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 shehadbeen 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 sneezingandsweaty.
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. “Sometimesthere 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, shedidknow 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 wasbarelypaying attention to the woman.
