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“What? It’s accurate.”
“It sounds like a medical condition.”
“It means it keeps things,” Rory said to Allison, unapologetically. “That’s all I mean. The town keeps things. People, mostly. The ones who need keeping.”
Allison looked down at her coffee.
She thought about clicking apply on a job listing at eleven at night. She thought about the GPS going quiet when she crossed the town line. She thought about the way the air had changed.
“I’m sure there’s a rational explanation for all of that,” she said.
“I’m sure there is,” Rory agreed pleasantly, and pulled a different notebook from the pile. “Now. Do you want to see the original survey maps from 1887? I’ve been trying to show someone these for months.”
She stayed for another hour.
* * *
Merrybrook Elementary was three blocks from Main Street, a low building of red brick with a covered entrance and a playground on the south side and a mural on the east wall that someone had painted, badly, enthusiastically, of Clearwater Lake and the mountains behind it. She stood and looked at the mural for a moment before going in.
The principal was a tall woman in her fifties named Helen Marsh who shook her hand with the grip of someone who had been running a small school for a long time and found it suited her. She walked Allison through the building with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this before, the gymnasium, the library, the teachers’ lounge where Lauren Davis, the fourth-grade teacher, was reorganizing a supply cabinet and looked up and said “you must be the new art teacher” and then, when Allison confirmed this, visibly relaxed in a way that suggested she’d been waiting for exactly this person for some time.
“I’m Lauren,” she said, abandoning the cabinet entirely. “Fourth grade, five years here, and I have been waiting to say this to someone, the art supply closet is a catastrophe. I don’t know what happened in there. Nobody will tell me. I need you to know before school starts so it doesn’t catch you off guard.”
“How bad is it?”
Lauren considered this. “Have you ever seen a craft store after a tornado?”
“I haven’t.”
“You’re about to.” She grabbed her coffee. “Come on, I’ll show you. And then I’ll show you where they hide the good supplies, which is a separate location entirely and highly classified.”
Allison followed her down the hall and decided, somewhere between the catastrophic supply closet and the hidden cabinet of actual good watercolors, that she had found her person at Merrybrook Elementary.
* * *
Her classroom was at the end of the east hallway, the last door before the emergency exit, with a window that faced the playground and, beyond the playground, the tops of the spruce trees and a slice of mountain that she could see from the teacher’s desk if she stood up slightly.
It was empty. Clean. Ready.
Except.
On the windowsill, the window that faced the playground, the one that was open just enough to let in a thread of outside air, someone had placed a small clay pot with a single marigold in it, bright orange, leaning slightly toward the light.
There was no note.
She looked at the marigold.
She checked with Helen Marsh’s assistant, who didn’t know anything about it. She checked with the custodian, who also didn’t know anything about it, and who mentioned, in passing, that the window in that room had a tendency to stick in cold weather, something they’d been meaning to get to.
She went back to her classroom and stood at the window and looked at the marigold and the playground and the spruce trees and the slice of mountain.
She had been looking for a place that felt like hers for a long time.
She wasn’t sure she’d ever found it before.
This, she thought, this room with its sticky window and its slice of mountain and its unexplained marigold, felt more like hers than anywhere she could remember.
She pulled out her phone and took a photo of the marigold on the windowsill, the mountain visible beyond the playground glass.
