By four o’clock I’d toured everything Mary Anne Bishop had lined up. There were three more places to see the next morning. I was pretending to consider seriously two of the properties we’d looked at, but found sufficient fault with them to make her eager for tomorrow. We were pretty sick of each other by the time I got in my rental car, which had been parked at her office all day. I’d tried a couple of times to steer her conversation toward the years Martin had been growing up here, but she’d never mentioned the Bartells, though she and her husband were both natives of the town.

I missed Martin dreadfully.

I was almost through with my paperback, so when I saw a bookstore on my way back to the motel, I pulled into its parking lot with happy anticipation. Any place books are massed together makes me feel at home. It was a small, pleasant shop in a little strip with a dry cleaner’s and a hair salon. A bell over the door tinkled as I went in, and a gray-haired woman on a stool behind the cash register looked up from her own paperback as I paused just inside the door, savoring the feeling of being surrounded by words.

“Do you want anything in particular?” she asked politely. Her glasses matched her hair, and she was wearing, unfortunately, fuchsia. But her smile was wonderful and her voice was rich.

“Just looking. Where are your mysteries?”

“Right wall toward the rear,” she said, and went back to her book.

I had a happy fifteen or twenty minutes. I found a new James Lee Burke and an Adam Hall I hadn’t read. The true crime section was disappointing, but I was willing to forgive that. Not everyone was a buff, like me.

The woman rang up my books with the same cheerful live-and-let-live air. Without thinking at all, I asked her where Cindy’s Flowers might be.

“Around the corner and one block down,” she said succinctly, and reopened her book.