Larkin Lake Lights: Four Clean Small Town Romances

Book One, Chapter 1: The Girl Who Left

The sign was still there.

Nora Quill saw it from a quarter mile out, a green rectangle leaning slightly toward the ditch as if it had been listening to something interesting in the cattails for fifteen years. WELCOME TO LITTLE LARKIN, it said. EST. 1876. POP. 2,143. The three had been repainted, and recently, in a white that did not quite match the other numbers. Somebody in this town had opinions about the population, and that somebody owned a brush.

"Okay, so," Nora told the windshield, "we are not going to cry at a road sign. We are thirty two years old. We have a master's degree. We have a car." The car, a 2011 Subaru with a hatch that only stayed up if you wedged a broom handle under it, answered by making the noise it made when it went over forty on a downgrade. Behind her the entire contents of a Chicago studio apartment shifted in a single slow avalanche. A box marked KITCHEN?? slid into the back of her seat. A spider plant she had been keeping alive out of spite leaned over her shoulder like a passenger reading the map.

She did not cry. She rolled the window down instead, and the air came in cold and green and smelling of pine sap and wet sand and, faintly, of diesel from the marina at the bottom of the hill. Somewhere out of sight a mourning dove was saying the same sad thing it had been saying since 1998. Nora's chest did something complicated that she declined to examine.

Main Street started at the highway and ran straight downhill to the lake, the way a child draws a road: no curves, no ambition, just a determined line toward water. The lake itself sat at the bottom like a blue plate somebody had set out for company. Larkin Lake, nine miles long and cold enough to stop your heart in August, glittering in a way that seemed frankly unnecessary for a Monday afternoon.

There was one stoplight. It was red. Of course it was red.

Nora stopped, drummed her fingers on the wheel, and looked very hard at the brick front of the old First Larkin Bank building so that she would not have to look at anything else. That was why she did not see the golf cart until it was beside her, bumping up over the curb with the cheerful disregard of a vehicle that had never once been ticketed. It was lime green. It had a fringed canopy, a basket on the front full of rolled papers, and a vanity plate wired to the back that read LUCILLE.

Driving it was a small woman with a silver pixie cut, purple reading glasses pushed up into her hair, and a tracksuit the precise color of an amethyst geode. She leaned across the gap between them and rapped two knuckles on Nora's passenger window, which was down, so she rapped the door instead.

"Nora Elizabeth Quill."

"Mayor Lindqvist," Nora said, and found she had sat up straighter, the way she had at nine in a fourth grade classroom that smelled of tempera paint and pencil shavings. "Hi. Hello. You look exactly the same."

"I look seventy four, and I earned every one of them. You look tired. Did you stop in Cadillac?"

"I stopped in Cadillac."

"At the gas station with the good jerky?"

"I don't eat jerky."

"That's where you went wrong." Hattie Lindqvist plucked a rolled paper out of Lucille's basket and passed it through the window like a diploma. "Your grant agreement. Countersigned. The state pays for ten weeks, starting today, which I'm aware you know because I'm aware you read it four times. The assessment report is due to the council on Lantern Night. August ninth. I have written that date on my refrigerator in permanent marker, which my granddaughter says is a ...