TOO LATE FOR ANGELS

A LETTER TO MY READERS

TOO LATE FOR ANGELS

What if…? Those two powerful words, I've found, are a passport to intriguing situations in mysterious places: a historic building that once housed a school for young women in the small town of Angel Heights; a rambling family estate in the North Carolina mountains. Now, TOO LATE FOR ANGELS introduces us, along with Augusta Goodnight, to members of the Thursday Morning Literary Society (which now meets on Monday afternoons) who find themselves up to their pantyhose in a perplexing dilemma in Stone's Throw, South Carolina.

In this case an emotional event led me to bring a distraught elderly woman to108 Heritage Avenue where unsuspecting Lucy Nan Pilgrim opens the door to a chain of baffling events that will cause residents of the tiny college town to wonder about one of their own. (Not that anyone would actually come out and say so!)

The house I grew up in is gone. Well, not gone exactly, but it has been hauled around the block to be converted into an office building after our old neighborhood was cleared to make room for a giant drugstore.

The house looks naked now, having been stripped of its outside brick, including the wraparound porch with its waist-high wall. What a shame that children will no longer hide behind it, giggling in anticipation of an unsuspecting "victim" to pounce on that enticing brown paper packed dropped carelessly on the sidewalk. They'll never experience the delicious "pain" of holding in laughter as they jerk the package abruptly away by a hidden string. Nor will they spy, safely concealed, of course, on the strange bearded man on his daily walk to town. No one else knew he was really an enemy spy who hid secret papers in his cane.

What if…? What if a woman, handicapped with dementia, returns to the home of her childhood? What if the person she claims to be disappeared sixty-five years before?

The mysterious bearded man is gone now, along with our fortress-like porch and the neighbors who knew our parents, as well as their parents before them and whether or not we were "worth our salt."

The town that nurtured the seed of my youthful imagination isn't so little anymore, and when I return, I see fewer and fewer familiar faces and find many of the landmarks gone. But know-it-all neighbors with carefully guarded secrets in closely-knit communities still exist - thank heavens - and in fact, thrive. In Stone's Throw, South Carolina, Augusta Goodnight will, no doubt, discover them all - or enough, I think, to keep her busy for a long, long time.