True believer - Nicholas Sparks [25]
That’s why she was here, after all. She loved everything about the town: the smell of pine and salt on early spring mornings, the sultry summer evenings that made her skin glisten, the fiery glow of autumn leaves. But most of all, she loved the people and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. She trusted them, she talked to them, she liked them. Of course, a number of her friends hadn’t felt the same way, and after heading off to college, they’d never returned. She, too, had moved away for a while, but even then, she’d always known that she would come back; a good thing, it turned out, since she’d been worried about Doris’s health for the past two years. And she also knew she would be the librarian, just as her mother had been, in the hope of making the library something that would make the town proud.
No, it wasn’t the most glamorous job, nor did it pay much. The library was a work in progress, but first impressions were deceptive. The bottom floor housed contemporary fiction only, while the top floor held classic fiction and nonfiction, additional titles by contemporary authors, and unique collections. She doubted whether Mr. Marsh even realized the library was dispersed through both stories, since the stairs were accessed in the rear of the building, near the children’s room. One of the drawbacks to having the library housed in a former residence was that the architecture wasn’t designed for public traffic. But the place suited her.
Her office upstairs was almost always quiet, and it was close to her favorite part of the library. A small room next to hers contained the rare titles, books she’d accumulated through estate and garage sales, donations, and visits to bookstores and dealers throughout the state, a project her mother had started. She also had a growing collection of historic manuscripts and maps, some of which dated from before the Revolutionary War. This was her passion. She was always on the lookout for something special, and she wasn’t above using charm, guile, or simple pleading to get what she wanted. When that didn’t work, she stressed the tax deduction angle, and—because she had worked hard to cultivate contacts with tax and estate lawyers throughout the South—she often received items before other libraries even found out about them. While she didn’t have the resources of Duke, Wake Forest, or the University of North Carolina, her library was regarded as one of the best small libraries in the state, if not the country.
And that’s how she viewed it now. Her library, like this was her town. And right now a stranger was waiting for her, a stranger who wanted to write a story that just might not be good for her people.
Oh, she’d seen him drive up, all right. Seen him get out of the car and head around front. She’d shaken her head, recognizing the confident city swagger almost immediately. He was just another in a long line of people visiting from someplace more exotic, people who believed they had a deeper understanding of what the real world was like. People who claimed that life could be far more exciting, more fulfilling, if only you moved away. A few years ago, she’d fallen for someone who believed such things, and she refused to be taken in by such ideas again.
A cardinal landed on the outside windowsill. She watched it, clearing her head, and then sighed. Okay, she decided, she should probably go talk to Mr. Marsh from New York. He was, after all, waiting for her. He’d come all this way, and southern hospitality—as well as her job—required her to