Score one for the town’s biggest gossip.
Ella Bellow totally came through. By nine o’clock the next morning, there were two dozen people waiting for us on the bookshop doorstep.
Not only that, there was a news truck too. And not just any news truck, but the one from Channel 5 in Boston.
“Are you the owner of Lovejoy’s Books?” someone called out, shouldering his way through the crowd. I recognized the questioner’s face—well, his smile at least. Half the people on the planet knew that smile. A video of it flying across a room on its own and landing on a plate of cream puffs had been leaked onto the Internet a few years ago, and made him, his dentures, and his morning news show, Hello, Boston! famous.
Carson Dawson was smaller than he looked on TV—way shorter than me—and a lot wrinklier underneath his fake tan. In one leather-gloved hand he clutched a cup of coffee from Lou’s. In the other he held a microphone, which he thrust into Aunt True’s face. Peacock, I thought instantly. Showy and loud.
“Co-owner,” my aunt replied, unlocking the door.
“Is it true that your brother is a wounded warrior, Ms. Lovejoy? And that the two of you are struggling to turn around an ailing family business?”
Aunt True shot a sour look at Ella Bellow, who seemed to be fascinated by one of the buttons on her black coat all of a sudden. Our postmistress had been oversharing again. “Yes, it’s true,” my aunt admitted.
“I’d love to interview you!” gushed Mr. Dawson. “We’re in town to film the famous waterfall, and when we saw the crowd, we came over to find out what all the commotion was about. This would make a wonderful companion piece. You know, ‘small town pitches in to help wounded veteran.’ Our viewers love local color.”
Hatcher looked over at me and rolled his eyes.
“I’ll agree to do an interview on one condition,” Aunt True replied. Raising her voice to make sure everyone gathered on the sidewalk could hear her, she continued, “What we’re doing this weekend is a surprise for my brother and his wife. They won’t be home until Monday, and I don’t want the story getting out beforehand.” She leveled a stern gaze at Carson Dawson.
He nodded, chuckling. “Got it. Mum’s the word.”
Aunt True asked Hatcher and me to hold the door open for everyone, then taped a piece of paper to the window. I inspected it as the waiting crowd streamed past. My aunt had posted a wish list—furniture, mostly, and other items for the reading nooks she was hoping to set up.
Lou was first in line, carrying a stack of boxes filled with donuts. He winked at me as he passed. “Gotta keep everyone’s strength up.”
Mrs. Winthrop was right behind him with a big coffee urn. Lucas was next. Annie Freeman, who’d come with her brother Franklin and their parents, was talking his ear off.
“Hey, Truly,” said Cha Cha as she trailed in behind the Freemans.
“Hey.” I waggled my fingers at Baxter, who was with her. He smiled shyly.
“My parents can’t come until after lunch,” Cha Cha told me. “They’ve got Cotillion practice sessions all morning.”
I was not looking forward to mine, but I didn’t tell her that. “No problem” was all I said.
The Nguyens filed in, along with the Mahoneys from the antiques store next door, Bud Jefferson from Earl’s Coins and Stamps across the street, and Reverend Quinn, the minister at Gramps and Lola’s church. Mr. Henry the librarian smiled at me as he passed, and so did Ms. Ivey and Mr. Bigelow. Mr. Burnside, our principal, had brought his whole family, and there were a bunch of other people I didn’t recognize.
“So happy to help Walt and Lola’s family,” said Mrs. Farnsworth, who ran the General Store with her husband.
Augustus Wilde swooped in after her, his silver hair brushed back from his forehead like the crest of a wave, and his trademark black cape fluttering in the chilly breeze. Hatcher looked over at me and grinned.
“We’re saved! Captain Romance is here!” he whispered, and I smothered a laugh.
Augustus was Pumpkin Falls’s resident celebrity. He wrote romance novels under the alias “Augusta Savage.” His books fill up an entire shelf in the romance section, or as Hatcher calls it, the shirtless-men-kissing-beautiful-women section. Augustus drops by at least once a week. He sneaks over to the shelf that holds his books and turns them face out when he thinks no one is looking.
“Guerrilla marketing,” he’d confided to me when I’d caught him at it. “We authors have to do what we can.”
Danny and Hatcher’s wrestling buddies swarmed in last, decked out in their team sweatshirts. Scooter Sanchez grinned at me as he sauntered past. I skewered him with a look that could have stopped an elephant.
“I didn’t say anything!” he protested.
He didn’t have to. I knew exactly what he was thinking.
