Rose's Ring

Chapter One

The rain came on a Monday, which Margaret Hale considered a personal insult.

It wasn't that she minded rain. Rain was good for reading, good for soup, good for the hydrangeas her late husband had planted along the side of the house and which she had kept alive for eleven years out of sheer stubbornness. What she minded was rain on a Monday, because Monday was book drop day, and the book drop at the Millbrook Free Library had a lid that hadn't sealed properly since the Clinton administration.

She stood under her umbrella at 7:42 a.m., keys in hand, and looked down into the metal bin with the expression of a woman viewing a crime scene.

"Oh, you poor things," she said.

A copy of The Joy of Cooking lay splayed on top, its pages swelling like a sponge. Beneath it, a stack of picture books, a James Patterson, and a large-print Louis L'Amour that she knew, without checking, belonged to Mr. Hendricks on Cherry Street, who returned it every three weeks and checked it out again the same afternoon.

Margaret gathered them into her canvas tote one by one, the way some people lift baby birds back into a nest.

Inside, the library smelled the way it always did on wet mornings: old paper, radiator dust, and the faint lemon of the floor polish Gus the custodian swore by. She flipped on the lights in the order she always flipped them, front desk first, then the stacks, then the children's corner with its lopsided reading tree, and last the little lamp over the periodicals table, which wasn't strictly necessary but which she thought made the room look like somebody was home.

She hung up her coat. She started the coffee. She laid the wet books out on paper towels across the workroom table like patients in a field hospital.

At 8:00 exactly, she unlocked the front door.

At 8:01, Frank Dombrowski walked through it.

"You're dripping on my floor," Margaret said.

"It's a public floor," said Frank. "I'm the public."

He was sixty-eight years old and built like a mailbox, broad and square and not especially interested in moving for anyone. He had been a detective with the county for thirty-one years, and retired for four, and in those four years he had come to the library every single morning the doors were open, except for one week in February when he had the flu and one Tuesday he never explained.

He shook out his umbrella with great violence, right there on the mat.

"Frank."

"What?"

"There is an umbrella stand eight inches from your elbow."

He looked at the umbrella stand as if it had personally wronged him, then dropped his umbrella into it. "Paper in?"

"On the table, where it's been every day for four years."

"Just checking. You could've moved it."

"I could've," Margaret agreed, "but then you'd have to ask me where it was, and we'd have to talk."

Something that might have been a smile moved across the lower half of Frank's face and was gone before it could do any lasting damage. He shuffled to the periodicals table, sat down in the chair under the little lamp, the chair everyone in Millbrook knew was his, and opened the Inquirer with a crack like a starter pistol.

Margaret went back to her patients.

Susie was late.

This was not news. Susie Shah, seventeen years old and in possession of the fastest typing fingers Margaret had ever witnessed, had been volunteering at the library every Monday, Wednesday, and Saturday since June, and had arrived on time precisely twice. The first time was her first day. The second was the day the new laptops came in.

She blew through the door at 8:37 in a yellow raincoat, earbuds in, a smoothie in one hand and a phone in the other.

"Sorry, sorry, sorry," she said. "The bus was, like, a whole situation."

"What kind of situation?"

Susie considered this. "A late one."

"Good morning, Susie."

"Morning, Mrs. Hale. Morning, Detective."

Frank grunted without looking up.

"He loves me," Susie told Margaret, dropping her bag behind the front desk. "He just can't say it. It's generational."

"I can hear you," said Frank.

"I know. That's why I said it."

Margaret handed her a stack of wet paperbacks and a roll of paper towels. "Triage," she said. "Anything that can be saved, blot and stand upright. Anything that can't, set aside and I'll call the borrower."

Susie looked at the soggy James Patterson. "Do people actually get mad about this?"

"Mr. Hendricks once didn't speak to me for a month because his Louis L'Amour had a coffee ring."

"Was it your coffee?"

"That's not the point."

Susie grinned and got to work.

The morning went the way Monday mornings went. Mrs. Abernathy came in for her large-print mysteries and stayed twenty minutes telling Margaret about her grandson's science fair volcano. Two young mothers brought toddlers to the reading tree and pretended not to be exhausted. A man Margaret didn't recognize asked for the restroom, then asked for the Wi-Fi password, then asked whether the library had a fax machine, then left looking faintly betrayed by the modern world.

At ten, Margaret brought Frank a cup of coffee and set it beside his elbow without a word.

He didn't say thank you. He never said thank you. But he moved the paper over three inches so the cup wouldn't drip on the box scores, and Margaret had decided long ago to count that.

"Anything good?" she asked, nodding at the paper.

"Township's raising the sewer fee."

"That's not good."

"You asked if there was anything. You didn't ask if it was good."

"I did ask if it was good. 'Anything good' is the whole question, Frank."

He lowered the paper an inch and looked at her over it. He had pale gray eyes that had spent three decades watching people lie to him, and they had a way of making you feel that he already knew what you were going to say, and was mildly disappointed in it.

"Phillies traded for a reliever," he offered.

"Is that good?"

"No."

Margaret sighed and went back to the desk.

It was nearly noon when the last of the book drop rescues was finished. Susie had blotted, fanned, and stood upright eleven books, pronounced four of them "basically fine," and laid The Joy of Cooking to rest with a solemnity usually reserved for pets.

"There's one more," she said, holding up a slim hardback. "It was stuck at the bottom. Under the lid thing."

It was an old copy of Great Expectations, the dark green cloth edition the library had owned since long before Margaret's time, its spine faded almost white from decades of sun on the classics shelf. Somehow it had stayed dry. Margaret took it from Susie and turned it over in her hands.

"That's odd," she said.

"What's odd? It's Dickens. People read Dickens."

"High school students read Dickens, in September, under protest." Margaret opened the back cover. There was no barcode. There was only the old card pocket, the kind they'd stopped using in the nineties, with a yellowed due-date card still tucked inside. "This one hasn't been in circulation in years. It's not even in the system. It should be sitting in the basement with the rest of the old stock."

"So someone stole it, read it, and felt guilty?"

"Or someone found it in their attic." Margaret ran her thumb along the edge of the pages. They fell open, the way old books do, at the place they'd been opened most.

Something slid out and fluttered to the desk.

It was a small rectangle of stiff paper, pale pink once, gone the color of weak tea. The edges were soft as cloth. Printed across the top, in faded red ink, were the words KESSLER'S LOAN & JEWELRY, and below that, a number, and a date.

March 9, 1987.

Margaret stared at it.

Across the room, without lowering his newspaper, Frank Dombrowski said, "That's a pawn ticket."

Margaret looked up. "How can you possibly see that from there?"

"I can't." He turned a page. "But I've seen that look on a lot of faces, and it's never over a grocery receipt."

Margaret tilted the ticket toward the window. Below the date, in pencil so faint she almost missed it, someone had written one more word.