That Night on Thistle Lane

She had the door open to her Subaru, which she’d owned since she’d started commuting to the University of Massachusetts in nearby Amherst, when her sister burst out from the kitchen ell, a later addition to Olivia’s old house. Phoebe didn’t have a chance to get into the car before Maggie flew down the front walk and caught up with her.

“Phoebe, what on earth is wrong with you?”

She knew exactly what her sister was getting at. “I pay my own way, Maggie. You know that.”

“It’s not as if Dylan offered to pay off your mortgage for you. The tickets are his donation to a worthy cause. It looks good if the ball is well attended. It’s great publicity for the neonatal ICU and what it does, and it gets other people thinking about giving. Everyone wins.” Maggie sighed at her older sister. “We can’t be grinds all the time.”

“I’m not a grind,” Phoebe said. “I love what I do. I have fun—”

“And you live within your means and never take a false step,” Maggie finished for her, then winced. “Sorry. That came out wrong.”

“It’s okay. It’s just...” Phoebe stared at the tiny tart in her hand, suddenly wishing she had left it on the table. “It’s a slippery slope, wanting more than you can have, but I take lots of false steps. We all do. I’m not being morally superior.”

“Oh, Phoebe, I know. You’re the kindest person in Knights Bridge. Probably in all of New England.” Maggie’s rich turquoise eyes shone with emotion. “I just don’t want you to miss out on a good time.”

“Dressing you and Olivia for a masquerade will be a great time,” Phoebe said, smiling at her sister. “I have to go. Those boys of yours will be tearing up the library.”

Maggie groaned. “They’ll be full of energy after spending the day with Mom. She lets them do whatever they want. When I picked them up yesterday, they were helping her muck out the goat barn. Knee-deep in you-know-what. I wouldn’t care except they didn’t have a change of clothes. I’ll never get the smell out of my van.”

“It’ll wear off in time but you probably don’t want catering clients to get a whiff.”

“No kidding.”

Phoebe commiserated even as she was amused at the image of her mother and her young nephews. “I’ll see you in a little while. I hope I wasn’t rude to Olivia—”

“You weren’t, and she’d understand if you were. Don’t worry. She’s trying to figure out things herself. This is new territory for her. For Dylan, too. He never pictured himself living in a little town like Knights Bridge until he met Olivia. He obviously still loves San Diego, too.” Maggie stepped back from Phoebe’s car and waved a hand. “They’ll figure it out. I should have such problems.”

“What would you do with a fortune like Dylan has?”

Her eyes flashed with humor. “Get someone to paint my house. I hate ladders.”

Phoebe laughed as she climbed into her car, but she also felt a pang of uncertainty about what was next for Dylan and his millions, and what it would mean for quiet, picturesque Knights Bridge.

She left her car windows open and drove back toward town. She could smell the clean, cool water of a stream that ran along the edge of the narrow road. Carriage Hill was the last house on the dead-end road, two miles from the Knights Bridge village center. The road hadn’t always been a dead end. Once it had wound into the heart of the picturesque Swift River Valley. That was before four small valley towns were depopulated in the 1930s and deliberately flooded to create Quabbin Reservoir. The reservoir now provided pure drinking water for metropolitan Boston.

Boston must have seemed so far away back then.

It seemed far enough away now. Barely two hours, but so different from her life in Knights Bridge. She’d never lived anywhere else. Olivia and Maggie had both lived in Boston for a few years before returning to their hometown, Olivia in March, Maggie last fall. Phoebe’s biggest move had been from her mother’s house—or madhouse, as she and her sisters would say fondly—to her own place on Thistle Lane. It was a cottage, really. Perfect for just her. She could even walk to her job at the library.

Phoebe appreciated the peaceful back road as she pulled her thoughts together. Story hours were a favorite part of her job, but her visit with Maggie and Olivia had left her feeling edgy and frayed.

Questioning, wanting...dreaming.

I like my life, she reminded herself as she came into Knights Bridge center, known as one of the prettiest villages in New England with its shaded town common surrounded by classic houses, a town hall, library, church and country store.

Phoebe parked in front of the library, a solid, rambling brick building filled with endless nooks and crannies. Persistent stories said the library was haunted, to the point that the producers of a television series about ghosts had considered it for a show before choosing another supposedly haunted New England library. Phoebe often heard creaks, groans, moans, whistles and—once—what she would have sworn were whispers. But she’d never considered she might encounter an actual ghost.

Specifically, George Sanderson, founder of the library in 1872.

Upon his death in 1904, he left the library his extensive collection of books and archives, a Steinway baby grand piano and a dozen straw hats made at one of the small mills he’d owned in the valley. The last Sanderson had vacated Knights Bridge during the Depression, when the family mills were demolished ahead of the damming of the Swift River for Quabbin. Homes, businesses, barns, fences, trees—everything in the valley went. Even graves were moved to a new cemetery on the southern end of the reservoir.

Old George’s portrait still hung above the fireplace in the library’s main room. He was handsome and stern-looking, not exactly the sort Phoebe imagined would encourage story hours for small children. As she headed up the sunlit brick walk, she heard squeals of laughter through the open front window, where the children’s section was located.

Her five-year-old nephew, Aidan, Maggie’s younger son, pressed his face against the window screen. “Hey, Aunt Phoebe!”

