Chapter 1 of 5The Chickadee Sings Loudest

"Okay, so, here's the part I left out of the offer letter," Sofia Navarro says, walking backward down the second-floor hall with a ring of keys swinging off her finger. "The board votes on your job at their next meeting. Owen Pritchard would like your position gone."

Marianne Abbott stops on the landing with one hand on the rail. Below her, in the reading room, somebody turns a page, and the sound carries up the stairwell, which in the Harmony Creek Public Library means it carries everywhere at once.

"You're telling me this before I've hung up my coat."

"I'm telling you because you're hanging up your coat." Sofia turns, and the keys go still against her palm. "I've cycled through acting assistants in this department since Eleanor died. Every one of them quit before the leaves were off the trees. I'd rather you knew what you were standing on."

"Leaves." Marianne puts her hand back on the rail. "It's the first cool Monday of the season and you've got me all the way to the end of autumn."

"I've got you to the board meeting. That's sooner." She says it kindly, and then she starts down the hall.

The office sits at the north end of the second floor, past the genealogy shelves and a marble bust of a founder whose nose has been rubbed pale by generations of schoolchildren. Sofia unlocks the door and steps aside.

"There you go. Head of Local History and Genealogy."

Marianne steps past her. The room is long and narrow, with windows down one side looking across Main Street at the courthouse lawn, a desk, an oak table, filing cabinets along the wall, and shelving from the floorboards to the ceiling.

"That's the Westwood Collection," Sofia says, nodding at the brown buckram boxes. "Every box labeled by hand. Eleanor did most of them herself."

"It's quiet."

"It's the quietest corner in the building. That's why she fought for it."

"Fought whom?"

Sofia walks to the window and lifts the sash. "Come here. Do you see the man in the tweed jacket, down there by the coffee shop, talking to those two women?"

Marianne crosses to the window. "The one with his hands behind his back."

"Watch the women, not him. Hands folded in front of them like parishioners." Sofia lets the sash down. "That's him. Owen Pritchard. President of the Historical Society, chair of the library board's finance committee, and the reason your predecessor worked with her door shut."

"She must have been a patient woman."

"She was a stubborn one. There's a difference, and I liked her for it." Sofia checks her watch. "Reference desk needs me. Daniel will bring up the cataloguing logins. And Marianne, don't let Pritchard inside your head. He has never lost a vote he cared about."

Then she's gone down the hall, and the quiet closes back over the room.

Marianne hangs her cardigan on the hook behind the door, sits, and tugs at the middle drawer of the desk. It sticks. She works it loose and finds the ordinary things: a stapler with no staples, a box of paper clips, a tin of cough drops gone to sugar. Under a rubber-banded stack of blank checkout cards lies a single manila folder with nothing written on the tab.

Inside is one sheet of library letterhead, folded in thirds, in handwriting that leans hard to the right.

*Sparrow journals — miscat?* *check deed history* *— JW?*

Underneath runs a column of call numbers, all of them in the 973s, the range that holds the library's local histories, and one has a small check beside it.

"Miscat," she says to the empty room. "Miscatalogued. Filed somewhere it doesn't belong." That much is plain, and JW is not.

She takes the letterhead with her and goes looking.

The 973s sit at the far end of the second-floor stacks, past the bound newspapers and a radiator that ticks like a cooling stove. The book with the check beside its number is smaller than its neighbors, bound in cracked brown leather, thick with dust along the top edge. There is no title on the spine, only a faded paper label, and the label is wrong. Whatever is inside this book, the catalog says it is something else.

She carries it back through the quiet, past the circulation desk, where a woman with reading glasses pushed up into her hair looks at the book and then at her.

"You found one of Eleanor's."

"I'm sorry?"

"The dusty ones." The woman taps a stack of returns straight. "She used to bring them down here and ask me if I ever remembered anybody named Sparrow in this town. I've lived here my whole life. I told her no."

"And?"

"And she'd say, 'That's the interesting part,' and go back upstairs." The woman shrugs. "You new up in Local History?"

"I started this morning."

"Then welcome to Harmony Creek. The ham biscuits at the bakery are cheaper than the ones at Food Lion, if that helps."

"It does," Marianne says, and means it.

Back in her office, she lays the book on the oak table and sits down with a pencil and the letterhead beside her.

"Knock knock. You must be Marianne."

A young man in a band T-shirt leans in the doorway with earbuds hanging around his neck. "I'm Daniel. Sofia sent me up with the cataloguing logins, but they're on a sticky note under your keyboard, so."

"I found them."

"Right. Nobody's changed them since Eleanor." He steps in and takes the room in slowly, not quite settling. "So you're the one who has to figure out the Westwood Collection."

"Do you know what she was working on?"

"Not really. She spent all her time on it, re-checking every call number against the shelf. Which is technically my job. She wouldn't let me help."

"Did she say why?"

He rocks back on his heels and looks at the book on the table instead of at her.

"She said she was making sure everything was where it said it was." He lifts one shoulder. "Anyway. If you need something pulled up from the basement, that's me."

Then it is the radiator again, and the tall windows, and the book.

She expects farm accounts. Local archives are full of them: a page per year, hogs and hay and the price of a hired hand, every entry as flat as a stone. She has spent most of her working life among them, in a basement room in Richmond with no windows, taking notes for a man whose name went on all the books.

She opens the cover.

The first entry is not an account. It is not a date, a name, or a sum. It is one line, in a small, steady hand, on paper gone soft and yellow at the edges.

*The chickadee sings loudest before the frost.*

Marianne sits back with it.

"No hogs," she says. "No hay. No price of anything."

She turns the page and finds another line in the same small hand, and another after that, and none of them is about hogs or hay or the price of anything.

"Fascinating," she says out loud, to the empty office with the best light in the county.

She pulls the letterhead closer and starts at the beginning.