Notes from the Bench

A repair café is a hall, some borrowed tables, and a line of toasters waiting to be fixed for nothing. They are the most cheerful rooms I know, and I gave my fictional town one and put my sleuth behind the counter.

June brings the estate sales out along the Sound. I go for the small broken machines, and I come home with something harder to price, the arrangement of a whole life laid out on card tables.

A well-made machine from the last century outlasts the household that bought it. The old ones were built to be opened and kept, and I try to give the ones I write the history they actually have.

A mill town does not empty all at once, and the mill itself goes last. This is what stays, and why I built my town to keep it.

Gault Mills is a town I am inventing for the mysteries I write. The first fact I settled about it is that it starts at the river.