Vivian's Key

The key came back on Christmas Eve. The woman who left it knocked on Christmas morning.

Vivian Bauer is eighty years old, small as a sparrow, and the last person alive who knew Margaret Hale's mother as a girl. She drove the Millbrook Free Library's bookmobile in the 1960s, left town in June of 1968, and never said why. Now she sits at Margaret's kitchen table every Sunday afternoon, telling her story one piece at a time, and stopping, every Sunday, just short of the end.

Meanwhile Gus has finally talked the borough into a new lock for the library's side door. When the old one comes out, a valentine falls out with it: red construction paper, a pressed violet, and two letters in pencil. E.P. Eleanor Pruitt ran the library for thirty one years and, as far as anyone knows, never received a valentine in her life.

And on the betting board at Bea's diner, Frank Dombrowski's fifty dollars now sits under BY VALENTINE'S.

Before the fourteenth of February, Margaret will learn who loved Mrs. Pruitt, why her own mother never laughed out loud, and what Vivian Bauer gave up the summer she left Millbrook.

Vivian's Key is the third book in The Lost and Found Library Mysteries, a gentle small town series about the things people leave behind and the neighbors who help bring them home. It answers the questions readers have carried since Rose's Ring and Rhoda's Recipe, and it is best enjoyed after them. No murders. Still more pie.