Belinda Winchester was the final one through the door. I caught the faint strains of “My Girl” from her ever-present earbuds as she craned to see over my shoulder.
“Where’s Miss Marple?” she demanded.
I pointed to the office, where Aunt True had corralled her for the day. Belinda marched over and clipped a leash to the dog’s collar. “Too much excitement in here for this old girl,” she announced, heading right out again. “I’m taking her for a walk.”
Carson Dawson and his crew trotted around behind Aunt True as she gave them a tour of the bookshop. She unlocked the rare book cabinet and showed off the first edition of Charlotte’s Web, which it turned out was Mr. Henry’s favorite book.
“Mine, too!” exclaimed my aunt. “It’s the perfect novel, isn’t it?”
“Sublime,” he replied as she passed it to him.
“I’m rather fond of it myself,” the TV host admitted.
Mr. Henry held the book reverently. “I’d give anything for an autographed copy!” he said, and Carson Dawson got some footage of him talking with Aunt True about E. B. White, and the author’s farm in Maine, where he’d raised actual pigs and observed actual spiders, and how he’d called the book his “hymn to the barn.”
“Fun fact,” said Mr. Henry. “Did you know that E. B. White did the narration for the audiobook? And that it took him seventeen takes to get through the passage about Charlotte’s death without crying?”
“I can never get through it without crying, either,” said Aunt True, and Mr. Henry nodded sympathetically.
I couldn’t help noticing that Scooter had managed to wedge himself in front of the camera. I also couldn’t help noticing Calhoun when he showed up a few minutes later, after the Charlotte’s Web lovefest was over. This was mostly because my aunt made such a big deal out of it.
“Truly!” she called from across the store, with one of those big “your secret is safe with me” smiles. “Your friend is here!”
My face flamed. Scooter gave me an odd look. Calhoun didn’t even glance my way, just went over and joined the wrestlers, who had formed a human chain and were ferrying boxes to the basement.
“Keep the books in the exact same order you find them, please,” Aunt True instructed them, then crossed the store to organize the group in charge of rearranging the bookshelves.
Lucas and Franklin and Amy Nguyen were put to work dusting, and Cha Cha and Jasmine and I were assigned two jobs: keeping the little kids out of everyone’s hair, and washing the glass globes on all the light fixtures.
“You can set up headquarters in my apartment,” said Aunt True. “Don’t let Memphis out, okay? There are board games in the trunk in the living room, and you’ll find rubber gloves and dish soap and whatever other cleaning products you need under the kitchen sink.”
“I have a practice session at the Starlite at eleven thirty,” I told her.
“That’s fine. Just see if someone can cover for you with the little ones while you’re gone.”
“I can do that no problem, Ms. Lovejoy,” Jasmine told her.
While Jasmine rounded up the younger kids, Cha Cha and I went to join Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Freeman, who had brought a ladder up from the basement. The two men started dismantling the light fixtures, handing the white glass globes down to Cha Cha and me.
“Wow,” said Cha Cha, as we carried the first two up to Aunt True’s apartment. She looked around in amazement. “Your aunt’s been everywhere.”
“I know, right?”
“Can I show Annie Aunt True’s scrapbooks?” begged Lauren, who had plunked herself down on the floor by the coffee table.
“I guess so,” I told her. “Be careful with them, though.”
In the kitchen, Jasmine was setting up a game of Candy Land for Pippa and Baxter. While Cha Cha returned downstairs for more glass globes, I rummaged under the sink for the rubber gloves and dish soap, and a few minutes later was up to my elbows in scummy water.
“This is disgusting,” I said, holding up a sponge that had quickly turned black with grime. “You think dissecting a frog was bad, Jazz, you’d faint if you saw all the dead bugs floating around in here.”
I rinsed the globe and handed it to her. She dried it carefully and set it on the countertop.
“One down, eleven more to go,” she said.
It took us a while to clean them all. When we were done. Cha Cha and I began carrying the now-sparkling results back downstairs. I paused in the bookshop doorway and looked around. The last time I’d seen so many people working together on a project was when all my Texas uncles showed up to build a deck for our new house in Austin. The one we sold. The one I’d still move back to in a heartbeat.
“Gotta go,” said Cha Cha, grabbing her jacket off the bench by the door. “I’m due over at the Starlite.”
“Oh, yeah,” I replied. “Calhoun’s first practice session, right?”
She nodded. “Wish me luck.”
“Truly! Could you bring your sisters down here for a minute?” called my aunt, who was standing by the sales counter with Carson Dawson. “Channel 5 wants a family shot to go with the interview.”
