Four Count - Scott Lomac

Pinecrest, Oregon, 1986. For twenty years the town has known Lila Monroe as the bookseller: punctual, agreeable, mildly unforthcoming. Nobody has noticed how she enters her own shop each morning - from the threshold, committing nothing until the room accounts for itself.

Before Pinecrest she was Starlight Lila of the Majestic, gold lamé beside Cara Thompson’s sapphire, forty girls breathing on the same four-count. She was also something the posters never advertised: a courier, paid in a currency she declines to name. In March 1966 Cara vanished, and Lila left Las Vegas with papers too good to have made herself, a pocket Rebecca pricked through with pinholes, and a night she cannot remember.

Now a construction crew has pulled a steamer trunk from a concrete slab at the old Majestic, with a woman inside. And an envelope has come under Lila’s door: a photograph, a threat in red ink, and on the flap, in pencil, five-figure groups in a hand only one person on earth ever knew.

To learn who is writing to her, and what she did in the hours she lost, Lila must reopen the troupe’s old grudges, two governments’ files, and the one book she should have burned. Cara’s rule for the finale still holds: We share a heartbeat on the four-count. Don’t you dare lose it.