“Why are you yelling at me? Why are you mad at me?” Phoebe sniffles out the words, wiping her face.
“We overslept, and I can’t be late today. I have a meeting I’m leading, and it starts in”—Diana looks at her watch—“thirty-two minutes. I still need to deliver you next door and get to work. It’s not a lot of time. Ireallycan’t be late. So I’m stressed out, and that makes me yell.” Her face is hot with the shame of losing control.
Phoebe lets Diana slide on her underwear, socks, and leggings. When she’s dressed, Diana hugs her. “I love you, Phoebe. I’m really sorry I’m a grump today.”
“I love you, too, Mama.”
Diana kisses Phoebe’s cheek and stands up. “Can we go?”
“I didn’t brush my hair.” Phoebe tugs at the knots tying up her hair, a crown of chaos atop her head.
Diana again checks her watch. No time. “We’ll ask Lakshmi to brush it for you, okay?” She picks up Phoebe, something she rarely does now that her daughter is nine, and carries her downstairs, where they pull on their coats and zip up their boots. Handing Phoebe her sandwich, Diana picks up their bags and opens the front door: 8:01 a.m.
Sunlight reflects off the snow covering the front yard, and a trail of Duncan’s footsteps leads to the curb. Diana and Phoebe hurry across the small strip of land separating their house from Lakshmi and Mira’s. Phoebe is silent until Mira opens her door, squealing her name. Phoebe greets her friend with a squeal of her own and skips inside.
“Would you mind trying to get out the knots in Phoebe’s hair?” Diana drops Phoebe’s backpack inside the door as Lakshmi steps up to the threshold in bare feet with a roomy WBUR fleece on her slender frame. “I’m afraid it’s a mess. Sorry.”
“Of course.”
Diana waves a relieved thank-you and turns to go.
“Diana, have you had any coffee? Breakfast?”
Diana stops on the bottom step. “Not yet.”
“One second.” Lakshmi disappears inside, the door left ajar. Diana watches the second hand on her watch click forward: 8:04 a.m. If she drives fast enough, she’ll have time to print out the meeting agendas before the other attendees arrive.
“Here,” Lakshmi says when she returns. She hands Diana a travel mug and banana, a perceptive look in her warm brown eyes. “Coffee, with extra milk, the way you like it. Eat the banana, Diana. Don’t throw it in the bottom of your bag and forget about it.”
“Thank you, thank you.” Blowing Lakshmi a kiss, Diana rushes off to her minivan and into the busy morning traffic.
She arrives at Alcott Memorial Library with a few minutes to spare, sliding into her reserved space in the far end of the parking lot. Leaning her head against the steering wheel, Diana takes several steadying breaths. Her anxiety today reminds her of the early days after Tom’s death. Back then, everything—a clogged toilet, an oil change for the car, the tax bill—sent her into a panic, wrapping around her like a heavy blanket in a heat wave.
She sits up and flips open the visor to check herself in the mirror. In the morning light, her face is blotchy and drawn.I look like I overslept, and I forgot to put on deodorant. Dammit.Diana picks up her purse from the passenger seat.I’ll set three alarms for tomorrow. And I won’t think about the letter for the rest of the day,she vows, opening her door into the biting cold.
Chapter Four
If Diana were to make a list of what she loves about her job as the assistant director of Alcott Memorial Library, at the top would be the library itself: the way the building smells, like stories yet to be told, or the unturned pages of a brand-new book. She loves how walking through the doors fills her with a sense of familiarity and safety, and how the library, after all these years, still seems like magic.
Completed in 1901, Alcott Memorial Library is a Tudor masterpiece, an odd architectural choice for a town that had been a Revolutionary War battleground, but Alcott lore is that the library’s main benefactor was a serious Anglophile. He wanted the recognizable dark trim and timbered ceilings and withheld his funding until the town agreed. He tried for a moat as well; town leaders finally stood up to his bullying when he made that proposal.
To Diana, the library is the heart of Alcott. Senior citizens return their books in the mornings, gathering by the circulation desk, while in the late afternoon, teenagers camp out at the wooden tables on the lower level to finish their homework. Diana remembers visiting the library with her mother when she was a child, and that she works here now reminds her both how rapidly time speeds by and how the past has only just happened.
Diana takes the elevator to the fourth floor, eyes on her watch: 8:26 a.m. After dumping her bag and coat in her office, she snatches a pad and pen from her desk and sprints to the conference room. Of course,the one morning when she would have welcomed late arrivals, everyone is on time. In the rear of the room, the department’s administrative assistant sets up the projector and laptop, and another colleague passes out agendas. They stepped in for her, again. She says a voiceless prayer of thanks and walks through the doors.
Ninety minutes later, Diana sits at her desk, sipping the coffee Lakshmi gave her, now room temperature, and listening to her stomach growl. She should have taken Lakshmi’s advice and eaten that banana on the drive to work. She also should have remembered to bring in the banana from her car.
The meeting, thankfully, went well, though Diana makes a mental note to avoid scheduling early-morning appointments again. Her guilt about the way she interacted with both of her children this morning gnaws at her. Hopefully, all she needs is a good night’s sleep to parent better tomorrow.
Yet sleep alone can’t fix the real reason she snapped at Phoebe.
Despite her vow to not think about the letter, halfway through her meeting, it crept back into her thoughts. Ignoring it, Diana understands, will be impossible. Without the truth, she’ll worry about Tom’s secret and obsess about all he might have done.
The only option is to decipher this strange, unsettling news. She has to figure out what Tom was really trying to tell her. The letter is more than a vague warning about unknown people. Or, at least, it has to be ... right?
What’s the first step people take on those British crime shows when they’re charged with solving a mystery? They call in a smart detective with a charming accent. She doesn’t have one of those, so Google will have to suffice.
Diana wakes up her computer and navigates to her internet browser. She enters“Thomas Morgan” + crimeinto the search bar and hits Return.
