Chapter 4 of 5Sometime Isn't a Date

Marianne Abbott is carrying a library journal in her tote bag, and it is not checked out to her name. The transfer form sitting on her desk wants two signatures, hers and Sofia's, and if it collects them every volume of the Westwood Collection leaves the Harmony Creek Public Library for Westwood Manor and gets itemized at the door, which would turn the book in her bag into a stolen book with her name written inside the cover.

Sofia has already been plain about it.

"Don't sign anything," she said before the library opened, and she meant the transfer form. "Not one page. If Owen comes back with that form, you tell him you're waiting on me."

"And if he doesn't come back?"

"He will."

Daniel Murphy is rolling a cart past the reference desk when Marianne comes down the stairs, and she catches him by the sleeve before he gets away.

"Two guys came in with a dolly," he says, before she asks. "They're taking the glass cases off the second floor."

"Are they touching the shelves?"

"Not yet. Mr. Pritchard's instruction was cases only."

"Daniel. If anyone asks where the 973s are, you haven't seen them."

His eyebrows go up. "Okay, so, that's the kind of sentence a person hears right before they get fired."

"I know."

He waits, one hand on the cart. "You want to give me context?"

"Eventually."

She leaves him with the cart and goes out into a morning still gray with the fog that comes down the Valley in the fall and burns off by midmorning. She walks with one hand on the strap of her tote bag, past the Dollar General on the corner, past the hardware store with its window full of rakes and bags of birdseed, and across the square where the bronze man on his granite block sits with his back to the shops. Somebody has raked a pile of leaves against the curb and left it there.

The Settler's Inn stands a short walk past the square, set back behind a low stone wall, with a chalkboard by the door and an iron rail along the front steps. Coffee is a dollar and a quarter. A country ham biscuit is four dollars.

Inside, the dining room is empty between meals: a row of tables with salt and pepper shakers, a framed photograph of the building beside the register, a sideboard with a silver tray on it. A guest book lies open on the desk by the stairs.

Grace Kim is at the sideboard with a rag, wiping the good spoons.

"Kitchen's closed," she says, "but the coffee's still hot."

"Coffee, please."

"Pick a table. I'll bring it."

Marianne takes the one by the window. Grace brings the cup herself, on a saucer, with a paper napkin folded beside it, and sets it down without asking whether she wants cream.

"You're Grace Kim?"

"That depends on what she's done."

"Only a conversation. I'm Marianne Abbott. I run Local History and Genealogy at the library."

"Ah." Grace picks up the rag and works at a spot on the sideboard. "So you're the one pulling the old ledgers."

"How would you know that?"

"The last woman who did sat in that chair you're in."

Marianne wraps both hands around the cup. "Eleanor Dawes."

"Eleanor Dawes."

The rag stops. Then it starts again.

"I'm told there are legends about this place," Marianne says.

"There are legends about every building in town. Most of them are about parking."

"And the other one?"

Grace leans back against the sideboard with her arms folded. "The one about the inn is that it's older than the square. Older than the church. People say the real first building in Harmony Creek is this one, and the town grew up around it backwards."

"Do you believe it?"

"I believe the foundation is older than the porch, and the porch is older than I am. Past that, I mind my business."

Marianne takes the photocopy from her bag, unfolds it, and slides it across the tablecloth, and Grace dries her hands on her apron and picks it up and stands there looking at it while the refrigerator hums in the kitchen behind her and she doesn't move.

"Where did you get this?"

"Out of a ledger. It had been sitting in the wrong place on the shelf."

"That's my dining room. That's my pantry. Somebody drew this building before it had a name."

Marianne watches her trace a rectangle that matches the dining room, a smaller square behind it, and a dotted line that runs off the edge of the paper.

"The label says E.S. Apothecary."

Grace raises one eyebrow, slow, and hands the page back.

"Does it."

"Should it mean something to me?"

"It means the map was drawn by somebody who stood in my kitchen."

She picks up the rag and goes back to the sideboard. "I've got a box."

"A box."

"In the attic. The woman who sold me this place left it up there. Deeds, letters, the kind of thing people don't want and can't make themselves throw out."

"You've never opened it?"

"I've been running an inn."

She says it and keeps working the rag along the rail.

"There might be something in it about the building."

Grace looks at the ceiling, as though the box might be up there listening. "You could go through it. Sometime."

"Sometime."

"Sometime isn't a date."

"No," Marianne says. "I've noticed."

Marianne sets the cup down and lines it up with the edge of her napkin. "If those papers said this building came first, would it matter?"

The family would have plenty to say. The Historical Society sells the timeline the family paid for, and it would not take that kindly. The church counts the family among its biggest givers, and word travels through a church. And every shop on the square makes its rent off Founder's Day.

Grace says it without any particular heat, and then she folds the rag over the rail of the sideboard.

"You left yourself off the list."

"I run an inn. I mind my own business."

Marianne stands and reaches for her wallet, and Grace waves her off.

"Coffee's on the house."

"If I came back with a reason," Marianne says, "would you open it?"

"I'd open it for a reason I couldn't argue with."

Out on the porch, the fog is off the street and the maple by the wall has gone orange at the top.

She is halfway down the steps when the door opens behind her.

"Mr. Washington," Grace says. "Corner table's open."

Marianne turns. An older gentleman is coming up the walk with a cane in one hand and a gray felt hat on his head, and he stops at the bottom of the steps.

She has carried Eleanor Dawes's note in her bag since her first morning at the library, and the last line of it is initials and a question mark she has never known what to do with. Grace has just given those initials a name.

He stops and looks at her, his eyes sharp, and nothing in him hurries.

"You're the new one at the library," he says. "Eleanor Dawes was supposed to call me."