Angol
A stranger walks into Winifred Baxter's apothecary and buys elderflower capsules he plainly doesn't need. He asks careful questions about the old Wexford family. And when he leaves, there is a playing card on the counter - the three of clubs, the same one Copernicus brought her last winter and that she has never been able to explain.
By the next morning the crows have come. Nine of them, then more, in a silent row along the church roof, and the old people of Pelican Cove begin to mutter the Wexford omen: when the crows sit the roof, the house gives up a soul. When the town historian is found dead at the foot of a dark stair, everyone agrees it was the omen come true.
Winifred does not believe in omens. She believes in a button torn off under tension, in a photograph stolen from its pin, and in a crow who has never once been wrong. She also believes the kindest woman in town is hiding something - and that the truth has been waiting forty years, at the bottom of the cold harbor, to come up.
