The Boxcar Librarian

by Brianna Labuskes

Genres: Historical Fiction; Small Town & Rural; LGBT Lesbian; Historical Mysteries

Synopsis

Inspired by true events, a thrilling Depression-era novel from the author of The Librarian of Burned Books about a woman’s quest to uncover a mystery surrounding a local librarian and the Boxcar Library—a converted mining train that brought books to isolated rural towns in Montana.

When Works Progress Administration (WPA) editor Millie Lang finds herself on the wrong end of a potential political scandal, she’s shipped off to Montana to work on the state’s American Guide Series—travel books intended to put the nation’s destitute writers to work.

Millie arrives to an eclectic staff claiming their missed deadlines are due to sabotage, possibly from the state’s powerful Copper Kings who don’t want their long and bloody history with union organizers aired for the rest of the country to read. But Millie begins to suspect that the answer might instead lie with the town’s mysterious librarian, Alice Monroe.

More than a decade earlier, Alice Monroe created the Boxcar Library in order to deliver books to isolated mining towns where men longed for entertainment and connection. Alice thought she found the perfect librarian to staff the train car in Colette Durand, a miner’s daughter with a shotgun and too many secrets behind her eyes. 

Now, no one in Missoula will tell Millie why both Alice and Colette went out on the inaugural journey of the Boxcar Library, but only Alice returned.

The three women’s stories dramatically converge in the search to uncover what someone is so desperately trying to hide: what happened to Colette Durand.

Inspired by the fascinating, true history of Missoula’s Boxcar Library, the novel blends the story of the strong, courageous women who survived and thrived in the rough and rowdy West with that of the power of standing together to fight for workers’ lives. And through it all shines the capacity of books to provide connection and light to those who need it most.

 

Release date: March 4, 2025

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 384

Sample

Chapter One
Millie

Washington, DC

1936

Millie Lang could hear the girls gossiping through the thin walls of the boardinghouse.

They were talking about her.

She tried to tune them out as she used up the last bit of her cherry lipstick. It was a luxury that she shouldn’t have splurged on but sometimes when the entire world was dreary and terrible, a pop of red could save the day.

Millie kissed a handkerchief and then smoothed down the fashionable bob she was still getting used to. Desperate for a paycheck, she’d cut off her long, thick braid right after she’d left her ranch in Texas in order to compete for jobs in the city.

It turned out a hairstyle couldn’t hide the stink of a life of mucking out stalls and slipping in cow dung.

Not in Dallas—where she’d first landed—and not here in DC, either.

The girls in the room next to hers giggled as if they could hear her thoughts, and Millie shook herself out of her mood.

There were plenty of people in the country who had worse things to deal with right now than snide remarks and cold shoulders. Maybe Millie had naively dreamed of making friends at Mrs. Crenshaw’s boardinghouse, but mostly she was just thankful for a roof over her head. Even if said roof leaked with the slightest hint of rain.

Millie beat the other girls to the kitchen, though not the landlady who had likely been there since 5 a.m.

“Good morning,” she said softly, always too aware that as a tall Texan, people expected her to boom out greetings and obscenities alike.

Mrs. Crenshaw grunted something approximating a hello in return, and then went back to her behemoth of a stove. Millie tucked into the slice of toast and creamed eggs without any further pleasantries. The widow who ran the boardinghouse was neither welcoming nor rude. Millie was just another boarder in a long string of them that let her keep a roof over her own head.

The other girls filled in around Millie, chattering on about their plans for the evening. Never once had they asked Millie if she were free, and she tried not to mind.

They were all luckier than a lot of folks and if she had to keep repeating that every few minutes to get through these mornings, then that was a small price to pay for keeping the right attitude.

When Millie stepped out of the boardinghouse, she turned, as she always did, to try to catch sight of the gleaming white dome of the Capitol. Laundry lines full of undershirts and unmentionables crisscrossed the garden court, blocking the view for now, but the dome was there, a promise that there were people working to try to make Americans’ lives easier.

At least, that’s what she told herself.

Barefoot, dirt-crusted children of various ages played jacks in front of the house across from Mrs. Crenshaw’s, their mother darning clothes on the back porch. Millie hopscotched through

the remnants of a board drawn several days ago, wobbling dramatically to make the children laugh and the mother shoot her a wan smile.

