Sky Lake Summer. Peggy Dymond Leavey

be long before she could exchange it for shorts and a T-shirt. She pulled the brush through her thick, blonde hair and thudded down the stairs and into the kitchen. The oatmeal was erupting in little volcanoes in a battered pot on the back of the stove.

      Mrs. McPherson, the egg lady, had called to remind Nell that she had three dozen brown eggs set aside for them. “I clean forgot when I went to fetch you yesterday,” Nell said, handing Jane a knife to butter the toast.

      They drove around the lake to pick up the eggs before noon, and Jane left the two women chatting in the pungent warmth of the McPhersons’ back kitchen to tramp the short distance down to the marina store. The tinkle of the bell over the door announced her arrival.

      She was the only customer, and the man behind the counter waited while she made her selection, then folded down the top of the small paper bag, leaving a pocket of air in the bottom with the raspberry jujubes—as though she’d bought a whole dollar’s worth instead of just nine cents, the change she got back from the can of pop.

      “Here for the holidays?” the shopkeeper asked, smiling.

      Jane nodded, her mouth full of gummy candy.

      “You’re Mary Van Tassell’s girl, aren’t you? I haven’t seen Mary in years. What’s she up to these days?”

      “My mother?” Jane’s teeth had come unstuck. “She’s selling real estate.” She wasn’t sure she should be telling this person these things. This tall, spare man with the thinning, foxy-coloured hair was not the shopkeeper she remembered from other summers.

      “You say hi to your mother for me. Jackson Howard’s the name. She’ll remember.”

      “I’ll tell her,” said Jane, easing the door open.

      She retraced her steps up the road, past the new municipal centre which had been under construction a year ago. A teenaged boy with a bandanna tied over his hair was crouched in the long grass, painting the lower part of the fence around the new building. His bare back was tanned from the sun. He stood up when Jane drew level with him and wiped the back of his neck with a paint rag. In his leather workboots, he was about the same height as she was, although she judged him to be a couple of years older. She had towered over most of the boys her own age since sixth grade.

      “Hi,” Jane said.

      If he returned the greeting, Jane didn’t hear him. “There’s a library in this building, isn’t there?” she asked after a few awkward seconds.

      “You can’t take drinks in there,” the boy said, a scowl spoiling his dark good looks.

      “I wasn’t going in now. Just wondering if they were open.”

      “At three,” he said, and hunkered down again onto the tops of his boots, pulling the grass away from the fence and reaching for his brush.

      There was no sign of activity up the road at McPherson’s yet, so Jane followed the sidewalk around to the front of the building which faced the lake. Two long tables had been set up in the shade, and these were filled with old books for sale, showing various degrees of wear. She moved along one table where paperbacks had been set, spine side up, in long, ragged rows.

      “Quarter apiece.” The boy had come around from the other side.

      “I’m just looking,” Jane said.

      “Well, I’m in charge,” the boy informed her. “You want anything, just give the money to me.”

      Jane spent several minutes bent over the titles on the rows of spines in front of her. They were mostly old westerns or romances, nothing that interested her.

      “What about these?” she asked, indicating some cartons underneath the table. She squatted on her heels and opened the flaps on one of the boxes.

      “Hardcovers,” said the boy. “Buck a piece. You Ms. Van Tassell’s granddaughter?”

      “That’s right.”

      “She said you were coming this week.”

      “And you are?”

      “Jess Howard.”

      Nell’s handyman. “Hi,” Jane said, trying the smile again. “I’m Jane Covington.”

      “I figured,” the boy said.

      Jane wondered if she might have red jujubes stuck to her front teeth. She drew one of the books out of the box, a small, blue volume with gold lettering on the cover. The Sea and the Jungle, by H. M. Tomlinson.

      She flipped idly through it, knowing it too wasn’t anything she’d want to buy, and wondered how long it would be before Jess Howard got tired of his surveillance. Suddenly, a piece of folded paper fell out of the pages of the book and fluttered onto the grass. She picked it up and unfolded it carefully. It was a handwritten letter and Jane read it, crouched over the carton of books.

      “That’s funny,” she said as she stood up, frowning. “Look what was in this book.”

      Jesse’s eyes passed quickly over it before he handed it back with a shrug.

      General Delivery,

      Sky Lake, Ontario, Canada.

      September 7, 1930

      Dear Madam:

      I feel a bit of a fool asking you to help us. I’m afraid I don’t even know your name. But you had such a kind face when you waited on me, and you smiled at my baby before we left your shop and got into the boat. I could think of no one else to turn to.

      I think we may be in danger. My husband’s brother is quite unwell. He has such terrible rages. I never would have come here had I known his true condition. I fear he may be losing his mind.

      Yours,

      Eugenie G. Fraser

      (Mrs. Thos. Fraser)

      “Someone’s old letter,” remarked Jess.

      “I know,” said Jane. “But it’s more than that. Whoever Eugenie G. Fraser is, she says she thinks she’s in danger.”

      “So?” said Jess.

      “Doesn’t that bother you?”

      Jess shrugged. “Not really.”

      “But it sounds like she’s asking someone for help.”

      “Maybe you didn’t notice the date,” Jess suggested, with sarcasm.

      Jane leaned her backside against the table and re-read the letter. The paper it was written on was very thin, its folds pressed flat by the book and the weight of the years. “It sounds as if she’s afraid of her husband’s brother. I wonder where it came from, who Eugenie G. Fraser is.”

      “By the return address, I’d say she was someone here on the lake,” Jess said, picking paint from his fingernails.

      “And this book must have belonged to the person who got the letter,” Jane decided. “There’s no envelope. I wonder who it was.”

      “The library gets donations like this all the time.” Jess waved an all-encompassing arm over the rows of books. “Most of the time they’re so old we can’t use them.”

      “You work at the library?” Jane asked.

      “Some of the time.”

      “Well, the letter was written to someone who ran a shop,” Jane said, wrinkling her brow. “She says here, ‘when you waited on me’.”

      “Could have been a waitress,” suggested Jess.

      “Then she wouldn’t have said ‘your shop’. She says, ‘when we left your shop’ and ‘before we got into the boat’. So it sounds like the shop was by some water. It could even have been the store