Leo Ramirez came through the office door with the Oakhaven Gazette folded so the front page faced out. "You need to see this before anybody else gets here," he said.
The headline ran the full six columns: A DEAL SHE WON'T MAKE.
Beneath it sat Sheryl Potts's byline, a photograph of Maeve at the fence line with one hand raised against the sun, and the figure $850,000 printed three separate times. Maeve Higgins read it standing at her desk in the Oakhaven Heritage Gardens office, her coffee going cold beside her elbow.
Sheryl had done her usual careful work. Julian Thorne got most of the column inches. The development, in his words, was "the single most generous thing my family has ever offered this town." The money would re-roof the carriage house, fund a full-time educator, and steady an endowment that had slipped three years running. Twice, in print, he called Maeve his friend.
What the story said about Maeve was gentler, and worse. She had "raised eyebrows." She had "surprised longtime supporters" by producing, at the last possible moment, "a claim of historical significance that no historian in the region has been able to verify."
Not one line explained what the claim was. Nothing mentioned her call to the Department of Historic Resources, or the woman there named Renee who had told her, plainly, to pursue it.
Near the bottom, three lines from the board chairman.
"Ms. Higgins's research is her own," David Chen said. "The board takes it seriously. The board also has a duty to the Gardens that doesn't pause for anyone's feelings."
Sheryl noted, cheerfully, that Chen had declined to say whether he still had confidence in the director.
"Ruby bought it at the Food Lion before seven," Leo said. "Read it in the checkout line. So did everybody else in the checkout line."
"I know."
"That's all you've got? I know?"
Maeve folded the paper along its own crease. Then she folded it the other way, laid it flat, and squared the edges with two fingers. Her hands wanted a job, so she gave them one.
"Leo, if I answer this in print, I'm arguing with Julian Thorne in public for six weeks, and he has better lawyers and a longer memory. If I say nothing, I'm the woman who won't pick up her phone." She looked up. "Which is worse?"
Leo took his cap off, turned it over, and put it back on.
"Tell people the truth."
"The truth needs a document stapled to it." She tapped the page. "Right now the truth is a sentence that starts with 'there's a possibility.'"
"Fine. What do we do about the cutting beds?"
"Plant them," Maeve said. "The roses don't read the paper."
The office line started ringing at 8:05 and did not stop. She let the machine take it, and walked the long border with Tessa and a wheelbarrow of compost, and by ten o'clock the humidity was sitting on everything the way late May does in the Shenandoah Valley, with the truck traffic on I-81 grinding away three miles west.
She played the messages back at half past eleven, a ham biscuit from the bakery on the Square going cold in her hand.
"Miss Higgins, this is Ruthann Pike. I've had four calls this morning and I don't know what to tell anybody. Honey, are you all right out there?"
"This is Wallace Deering. My wife and I have given to these Gardens every year since 1994. I'd appreciate a call back before we decide about this one."
"Miss Higgins, I don't know what you think you're doing. That money would have paid for my grandson's field trips. Shame on you."
She deleted the last one. The other two she left sitting there, because she couldn't think of one true sentence that would fit inside a phone call.
Clara Bellweather arrived at noon on foot, a ten-minute walk from her apartment above the bakery and easier than hunting for parking. She came in without knocking, set her bag on the chair, and picked up the Gazette the way she might pick up a dead mouse.
"Sheryl Potts has never once let a fact spoil a good paragraph," Clara said.
"Did you get to the historian who can't verify anything?"
"I read the thing twice, the second time with a pencil." Clara tapped the column. "She never names the historian, because there isn't one. She telephoned me Friday and asked whether any local scholar had reviewed your claim. I told her the Historical Society has not been asked. Which is true."
"She turned my answer into a verdict."
"Actually, she turned my answer into a verdict. I'm sorry for it."
"Don't be. It's accurate. That's the part that stings."
Clara sat down and folded her hands. "Beatrice Thorne came to the Society on Saturday. Forty minutes. She wanted to know what you'd pulled from the map files."
"What did you tell her?"
"That you were researching a grant."
"Did she believe you?"
"She said it was a charming story." Clara looked at her over the reading glasses. "I have watched you carry something since the sixth of May, and I am too old to keep pretending I haven't noticed."
"When I can say it out loud, you'll be the first."
"I'll hold you to it."
At two o'clock, Dorothy Claggett came by, which she had never done in nine years on the board. She stood in the doorway with her purse against her chest and did not sit down.
"I'm not staying. I wanted to say this to your face instead of over the phone."
"Say it."
"I voted with you last Thursday because a week of looking seemed reasonable. I still think it was reasonable." Dorothy's jaw worked. "But I've had nine calls since yesterday and eleven today, and every one of them was somebody I sit beside at church. I am not going to stand up in that carriage house and explain the Manahoac to people who think I've lost my mind. Not unless you hand me something I can hold."
"How long do I have?"
"Until somebody calls a meeting."
"That isn't a number."
"No. It isn't." She left without closing the door.
By four-twenty the machine counter read nine. Maeve pressed play with her thumb and stood at the window, and three of the last four were the same sentence in different mouths.
"You're the only one in this town with a spine, so don't you fold."
"My husband says you're costing us money."
"I'm praying for you, whether you want it or not."
Then Sam Cole's voice, low and unhurried, with the shop noise behind it.
"Maeve, just saw the paper. Don't let them get to you." A pause, the sound of him deciding something. "But you need to know — people are starting to choose sides."
She played it a second time. Then she crossed the room, worked the dial on the safe, 18, 97, 24, and took out the botany manual. It went onto the desk beside the folded Gazette, blue ribbon showing at the cracked spine.
She picked up the receiver and dialed.
"Cole's Hardware."
"Sam. It's Maeve. I need to know who's already picked."
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