It has rained on the Sound for a week, the fine kind that hangs in the air and never quite comes down. I have spent most of it building a town. Gault Mills is not a real place. I am making it up, for the mysteries I write, and I began where the town began, at the water.
Water first
The river ran the mill. The mill made the town. That order still shows in the street plan, because a town gets laid out once and then mostly stays where it was put.
So far I have settled very little, on purpose. Gault Mills leans toward the river. Main Street runs parallel to the water, a block up from the bank, and the mill stands where the current runs hardest, because that current was the whole point of putting it there.
Borrowed and invented
I grew up in Astoria, down the Oregon coast, near towns that ran on one mill and one payroll. The weather in Gault Mills is theirs. So are the bones of it, the short blocks stacked along the slope above the water. What I will not borrow is fact. The river is made up, and so are the people, and so is everything that ever happened there. That way no one can check the town against a real place, and I keep it straight only against itself.
Keeping it straight
That last part matters more in a mystery than in other books. A reader of puzzles checks. If a house is three doors from the corner in April, it is three doors from the corner in September, or the reader is right to feel cheated and stop trusting me. So I keep a plan. The town has to keep its facts the same on every page, and the safest thing is to decide them slowly and write them down.
For now the river has no name. It is just the river, which is what it would be to anyone who lived on it. The town came out of that water once, and on the page it still does.