We have a number of new people on the mailing list this month - hello and welcome! I hope you'll enjoy the offerings! I usually send out a free story approximately every month or two. 

Also, in case anyone missed it, Shamus & Shifter (Keeley #7) came out at the end of March and is now available on Amazon and Kindle Unlimited!

I have always loved bookstores and libraries - who doesn't? - and I love that bookmobiles can bring books to even more people. I've read a lot of stories about magic libraries and bookstores, but never saw one about a magic bookmobile, so I decided to write one. But the nature of its magic may not be exactly what you think ...

You can download on Bookfunnel to read at your leisure, or read the story in its entirety below.

With a name like Polly Culpepper, Polly felt that she was inevitably destined for some quirky, unusual occupation. If she hadn't ended up as the owner of a traveling bookmobile, she imagined that she would probably have been a pet psychic or a fortune cookie writer or an eccentric sculptor who made found-object sculptures out of trash and lived in a junkyard.

Of the options, she preferred the traveling bookshop.

The plan had occurred to her because so many people in Alaska lived out on the sprawling highway system, hours from a bookstore or library. Why not, she thought, bring the books to them?

On the outside, her traveling bookshop looked like an ordinary old-fashioned 1980s van; there was a bit of an A-Team van vibe to it. She had cleaned it up, refurbished it completely, and painted the outside purple, then stenciled fireweed and wild rose flowers, liking their crisp splashes of pink. Pink letters read POLLY'S BOOK VAN. The result was nothing like anything else on the road, and it was certainly attention-getting.

She had camping gear in the front with her. Two or three days out of the week she slept at home; the rest of the time she camped out on the road.

The back, of course, was full of bookshelves. They were packed with cheap paperbacks for the most part. She accepted trades, sales, or loans, for which she kept a ledger and collected the loaned-out books when she came back around on her two-week travel circuit.

She set up in parking lots of roadside businesses, in small downtowns, and anywhere else she could look for a few people who needed a book.

It was a fun, free-wheeling existence. She took a couple of months off from the bookmobile circuit in winter and had a part-time job at a bookstore that helped pay for it. It wasn't something she was ever going to get rich at. In fact, barely scraping by was her daily routine. But all in all, she thought that young Polly Culpepper—who would probably have made a good children's book protagonist with that name, she thought—would have been happy to know this was her future.

"How do you fit so many books in there?" was a question she had been asked by more than one patron.

"It's bigger on the inside," she said, laughing it off.

But, well ... it wasn't really a joke.

She had discovered this peculiar property of the van after moving all the books in. She began the bookshop project with a starter library from her own groaning bookshelves: rejects and discards and doubles, books she'd read once and didn't plan to read again, and a few old favorites that she hoped someone else would love as much as she did. Once the van's bookshelves were packed and her own were somewhat emptier, she climbed into the van to make sure everything was strapped down for travel. It took her a little while to notice that she could stand up without bumping her head.

"Hello, what's going on?" she said aloud.

The interior of the van was poorly lit, and she had to use her sense of touch as much as sight to feel her way deeper inside. She really should have touched the opposite side by now.

But instead all she found were more shelves loaded with books. Polly ran her fingers across them. Were these her books? Had she put all these in here? It was too dark to see properly, but she had a dim sense of more shelves extending beyond her, accompanied by a dusty old-library smell.

She pulled out a couple of books, fat dog-eared paperbacks that could have been any of the ones in the many boxes she had reserved for her traveling library/bookshop. It was too dark to read the titles, so she made her way back out to the sunlight again to see what they were. It was a bit startling, after the dimness and sense of vast space she had just experienced, to step down from the van into her own ordinary front yard.

Polly looked at the books she had taken. Were these her own books? She wasn't entirely sure. They looked like typical books from a used bookstore. One was a romance paperback with a red X through the cover, the other a thick fantasy novel that was book 3 of a series she had some vague recollection of reading a long time ago. She opened the pages of the books and shook them on a strange urge to see if there was a message inside, but nothing fell out.