“Aidan Sloan, do not poke that screen,” she said firmly, picking up her pace.

He giggled and disappeared from sight.

Phoebe ran up the steps and went inside, welcoming the cool, solid wood-paneled interior, hardly changed since the library was built to George Sanderson’s specifications. The main room included a small stage, the piano tucked on one end. Before Phoebe’s arrival as director, the library had seldom used the stage and the trustees had complained about the “wasted space.” With careful planning, she’d gained their support and found the money to launch a modest concert series, with musicians who didn’t expect more than a few dozen in the audience, and opened up the stage for art and garden shows. It was where the library would hold its vintage fashion show in less than two weeks.

We make use of all that we have.

That was Phoebe’s motto for the library as well as her own life. Why moan about what she didn’t have when so much was right within her grasp?

Her older nephew, Tyler, almost seven, was sitting cross-legged on the hardwood floor in front of the stage with a book about raptors in his lap. “Aunt Phoebe, did you know that raptors have three eyelids?”

“In fact, I did, Tyler.” She laughed. “You’d be surprised at what a librarian knows. Would you like to see a raptor’s eyelids sometime?”

He nodded eagerly.

“We’ll have to figure that out, then. Right now, though, let’s go in with the other kids.”

“I want to stay here.”

Tyler—as redheaded as his mother—preferred to read a book on his own than to be read to, especially with his squirming younger brother. Phoebe put out a hand, but he ignored it and stood up on his own. He shuffled past her into the children’s section, his head down, shoulders slumped, as if she’d asked him to walk the plank.

He and Aidan would be tired after spending most of the day with Elly O’Dunn, their energetic maternal grandmother. She’d taken the afternoon off from her job at the town offices to look after the boys while Maggie catered a lunch and then met with Olivia at Carriage Hill. Phoebe, her mother and her two youngest sisters were doing what they could to help Maggie as she managed two young boys and a catering business on her own, without Brandon Sloan, her adrenaline-junkie carpenter husband. Phoebe didn’t have all the details, but she knew Brandon’s construction work in Boston had been on-and-off at best the past year or so. It had to have put a strain on his marriage. He had a tendency to take off into the mountains or up the coast when things got tough, instead of talking.

Brandon was the third of six Sloan siblings—five brothers and a sister. His family owned a successful construction business in Knights Bridge and would welcome him back, but returning to his hometown would signal defeat in his eyes. Phoebe had known him since nursery school. He’d wanted out of Knights Bridge at ten. Then he and Maggie fell for each other as teenagers and married in college. Almost no one in town had believed their marriage would last. Phoebe had hoped it would, because they were so much in love.

She sighed. She could be such an idiotic romantic. Hadn’t she learned by now?

She gathered the dozen boys and girls onto a round, dark red rug. They came quickly to order, even her nephews. They were reading Beatrix Potter and had just started The Tale of Peter Rabbit, their last book of the summer, and they couldn’t wait to find out what happened next.

* * *

With Peter Rabbit and Knights Bridge’s little ones safely back with their families, Phoebe locked up the library and walked across South Main Street and through the common to Main Street and the Swift River Country Store, a town fixture for the past hundred years. It sold everything from galoshes to canned goods and fresh vegetables to a decent selection of wine. The afternoon heat had eased but it was still warm when she headed back to the library with two bottles of pinot grigio, already chilled. Olivia would bring a bottle of some kind of red from a California winery owned by Noah Kendrick, Dylan’s best friend and founder of NAK, Inc., the high-tech entertainment business that had made them both fortunes. The only thing Phoebe knew for sure was that her choice of white wine wouldn’t be nearly as pricey as whatever red Olivia brought.

Having a friend fall for a wealthy Californian had its unexpected advantages.

Normally she’d have walked home but her visit with Maggie and Olivia meant she had her car. She got in, set her wine on the front seat next to her and shut her eyes a moment, listening to the rustle of leaves as a gentle breeze floated through the shade trees on the wide library lawn.

Finally she started her Subaru and turned off South Main onto Thistle Lane. The library stood on the corner. Thistle Lane led away from the common, connecting to a back road with views of the reservoir in the distance. On her trips to the library as a girl, Phoebe had dreamed of living on the quiet, tree-lined street, away from the chaotic life she had out in the country with her parents and younger sisters. Thistle Lane represented order, independence and, at least to a degree, prosperity.

In less than five minutes, she turned into her short paved driveway. An old American elm graced the corner of the yard next to hers, holding on against the ravages of Dutch elm disease, in part due to intervention by the town. It was a beautiful tree, a symbol of the past and yet very much part of her everyday world. When she bought her house eighteen months ago, she’d thought she was being practical, never mind that she was the only one to make an offer. The house was built in 1912 by one of the early directors of the library, then sold to a series of owners, until, finally, the town was forced to take possession when the heir to the last owner couldn’t be located and property taxes went into arrears.

Phoebe rolled up her car windows, shut off the engine and collected her wine bottles as she stepped out into the shade. With its new roof, furnace, windows, wiring and plumbing, the house was no longer a notch above a tear-down. It still needed a new kitchen and bathroom, but she had to save up before she tackled any more big projects. Right now, she was concentrating on some of the fun cosmetic work—paint, wallpaper, gardens and restoring flea-market and yard-sale finds.