“Why didn’t you say so before?”

Alice shrugged. “A pretty distant cousin. Anyway, this visit I want to ask you about, unfortunately I can’t give you much to go on. It was made last spring, more than a year ago, by Camilla, who would’ve been about sixteen at the time. I was wondering if you could tell me—if you even know—why she visited.” Alice paused, daring to look at Mrs. Snowden’s face. What she saw was not encouraging: an expression of bewildered puzzlement. Alice squeezed her eyes shut as she continued, just wanting to get to the end of the clearly doomed pitch now so she could go. “I realize this is an insane request, that there’s almost no way you’re going to remember an encounter from so far back, an encounter that probably seemed extremely trivial to you at the time, but I had to ask and—”

“I do remember, actually.”

Alice’s eyes snapped open. “What?”

“I said, I do remember.”

“You do?”

“Normally, of course, there’d be no way. The errand this girl—your cousin, Camilla—was on, though, was so sweet. She was planning on throwing an anniversary party for her parents, but was less than fully confident that she had the date right. Told me she didn’t want to look it up on her home computer for fear that her parents would figure out what she was up to. It was important to her that the party be a complete surprise. That’s why she came to the library. A good thing she did, too. She couldn’t have looked up the wedding announcement online, at least not in the Serenity Point Citizen. The year 2000 is as far back as their online archives go.”

“That’s amazing. I mean, that you remember.”

“Well, the truth is, I might have forgotten if I didn’t know how sick Mrs. Flood was at the time, how unlikely it was that she’d make it to another anniversary. And of course she died so soon after Camilla came in . . .” Mrs. Snowden trailed off. “Well,” she said, smiling sadly at Alice, “that really sealed the event in my memory.”

“Did she have it right?”

Mrs. Snowden cocked her head at Alice, not following.

“The date of the anniversary, I mean.”

“She did. It was the year she had wrong. Her parents were married one year after she thought they were. It could have been embarrassing, I suppose, if she wrote the date on the invitations or the cake or something. Not really, but she might have thought so.” With a smile, Mrs. Snowden said, “You young people can be so intense.”

For a while Alice and Mrs. Snowden were both silent. And then Alice said, “So you helped her find the wedding announcement?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Do you think you could help me find it, too?”