The Nightingale Inn
Series anchor
Fourteen rooms on the bluff, built in 1871, still using brass keys because Eleanor sees no argument for changing. The boiler dates to 1987 and is the only thing at the inn with a documented temper.
The setting
Larkspur Cove
Mid-coast Maine, an hour from anywhere, which in a nor’easter means rather longer. The harbor is crescent-shaped and holds about forty boats. Everything else in town is within ten minutes of it on foot.
I made the place up, but I made it up out of real parts: brass room keys, a chalkboard menu, a ferry timetable nobody trusts in November, and a fourteen-room inn that costs more to keep standing than it earns.
Where to find things
Landmarks
Tidemark Bakery
Town institution
Marguerite has run it for thirty years and writes the day’s list on a chalkboard by the door. What is on the chalkboard is a matter of public interest.
Larkspur Harbor
Working waterfront
Lobster boats, a fuel dock, and Leo Tran’s office above the chandlery with a window facing the mouth of the cove. Very little enters or leaves without being logged.
The Ferry to Sparrow Island
Transport, and plot device
Dot’s boat, two crossings a day when the weather allows. It is responsible for a good deal of the forced proximity in this series.
The Rusty Cleat
The pub
Chowder, a pool table with a slope in it, and the same eleven people most nights. The Hartwells hold their arguments here when they want witnesses.
Cove Books and Charts
Bookshop
Maya Reyes’s shop on the harbor front. Nautical charts at the front for the summer people, fiction at the back for everyone else.
The Larkspur Free Library
One room, upstairs
Above the old fire station, open four afternoons a week, run single-handed by Olive Park. The card catalogue was never digitized because nobody has ever needed it to be.
Larkspur Animal Clinic
Dr. Frost’s practice
On Harbor Street, one exam room, open Saturdays. Admiral is on the books as a regular patient, which Admiral does not accept.
The year
Four seasons, one of them reliable
- Spring
- Mud, then lupines along the coastal road. The inn reopens and the first bookings arrive from people who have been coming for decades.
- Summer
- Weddings, the ferry running full, and Lupine Days on the town green in June. Every room is taken and the kitchen starts at four in the morning.
- Autumn
- The summer people leave, the light turns, and the town gets itself back. Best pie of the year.
- Winter
- Nor’easters, a half-empty dining room, and the sort of quiet the Hartwells spend all summer looking forward to and all January regretting.
The thread
What is in the wall
The Nightingale Inn has stood above the harbor since 1871 and has been in Hartwell hands the whole time. Eleanor has kept the front desk since 1971.
In the first book a contractor opens a kitchen wall and finds something behind the plaster that nobody in the family can account for. Some of the inn’s stories are easier to find than others, and Eleanor has never been in any hurry about the rest.
Everything in a kitchen has a personality.