The Speed of Mercy by Christy Conlin (good books for high schoolers txt) 📕

was now more of a meadow of high grasses and wild-flowers. An old swing hung from a tree. The haze had blown away and the blue sky hitting the blue bay gave the place an oddly monochromatic look. Even the fir trees were an unearthly pale blue.

Mal sat on the verandah of the abandoned house. Her phone was now dead. The rocking chair was rickety and she creaked back and forth on it, trying not to fall asleep. She was still on antibiotics. She hadn’t had any appetite since she arrived in Nova Scotia. That was six days ago — first jetlagged one in Halifax, the day trip to Mercy Lake, and three days in the motel. The day at the museum in Bigelow Bay with the historian and then with the crazy lady, Seraphina, saying she knew Mal’s mother, telling her to leave.

Mal took a sip of water from her bottle. Not a single vehicle had passed and she guessed she’d been in the rocking chair for more than half an hour, probably longer. She was light-headed, probably because she was dehydrated. She would have to be more careful. Or maybe she should just drive to the airport and fly home. That would be the sensible thing to do. She could give her research (although she felt like an idiot even thinking of her papers and notes and emails as research) to a real journalist. What if someone had hacked her email? She hadn’t even checked it since she’d been here. Before she left, she’d deleted all her unanswered mail, unsubscribed from newsletters and blogs, all the things that were eating up her focus and concentration. Set auto-reply on her email. Deactivated her social media. A full-on digital detox. She would try life old-school.

Mal closed her eyes. What to do next? Back down to the Valley to the Jericho Centre to try to find the girl? The woman, she reminded herself. The at least middle-aged woman by now. Or find the poet the historian had told her about? Or drive to the airport and fly back to California and get some proper rest, shake the strep throat and figure out a way to —

“You there.”

Mal opened her eyes. A very old woman with a thick wooden walking stick was coming up the driveway, almost at the steps to the verandah. Mal stood up. Her face was a mosaic of intricate wrinkles and her hair was dyed raven black. At least Mal thought it was dyed. “Hi there. I’m looking for Lucretia,” she said casually, the way she would if she had an appointment. Mal cleared her throat, feeling ridiculous.

The old lady pounded her stick into the ground and then she cradled the top of it. The cane was rough-hewn, still with bark. “Well, aren’t we all. She left some years back. Went over yonder. I don’t expect we’ll see her again here. Maybe she’ll appear eastward, down by Lupin Cove. She was a distant relation of mine. And yours. We’re all from the same family line, you understand. So the story goes. But no one remembers the old ways anymore.”

Mal did not understand. But at that, the old lady turned, done talking, and headed back down the driveway and right onto the road, past the old swing, and then disappeared behind the line of trees. Mal closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. It was all so bizarre. She wouldn’t be surprised if the Log Lady jumped out from behind a tree and shouted, “Who killed Laura Palmer?” Mal hurried down the driveway and ran past her car onto the dirt road. The old woman had vanished. “Wait,” she called out, but the word just echoed back, a strange foreboding sound dangling on the hot air of the lonesome dirt road.

A Walking Tour of Seabury

by the Sea.

Sisterhood.

Then

They are both awake at first light, her father downstairs with his coffee and research and teaching preparations, Stella lying in bed thinking about Charlotte Sometimes, a book she read last year. She brought it with her but she knows better than to try to read it now, bringing on a headache. Instead, she rests in bed, the soft light coming in through the sheers. Stella pictures the book in her mind, but when she imagines a page, it is blank. All the pages are blank. It was a Christmas gift from her mother, a book about a girl who was a reluctant time traveller — from postwar England to Second World War England and even further back, to the Great War, almost trapped in these layers of time, returning, trading places with a girl from the wartime, a girl she later understands died, which was the only reason she could travel in time. Stella feels tears in her eyes for this fictional character, trapped forever in a paperback, living her life over and over again, unable to escape the sad truth at the end.

She stays in bed listening to the birds outside until she hears her father coming up the creaky stairs, knocking softly on her door. “Awake, Little Bear?”

They eat toast and blueberries together at the kitchen table before heading outside.

It is only a five-minute walk to the harbour. There are two wharves where fishing boats are tied. “Lobster and scallop boats, Stella. They head out from the harbour into the inner bay, the outer bay, and then into the Bay of Fundy herself,” her father says as they walk through Seabury’s downtown, if it can be called that. The village nestles on the side of a wide bend in the Mercy River, a tidal river that expands as it flows into a huge bay, now obscured by the fog bank. Main Street runs through the village and then weaves and slopes up into what her father tells her is “inland Nova Scotia,” a landscape of lakes and rivers, forests and glens.

“That’s the enchantment of Nova Scotia, Stella. It’s pocket-sized but so diverse.”

Thin residential streets