A good traveler has no fixed plans and is not intent on arriving.
—Lao Tzu
SEYMOUR LAUGHED. “PAID in books, huh? That’s a unique tax dodge.”
I spoke up. “Norma also bought a lot of books. Right off the shelves, and special orders, too.”
“Maybe we should check the titles of those purchases,” Seymour said.
Brainert threw up his hands. “Now, why would we do that, for goodness’ sake?”
“Because . . . if she bought An Idiot’s Guide to Burglary, or How to Fence Stolen Goods, or even a book by Bill Mason, then I think we may have found our culprit.”
“Bill Mason?” Brainert cried. “I read Confessions of a Master Jewel Thief myself. Does that make me a suspect?”
Seymour smirked. “Nope. You have the perfect alibi. You were drunk as a skunk.”
Brainert sneered but said nothing. Seymour swung around to face me.
“What’s Norma’s last name, anyway?”
“You’re the one who brought her to town,” Brainert huffed. “Don’t you know?”
“Hey, give me a break, Brainpan. Norma lives the van life. I don’t know her last name because the United States Postal Service doesn’t deliver mail to transients—only their PO boxes, when they have them. I’m sure Pen knows her name, though.”
Seymour and Brainert both faced me, and I drew a blank. I only knew her by what some folks around town called her, though I was too polite to refer to the woman as “Norma the Nomad.”
“Stanton,” Aunt Sadie said with a decisive nod. “I remember now. Her name is Norma Stanton.”
“Miss or missus,” Seymour pressed. “Single, divorced, or widowed?”
This time Sadie and I both drew a blank, and I suddenly realized how few facts we actually knew about the history of Norma Stanton.
My aunt must have drawn the same conclusion, because she began to reminisce aloud.
“I remember the day she came two years ago. Norma’s van was following Seymour’s ice cream truck down Cranberry Street, towing that funny-looking teardrop trailer.”
I remembered that day, too.
Norma arrived the same day as the crows. It was late October—almost Halloween—when the townsfolk woke to find that thousands of those ebony-feathered birds had taken over our quaint little town.
“MOM!” MY SON cried. “The bus driver said they canceled school!”
I was kneeling on the plank floor of my bookshop, assembling a display for the new John Grisham hardcover, when Spencer burst through the front door. My aunt followed him inside a moment later. Each time the door opened, the raucous caw-caw-caws of a thousand crows drowned out all other sound.
“Since school’s closed, I’m going upstairs to play video games.”
Spencer dashed past me and was on the stairs to the second-floor apartment before I could question him. That left it to Sadie to fill me in.
“The driver told me Principal McConnell sent him around to inform everyone school has been canceled because of the crows—”
“Because of the crows?”
“The woman said the playground is covered with birds. The crows took over the swing sets, the climbing bars, the sliding board, the bullpen, and all the benches around the Little League’s baseball diamond.”
“But they’re just our fine feathered friends,” I replied as I stuck Mr. Grisham’s head onto the tube cloaked behind his standee body. “I’ll bet the administration would be just as frightened by a horde of toddlers converging on the place as they are of the crows—”
Hah, I know I would, cracked Jack. Be scared, that is. Kids carry disease.
“Or maybe the principal watched Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds once too often,” I continued, ignoring the voice in my head.
“I don’t think the principal is wrong,” Sadie replied with a barely suppressed shiver. “I just walked along Cranberry Street on my way back from Bud Napp’s hardware store. You would not believe what I saw. Those birds are everywhere, squawking so loud you can’t hear yourself think.
“They’re crowded together on sagging telephone wires. Crows are on roofs, store signs, and streetlights. In the town square the birds took over the benches, the chess tables—even the gazebo. And yes, they’re perched on our brand-new sign, too.”
Sadie went quiet for a moment, her eyes focused on the street outside. Suddenly she pointed. “Will you look at that.”
Peering through the display window I saw Seymour pulling up to Buy the Book in his ice cream truck. Parking right behind him was a white van towing a teardrop-shaped trailer. As we watched, a lanky, middle-aged woman in a flannel shirt, denim overalls, and a baseball cap exited the van holding a half-eaten chocolate-covered ice cream bar.
When Seymour spied us through the window and waved, Sadie and I went outside to greet him and his new friend. We had to speak loudly to be heard over the bird cries.
“Can you believe these crows?” Seymour shouted. “All we need is Tippi Hedren, and we’ve got Hitch’s sequel!”
“What are they looking for in Quindicott?” Sadie replied. “Don’t crows eat dead things, just like vultures?”
“They’re carrion birds, for sure,” said Seymour.
Sadie hugged herself. “It’s creepy.”