They hadn’t traded names despite the fact that they saw each other most days. A lot of people simply didn’t have space in their lives for one more thing to remember.

Mrs. Crenshaw’s was one of dozens of slim brick town houses behind the Capitol. Some of the people who Millie worked with had deemed the area a slum, but Millie had trouble seeing it that way. Of course, the neighborhood smelled of human waste and garbage, beer and vomit, but that was the natural consequence when the privies were in the streets and families were packed into too-small rooms because they couldn’t afford anything else.

The people, though, they all helped each other. Maybe Millie didn’t know the name of the mother who darned clothes across the courtyard, but if Millie asked her for her last eggs, the woman would give them to her.

She waved toward the old men who’d taken up their daily posts on the stoops just at the edge of the neighborhood before it gave way to federal buildings, and then she had to sidestep the grocer who tried to entice her into buying an apple. It was a dance they did every day—the man knew Millie sent all her extra pennies back home to Texas where her aunt and uncle were still raising six boys through years of devastating dust storms—but it was his way of saying hello and she mostly appreciated it.

Then came the job boards. A large group of loud men jostled for position just ahead of her on the sidewalk, where they waited every day.

Each morning, someone would hang a list of positions that needed to be filled, and anyone who was unemployed in the area lined up for the handful of opportunities. Some people camped out overnight just so they could get the first shot at the job.

There were never enough for everyone who needed the work.

Millie scanned the crowd for a checkered hat, and found it on the outskirts. She hated any day she spotted the thing—it meant Phil likely wouldn’t get work that day, because she should be gone by now. But Millie also loved the few minutes she got to talk with the one person she considered a friend in the city.

She bumped an elbow into Phil’s side. “A little too much fun last night?”

Phil—or Philomena by birth, though she would never go by that while job-hunting—rolled her eyes. “The boys were sick and Lilly has colic. So, whatever the opposite of too much fun is, that’s what we had.”

Millie had met Phil in the shared courtyard of their buildings three days after Millie had moved to Washington. They could only ever chat briefly in passing because Phil had three younger siblings she helped provide for by dressing as a man for the better paying jobs. Still, Millie had recognized a rare kindred spirit in her.

“I’m sorry.” If Millie had any extra money at all beyond the couple cents she’d used to splurge on that lipstick, she would have gladly handed it over. Instead, all she had to offer was a book. She pulled it out now and watched Phil’s entire face brighten.

For Phil, who never let herself splurge on anything including lipstick, one

book could make her entire month. Millie always hunted for any that had been discarded at work or in cheap library sales or even on the top of trash bins, though she never mentioned that part. She’d only ever been able to bring a few, but each one had felt like a gift to Millie instead of from her.

“The Secret Garden,” Millie offered.

Phil paged through it. “‘Is the Spring coming? What is it like?’ ‘It is the sun shining on the rain and the rain falling on the sunshine . . .’”

The words tugged at Millie. The past few years had felt like a never-ending winter, and while none of them could truly see the spring yet, there were signs that it might be coming.

“This is for you,” Phil said, shoving a newspaper under Millie’s arm. Millie knew it would be open to the advertisements for housing because Phil hated the gossiping girls more than Millie did. Millie couldn’t afford anything better, not with how she sent most of her paycheck home. It was the least she could do after her aunt June and uncle Matthew had taken her in as a child, but it often meant eating a handful of pickles for lunch and potato soup for dinner, always wondering if she was one emergency away from sleeping beneath someone’s overhang instead of in a sometimes-warm bed.

Phil winked at her. “And now it’s time to make my own luck.”

Then she was gone, ducking under the arms of the larger men pushing and shoving to get closer to the job board.

Millie was still smiling as she caught the streetcar toward the old theater that housed her little department of the Works Progress Administration.

The Federal One Project was the Roosevelt administration’s answer of what to do with America’s white-collar workers—the artists and actors and authors and historians—who were just as unemployed as the rest of the country. Out of it had been born local theater initiatives, Living Newspapers, murals on post office walls, and best of all, at least in Millie’s opinion, the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP).

In the beginning, there had been lofty goals that the FWP could spark an American Renaissance in literature. In reality, that simply wasn’t a practical way to employ the sheer number of writers who needed relief.

So the American Guide Series—Baedeker-like travel books for each state—was born.

