Introducing a Mel Jones Mystery
I said more soon and here I am. A gold star for follow-through.
A few things have happened since I last wrote. The tribunal is still deliberating on Last Knight. I am still not obsessively refreshing my messages. (I am still obsessively refreshing my messages.) And somewhere in the background of all of this, while I was busy being distracted and waiting and doing the particular kind of not-working that looks a lot like staring at a document, I sent Shadow Pine Lodge to beta readers.
I say “sent” like it was a planned, intentional act. It was more like: I had done the work, it was as ready as I could get it, and there were people I trusted who had offered, and so I said yes and hit send before I could talk myself out of it. Vera and Avery are in other people’s hands now. My neurodivergent vampire is out there in the world, on other people’s screens, being read by people who are not me, and I am choosing not to think about this too hard.
What I am thinking about instead, what has genuinely been pulling me back in, is The Museum of Ephemeral Arts.
Let me tell you about Mel.
Mel is forty-one, meticulous, and quietly capable in the way of someone who has spent years being the only person taking something seriously. She has been able to see the dead since childhood. Her mother was the first ghost she ever saw whole, she said goodbye to her as a teenager, and that experience is the reason the notebooks exist. Forty-three of them, now nearly forty-four. A system built out of necessity, refined over thirty-two years.
She takes a job as a tour guide at a museum dedicated to vanishing things, forgotten trades, lost sounds, the smell of industries that no longer exist. The museum’s philosophy is simple: the forgotten thing is worth keeping. Mel has believed this her whole life. She just usually believes it about people.
The east corridor has been cold since anyone can remember. The sensor keeps going off. And something in the wall has been waiting a very long time for someone to pay attention.
What Mel finds, slowly and carefully, alongside an archivist with strong opinions about misfiled records and a technology specialist who is brazen and tactile and the exact opposite of Mel’s careful containment, is Bette Heron. Romani muralist, contracted by the WPA Federal Art Project in 1937, painted something extraordinary on the east-facing wall, died there in March 1938, and was subsequently erased. The mural painted over. The records buried. The Aldrich family’s lawyer still turns up, eighty-six years later, to offer money in exchange for calling it all uncertain provenance.
The museum declines. Files the evidence. Uncovers the mural intact beneath a wall.
But Bette’s urgency turns out to be about more than justice.
In the east garden, just outside, softer and harder to read than anything inside the building, there’s something else. Something Mel can barely make out at first, formless and patient, attached to the memory of this place more than to any unfinished business. It’s Caroline. A young Aldrich woman, removed by her family in February 1938, who lived out her full life and came back, after all of it, because she couldn’t let go of the time she’d spent here. Bette doesn’t know she’s there. Caroline doesn’t know Bette is inside. They have been thirty feet apart, and alone, for eighty-six years.
Mel finds them both. Tells them both. Holds the door open and watches them cross the garden to each other.
I wrote that scene and had to go lie down for a while.
This book is quieter than Last Knight in almost every way. More meticulous. Tender in a way I didn’t know I was going to let myself be. It is, at its core, about the work of being heard, and the people rare enough to know how to listen.
It’s also now officially titled The Museum of Ephemeral Arts: A Mel Jones Mystery, which means I have committed to a series identifier, which means Mel is going to need more cases, which is a problem I am delighted to have.
More soon.
Harlo
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