Seymour’s new friend didn’t think so. “The fact that they commune with the dead is what makes crows and ravens so special,” she said with the excited enthusiasm of a motivated teacher. “The Vikings believed these birds were envoys sent by Odin himself to bestow some great wisdom to the human race. In Celtic mythology, crows and ravens are interchangeable, and both are believed to carry messages between the realms of the living and the dead.”
“But what’s their message?” Seymour asked.
The woman smiled, green eyes twinkling beneath her baseball cap. “Sometimes you just have to watch them, listen to them, and maybe you’ll understand.”
I didn’t know quite what to say to that. Thankfully Seymour stepped in.
“This is Norma,” he announced. “She saved my skin just now, out on the old rural route from Waverly.”
“Come inside,” Sadie said. “It’s quieter in the bookstore.”
Norma was immediately taken with Buy the Book. Her eyes wandered across the parade of covers and spines almost as soon as she entered. After some small talk, Norma excused herself to use the restroom at the back of the store, and Seymour told Sadie and me how they met.
“I was driving my truck back from Waverly, where I picked up a huge consignment of frozen treats. I took the back roads to avoid the highway since my truck doesn’t exactly move at the speed of a Formula One race car.
“So, I’m out in the middle of nowhere when suddenly the engine cuts out. I could not figure out what was wrong, but I did know two things: I was stuck, and the freezer had stopped working along with the engine.”
Seymour frowned. “You would not believe how hard it is to find a tow truck big enough to tow another truck. I was calling everywhere and getting nowhere. Meanwhile hundreds of dollars of frozen goodies were ready to melt.
“I was cursing myself for getting into the ice cream business when Norma pulls over and asks if I need help. Before you know it, she’d unloaded a gas-powered generator from that teardrop trailer she’s pulling. Like some expert, she hooked it up to my electrical system and restarted the freezers.”
Seymour sighed. “It took over an hour for the tow truck to arrive, but Norma stuck with me the whole time. When the tow truck driver finally showed up, he glommed onto the problem—it was just an electrical cord that came loose. Anyway, he fixed the truck on the spot without towing it, and here we are.”
Norma returned with a sunny smile. She’d removed the baseball cap to expose a brown pixie cut. Though her hair was lightly streaked with strands of gray, she had few wrinkles and wore no makeup. Her face looked fresh with glowing skin and cherub-like cheeks, and when she spoke her animated expressions and bright green eyes appeared to tap into a flowing stream of positive energy living inside her.
“This is a charming place you have here, almost magical,” Norma gushed. “I can feel the good vibes. And that is some space attached to the store. Do reading groups meet there?”
“A lot of them,” Sadie replied with a note of pride. “There’s two or three groups who meet almost every week.”
“Where are you from?” I asked Norma.
The woman shrugged. “I travel everywhere and nowhere.”
“I mean where do you live,” I pressed.
“In my van,” Norma replied, as if it were the most common thing in the world. “There’s ‘nowhere to go but everywhere.’ So I just ‘keep rolling under the stars.’ ”
“That sounds familiar,” Sadie said. “Is that from—”
“Jack Kerouac, On the Road—the original scroll.”
Sadie nodded and returned her sly smile.
Norma turned back to me. “Wherever the road takes me, that’s where I call home—and that’s my own quote!” She winked.
“I respect your free-spirit spirit,” I said, “and your love of Kerouac, but where are you rolling at the moment?”
“I’m heading for Maine. I heard from a road buddy about a warehouse hiring seasonal workers. Most nomads head south or west for the winter, but I actually like cold and snow. It’s what I grew up with. Anyway, jobs for folks like me are plentiful around the holidays, and the Evergreens Campground in Solon offers year-round accommodations with water and electricity hookups.”
Seymour jumped in.
“Because she helped me, poor Norma is behind schedule and will never make it to Maine tonight. I suggested she stay around here, but she needs a place to park her van and trailer. Trenchers’ Campground up near Picket’s Farm should work for her, don’t you think?”
Sadie shook her head. “It’s closed for the season. Annie Trencher was in here yesterday. She told me she and her husband already moved with their kids back to their place in town.”
“Rats, what rotten luck,” Seymour said.
Norma touched his big shoulder. “Don’t worry. I’ll find a place. There are plenty of roads out there and a lot of woods, too. I’ll find a spot.”
“I won’t have you shivering in the wilderness,” Sadie insisted. “Not when we can help. Let me make a quick phone call . . .”
And that’s exactly what she did. Sadie called our pastor, Reverend Waterman, who agreed to her idea of letting Norma stash her van and trailer in the church parking lot. He even allowed her to use the restroom and shower in the church basement.
Norma was grateful for the help.
Problem solved—with a little ecclesiastic charity and auntie ingenuity.