Introducing America

to Americans was the tagline used most around the office. So many people were like Millie and had never ventured outside the town in which they grew up. The guides weren’t just meant for road trippers, but also for anyone who wanted to learn about the rest of the country in a way they hadn’t ever been able to before.

People had ideas about the places they didn’t know or understand, and they were all eager to assume the worst rumors they’d heard, especially these days. The guides helped show what it was really like out there, to replace scary shadows with names and faces, landmarks and landscapes.

Their existence—and that of the FWP—also meant Millie had a job. She wasn’t sure what would have happened to her without the program.

Aunt June and Uncle Matthew had been so generous to take her in and feed her, but about a week after they’d survived a dust storm so biblically vengeful it was given its own name, Millie had overheard a discussion she probably shouldn’t have. June had suggested to Matthew that she should simply walk into the dust-laden wasteland so there would be one less mouth to feed.

Millie had left the next day, headed to Dallas. Looking back seven months later, she couldn’t imagine what had given her the courage to do so. If she had to guess, it had probably simply been ignorance of how bad it could be on her own.

Dallas had quickly enlightened her.

She generally thought of herself as resourceful, but she wasn’t sure that she would have made it another week in the city if she hadn’t seen the Federal Writers’ Project advertised on a sign in the window of a shoe store.

The program had seemed too good to be true.

It hadn’t taken her long to realize that maybe it was.

But she had a fresh start in DC, and she didn’t want to waste it.

The streetcar stopped not far from the Old Auditorium—the converted theater that was acting as the headquarters for the Federal One Project. Millie took one last gulp of fresh air before she entered the stifling building. DC had been built on a swamp, and the Old Auditorium didn’t let them go a day without remembering that.

She was already damp by the time she took her seat on the old stage. Millie was used to heat, but not this air that suffocated a person with each breath.

Discreetly, she dabbed at her forehead, and then she reached for the packet of pages waiting for her on the desk.

What she liked most about her new editorial position at the FWP headquarters was that she got to read travel essays from all the states rather than just Texas. Millie enjoyed the thrill of being transported across the country and then back again on any given day as she searched for misspellings and grammatical errors in the guides.

Today’s pages were from Louisiana, a state that was known to be troublesome to edit. Not because of the content, but because the state director was the wife of a friend of a senator and had grand visions of being the hostess of a poets’ studio. She had such little interest in the guides, she’d originally forbidden her staff from working on them in hopes they would instead

instead create the next great Walden.

The woman might have been removed from the position, but her legacy lived on in the purple prose that was known to slip through into the essays.

Still, Millie always liked working on Louisiana. It had been the state just next door to her own—and it was one she’d never been to or even thought of before.

Curiosity had died in the years after the crash, when survival had been constantly front of mind. But like the spring in The Secret Garden, curiosity was in the air once more. There wasn’t quite room for it yet—as Millie had thought just that morning about learning the name of her neighbor. It was slowly returning, though.

And that was important, Millie was beginning to realize. When someone was curious about the world, about both their neighbors and strangers who they shared a country with, it countered the hate that could brew from ignorance and fear.

Also, it was simply fun to learn about so many different people with lives that were so different from her own. Millie had made friends with a maid in Massachusetts, a boxer in Chicago, a fisherman in New Orleans.

As someone who had never had anyone other than family to care about, it was almost exhilarating. The town Millie had grown up in hadn’t had any children her age, her cousins were too young to be companions; in Dallas Millie had made a fuss about a too-friendly supervisor and then had been ostracized for doing so; and in DC everyone was too busy to socialize.

Maybe it was a bit sad Millie found connection in these pages that passed over her desk day in and day out, the ones telling stories of people who rode horses in rodeos and rode waves off the coast of California, who skied mountain passes in Denver and performed acrobatics on the wings of airplanes in North Carolina.

But it was more than she’d ever had before.

“If you look at a map you will see that Louisiana resembles a boot with its frayed toe dipping into the Gulf of Mexico.”

Millie smiled. You couldn’t remove a poet’s heart from their body. Or their writing.

She went to make a note in the margins and then cursed when the nib of her pen snapped.

The FWP had to keep their supplies in a closet buried deep in the back of the theater to discourage casual visitors from getting light fingers

Millie wound her way through the dark hallways of the Old Auditorium, wrinkling her nose at the pungent mildew that grew stronger the deeper she went into the theater.

