"Hello," said the boy with a curious look.

"Hello."

"You've moved into the cottage, haven't you? You buy a lot of books," the boy continued.

"Please, go first," the stranger said. The boy beamed at him and offered me his comic books, which meant all the other children began jockeying for place behind him. My customer withdrew again, back to the cookbooks, leaving his money and his book behind. There wasn't much for me to do but ring up the children as quickly as possible and break apart a scuffle that started when a boy grabbed the wrong bag and its rightful owner socked him in the arm.

When the last of them were gone he was still there, pretending to have been reading the backs of books the entire time. He waited another few minutes before he set a paperback down, carefully using his sleeve to rub his fingerprints off the slick cover, and returned to the counter.

"You should have gone first," I said. "They're impatient little beasts sometimes."

"I don't mind," he stammered. "May I have my book now?"

"Of course," I said, giving up on restarting our argument about payment. I offered him the book wrapped in a clear plastic bag, normally reserved for rainy weather or people with a lot to carry. "See? So you can make sure you have the right one this time."

He looked down at the title through the plastic. "Yes, I see," he said gravely, clearly uncertain whether or not I was joking.

"So you've moved into the cottage at The Pines?" I asked, as the ancient cash register spat out a receipt. I tore it off and offered it to him. He shoved it in a pocket absently.

"Word travels fast."

"Get used to it. I'm Christopher," I added, offering him my hand.

"Lucas," he replied, hesitating briefly before shaking.

"Staying the winter?" I asked, while he shifted uneasily and glanced around.

"Probably through spring at least."

"You working in town?"

"Not really," he said abruptly. "Thank you – have a nice day."

He was out the door and down the steps before I could get another reply out.

***

It is a natural human urge to settle in certain formations, which can be repeated in a village of five thousand even more easily than a city of five million. The village is merely the city stripped to its basic component parts, after all: places to gather, places to buy and sell, places to live, places to play. The church, the shops, the houses, the park.

Low Ferry's major road was a two-lane blacktop lined with shops, the only reliably-plowed street in the winter. During the summer the cheap asphalt sometimes melted and stuck to peoples' shoes. My shop, and my little apartment above it, stood about midway down the road in the heart of our bustling retail district which consisted of my bookshop, the hardware store, the cafe -- which was also a general store and sold homemade jam in summer -- a department store with a grocer's built into one side of it, and two antique shops that closed when the tourist season ended each year. At the northern end of the road, before it shot off in search of a freeway to join, there stood a small squat wooden church which was attended by nearly everyone who lived in the village.

Spreading out from the shops in a vaguely oval pattern were shady streets with pleasant grass-yarded houses, none more than a decent half-hour's walk from the center of town. The two lower schools stood on one side of town and the high school on the other, closer to the manicured sports field. To a child it must have seemed pretty tedious, spending eighteen years with the same forty or fifty faces. Or maybe it was reassuring. I went to school in Chicago, where the faces changed from year to year.

Beyond the village, the access roads stretched between hills and fields, threading around farms and across a river that flowed under the highway to the southeast, and routinely flooded the roads during the spring thaw.

Off to the west, one of the roads led to an old abandoned farm, rotting for lack of use. Before the sodden and crumbling farmhouse, however, the road split and the smaller fork wound up a small hill covered in pine trees. In the shade of The Pines was a little cottage, probably built by the man who once built and abandoned the farmhouse. It was situated so that the road curled around the house, the front door facing south-west and the kitchen windows predominantly east to catch the sunrise in the winter. The hill and trees shielded the western sunset, making for early darkness even when the days were long. It's difficult to find a reason anyone would have built the cottage or a reason anyone would stay there, since a wide two miles of field lay between the cottage and the nearest edge of the village. In the winter it would be cut off without a four-wheel-drive or a long cold hike on snowshoes, and it had no advantage in its isolation.

In addition, the roof leaked.

Paula, who ran the hardware store, was the second person to ask me about Lucas. She came over the day after I was commissioned to repair the Farmer's Guide, bringing with her a mallet and a stylus set I'd asked to borrow so I could emboss the new leather cover. I capped the scalpel I was using, set it somewhere I'd remember to find it later, and joined her at the counter.

"Tools for the master," she said, passing them over. "Whaddaya give me for them?"

"My undying gratitude?"

"Can I eat gratitude?"

"Fine, grab a few magazines," I said, waving a hand at the rack while I looked through the box of oddly-shaped implements.