Overdue: a sample mystery plan

Premise

A small-town librarian notices that one forgotten travel guide has been returned to the night drop every Tuesday for more than thirty years, always a day late, by a borrower whose library card was cancelled in 1994.

World

Harlow Falls, Vermont, is a mill town of about two thousand people whose mill closed in 1989. The Harlow Free Library fills a converted bank building: the old vault holds the local-history shelves, and the returns slot is the bank's brass night deposit. The library still runs on a card catalogue nobody can afford to retire, a part-time board, and a fines box that collects about eleven dollars a month. Everyone knows everyone's car. Nobody, it turns out, knows who comes to the night drop on Monday nights.

Cast

Outline

1. Chapter 1: The Tuesday Book June finds the guide in the night drop again and pulls the cancelled card from 1994.
2. Chapter 2: Card 0417 The card belonged to a woman who left town the year the mill closed, and Walt goes quiet when June says her name.
3. Chapter 3: Margins Pencil marks in the guide trace a route through towns whose stations closed decades ago.
4. Chapter 4: The Night Drop June and Dee wait in the dark on a Monday night to see who comes.
5. Chapter 5: What Walt Kept Walt explains the letters he never delivered.
6. Chapter 6: Paid in Full June decides what the library is owed, and what it can forgive.

Chapter 1: The Tuesday Book

The book came back on a Tuesday, the way it always did.

June Abernathy found it at twenty to eight in the morning, lying face down in the brass slot that had been built for bank deposits and now took library returns. She knew it before she turned it over. Every librarian has a few books she can recognise by weight. This one was a 1979 guide to the railway towns of northern New England, green cloth gone grey at the corners, and it weighed exactly what a book weighs when nobody has read it in a long time.

Except somebody had. The book card in the pocket at the back was the old kind, with a column for the due date and a column for the borrower's number, and every line said 0417 in the same careful hand. The dates ran to the bottom of the first card and halfway down a third. The earliest was March 1994. Every due date was a Monday.

There was no checkout on the computer. There never was.

She carried it to the desk and opened the drawer where the cancelled cards lived, the ones the board kept asking her to throw away. Card 0417 was near the front. The name on it was written in fountain pen: Marian Coyle. Below it, in red, the librarian before June had stamped CANCELLED and the date. March 14, 1994.

Inside the front cover of the guide, in pencil so light she had to tilt the page toward the window, someone had added a line since last week.

Still a day late. Still sorry.

June sat with that for a while. Then she wrote out a fine for ten cents, put it in the drawer with card 0417, and walked the book back to the travel shelf, to the exact gap it had come from, where whoever it was would know to find it.

The sample ends here.

Start your own

In WriteForYou you begin the same way: type a premise of a sentence or two and choose from 1 to 12 chapters. You review the world, the cast and the outline, and can ask for changes, before chapter 1 is written.