When she got to the closet, she paused, hand on the knob.

There was someone inside.

She considered knocking—not wanting to startle whoever it was.

But then she heard “No.”

It wasn’t a calm rebuke or even an angry one.

It was a plea, laced with panic.

Millie yanked open the door.

All she could see was a man’s broad back and then high heels and long legs. The man was gripping the woman’s thigh tightly and had the other hand pushing her head into the wall.

He shifted then, and Millie caught sight of his profile, recognizing him immediately.

Foxwood Hastings, the son of a powerful senator who was trying to cut all the funding to the Federal Writers’ Project.

There was talk that Foxwood would make a play for the White House one day.

The woman’s eyes were wide and wet, her mascara smeared on her cheeks.

Millie thought about her boardinghouse, which wasn’t perfect, but gave her some semblance of security. She thought about the money she sent back to Texas that meant all six of her cousins could eat that week. She thought about Phil dressed in workman’s clothes just on the hope of getting a few bucks that day. She thought about creamed egg on toast and pickles for lunch and that last tiny bit of lipstick that she’d already chewed off on her way over.

She thought of pink slips and job boards, and what would happen if she did exactly what she wanted to do.

Then she did it anyway.

Millie curled her hand into a perfect fist, hauled her arm back, and then let it fly directly into the face of a man who could, unequivocally  and completely, ruin her life.

 

Chapter Two
Alice

Missoula, Montana

1924

Montana was going to kill Alice Monroe.

She’d heard that all her life, so many times that she’d started to believe it.

Alice had been born in a blizzard and had survived because her aunt was used to delivering breeched calves. When she’d been five, Alice had been playing on the banks of the Blackfoot River and slipped. The rapids pulled her under, the water nearly devouring her. A fly fisherman had been in the right place at the right time, and still had nearly been too late.

At twelve, the wildfire smoke from the plains had filled her lungs. Her chest had gone impossibly tight as her lips turned as blue as the glacial ice in the mountains. She didn’t know how she’d survived that one, though she’d heard stories of her father scooping her in his arms and running, full speed, through town toward the doctor’s house.

Montana had already taken her mother. And no woman Alice knew was stronger than Mary Monroe.

Montana was going to kill Alice one of these days, but not today. Today, Murdoch MacTavish was going to kill her.

“You carried them out?” Mac asked, his voice flat as he stared at the apple crates full of books stacked neatly on the library’s steps.

Murdoch MacTavish—Mac to everyone including his mother—was her father’s right hand. One time, Alice had asked what Mac’s position actually was, and her father had waved as if to encompass everything. In practice, that often meant shadowing Alice to make sure she didn’t do more than lift a finger to turn pages in a book.

A lot of his time was also spent smuggling hooch in from Canada. Federal Prohibition might have been passed only four years ago, but Montana had been “dry” since 1918. She had a feeling her father had been thriving in the six years since, especially because she’d yet to meet a person who had trouble finding liquor in Missoula. There were speakeasies and “soda shops” and gentlemen’s clubs on every corner.

“You should have waited for me, Miss Monroe,” Mac said. His tone was deferential, but his eyes screamed in betrayal. She was making his life so much harder. Her father would blame Mac for allowing Alice’s little rebellions, and for that she did feel guilty.

Still, she could carry a couple damn apple crates to the sidewalk.

“I’ll certainly let you load them up,” Alice said brightly, pretending to wipe at her brow. In the more frustrating moments, she reminded herself that the overprotectiveness instituted by her father, and then carried out by all his various minions, came from a place of love. Despite what the doctors told him, Clark Monroe had become convinced any level of exertion beyond an empty-handed stroll along the Blackfoot was too much for Alice. And she was only allowed that if she promised not to get too close to the water.

Fall in once at five years old and get deemed a slip-risk the rest of your life. At nineteen, the restraints were starting to chafe.

Mac stacked three crates on top of each other and lifted them with hardly a grunt. Alice sighed as his muscles bunched and pressed against his simple white shirt, his golden curls falling over

his eyes. The sweat-slicked skin at the nape of his neck glistened and Alice fought the silly urge to press her mouth there to taste the salt.

Alice startled when someone called her name, and she prayed her end-of-summer sun-kissed skin would hide the blush that was inevitably working its way over her cheekbones.

