CHAPTER ONE

      “EVERY TABLE FULL except the reserved one, and it’s a Tuesday.” Carrying two glasses of iced tea, Mabel paused to grin at Lucy Peterson. “Those new soups are a hit.”

      She continued into the crowded dining room of the café. Lucy, who had just finished ringing up a customer, looked around with satisfaction. Mabel was right. Business kept getting better and better.

      The bell over the door rang. Lucy’s head turned as her guest slipped in, her carriage confident, her gaze shy. The hat lady.

      Last time Lucy had seen her, the day before yesterday, she’d carried herself decorously and yet with regal authority. The pillbox hat had said it all. She was often Queen Elizabeth—the second, she always emphasized. She didn’t actually look much like Queen Elizabeth II, being slender rather than matronly in build, with hair that had been blond when she first appeared in Middleton, perhaps ten years ago. Now her hair was primarily white, as wispy and flyaway as the woman whose head it crowned.

      But today, she wore a flower-printed dress and a broad-brimmed hat festooned with flowers. Her face was softer, her carriage more youthful, her gaze vaguer.

      This was always the awkward moment. Lucy had to pretend she knew who Middleton’s one and only homeless person was. Calling her by the wrong name seemed so insulting.

      Talk in the café hadn’t