I nodded and trotted back upstairs.
“Hey, Truly, have you seen your aunt’s prom picture?” said Annie, holding up one of the scrapbooks. “Check out her B-O-U-F-F-A-N-T!”
She and Lauren dissolved into giggles.
“Very funny,” I said, glancing at it. Then I looked a little closer. What caught my eye wasn’t so much the picture of my aunt in her prom dress and huge hair—almost as huge as the hair on the guy she was with, whose picture I was pretty sure I’d seen somewhere before—but rather the program on the opposite page. It was for a West Hartfield High School drama production of Much Ado About Nothing, starring none other than Calhoun’s parents.
As I hustled my sisters back downstairs to the waiting camera crew, my brain shifted into sudoku mode, puzzling over this new piece of information.
“Smile, everyone!” said Carson Dawson, baring his own toothsome grin as he bounded out in front of the camera.
“Hellooooooooo, Boston!” he announced, launching into his show’s trademark opening cry. Work in the bookshop ceased as our friends and neighbors crowded around to watch. “Greetings from beautiful Pumpkin Falls, New Hampshire! I’m here today at Lovejoy Books, where an entire town is banding together to give a wounded warrior a helping hand.”
Hatcher pinched me, and I pinched him back. Could this possibly be more embarrassing?
Mr. Dawson quickly zeroed in on Pippa. “What’s your name, sweetheart?” he asked, crouching down and holding out the microphone.
“Pippa Lovejoy,” my little sister replied, twisting one of her strawberry blond ringlets around a forefinger.
“And is this your family?”
She nodded, her sparkly pink glasses flashing in the bright spotlights.
“You have a big family!” the TV host exclaimed.
Pippa nodded again. “Theven.”
“What?”
“There are theven of uth,” Pippa repeated, holding up seven fingers.
“Ohhhhhh,” chuckled Carson Dawson. “Theven of you!” He winked at the camera. “Isn’t she just the cutest, folks?”
“Get me out of here,” muttered Danny under his breath.
Carson Dawson straightened up and turned to face the rest of us.
“Whoa, tall timber!” he said when he spotted me. Chuckling, he made a show of craning his neck to look up into my face. Which was in the process of turning bright red. “What’s your name, young lady?”
“Drooly Gigantic,” said Scooter in a stage whisper from somewhere in the crowd.
My face went from red to five-alarm fire. I gritted my teeth and promised myself that I would flatten Scooter Sanchez the minute I had the chance.
“My name is Truly,” I managed to tell the TV host.
“You grow truly tall timber up here in the Granite State, don’t you?” Carson Dawson quipped, looking over at my aunt. Sizing her up, he added, “but then, I can see that your niece here is a chip off the old block.”
“Uh-oh,” muttered Hatcher. “Incoming!”
Aunt True gave Carson Dawson a withering look. Stepping forward, she put her arm around my shoulder. “Ayuh,” she replied in a broad, fake New Hampshire accent, “but then we Granite Staters always have preferred tall timber to splinters.” She looked down from her considerable height at the TV host and sniffed.
His smile faltered. He turned to the cameraman and whispered, “Remind me to edit this bit later.”
Smiling his big fake smile again, Mr. Dawson blathered on about our family, and the bookstore, and Dad’s injury, and what we were doing this weekend to surprise him. “It’s a veritable ‘Bookshop Blitz,’ folks! I’m told we won’t recognize the place when they’re done with it tomorrow.”
The lights were hot, so was my face, and my cheeks hurt from smiling. Would this ever be over?
“Good one, Aunt True,” whispered Danny, as the camera finally stopped rolling and the news crew began packing up. “Way to put that twerp in his place.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Aunt True replied, the picture of innocence.
Carson Dawson promised to return the following afternoon for some “after” footage of the remodeled bookshop. On his way out, he and his news crew posed for the photographer from the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle, who’d been prowling around snapping pictures for the past hour.
“Never apologize for being ‘tall timber,’ ” Aunt True told me, slipping her arm around my waist. “You and I were born to stand out in a crowd, Truly, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”
I gave her a rueful smile. That was the difference between an owl and a parrot. I didn’t want to stand out in a crowd—I much preferred stealth mode. But I thanked her anyway.
“This is great!” the photographer said happily to my aunt as the Channel 5 crew left. “Definitely A-section material. I’m going to push for front-page placement in this week’s issue.”
The minute she said that, something clicked. I knew where the next clue was!
But first, I had an appointment at the Starlite Dance Studio.