with a daughter who was new to town.
His life was too chaotic to offer much to a new relationship, right?
Even if she had been beautiful as well as easy to talk to.
He forced his focus back to Mary.
“Yes, bookshop,” he said, shaking his head to clear it. “I heard about this. It’s new, right?”
“Not even open yet,” Mary said, sounding as proud as a parent watching their child take their first steps. “But I can already tell it’s going to be great. I know you can buy anything online these days, but nothing beats browsing through an actual bookshop with actual paper books in my opinion.”
“You have a kindred spirit in my daughter,” he said, smiling, as he always did, when he thought of Eloise. “She’s a real bookworm.”
“Good for her,” Mary said approvingly. “She’ll be mighty excited to have a place in town to get things to read, I gather.
Ooh, I am just so pleased. Eleanor’s only been in town, what, six months and she’s already contributing so much to the community.
It’s the kind of thing that really warms your heart. ”
He nodded. The town all seemed to be abuzz with the promise of the new bookstore.
He couldn’t say he wasn’t impressed with the gumption it took to come to town and get a bookstore up and running in as short a time as Eleanor Ridley seemed to have done it.
He was getting his business going too, but all he really needed was a desk, a chair for clients to sit in, and his laptop.
Some filing cabinets helped too, but most things were digital these days.
Building a whole store from the ground up seemed a lot more complicated.
“I can only hope that my new start in town is just as triumphant,” he said to Mary with a smile. “For me and for Eloise.”
The market owner gave him a kindly smile. “Something tells me that it will be just so,” she said. “Mark my words.”
“—because of the age of the rails, and the new construction that had been built on the site in the intervening centuries,” Winnie said in her best public speaking voice, addressing the small crowd of tour-goers in front of her, “all physical evidence of the railroad was considered lost. But, as a homeowner’s recent project revealed, a little bit of history was still preserved, just waiting to be found. ”
Winnie didn’t give that many tours herself these days. She was only giving one today because one of the junior employees had called in sick with one of those terrible summer colds that made you feel twice as miserable because you were sneezing and sweaty.
She loved doing it, though. It reminded her of how she’d gotten started at the historical society in the first place, as a teenaged intern desperate to find her place in the world when everyone else seemed so busy with their friends, boyfriends, or girlfriends.
She knew now that lots of teenagers felt the way she’d felt back then, but at the time, she’d been so sure that she was the only person in the world to feel totally disconnected from her peers.
And she had found her place in the historical society… kind of. She was comfortable here, and her work was her passion.
But it wasn’t the same as having people. She still hadn’t found her people.
“And that is one of the most amazing things about working in historical preservation,” she went on, enjoying the eager, attentive expressions on the faces of the patrons.
“Sometimes there are things that you think are gone forever, that can never be recovered. And then, suddenly, we get to find that piece of the past again.” She paused, thrilling when she saw several quiet nods of agreement.
“Now, please take your time looking at the exhibit before we move into the next room, but please don’t lean on any of the glass cases containing the historical artifacts. ”
Winnie retreated to the corner of the room nearest where they’d head into the next part of the exhibit, as was her custom. This let her keep track of the whole tour group, both the stragglers and the people who couldn’t wait to creep ahead to see what was next.
It turned out that this was also the perfect vantage point to see two women who looked strangely familiar.
And apparently, she looked familiar to them too.
“Oh my gosh!” one of them said in the kind of fake whisper that meant she really wanted to be overheard. Winnie suppressed an eye roll at the woman, who was in her thirties just like Winnie, spelling out an acronym. “Is that… oh, what was her name? Winnie Buster?”
At the sound of her own (admittedly mangled) name, Winnie froze.
Oh no, she did know these women.
“Excuse me, miss?”
Winnie looked down at a diminutive elderly lady, who was clutching the historical society pamphlet between eager hands.
“Yes,” Winnie said, forcing a smile to her face, “how can I help you?”
“I just have some questions about the trains,” the woman said. “How long ago did you say they were built?”
Winnie had covered this in her tour, but there was always someone who hadn’t been listening or who had hearing challenges. Historical society clientele did tend to skew older, after all.
“The railroad was first chartered in 1826,” she began, the words falling easily from her lips without her mind having to focus too much on what she was saying.
Which was good, because she was barely paying attention to the woman.
Instead, her focus was on the two women who were whispering behind their hands like this was middle school.
Middle school was actually where Winnie had first encountered Brittany Hunnicutt and Whitney Boyd. Britt and Whit, they’d called themselves, proudly proclaiming their best friendship until the whole school had taken it as fact that they were the two reigning queen bees of the school.
They had been old-school it girls, the kind that felt that their own status was best maintained by bullying other students.
And Winnie had been one of their favorite targets.
“Do I even know who that is?” Whit asked, looking at her fingernails in a bored way.
“Yes,” Britt insisted. “She was that mousy little thing back in high school? Super tragic hair? And then she moved, but apparently she’d totally the same, if she’s still giving tours at some dusty old history place.”
In her head, Winnie had about a hundred comebacks for this. Nobody had made these two come to the historical society! Unless there was some super weird criminal kidnapping people and forcing them to learn about old railroads at gunpoint, these two were here entirely of their own volition.
“And how many people rode on the railroad?” the old woman asked, drawing Winnie back from her thoughts.
“Oh, none,” Winnie said, struggling to focus. “It was a cargo line. Only about six miles long.”
The woman frowned thoughtfully. “I don’t know why a person would take a train to go only six miles,” she mused.
“It wasn’t for people,” Winnie said. Wait, hadn’t she just said that. “It carried cargo.”
“Wait, I do remember that,” Whit said. “What a weird little coincidence!”
Winnie had to fight not to grind her teeth. The condescending way they were talking, pretending like they were in their own little world when anyone could hear them, was taking her straight back to high school.
Most kids hated moving as teenagers, at least according to every book Winnie had ever read.
When her parents had told her they were moving and that she would have to start over at a new school, Winnie had been so happy that she’d cried.
She hadn’t exactly made a bunch of new pals at her new school, but at least she hadn’t been forced to spend time listening to these two spread their mean rumors.
“Cargo,” the elderly lady said. “Oh yes, I suppose cargo would fit the bill. Some things are heavy, you know.”
Winnie did in fact know that some things were heavy. She made herself smile and nod robotically at the woman.
“Indeed. But it’s time for us to head into the last room on the tour.
” She said this second part loud enough that the rest of the room could hear her.
Obediently, everyone shuffled into the last room, a permanent exhibit about Magnolia Shore’s history.
Winnie kept her eyes fixed on middle distance as she gave the same speech she’d given a thousand times before about the town’s founding back in the colonial era, then thanked everyone for coming, pointed out the donation box, and fled.
She headed swiftly back to her small office, refusing to look behind her for even a second.
“Oh, hey, Winnie,” Colin, one of the summer employees, called out to her. He was a history student at a nearby college and was getting class credit for working here. “I’m ready to take the next tour.”
“Thanks, Colin,” she called over her shoulder. She likely should have been more effusive, especially since he had hurried to come in on his day off. But the only thing in her brain at that moment was escape, escape, escape.
She didn’t think she took a full breath until her feet hit the pavement outside.
Winnie sucked in a lungful of sea air, feeling faintly resentful.
How dare those two bullies from her past show up at her work?
That was her safe place and it had been for years.
In fact, she wanted them to leave the whole of Magnolia Shore, to go back to Lindonvale where they’d all grown up or wherever they lived these days.
As much as she would have liked it though, Winnie did accept that she wasn’t actually in charge of the whole town.
All she could do, in the end, was hope that they would leave town soon enough… and never come back.