“I found Treasure Island just in time,” Mrs. Joseph cried in triumph. She was old—one of the original six women who’d founded the Missoula Library out of their ladies’ reading group back in 1882—but she moved with the agility of the native Montanan that she was.

“Oh, thank you. Nathaniel will be beside himself.” The book was one of their more popular volumes; every boy within town limits had checked it out at least once. Part of Alice balked at the idea of bringing it with her to the mining towns on the outskirts of Missoula, but those children needed a little laughter in their lives, too. Maybe more so than the children in the city.

Mac, loaded down with three more crates, waited for her to put the novel on top, but she shook her head and held on to it. She wanted to hand deliver this one herself.

“I saw you’re taking the new Agatha Christie,” Mrs. Joseph said. “Dawn will appreciate that one.”

Alice grinned. The Secret Adversary wasn’t actually new—it had been published two years earlier in 1922. But for Montana standards the book might as well be fresh off the presses.

Mrs. Joseph was right, too. Dawn Chatham, a young bride from New York with an innocent face and a macabre imagination, had become enamored with Mrs. Christie’s work after reading the author’s debut, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

As she did with most of the books the library ordered, Alice had read The Secret Adversary before shelving it, and the dedication had hit her in the chest.

“To all those who lead monotonous lives in the hope that they may experience at second hand the delights and dangers of adventure.”

The sentiment felt mean, a little cutting, even, given that Mrs. Christie herself experienced plenty of thrills and delights. Yet Alice’s world had reshaped itself around the notion. Alice could imagine the same was true for many of Mrs. Christie’s readers, Dawn Chatham included.

Life in the mining towns surrounding Missoula was difficult, at best. Montana wasn’t going to kill those residents because they were too tough, but the land certainly did try. The settlements were made up mostly of men, especially the more rudimentary camps deep in the northern woods. But there were a few that hosted wives and children, too.

As one of Missoula’s three librarians, Alice tried to bring a little secondhand delight and adventure to all of them when she could.

“Don’t you worry about closing up tonight,” Mrs. Joseph said, her expression mischievous, her eyes darting between Mac and Alice.

“We won’t be any later than usual, God and roads willing.” Alice was fairly certain her infatuation with Mac was the worst-kept secret in Missoula and had been since she was a girl. Her father had hired Mac when the boy was just fourteen and had employed him for the past six years as a secretary, an enforcer, a driver and everything in between. When Alice had come up with the idea of delivering library books to the mining camps surrounding Missoula, he’d become her chauffeur, as well.

Alice both lived for and dreaded the two days a month they made the trips. She got to spend time with him, but was also painfully reminded that he would never view her as anything but the fragile daughter of the employer he worshipped.

Mac pulled away from the curb and started down Higgins Avenue, and Alice waved to several people out and about doing their shopping. As the mayor’s daughter and one of the town’s librarians, she recognized most of the city’s residents even if she didn’t know all their names. Community was important out here. Even though Missoulians on the whole had fairly comfortable lifestyles, they never took for granted that they lived at the mercy of nature. Isolation was death in the Western territories.

After Mac took the road that ran along the Blackfoot River, he nodded to the book in her lap.

“Is that a special one?” he asked, in that lilting way of his that was such a contrast to his big frame. His parents were from Scotland, like so many others who’d settled in Missoula. He didn’t have their accent, but that magical cadence had been baked into his speech patterns. She could listen to him talk for hours, though he was, unfortunately, a man of few words.

Alice smiled down at the novel, her fingers tracing the title. “This one is for Nathaniel Davey. He finished The Wonderful Wizard of Oz a little while back and was so disappointed when I didn’t have anything as fun on our last trip.”

“I haven’t read it either,” Mac admitted, like it was a confession.

“Well, you can’t read this one now,” she teased, tapping Treasure Island. “It will be on loan for the next month.”

“What about the other one?” he asked. “The one with the wizard?”

“You would like it,” Alice promised. “It’s all about courage and heart and finding your way home. It’s one of our most popular books, though, so you’ll likely have to wait your turn if you want to check it out.”

“Is it a children’s book?”

Alice didn’t rush to reassure him it wasn’t. He was proud, like so many of her neighbors. That trait had been the hardest thing to overcome as a librarian. Not acquiring books, not the social work expected of her, not even smiling at patrons who didn’t deserve to be smiled at. No, it was chipping through that

pride, which too often kept people from checking books out at all for fear they wouldn’t understand them.

