“I was sick of city life, and I’d been here before, the Maine coast, anyway, so I decided to be impulsive.”

She laughed, more like a nervous punctuation mark. Her hair was auburn, bordering on black, and her eyes were blue with a little bit of green in them. She had a small nose that turned up a little at the end, and a narrow mouth with a thin top lip and a plump lower one. She had thick, dark eyebrows and faint freckles on her forehead, and Harry figured she could be anywhere from his age to somewhere in her early thirties.

“You just up and moved here without having a job?” Harry said, and immediately regretted how the question sounded.

“I did.”

“Where are you living?”

“Just up the hill past the inn. You know that large brick house with the weedy front yard? I’m in there. It’s from Airbnb, just a room, my own bedroom, but it’s actually bigger than the apartment I rented in New York. What about you? Are you working here now, in the store?”

“I’m helping out. Probably for the summer, then I don’t know. Maybe move to New York City?”

“Don’t do it.” She laughed.

“Okay.”

Grace’s cheeks darkened. She pulled at an unpierced earlobe. “No jobs here, then?”

“Oh, right. I don’t know. It’s probably too soon to make decisions about what’s going to happen here, but I can find out and let you know.”

“Okay. That would be good. Kennewick Inn’s looking for a hostess, but I thought I’d try here first.”

“Should I call you?”

“Sure,” she said, and Harry handed her a pen. She turned over an Ackerson’s bookmark and wrote her phone number. “Thank you. I knew it was a long shot, and I don’t expect anything, so—”

“I’ll find out and let you know.”

“Okay. I’m going to browse around a little.”

“You should.”

She wandered off into an aisle where Harry couldn’t see her. It was such a strange interaction that for a moment Harry stood, just going over the conversation in his mind. Something she had said had struck him as particularly odd. For a moment, he couldn’t place it but then it came to him. She’d asked, “Are you working here now, in the store?” How had she known he’d just started working there? Then Harry remembered the funeral, the minister saying something about how proud Bill was of his son, who had recently graduated from college. That must have been it.

John came out from the back room. “Just cracked the last box,” he said. “Finally found the Wodehouse editions. There are some firsts. American ones, but still, not an entire loss.”

Harry’s weariness must have shown on his face, because John said, “Go home. You’ve done more than enough here today.”