“Don’t think you know the first thing about Jimmy, because you don’t,” Stella informed.
“Sounds like you do.”
“Are we discussing our love lives?”
The glare was worsening; it was white hot, as a matter of fact.
“Do you want to talk about your mother and me?”
“Absolutely not.” Stella took a step back. “Good God, no.” As she thought that over, she had a most sour expression. Her mother in love? Just the idea made her head hurt. She looked up at the beehive. “There are too many bees. Aren’t you afraid you’ll be stung?”
“Watch.” Matt went to a bee drowsing on the bark of one of the cut branches and snatched it up in his hand. When he opened his hand for Stella to see, the bee hovered there for a moment, stunned, then calmly flew off.
Stella laughed out loud. “You’re nuts.”
“You’re the one with the black hair.”
“I wanted to honor her,” Stella said. For some reason she felt like crying. “I wanted somebody to remember Rebecca.”
“So did I.”
Stella was standing on a completely familiar corner, yet she felt impossibly lost. Could it be she and Matt wanted the same thing?
“I think you deserve this.”
Matt reached in his pocket for the compass Jenny had given him.
“Your mother gave it to me. I guess your grandmother gave it to her. But I think it’s meant to be yours.”
“Are you trying to buy my friendship or something?”
“Nope.”
“What are you trying to do?”
“Cut down an eyesore.”
Matt went back to work and Stella watched for a while. The sound of the saw and the hum of bees echoed all through town. People had to shout at each other in order to be heard, and there were some folks who had a craving for honey when they weren’t even partial to sweets.
After a while, Stella decided to try out Rebecca’s compass. It showed true north and felt cool as the north in her hands. She walked for half a mile, and when she looked up, she was standing outside the library. That’s where she’d been led.
Mrs. Gibson was locking up, but she agreed to let Stella run in and look for the bracelet she said she had lost. Mrs. Gibson more than understood. She wasn’t judgmental; her own daughter Solange had tinted her hair blue when she was a teenager and run off to New York to be an actress.
Go on, Mrs. Gibson said, unlocking the door that was carved out of local wood, another huge oak, felled before anyone in town had been born.
Stella had told one last lie, but one which wouldn’t hurt anyone. The bracelet her father had given her was around her wrist, as always. This lie told to Mrs. Gibson tasted plain in Stella’s mouth, that’s how close to the truth it was.
Two minutes, Mrs. Gibson called, but that was time enough for Stella to run in and leave her uncle’s thesis on the table in the historical records room. Nearby was a case where important artifacts were displayed: the town seal of Unity, the land grants from the king, a letter from Lincoln to Anton Hathaway’s parents, citing the boy’s bravery and his sacrifice to his country.
“I see you found what you were looking for,” Mrs. Gibson said when Stella came out of the library. Stella held up her hand and shook it so that the bell on her bracelet made a tinkling sound.
“Every time someone died in this town they rang the bell that’s up at the old meetinghouse. But not for Rebecca. Matt wrote about it in his thesis.”
“Did he?”
“The meetinghouse burned to the ground in the big fire. That’s when the bell melted. Matt told me all about it.”
Stella remembered a mention of the slight of the unrung bell in the last chapter of the thesis. She found herself walking Mrs. Gibson to her car, wanting to hear more about Matt.
“He’s a good person and he’ll be a good teacher. I’m glad he’s going to get his degree.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” Stella said.
“My feelings exactly,” the librarian agreed. “That thesis is bound to turn up.”
After Mrs. Gibson got into her car and drove off, Stella stood there for a while, watching the exhaust from the car turn from black to blue to gray. When she left the parking lot, Stella took the long way back to the tea house. She passed the firehouse, which never would have existed without Leonie Sparrow, and the elementary school, founded by Sarah Sparrow, and the town hall, built a few years after Rosemary Sparrow ran so fast through the woods that she managed to save every boy fighting in the fields. The whole town turned blue at this hour, the white houses, the church with its steeple, Town Hall, the train station where the clock chimed the time. Blue as the shadows of the plane trees, the lilacs, the sidewalks, all of it blue as could be before the dark fell, a curtain of night so deep most people in town could sleep well, and the rest—the guilty, the lovesick, the aging, the sorrowful—would simply have to face whatever the night might bring.