The town was the little old town of Florinna, Alabama. It had boomed when the Jackson Lumber Company established a mill there in 1895 and shipped out 2 million board feet of tongue-and-groove, end-matched rift flooring a day to cities in the Northeast and overseas to Europe. The optimistic, forward-looking settlers of Florinna built sturdy, straightforward heart-pine houses with long windows opening onto wide, sloping porches. They planted hundreds of baby live-oak trees all up and down the streets. They built a brick school on the hill, and one brick downtown street with everything anybody could possibly need or want: a feedstore, a grocery store, a drugstore, a hardware store, and a dry goods store. But in 1916 the planer mill burned, and in 1930 the Depression came, and in the 1960s the road just east of Florinna became an access road to I-10, and one by one the stores shut down, the porches sagged on the houses, the windows on the school were boarded up, and Florinna children were bused to the big, new school in the east end of the county. For forty years the only things that continued to thrive in Florinna were the live-oak trees and Smash Dykes’s feedstore.

Then Hurricane Katrina hit, and the real estate developers turned their backs on the coast, took off their sunglasses, and saw for the first time, fifty miles inland and 120 feet above sea level, the peaceful, little old abandoned town of Florinna, with its oak-shaded brick streets and its Victorian downtown. “Whoa!” they said, and they started writing contracts. The hardware store became an art gallery selling folk art, the dry goods store became a gift shop belching out the scent of Yankee candles, and the grocery store had a sushi bar. Big tubs of geraniums lined the sidewalks, a vacant lot was turned into a pocket park, and now after just one year Florinna was hovering on the edge of cute.

Mrs. Horne, fresh from her divorce with nothing but her white cat, Precious, under her arm and $3 million in her bank account, came down from Birmingham and set up her book and gift store in the old drugstore building right next to Smash Dykes’s feedstore. She called it White Cat Books.

“First I thought of cats for the mural,” Mrs. Horne said to Lucy, “a whole wall of cats.”

From the front of the store Lucy heard knock-knock-knock. “Do I hear—”

“But then I thought, no, no, no, this is a bookstore, it needs to be a scene from a famous book, and I thought of Lad: A Dog, but nobody reads Lad: A Dog anymore, everybody’s into shar-peis—I’m an animal lover, Lucy, I bet you were beginning to guess that.”

“Yes,” said Lucy. “Is somebody—”