As I followed my family across the village green toward the waiting school bus, I waved to an elderly woman seated on a bench. She waved back. Thelma Farnsworth and her sister Ethel were married to a pair of brothers. Ethel and her husband Ike Farnsworth ran the General Store; Thelma and Elmer Farnsworth had a small dairy farm at the edge of town. Every summer, the Farnsworth sisters also helped out as cooks at Camp Lovejoy.
“Are you part of a circus?” Thelma asked me, puzzled, as the stream of Giffords in matching T-shirts flowed past her bench.
“We might as well be,” I muttered in response.
“Did you hear that, Elmer?” Thelma shouted to her husband, who was bent over a nearby trash bin, sorting through its contents. A bag full of empty soda cans was at his feet. Elmer loved collecting junk. “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” was his motto.
“ELMER!” Thelma called again, louder this time. “THE CIRCUS IS IN TOWN!”
Elmer was hard of hearing but refused to wear a hearing aid. The reason I knew this pretty much summed up my life in Pumpkin Falls. There were no secrets in a town the size of ours. Everybody knew everything about everyone else—including the fact that Elmer Farnsworth had a stubborn streak which, combined with his pride, was keeping him from admitting that he didn’t hear as well as he used to. This had been a topic of lively discussion recently on the General Store’s front porch, where he and his buddies liked to hang out, and where I often overheard their conversations when I was eating ice cream with my friends.
Elmer snapped upright like he’d been poked with a pin. “I LOVE THE CIRCUS!” he bellowed.
I did a mental face-palm and ran for the bus.
I loved my family and I loved our reunions, but I didn’t love being such a public spectacle. Stealth mode was more my speed, my term for flying under the radar. I didn’t love people staring at us or the prospect of being front-page news, and I especially didn’t love our matching T-shirts—this year’s were a blinding shade of neon green with a bright orange pumpkin on the front and THE GIFFORDS GO TO PUMPKIN FALLS! splatted on the back.
I hated to admit it, but as much as I’d been looking forward to our family reunion, I was looking forward to it being over, too. Because then my perfect summer could finally begin.
CHAPTER 2
I hummed to myself as I set out paper plates and napkins on the half dozen picnic tables that stretched end to end across our backyard. My dad had tacked a note to the bulletin board at the General Store last week, asking if anyone had any extra we could borrow, and just like that, trucks had started pulling into our driveway with picnic tables. Small towns had their drawbacks, but there were definitely advantages, too. I’d always thought that Texas was friendly, but Pumpkin Falls could give it a run for its money in the neighborly department any day of the week.
I plunked down another paper plate and thought about the perfect summer that would soon be mine. It shimmered in my mind like a lane in the pool first thing in the morning, before anyone else dove into the water. Smooth as glass, not a single ripple—perfection! Well, except for the fact that Mackenzie wouldn’t be here. That definitely counted as a ripple. Still, I was looking forward to long lazy days, with plenty of time for bird-watching and bike rides and hanging out with my friends. Plus swim team. Summer swim team was the best. It was much more relaxed than during the school year, and practices were going to be outside, just like in Texas, since Coach Maynard had wangled special privileges for our team at Lovejoy College’s outdoor pool.
Helping out at the bookstore was near the top of my list of things to look forward to as well, which was kind of a surprise. When we’d first arrived in New Hampshire, I’d thought the bookstore was stupid. Well, not exactly stupid—I’d loved visiting it when Gramps and Lola, my Lovejoy grandparents, had been in charge—but to me, the family business represented the whole reason we’d had to move away from our home in Austin, so I’d resented it at first.
That wasn’t fair, of course. It wasn’t the bookstore’s fault that my father had lost his right arm in a bomb explosion in Afghanistan, and that he couldn’t be a pilot anymore. But it had taken me a while to understand that.
Lovejoy’s Books had been in a sorry mess when we’d first arrived, teetering on the brink of closure. But my dad and Aunt True—with help from all of us, and from Belinda Winchester, the town’s resident cat lady, who had unexpectedly stepped forward to invest in the business—had done what had at first seemed impossible. These days, the bookshop’s future was looking a lot less rocky.
It still surprised me how much I loved spending time there. Unlike my sister Lauren, who loved books the way I loved water, I wasn’t the world’s biggest bookworm. But there was more to running a bookstore than just reading, as it turned out. I got to help Aunt True come up with creative displays for the windows, which I was surprisingly good at. I got to use the cash register and help set up for events, and I was Aunt True’s assistant for Story Hour on Saturday mornings. And now that we’d added Cup and Chaucer, the mini café that was my aunt’s latest marketing scheme, I also got to run the espresso machine and make hot beverages for our customers, which was fun.
And then there was the cherry on top of my summer sundae: Romeo Calhoun.
Calhoun loomed large in