“They’re written in a way that’s accessible for children, but that any age group can appreciate,” she said. “The best children’s books are the ones that trust young readers with big ideas. And those will resonate with us, even when we’re past the point of thinking we need to be taught lessons.”

“What kind of big ideas?” he asked.

She swallowed. “Love.”

His brows rose and she rushed to continue. “Familial love. Friendship, a sense of self and finding a place in the world.”

“Your father gave me that, you know,” he said. “A place in the world.”

Alice’s stomach clenched. Her father would forever be the third person in the space between them. No matter how much Alice sometimes daydreamed about throwing caution to the wind and climbing into Mac’s lap—right there, in the Ford—that fact stopped her. Even if a miracle occurred, and it turned out Mac would actually welcome the weight of her on his thighs, Alice would wonder if it was just as a favor to her father. Or if Mac thought it was the obvious step to marry into the family so he could be the son her father had really wanted.

She hummed some noncommittal sound and returned her attention to the river. They were deep in the dog days of August. Winter awaited them, but it was hard to imagine now with how the heat baked the earth.

Even though the summer weather could be uncomfortable in its own right, Alice liked to store up the sun when she could so she had an excess to help her get through the dark, cold days that were to come.

They pulled away from the Blackfoot eventually, and began the long climb toward the largest mining town within driving distance. The roads were rough and rutted, and when it rained or snowed they became nearly impossible to navigate. But at least they existed.

Alice loved the moment they crested the top of the hill and Garnet came into view. The town had been built in a valley and so was cradled by the side of the mountain. The main street, boasting a mercantile, a hotel, three saloons, a blacksmith, and other shops, wound its way toward them.

In truth, Garnet was a ghost of the town it once had been during the gold rush days of the last century. The earth went bare, a fire razed half the buildings, people fled. But Garnet still stood. For her, it had become a symbol of resilience.

The children—currently numbering ten—had learned to recognize the sound of the automobile engine. They probably came running for any visitor, but Alice liked to think they were especially excited for the haul she brought with her.

She didn’t like to credit the penny candy Mac made sure to stock up on for 

their enthusiasm. It was the books the children liked most, no one could convince her otherwise.

They gathered around the Ford now, greedy and grubby hands banging on the doors as Mac drifted to a stop. He hollered at them to move, but there was a fondness to his smile that the children could spot. Boys and girls who grew up in towns like this learned early to recognize real anger when they saw it.

Alice laughed as she greeted them, and toppled slightly when one of the younger boys hugged her around her knees. Mac’s hand steadied her immediately, his palm hot against her lower back. She shifted away. No matter what the men in her life thought, she wasn’t actually made of glass.

The chaos eventually subsided, the children knowing by now they couldn’t just rush in and grab for the books. They formed a polite line behind the Ford as Mac opened the trunk.

Idly, Alice scanned the heads, and realized one was missing. She lifted her attention to some of the adults who’d gathered around, hanging back for now, but nearly as eager as their young ones.

She found Nathaniel’s mother, Jane, easily.

“Is Nathaniel all right?” Alice asked after they’d exchanged greetings. Nathaniel was Jane’s oldest boy, but he was also the oldest of all the children in Garnet. As such, he often wore the serious expression of someone wise beyond his years, his shoulders heavy with too much responsibility.

Since the age of the children in Garnet skewed so young—and they were all forced to attend class together with the one teacher—Nathaniel had lost interest in school. He said he didn’t need it, he said as soon as he was old enough he’d find work with a mining company. And that would be far too soon. Alice had ached for him as she all but watched the raw and pure joy of childhood in his eyes dimmed by the realities of this life.

So Nathaniel had become her secret project.

Alice knew better than to try to argue with him outright. But the trip following that conversation, she’d brought him a special book, one that only older boys could read. One he didn’t have to share with the little children.

The Call of the Wild had yet to fail her.

“He’s pouting,” Jane said now on a sigh, one of her babies hanging off her skirt, thumb in his mouth. “We’re leaving.”

“Oh.” Alice wanted to say You can’t. She had been making headway with

Nathaniel. But, of course, that would have been a ludicrous reaction. Instead, she asked, “To where?”

“Toward Butte,” Jane said. “Nowhere as fancy as the city, but in that direction.”

