Amy slipped the card back into the book and held on to it as tightly as she held her children’s hands when they crossed the street.
At the front of the store, Amy paused to pay the old gentleman while Zoë waited outside under an umbrella.
“Did you find what you needed?” he asked politely.
“Yes, I did,” she said. “And I especially enjoyed the sunshine and the field of wildflowers.”
The man took a moment to reply, as though he were trying to decide what to say. Act as though he had no idea what she was talking about? Or acknowledge what she’d said?
When he looked up at Amy, his eyes were twinkling. “We do so like to please our customers.”
“You have pleased me very much,” she said as she took the receipt from him. She paused at the door. “If you should come across a book that has some designs for summerhouses in it, I’d like to buy it. I want something old-fashioned, Victorian maybe.”
“With or without plumbing?”
“With, certainly,” she said.
“I’ll see what I can find and send it over to Mrs. Hightower’s house.”
Amy gave him a radiant smile. “Thank you.”
The old man smiled back as she left the store.
“What was that all about?” Zoë asked. “I thought you were going to ask him out on a date.”
“No, I was just asking him about another book I want.”
“We’ll have to share the umbrella,” Zoë said as she started to walk, but Amy held out her hand.
“I think the rain’s stopped.”
“Great!” she said as she closed her umbrella. “It was raining so hard that I couldn’t find this place. I hadn’t seen it before and you gave me directions about the pizza place, but I still couldn’t find it. I found the pizza parlor, but no bookstore, not even an alleyway. And the idiot girl in the shop on the corner said she didn’t know of a bookstore except the one down the street. When I finally found the place, I wanted to drag her here to see it. What a day!”
“Sorry,” Amy said, but she felt no guilt. She knew magic when she saw it, and she knew she’d just experienced it. But Amy had an idea that Zoë wasn’t one to believe in magic. In fact, she didn’t think that Zoë believed in much of anything.
“Did you find out anything last night?” Amy asked.
“Yeah,” Zoë said, then lowered her voice. “I had to pay to subscribe to an online newspaper, but I found out that—” She looked around as though Faith might be behind them. “You can’t tell Faith about what I found out because I think it would upset her a lot.”
“What did you find out?” Amy asked.
“Six months ago two teenagers in Faith’s hometown found a skeleton at the bottom of a cliff. It’s been identified as Tyler Parks.”
“He died?” Amy asked as she stopped walking. “That poor, poor man. I wonder—”
“No,” Zoë said. “You’re not understanding. He didn’t die, he was murdered.”
“Murdered? But—”
“The article said that the skeleton was years old, at least fifteen.”
“Fifteen? But that means that he died not long after Faith saw him.”
“Not died,” Zoë said louder. “Murdered. There was a hole in his skull, like someone hit him on the head with something heavy, like a rock, maybe.”
Amy took a moment to think about all this. “Are you sure Faith doesn’t know about this?”
“Yes. I called Jeanne but she was no help. She had never heard of Tyler Parks.”