From the Grounds Up Read Free

resumes service as an official train stop on September first.'
    Sarah Kingston's smile rivaled the sun.

Chapter Three
    September first.
    And it was now mid-May. Three and a half months. Not a lot of time to outfit the place and turn it into a gourmet coffee shop with all the bells and whistles that caffeine-fiends had come to expect. God knew what kind of problems lurked behind the walls. The building was nearly a century and a half old.
    But Sarah owned the property. And as a real estate agent, she had connections all over town. Inspectors. Contractors. Hell, her cousin Ronny even was one.
    We could do it. If we moved fast.
    'How much work does the interior need?' I asked her. 'Is the kitchen from the cafe still there?'
    'Let's find out.'
    Sarah held up a key. It was enormous by modern standards. A skeleton key, my mom had called them, though I was never sure if that was because the old locks looked like skulls or the keys themselves were long and skinny like skeletons.
    As Sarah struggled to open the station's main entrance, I looked around again. The front of the depot bordered directly on Junction Road, one of the few thoroughfares in Brookhills that ran on an angle, north-east to south-west. Much to the disgust of current city planners, who raised ninety-degree grids to the level of religion.
    To make the depot area even more of a throwback, the buildings in the Junction fronted directly on the sidewalk, with nothing but a couple of parallel parking spaces between the storefronts and traffic. There were no parking lots in front (like modern Brookhills businesses were required to provide), or even in back. The depot and the store-owners that lined the two blocks north of the tracks were 'grandfathered', meaning they didn't have to comply with current codes, or at least not all of them.
    As I faced the front door of the depot, to the left were the railroad tracks. To the right and across a gravel driveway was a florist shop, now closed for the evening.
    On the opposite side of the street was PartyPeople, which looked like a caterer. Penn and Ink--maybe a studio or an artists' supply shop--next to them. Tucked in closest to the tracks and directly across from the depot, was a storefront advertising piano lessons.
    An eclectic collection of small businesses. We'd fit right in. Sarah, Amy and me. Should Caron change her mind and commit, Uncommon Grounds would be about as eclectic as you could get.
    As Sarah finally bested the lock and went to swing open the door, I snuck a glance around the corner to the track side of the building. Four angled parking spots and beyond them at the back of the building, a big lot that looked like it had recently been cleared.
    'What's going in behind the depot?' I asked as I followed Sarah into the building.
    'Parking.' Sarah slipped the big key back into her jacket pocket. 'People need somewhere to leave their cars before they take the train downtown to work.'
    'Of course,' I said absently, trying to get my head around nearly unlimited parking provided to us and to our customers for the magic word: 'free'.
    Later, I would count the parking spaces and multiply that by the cost of a latte. The number would be inflated, but hey, a girl can dream, can't she?
    Right now, though, I was eager to go over the interior layout of the depot itself. In front of me were three ticket windows. Happily the previous businesses had left them untouched, probably willing to forgo extra space for the charm the counter provided.
    The three clocks I'd glimpsed from outside were labeled: 'Seattle', 'Brookhills' and 'New York City'. The Brookhills entry in the center was clean though hanging a little askew, like someone had just finished polishing it. The time, best as I could tell, seemed right--a quarter to eight. In contrast, the bracketing Seattle and New York clocks looked forgotten. To my eye, they read ten after ten and six o'clock, but given the dusky light inside the station and the sheen of dust that covered