One

      “He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember on Christmas Day who made lame beggars walk and blind men see.”

      —Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

      CLARE MORGAN HADN’T felt this happy in a long time. A very long time, she thought as she gathered up books to take to Rivendell, the local assisted-living facility. She prided herself on her self-sufficiency and independence—her professionalism as a librarian—and she was happy in countless ways, but this was different. This was happiness born of contentment. The uncertainties of the past few months were lifting and confidence settling in that she’d made the right decision to leave Boston and come to out-of-the-way Knights Bridge, Massachusetts.

      New to the town and its small, charming library, Clare was getting a feel for the reading preferences of the seniors at Rivendell. Audrey Frost liked cozy mysteries, particularly ones set in England. Grace Webster would read anything but was partial to literary fiction and classic adventure novels. Arthur Potter had asked Clare to bring him all the Harry Potter books, since he and Harry shared the same last name and he’d always wanted to be a wizard. Daisy Farrell, Rivendell’s newest resident, had requested A Christmas Carol, the classic Dickens story apparently a favorite with her and her late husband.

      Almost everyone at the facility was widowed, but Clare gathered that many had enjoyed long marriages.

      Except one feisty woman in her late eighties whose name Clare had forgotten. “I’ve never lived alone until four years, three months and eighteen days ago,” she’d said when Clare had delivered her a stack of biographies. “It’s heaven on earth.”

      Clare was a widow herself, but she wasn’t sure how many people in her new town were aware that she’d been married. She had enjoyed the entire one year, two months and three days of her marriage to Stephen Morgan. Every single second had been bliss—including the inevitable arguments. That he’d been gone for six years seemed inconceivable. But every day she saw him in Owen, their six-year-old son, born seven weeks after his father’s untimely death in a car accident.

      She put the books in a box, careful not to overfill it and make it impossible to carry. The seniors also had several book clubs that met both at Rivendell and at the library. Vera Galeski, a part-time worker at the library, had taken Clare through the various book clubs. Her predecessor as library director, Phoebe O’Dunn, born and raised in Knights Bridge, had run a tight ship. She’d left Clare with a balanced budget and a well-trained group of volunteers, among them several mobile residents of the assisted-living facility.

      She checked her watch. Three o’clock. Owen, a first-grader, would be walking from school soon to play with Aidan and Tyler Sloan at their house. So far, Owen was adjusting well to his new school. It had only been six weeks since his and Clare’s arrival in Knights Bridge, and she expected bumps in the road—but small ones, especially compared to the huge one of losing Stephen. Owen, of course, didn’t remember his father. He was a photo in an album, part of funny stories Clare told about life before he was born.

      Stephen had been the love of her life. It wasn’t something she told her young son, but she didn’t hide it, either.

      She got on with her work. She went out the heavy front door and took the ramp instead of the stairs. In anticipation of the run out to Rivendell, she’d parked on South Main in front of the library, a sturdy mostly brick building donated to the town in 1872 by George Sanderson, whose stern portrait hung above the fireplace in the main sitting room. As far as Clare knew, there were no Sandersons left in Knights Bridge.

      She hit the button on her key fob to unlock the car doors. She popped the trunk, setting the box inside next to ice skates she’d found at a secondhand sports store in Amherst, a nearby college town. Owen desperately wanted to learn to ice skate. He insisted six was old enough. Every winter for the past fifty-plus years, the town had created an outdoor rink on the common. It was an “at your own risk” operation, with no supervision, no walls to grab hold of—not even a proper place to warm up. Hypothermia and frostbite were real concerns in a New England winter.

      Clare put the brakes on her litany of concerns. Questions, she told herself. Not worries. She wasn’t a panicky, overprotective mother and didn’t want to become one. She was asking appropriate questions and taking appropriate precautions without turning either Owen or herself into chronic fretters.

      But she’d been on South Main last week when two teenage boys had collided, requiring Band-Aids and a lot of cursing if not a trip to the ER and stitches.

       Still...

      Clare got in her car. Bringing books to the seniors at Rivendell was one of the easy, low-tech, low-stress parts of her job, and she loved it.

      She glanced back at the library. It was decked out with twin wreaths on the front door, swags of greenery around the windows and a trio of grapevine reindeer next to the steps. Tasteful and festive. Decorating for the holidays was a long-standing tradition in Knights Bridge. According to the trustees of the Knights Bridge Free Public Library, most of the decorations, accumulated over decades, had succumbed to a roof leak last winter, but many had been in need of discarding or replacing. Few were missed. The library had its secrets, but not many treasures. By the time Clare started work, volunteers had already dived in to create new decorations, particularly with natural materials. Except for one anemic-looking grapevine reindeer, the results were impressive, and she and Owen had plans to rehabilitate the reindeer.

      She turned off South Main at the end of the oblong-shaped common onto the main road out to the highway. Freshly fallen snow added to the festive atmosphere. What could be more perfect than Christmas in her small New England town?

      This would be her and Owen’s best Christmas ever, Clare thought, smiling as she drove on the winding road.

      * * *

      Knights Bridge’s only assisted-living facility was located in a beautiful spot with views of snow-covered meadows that gave way to woods. In the distance, Clare could see a sliver of water, not yet frozen over, that she knew to be part of Quabbin, a vast reservoir built in the 1930s by the damming of the Swift River. Many of the elderly residents of Rivendell knew people who’d lived in the valley, or had lived there themselves, before its four small towns had been taken over by the state and disincorporated, their entire populations forced to relocate.

      The “accidental wilderness,” Quabbin was called now, with its protected waters and watershed. On a previous visit to Rivendell, Grace Webster, a retired teacher and avid bird-watcher, had told Clare about the return of bald eagles to the valley.

      She grabbed the box of books and headed inside, setting the box on a chest-high wall unit in the corridor. She waved to the receptionist, who was expecting the delivery, but the young woman was dealing with a man in expensive-looking dark brown cords and a canvas shirt, its sleeves rolled up to his elbows, as he visibly tried to control his impatience. “Her name is Daisy Farrell,” he said. “She’s your newest resident. She’s in good health for a woman in her eighties, but I want to review her care with your medical staff.”

      “Of course,” the flustered receptionist said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize today’s moving day for Mrs. Farrell. I only just got in.”

      He calmed down. “Thank you.”

      One of those imperious, successful men who likes to get his way, Clare thought as she worked a sore muscle in her arm from carrying the heavy box. She would bet the man wasn’t from Knights Bridge. Why was he interested in Daisy Farrell? Clare pushed her questions aside. It didn’t matter. Whatever his reasons for being here, she doubted he’d ever show up again.

      The man left the receptionist to fulfill his request and seemed to notice Clare for the first time. He glanced at the books in the box. “That’s quite a range of titles.”