Page 61 of The Roommate Lie

I’m two seconds from telling her we need to map out our plan before we jump in. That if she wants to pursue me in public, we need to practice in private. Then I realize we aren’t alone.

There’s an Old Bird on my front stoop. The sinister but sweet one.

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Dottie Hawkins coos. “I almost gave up on you.”

It isn’t until we get closer and I open my front gate that I notice the little red wagon. There’s a vintage Radio Flyer parked in the grass by Dottie’s feet. Inside, a small odd-looking suitcase is nestled on a blanket—at least, it looks like a suitcase—and both are the exact same shade of red to match her wagon.

I have no idea what’s in that case, what she carted all the way across the hedgerow to my house, but the wagon itself is familiar. My mom says Dottie used to pull her kids around in itwhen they were little. These days, she does the same thing with her grandkids whenever they’re in town.

Dottie smiles at us a little too sweetly, a little too knowingly. “How are my favorite hedgerow troublemakers?”

I’m not sure if she’s talking about Alice and me or the Sharps. If this is because Carrots and Blythe are the talk of the town or because Tyler and Lydia have made it onto the Victorian’s enemy list, but I don’t ask her to clarify. If there’s any trap I don’t want to walk into today, it’s an Old Bird trap.

Alice greets her politely, but she seems a little wary too, not nearly as comfortable with Dottie as she is with Muriel next door. It takes her a second to notice what’s inside the wagon. The red square case with its thin gray handle. “Is that a typewriter?”

Dottie shrugs mischievously. “Why don’t we take it inside and find out?”

She leaves the wagon parked in the grass, and I carry the heavy red case into my dining room, setting it on the table. Dottie pauses dramatically before opening it, and the most pristine, mint-condition typewriter I’ve ever seen is waiting inside. Cherry red to match the case.

“Is that an Olympia?” Alice breathes, and Dottie nods happily.

“I heard your typewriter got torn up in transit. I figured I’d bring over a replacement.”

“It’s gorgeous.”

Alice has the dreamiest look on her face, like she could wax poetic about that typewriter all day, maybe in sonnet form. Then her expression shifts, and she glances up. “How did you hear about my broken typewriter?”

Dottie shrugs. “News travels.”

Pulling our focus back to the antique on the table, she runs her fingers over the keys. “This little beauty belonged to mygreat-aunt Clarissa. Some people say she stole it off a commuter train at Penn Station—but that’s probably idle gossip.”

Probably?

I give Dottie a look and try not to laugh. If any Old Bird was going to have a heartwarming story about a family heirloom that also involved theft, it’d be her.

She’s the live wire of the group. Dottie is the only Old Bird who married an out-of-towner, and she met him at a music festival when she was nineteen. While dancing in the rain. Harold Hawkins was nineteen too, and they got married seventy-one hours after they met, as soon as the county courthouse opened downtown on Monday morning.

“Great-Aunt Clarissa wrote every single one of her cozy mysteries on her beloved Olympia,” Dottie says, and that’s when her story clicks.

“Clarissa Brimsley?”

Now I’m as excited as Alice, maybe more. Dottie is related totheClarissa Brimsley? We’ve read every single one of her books in the Nothing Amateur About It book club, and I’ve read them twice. Those things arewild.

“Her longest series involves a small-town librarian who solves murders,” I tell Alice. “With the help of her trusty gray cat, Professor Snickers.”

If you’ve never read a book where the heroine catches the murderer by toppling an entire card catalogue onto him—with the help of her cat—you haven’t lived.

Alice is enchanted with the whole thing. The typewriter, the story—all of it. She glances at Dottie, her face full of gratitude. “This was so sweet of you. I’ll take good care of it while I’m in town. You won’t even know I borrowed it.”

“Oh, forget borrowing it. I want you to have it. For keeps.”

Alice gasps and tries to say no, but Dottie insists. Her Old Bird cunning fades, and she’s just someone’s sweetgrandmother who’s trying to do a good deed. The kind of woman who always bakes cookies for her grandkids and pulls them around in her beloved red wagon.

“It’s been sitting in my attic for years. I’ve thought about donating it, but I’d rather give it to a fellow author. It’s about time this old girl wrote some new books.”

Dottie pats the typewriter lovingly, and that sentiment is so sweet, it makes Alice tear up. “Are you sure?”

“Nothing would make me happier. Or Great-Aunt Clarissa.”

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