At a coffee shop, she sat at a table and watched the bookstore across the street. Its large windows were packed with books. A banner announced an upcoming author signing. Someone was always at the door, coming or going. It was impossible to believe the manuscripts were in there, locked away in some vault hidden in the basement. It was even more far-fetched to think that she was somehow supposed to deliver them.

Elaine had suggested that Mercer stay away from the store and wait until Cable made the first move. However, Mercer was now her own spy, making her own rules, though still without a clue. She wasn’t exactly taking orders from anyone. Orders? There was no clear game plan. Mercer had been tossed into battle and expected to adjust and improvise on the fly. At 5:00 p.m., a man in a seersucker suit and bow tie, undoubtedly Bruce Cable, walked out of the store and headed east. Mercer waited until he was gone, then crossed the street and entered Bay Books for the first time in many years. She could not remember the last visit but guessed she was either seventeen or eighteen, and driving.

As she always did in any bookstore, she drifted aimlessly until she found the shelves for Literary Fiction, then scanned quickly through the alphabet, about midway down to the Ms, to see if either of her books might be in inventory. She smiled. There was one copy of the trade edition of October Rain. There was no sign of The Music of Waves, but that was to be expected. She had not found her short story collection in a bookstore since the week it was published.

With a partial victory in hand, she wandered slowly through the store, soaking up the smells of new books, and coffee, and, from somewhere, the hint of pipe smoke. She adored the saggy shelves, the piles of books on the floors, the ancient rugs, the racks of paperbacks, the colorful section for bestsellers at 25 percent off! From across the store she took in the First Editions Room, a handsome paneled area with open windows and hundreds of the more expensive books. Upstairs in the café, she bought a bottle of sparkling water and ventured outside on the porch, where others were drinking coffee and passing the late afternoon. At the far end, a rotund gentleman was smoking a pipe. She flipped through a tourist guide for the island and watched the clock.

At five minutes before six, she went downstairs and spotted Bruce Cable at the front counter chatting with a customer. She seriously doubted if he would recognize her. His only clue would be her black-and-white photo on the dust jacket of October Rain, a novel that was now seven years old and had generated only pennies for his store. But she had been scheduled to sign here during her aborted book tour, and he allegedly read everything, and he probably knew her connection to the island, and, most important, at least from his viewpoint, she was an attractive young female writer, so perhaps the odds were even that he would spot her.