If You Came to Alderhaven for a Day...

A view of fictional Alderhaven, Oregon, a small coastal town surrounded by evergreen forest and the Pacific Ocean.

If Alderhaven appeared on an Oregon map, you would probably have to look twice to find it.

It sits along the southern coast, where forest gives way to cliffs and the Pacific has spent centuries arguing with the shore. The population is somewhere around six thousand, though I suspect Marion Steele could tell you exactly how many people are home for supper on any given evening.

But suppose you found the road into town.

What would you do with one day?

Start at the Salt & Quill

You should probably begin with coffee.

Not because every cozy mystery requires caffeine, although there may be an argument for that, but because the Salt & Quill is one of the places where Alderhaven seems most like itself.

Part bookstore, part coffee shop, part unofficial gathering place, it is where Seraphina Beckett spends much of her time when she isn't asking questions someone would rather she leave alone.

If you're lucky, Sera will be behind the counter.

If you're very lucky, Simba will be asleep.

Simba is a Siamese cat who technically belongs to Sera. Simba has never acknowledged the technicality.

Choose your chair carefully. If he is already sitting in it, it is his. If he is looking at it, it is probably his. If he has ever considered sitting in it, negotiations may be difficult.

Take your coffee to a table and stay awhile.

Someone will come through the door.

It might be Marion Steele, who has reached the age where she no longer wastes time pretending not to know things. Marion has lived in Alderhaven most of her life, and if there is a difference between town history, town gossip, and information you probably weren't supposed to have yet, she has never found the distinction particularly useful.

Or Callie Monroe may appear, moving with the unconscious balance of someone who can get over, around, or across almost anything in her path. Don't underestimate her because she's young.

Actually, that's good advice for most of Alderhaven.

Then take a walk

Eventually you'll have to leave the Salt & Quill.

Simba may insist upon it.

Alderhaven is a walking town, and before long you'll find yourself near the statue of Jonas Albright.

Jonas was a Massachusetts schoolteacher who came west in the 1850s with his wife, Margaret, their five children, and some rather inconvenient ideas about how people ought to live together.

He wasn't alone.

Five families founded Alderhaven.

The Albrights. The Whitfields. The Marches. The Delgados. The Steeles.

Their descendants are still here.

So are some of their ideas.

I didn't fully understand how much those founders had shaped Alderhaven when I began writing the first Seraphina Beckett mystery. I knew the town was unusual. I knew its people valued independence, kindness, intuition, and the occasional refusal to do something merely because everyone else did it that way.

Only later did I begin asking the question Sera is now asking:

Where did those ideas come from?

I'm discovering the answer while writing The Founders' Light, a story about Alderhaven's five founding families, and I have a feeling Jonas and Margaret Albright still have a few things to teach me.

But we have only one day in Alderhaven, so we should keep moving.

Lunch is going to require a decision

You have choices.

You could stop at the Gilded Mug, where Delia March presides over coffee, conversation, and whatever else needs presiding over.

Or you could find your way to Harbor Hearth, where Tilda Gable understands one of the fundamental laws of small-town life: many problems become more manageable after someone has been fed.

Either way, don't be surprised if someone greets you before you've been properly introduced.

Alderhaven isn't unfriendly to strangers.

It simply hasn't decided you're a stranger for very long.

Spend the afternoon near the water

This is the part of Alderhaven I wish I could actually visit.

The town sits where the Oregon forest meets the Pacific, with cliffs, coves, paths, and places where the trees grow close enough to make the rest of the world feel farther away.

Walk toward the bluff.

Listen to the ocean.

Stay long enough and you may understand why Alderhavians have invented words for things the rest of us apparently decided didn't need names.

Quietgold is one of them.

There are others.

I've discovered that once a fictional town starts inventing its own vocabulary, the author has probably lost control of the situation.

I'm fine with that.

Alderhaven was never meant to feel like a town somebody designed.

It was meant to feel like a place that grew.

Stay until evening

This is when I think Alderhaven would be hardest to leave.

Shops begin closing. Lights appear in windows. Someone carries dinner across the street to someone who needs it. A conversation begun that morning is still unfinished somewhere else.

Sera may be back at the Salt & Quill.

Callie may be sketching.

Marion almost certainly knows what happened while you were gone.

And Sheriff Daniel Cross may appear, say very little, and somehow leave you with the impression that everything is under control.

You might notice something else by then.

Alderhaven isn't special because nothing bad happens there.

Bad things do happen.

People make mistakes. Families lose one another. Secrets survive longer than they should. People hurt one another, deliberately and accidentally.

What makes Alderhaven different is what happens afterward.

Again and again, its people ask some version of the same question:

What can we repair?

Sometimes the answer is a relationship.

Sometimes it's a wrong.

Sometimes it's a person who has spent too long believing she has nowhere to belong.

And sometimes the answer is simply dinner.

Before you go...

If Alderhaven were real, I think I'd tell you to stay another day.

There are roads you haven't taken yet. Stories you haven't heard. Five founding families we have barely begun to know.

And Simba still hasn't decided whether he likes you.

Alderhaven doesn't exist on an Oregon map.

But after three books, I'm no longer entirely convinced it isn't real.

And if you've spent a little time there with me, perhaps you aren't either.

Welcome to Alderhaven.