At about five o’clock, I went back to the café to get a coffee. I was in there about fifteen minutes when I looked up from the Chronicle-Herald and saw Brian Moore come in. He sat three tables over, as far as possible from my table, facing the window. Sarah was the waitress again. He ordered lemon tea and a scone.
I kept my head bowed to the newspaper, but I wasn’t really reading. I was concentrating on not bothering Brian Moore. But ten minutes or so after his tea and scone were served, he looked over at me and said, “I recognize you from the photograph on your book. I was terribly sorry to learn of the death of your wife, Mr. Lattimore. Very rough, very rough. I can’t imagine. Jean keeps me informed. I’m her husband, Brian.” He sipped his tea, just to warm up, it seemed, and decided to take the scone with him. He wrapped it in a paper napkin, stood, nodded goodbye, paid his bill, and left the café.
I was very excited to tell Elizabeth. She knew my feelings about Moore’s novels. She had read only I Am Mary Dunne, which she admired. During our time in the Essex Hotel, I even stole — well, paraphrased — a few lines of his, from French for Murder and This Gun for Gloria, for a Mr. Keen script.
Back in the cottage, I prepared a lamb chop, couscous (adding to it finely chopped, sautéed mushrooms), and asparagus for dinner. I moved the shortwave to the kitchen table and tried to catch channels from Europe, but the airwaves were all static and full of the high-pitched whistling sound that shortwaves make. I took a half-hour nap. At about nine-thirty, I threw on a sweater and went down to the shore. Philip and Cynthia were out; I recalled them saying they were having dinner with Brian and Jean Moore. I was ten or fifteen meters back from the beach when Elizabeth showed up, carrying the books, of course. She set them out on the sand.
“Elizabeth, I’m so happy to see you,” I said.
She walked a few steps toward me, stopped, and appeared to study my face for a moment. “You look so tired, Sam. You’re not sleeping, are you?”
“In fact, I just now took a nap.”
“Then I can only imagine how you looked before the nap.”
“You’ll never guess who I saw today over at Vogler’s Cove. Brian Moore. I’m absolutely not kidding.”
“Did you faint on the beach, Sam? Did you need a fainting couch?”
“He stopped into the café there. He had lemon tea and a scone.”
“Did you talk?”
“He said something to me, just a few sentences. Me, nothing back.”
“Are you going to have those few sentences embroidered on a sampler and frame it and put it over your bed?”
“No, because I have the photo-booth photographs of us over my bed.”
Elizabeth looked out to the water: a few gulls, white flashes in the dark; a lot of stars; it was a very clear night. “Tomorrow night I intend to tell you what happened that day in the hotel. I think it’s time, Samuel. I can’t say all the reasons, but you’ll just have to trust me. So I’ll see you tomorrow night. Promise me.”
I felt a rush of anxiety and couldn’t catch my breath. Still, I said, “I promise. Of course I promise. I’m here every night you are, without fail.”
“You forgot to tell me what birds you saw today. Did you bring your list with you?”
“Right here in my pocket.”
The Scissors Let the House Enforce the Distinction
THE HOURS OF the Port Medway Library were eleven A.M. to six P.M. Tuesday through Friday, eleven to eight on Saturday, and noon to five on Sunday. Sunday last, at around two P.M., I drove over to look around. The library consists of three rooms: the main room, whose windows look out over the sea, a room for children’s books, and the “reading room,” which contains three easy chairs, a sofa, and a long table with reading lamps.
It was overcast and dreary out. The moment I stepped inside the cobblestone building, I saw the librarian asleep at her desk, using her folded arms as a pillow. (I thought right away of Elizabeth’s story of stealing a book in Wales; I now knew of two sleeping librarians, a continent apart.) Her dark brown hair was fanned out across — I looked — an open copy of The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. There were no other patrons in the library. I toured the stacks in the main room and soon discovered, off in a corner, a section dedicated to natural history, especially that of Nova Scotia. In this section were field guides to birds, wildflowers, trees, fish, reptiles and amphibians, moths and butterflies. I also found a number of personal accounts, written by locals. One was called When I Walk Out in the Morning: Notes on Birds and Bird-Watching by Malcolm Drury. According to the back cover, Drury was born and raised near Vogler’s Cove. In the author’s photograph, an elderly Drury had a pair of field glasses hanging from his neck. After reading a few pages, I knew this was the book for me. The writing was direct and informative, with a pleasant style, not too many autobiographical distractions, and there were hand-drawn maps, a nice touch.
I tried to figure out the protocol for checking out books. Then I noticed a stack of three-by-five index cards on the desk. The librarian was lightly snoring. On the topmost card was the title of a book, The Moon and Mrs. Miniver. It all appeared quite efficient and perfectly well matched with the local feel of the library, which was built, according to the cornerstone, in 1902. So I took a new card from a stack on an adjacent table and wrote, “When I Walk Out in the Morning, borrowed by Sam Lattimore.” I had forgotten the date, so I didn’t write that down, but I added my unlisted phone number. I wedged the card under the librarian’s hand and left. Sitting in my truck, I opened the book at random to a section called “The Odd Sighting and Tidbits,” which included data from a scattered coterie of birdwatchers:
Sept. 24—a dark-phase rough-legged hawk at Grand Pre
Sept. 28—2 ospreys, 650 km offshore, at southern edge of the Grand Banks
Oct. 4—a pied-billed grebe at Canning Aboiteau
Oct. 6—a sandhill crane, east of Scotch village
Oct. 9—a yellow-billed cuckoo in lower Canard Valley
Oct. 10—two immature peregrine falcons, one yellow-billed cuckoo; on Brier Island, also a great horned owl hooting at night
Oct. 11—a northern saw-whet owl tooting in the morning turned out to be Roger Foxall! (He did hear one on Brier Island)
Oct.12—twenty-two American widgeons, thirty-seven greater yellowlegs in Canning
Oct. 13—one stilt sandpiper, 400 green-winged teals at Sheffield Mills
Oct. 18—a black-billed cuckoo east of Canning
Oct. 21—a northern mockingbird in Canning; a Say’s phoebe photographed on Brier Island
Oct. 23—a bufflehead and many lesser scaup at Canard Poultry Pond
Oct. 25—several fox sparrow seen in Truro
Oct. 26—on Bon Portage Island, 5 Leach’s storm petrels, 25 northern saw-whet owls, 1 boreal owl, 1 yellow-bellied sapsucker, 1 northern mockingbird, 1 red-eyed vireo, 1 northern oriole, a few water pipits on Bon Portage Island
Oct. 30—125 buffleheads and a number of black-bellied plovers at Porter’s Point
Oct. 31—a dark-eyed junco singing in Wolfville
I read a few more pages and then drove home.
“Is this Mr. Lattimore?” the voice on the phone said when I picked up and said hello. “My name is Bethany Dawson. The card you thought was for borrowing a book was not. It was for inventory. You’ll have to come in and start over, please.”