Wayne Xavier calls from Stamford on a Tuesday in June. He’s coming to Thornbury for the weekend. He has the Impala, a reservation at a new inn on Main Street, and the particular confidence of a man who has driven this road before and intends to drive it again.

Lorri Oliver has a restaurant to run, a town that is starting to notice her, and a red leather booth that Wayne knows better than to take for granted.

She also has a question she cannot yet answer — the kind that arrives quietly, without announcing itself, and sits down at the bar and waits.

Wayne is the third book in the Something in the Water series. A Ferris wheel in June. A craftsman’s hand at the first button. A fork on the table that nobody has picked up yet.

And at the bar on a Tuesday in October, a man from Ridgefield who drove an hour without being asked and didn’t need to ask for her.

The Something in the Water series just got complicated.