With a lazy shrug, Cybil started to fold the paper. "I'm going to go tug on a couple of very thin threads toward finding where Ann Hawkins lived for our missing two years. It's damned irritating," Cybil added as she rose. "There weren't that many people around here in sixteen fifty-two. Why the hell can't I find the right ones?"
BY NOON, LAYLA HAD DONE ALL SHE COULD DO with her housemates. She changed into gray trousers and heeled boots for her afternoon in the office.
On her walk she noticed that the windows on the gift shop had been replaced. Cal's father was a conscientious landlord, one she knew had a lot of pride in his town. And she noticed the large, hand-printed Going Out of Business Sale sign that hung in the display window.
That was a damn shame, she thought as she walked on. The lives people built, or tried to build, tumbling down around them, through no fault of their own. Some let it lie in ruins, unable to find the hope and the will to rebuild, and others shoved up their sleeves and put it back together.
There was new glass at Ma's Pantry, too, and on other shops and houses. People, jackets buttoned or zipped against the chill, came and went, in and out. People stayed. She saw a man in a faded denim jacket, a tool belt slung at his hips, replacing a door on the bookstore. Yesterday, she thought, that door had been scarred, its windows broken. Now it would be fresh and new.
People stayed, she thought again, and others strapped on their tool belts and helped them rebuild.
When the man turned, caught her gaze, he smiled. Layla's heart took a jump, a little bump that was both pleasure and surprise. It was Fox's smile. For a moment she thought she was hallucinating, then she remembered. His father was a carpenter. Fox's father was replacing the door of the bookstore, and smiling at her across Main Street.
She lifted her hand in a wave and continued to walk. Wasn't it interesting to get a glimpse of what Fox B. O'Dell might look like in twenty years?
Pretty damn good.
She was still laughing to herself when she went inside Fox's office and relieved Alice for the day.
Since she had the offices to herself, she slid in a CD and started the work Alice had left her to Michelle Grant on low volume, muting it whenever the phone rang.
Within an hour, she'd cleared the desk, updated Fox's calendar. Since she still considered it Alice's domain, she resisted killing another hour reorganizing the storage room and the desk drawers to her personal specifications.
Instead, she pulled out one of the books in her satchel that covered a local's version of the legend of the Pagan Stone.
She could see it in her mind's eye, ruling the clearing in Hawkins Wood. Rising altarlike out of the scorched ground, somber and gray. Solid, she thought now as she paged through the book. Sturdy and ancient. Small wonder how it had come by its name, she decided, as it had struck her as something forged by gods for whatever, whomever, they might worship.
A center of power, she supposed, not on some soaring mountaintop, but in the quiet, sleepy woods.
There was nothing new in the book she scanned-the small Puritan settlement rocked by accusations of witch-craft, a tragic fire, a sudden storm. She wished she'd brought one of Ann Hawkins's journals instead, but she didn't feel comfortable taking them out of the house.
She put the book away and tried the Internet. But that, too, was old news. She'd read and searched and read again, and there was no question both Quinn and Cybil were better at this end than she was. Her strength was in organizing, in connecting the dots in a logical manner. At the moment, there were simply no new dots to connect.
Restless, she rose to walk to the front windows. She needed something to do, a defined task, something to keep her hands and her mind busy. She needed to do something. Now.
She turned back with the intention of calling Quinn and begging for an assignment, no matter how menial.
The woman stood in front of the desk, her hands folded at her waist. Her dress was a quiet gray, long skirt, long sleeves, high at the neck. She wore her sunny blond hair in a simple roll at the nape.
"I know what it is to be impatient, to be restless," she said. "I could