“Oh,” Alice said again, off-kilter. Families came and went in towns like these. She’d seen plenty of that in the two years since she’d started coming out here. But she had a feeling Nathaniel would put his next book down and then never pick one up again if there wasn’t someone in his life encouraging him to read. “Is he here?”

Jane jerked her head toward the trees. “Too stubborn, like his father.”

Impulsively, Alice hugged Jane. “Good luck.”

“Thank you, Miss Monroe,” Jane said. “We don’t say it enough.”

Alice shook her head. This was part of her duty as a librarian, she didn’t need gratitude. “It’s my pleasure.”

Mac was still handing out the books, making sure to keep track of who borrowed what. The adults were swooping in now that the children had been satisfied. Dawn was already sitting on the ground with her Agatha Christie cracked open, not even able to wait to get back to her cabin.

Alice smiled at the group, and then made her way toward the trees.

“I hear you’re going on an adventure,” Alice said when she found Nathaniel.

“Screw the adventure,” Nathaniel all but spat. Maybe she should chide him for his language, but that would be a silly hill to die on.

“Would Buck say ‘screw the adventure’?” Alice asked, knowing how much Nathaniel had loved the main dog character in The Call of the Wild. “Or Dorothy?”

“Buck wouldn’t say anything, he’s a dog,” Nathaniel said, a little slyly. And that’s why he was one of her favorites. “And Dorothy was trying to get home, not trying to find an adventure.”

“Sometimes the adventure finds us,” Alice said. “And along the way you might find your home.”

Nathaniel pursed his lips. He was too polite to roll his eyes, but she knew he wanted to. Instead, he stared at the ground, and whispered, “I don’t think they’ll have any books there.”

Oh.

“Well, you’ll have this one,” Alice said, holding out Treasure Island, now more glad than ever that Mrs. Joseph had been able to find it in the returns pile.

Nathaniel’s eyes flew from the novel to her face, then back again, like he was hungry for the gift but knew too much about disappointment to get his hopes up. “I won’t be able to return it.”

“It’s yours now.” Alice would replace the library copy with a new one, of course. She couldn’t do it as often as she liked—her father realized that she would spend his vast fortune on books if he let her—but she could get away with buying one or two every once in a while.

“I don’t have to share?” he asked, finally taking it. He met her eyes, his own wide and wondrous. “It’s mine?”

Alice loved and hated how much joy it gave him, because it was such a small gesture. She thought of a passage from the next book she had been planning on bringing him—The Adventures of

Huckleberry Finn.

“It was only a little thing to do, and no trouble; and it’s the little things that smooths people’s roads the most.”

“You don’t have to share,” she promised him. “Though you might want to when you make friends in your new town.”

“Thank you,” he said, his attention locked on the gift. Alice hugged him, lingering for just a second longer than she would have otherwise. She wondered what would become of him. Of course, he probably would end up in the mines, especially in Butte. Alice shivered at the thought. She had talked to miners before, and they all wore the haunted expression of those who went deeper into the land than any one man should.

She just hoped that for Nathaniel, the stories would accompany him into the darkness, that they would offer him escape when he needed it most.

An old library book was a small price to pay for that.

Alice couldn’t shake the grim mood that settled over her as Mac drove to the two other mining towns that were close to Missoula. By the time they were headed back home, it was all she could think about.

“You have something on your mind,” Mac said, a comment more than a question. That was one of her favorite things about the quiet man—he opened the door but never shoved anyone through.

“It was only a little thing to do, and no trouble . . .”

“These books mean so much to them,” Alice said. The sun had settled in around the tops of the trees, painting everything golden. Not even the dust kicked up from the dry road could detract from the beauty of the land she adored and feared and claimed as her own no matter what.

“You’re doing a good thing, Miss Monroe,” Mac said, as if she’d been fishing for compliments.

She shrugged it off, along with the use of her surname. Alice had conceded that was a battle she was never going to win. “But we only help the three settlements around Missoula. There are so many more people out there who don’t have any kind of relief from . . .” She trailed off.

Alice knew she was lucky to have been born into her family. That even when she complained about long winters and wildfire smoke and the fact that any kind of rare book took years to arrive in Missoula, she was insulated from the sharpest edges of living out here. Mac hadn’t been—at least not until he’d turned fourteen. ...