Polly went back to the house and got a flashlight. When she shone it into the van, the beam played across bookshelves and the perfectly normal back side of the inner van wall, covered in the carpet that she had put up for extra noise damping on the road.

But she searched and searched for a hole in the bookshelves where she could have pulled off those two books, and found nothing.

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She was always worried someone was going to get lost in there, but so far, no one ever had.

The strange quality of the book van had a way of concealing itself. There were times when Polly geared up for a spelunking trip, with a flashlight and backpack and rope and chalk—but the van would remain its normal size, giving nothing away. It only ever revealed itself to her when she was tired or completely unprepared. The extra space was never there when she looked for it. But it might readily appear if she stumbled in with an armload of books late in the evening, only to accidentally walk past where the wall should be.

Similarly, not all customers found the extra space in the van; in fact, most didn't. Those who explored the shelves and vanished for unexpected and impossible periods of time tended to be children and daydreamers, those who might easily brush off such an experience as a fantasy or simply part of their way of interacting with the world.

She got used to customers coming up to her with books she definitely hadn't put in the van. She never entered those in the lending library ledger, or charged much for them; in fact, she often threw them in free with the rest of the purchase.

People never came out with truly impossible books, or anything really expensive. In fact, most of the unexpected books were simply random used-bookstore finds. Sometimes someone would emerge in delight, cobwebs in their hair, carrying a dog-eared copy of a book they had loved as a child or something out of print that they had looked for elsewhere in vain. But it would never be a specific book, a long-lost childhood copy with an inscription from a long-gone relative, or a book that had been destroyed and could never be owned again.

Polly supposed that such a thing theoretically could happen, given the mysterious qualities of the van—but it would also pull back the magician's curtain from the van's strange, unpredictable magic, revealing its impossible nature. In some way, it seemed to prevent this from happening. She found herself following that rule as well, not trying to pry into its secrets or take advantage of it as a source of free books for sale; it felt to her as if this would be the same thing as killing the goose that laid the golden eggs.

She felt as if she had been made a custodian for the strange, unpredictable magic that had come so mysteriously into her life. It was not something she owned, merely something that had decided, for whatever reason, to show itself to her. And it could vanish just as suddenly as it had come if she didn't treat it right.

Polly assumed all along that the van couldn't possibly be unique. It was far odder to her to imagine that she was the sole keeper of the only magic in the world than to think that there were other miraculous places out there somewhere. And yet, when she first encountered it elsewhere, it took her a while to recognize it.

She was in a cramped and crowded used bookstore on a rainy day, collecting more stock for the store as well as reading material for herself. The store had looked tiny from the outside, but once she pushed her way between the narrow shelves, she found that it must go all the way to the back of the building. In fact, it was huge. She wandered among the aisles, all of them lit by the same omnipresent dim light that always seemed to come from just beyond the next shelf, and gradually, as her arms filled with books, she began to realize what must be happening.

She wasn't afraid, only fascinated. She had spent enough time in the van's impossible stacks to know that she could find her way out again. And indeed, just a little before she was done—but with her arms too full to carry any more—she took a turn that shouldn't have led back to the front of the store (surely she was much too far back, and she knew she hadn't made that many turns) and there she was at the counter, with sunlight streaming in through the smudged front window.

The old man at the till glanced at her purchases and got out a bag from under the counter, not even bothering to enter the titles into the ancient computer with its ink-stained keys. "Special," he said. "Whole bag for five."

Polly smiled a little; she recognized this because she had done the same with some of her customers' impossible purchases.

"I have a book van," she said. "I'm leaving tonight, but I'll come by again when I'm back in town. Maybe you'd like to stop by and check out mine too, the next time I'm here. I can fit a lot more books in the van than you would expect."

He looked up, and their eyes met with a kind of recognition in them. Then he nodded a little.

"Love to," he said, tucking a paper bookmark into the topmost of her books before placing it in the bag. "Come back soon."

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