The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy by Elizabeth George

 
    For an entire generation, the story that follows could not be told. She who effected the vanishing of Langley, Washington’s most famous citizen was still among the living and had the knowledge of exactly what she had done been revealed before this moment, there is little doubt that legions of the broken-hearted, the disenchanted, the disappointed, and the downright enraged would have ended up marching along the quiet street where she lived, bent upon violence. This, of course, would have followed whatever the aforementioned legions had done to a disused potting shed in the arboreal confines of Langley Cemetery, where the shape of a body on a moth-eaten blanket and a rotting first edition of an antique novel marked the spot of a deeply mourned departure. But now, at last, everything can be revealed. For all involved have finally passed, and no danger remains to anyone. Langley, Washington, has long since returned to the sleepy albeit lovely little village that has sat above the gleaming waters of Saratoga Passage for more than one hundred years. And what occurred there to its citizenry and to its gentle, well-meaning, but far too malleable librarian has been consigned to history.
    Annapurna didn’t start out her life intending to become a librarian. She also didn’t start out her life intending to become a book fairy. Indeed, she didn’t start out her life intending to become Annapurna. Instead she began her time on earth as Janet Shore in a very ordinary manner which, no matter how close the examination, would never suggest to anyone who was acquainted with her that she possessed powers beyond an average mortal’s.
    She was born at home in the village of Langley, which at that time was a little enclave of colorful cottages and, alas, perpetually dying businesses sitting high on a bluff on Whidbey Island. Above the strait that it overlooked, bald eagles flew and in this strait orcas and gray whales swam. Gold finches flashed the sunlight of their bodies in the air, swallows coursed joyously from the eaves of old storefronts, hummingbirds hovered before spikes of white quamash, and at just the right moment in just the right season, starlings swooped in great dancing clouds near the terminal where the ferries came and went. Here, hemlocks and firs soared into the heavens, rabbits openly munched unmolested in garden beds, raccoons were known to wander through the open hallways of the middle school in a search for discarded lunches, and deer high-stepped among the various cottages, decimating everything from tulips to topiaries.
    In this pleasant place Janet Shore made her first appearance, born into a very ordinary family on a very ordinary day in a very ordinary house as her parents had eschewed hospitals for the birth of all their children and were not about to alter this course when Janet—child number six—came along. Perhaps more observation during her birth would have told her parents of Janet’s yet-to-be tested powers, but her parents were not the observant sort, nor were her four brothers and single sister, all of whom spent their mother’s labor and subsequent delivery of the sixth bundle of Shore joy in the back yard of the family home where a search for forty dollars in dimes—prepared in advance by their wily father—would end up producing only $39.90, no matter the length of time that they spent searching, which would be, naturally, quite considerable. Indeed, the five youngsters—aged three to ten years—had actually managed to dislodge only $25.70 from the lawn, the vegetable beds, the compost heap, and the flower garden when their father emerged from the house to tell them that the Shore line—he had that kind of sense of humor, alas—had been extended once again.
    In very short order, they were introduced to Janet who was not—as you might well imagine—nearly as interesting to them as the dimes that still lay unclaimed in the yard. And it