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Miles steered them to a small room where lettering on the wall identified the area as the SILVER COVE LOCAL HISTORY AND HERITAGE CENTER. A massive, sepia-toned photograph of the town harbor hung below the sign. The space was filled with rows of low bookshelves, each labeled with its subject matter, including Native American History, African American History, and Ecology. It was impressive, and a far cry from the shabby library Cam remembered from her childhood, when she and Avery would pluck warped copies of Nancy Drew and Baby-Sitters Club novels from the dusty shelves.

“This is a nice setup,” Francine told Miles, who grinned like a proud dad at the compliment. “I had no idea this was here.”

“The renovation a few years back helped us enter the twenty-first century,” Miles said. “We also have a large digital collection.” He pointed to a separate shelf against a wall that was labeled with Marshall’s name. On top of it was a large, framed portrait of the man himself. As Miles had attested, his beard was truly remarkable. It was dark and voluminous but neatly trimmed and shaped into a point that rested on his white, high-collared shirt, and his mustache curled upward in a handlebar style. He was posed sitting at a desk with an expanse of impressive books behind him and a serious look on his face. His hand rested next to a pen and paper, a flourish no doubt meant to show the great writer at work. Cam and Francine bent in to give him a closer inspection.

“Kind of imposing, don’t you think?” Cam asked.

“He looks like no fun at all,” Francine declared, checking the date on the caption. “For 1928, his style is pretty dated. Most men were wearing a much more clean-shaven look then. And his fit is really starchy. It’s something you would expect a far older man to be wearing.”

“Unfortunately, you won’t find much written about Ada Merriweather,” Miles said as he squinted at the shelf and pulled several volumes. “She died quite young, in her early twenties, as I recall. The flu, I think?”

Cam and Francine locked eyes. Miles’s matter-of-fact delivery of this news shifted things for Cam. Suddenly, Ada seemed like a tragic figure. Cam realized that she had just assumed that her ghost was some old, long-dead lady who had lived a full life and died peacefully in her sleep—save for whatever bit of unfinished business she had among the living, of course. But a woman so young? Why, she had barely gotten to live at all.

Miles opened a book and flipped through it, consulting the index. “This is considered the definitive biography of Marshall Merriweather,” he said. “There’s a first brief mention of Ada here.”

The women stepped closer to read the passage.

In 1925, Merriweather married nineteen-year-old Ada Poulson, the daughter of one of his business associates, shipping magnate Edward Poulson. Ada Poulson was ten years Merriweather’s junior and was also a native of Silver Cove. Like the Merriweathers, the Poulsons attended the Silver Cove Presbyterian Church, and Ada was a member of the Ladies’ Auxiliary Club.

Merriweather considered the match to be advantageous. The marriage was, by all accounts, a happy one, though tragically short. In 1928, Ada Merriweather contracted the influenza that felled twenty-three of her fellow Silver Cove residents that year and succumbed to it on November 3. Her main influence on the great author was in her capacity as his personal secretary, taking his dictation for the manuscript that would become Stormy of Silver Cove.

In his later lectures about the book, Merriweather described pleasant evenings sitting by the fire with Ada. He would smoke his pipe and stare into the fire, summoning words, while Ada wrote in longhand. “I would speak the words as they came to me, with Ada copying down my every utterance. At times, she would stop and praise a particularly clever turn of phrase or lovely description. She was a most helpful secretary and an amiable little companion and, without her, writing Stormy would have been a much more tedious affair.”

A wedding photo accompanied the section. It was black and white, of course. Marshall looked just as he did in his portrait, standing stiffly in a dark suit and crisp white bow tie. Cam was struck by Ada’s beauty. The dark-haired woman beside Marshall was petite, and there was something elfin about her. In the image, her head was thrown back and her chin jutted out, a pose that might have looked haughty. But on her, it looked more determined. Her eyebrows were plucked to a skinny line, and her lips were painted dark, like Clara Bow. She wore a dress that hung straight from her shoulders to her knees with a scalloped hemline and floral beading at the neckline. A wide headband cinched around her forehead, and a pouf of tulle seemed to sprout behind it.

“And,” Miles said, turning to a later page, “there’s another mention of her here.”

Cam scanned it. Apparently, Marshall Merriweather had been so devastated by the death of his dear young wife that he never wrote another book. Readers, critics, and his publisher had clamored for more from the brilliant author, the biography said. But owing to his grief, he could never finish another book. Instead, he had toured the region, giving talks about literature.

“Fun fact!” Miles adjusted his glasses in excitement. “Marshall Merriweather named Stormy the horse after a cat that his wife had as a child.”

“Is that in this book?” Cam asked.

“Ah, no,” he answered. “But a photo of Ada that surfaced a few years ago as part of our local history project showed her and the tabby—and the back of it had the caption ‘Ada and Stormy,’ which is how I knew. I can find that for you in the section over there.”

Cam picked up the book and examined the spine, noting the author’s name. “Charles Shipman,” she read aloud. “Is that any relation to our mayor?”

“Yes, that’s Roxy’s father,” Miles answered. “Charles Shipman was Marshall’s favorite nephew. Though actually, I suppose he was his only nephew.”

As Cam turned pages, another book at Miles’s elbow dropped to the floor with a loud smack, and he quickly bent to pick it up.

“Sorry,” he said, looking startled and confused. “Goodness, I must have knocked that over. I’m usually so careful with them. I’d be happy to copy those parts for you,” he said, pointing to the passages about Ada. “And that biography is available for checkout, too. One more way of researching her is that we can check the archives of the Silver Cove Weekly for any mentions of Ada. Our staff and a few volunteers have just finished digitizing every issue that we used to store on microfiche, so you might find more information than in those books. It was a pretty big undertaking,” he added, looking pleased with the Herculean efforts. “If you’ll wait here, I’ll go find that photo for you and see what else I can pull up.”

Francine studied the wedding photo more closely. “Her dress is very in keeping with the times,” she said. “Fashionable, really. She looks like a flapper, which seems surprising to me, given that the wedding was in a small town, where things were a little more traditional. I think our Ada was ahead of her time—for Silver Cove, anyway.”

Cam joined her in scrutinizing the page. “She’s so beautiful,” she heard herself saying, though she hadn’t meant to say it out loud. “I wonder what it is that she wants.”

They studied the pages for a bit, and then Cam picked up a copy of Stormy and leafed through it.

“I read this ages ago, of course,” Cam said to Francine, recalling a beat-up copy at Birdie’s house that had been either her mother’s or her aunt’s. She and Avery had both read it one summer. It was about a brother and sister who defied their parents to rescue an injured farm horse that was supposed to be put down. The boy secreted the horse away in an abandoned barn and brought her back to health.

“You must have read it, too,” Cam said.

“Yeah,” Francine said. “I was never much of a horse girl, but I loved that the kids saw something in the poor animal even though all the adults said she was a lost cause. I remember it being a really sweet story.”

Cam examined it again. “I remember it having a good lesson, which is that even the smallest and sometimes the most powerless people can make a difference in the world if they believe in something,” she said. “Though I probably didn’t consciously get that back when I read it.”

Eventually, Miles returned with photocopied pages. He looked excited. “You’re in luck,” he said, depositing some pages, still warm from the library’s copy machine, in front of them. “There were a few mentions of Ada Poulson in the Silver Cove Weekly before her marriage to Marshall Merriweather.”