She liked the booth looking out onto Main Street so she could “people-watch,” she said. I can conjure her up so clearly, red nails clicking on the white mug of coffee the waiter always brought her as soon as we sat down, dark gaze scanning the town outside, a queen secure in her kingdom.
But the restaurant is dark, the painted letters on the glass flaking off, and I look over at Ben. “The Jay closed?”
He shrugs. “We had to raise the rents downtown, and the owner decided it was time to retire.”
My gaze moves over the street, and now I see that the Jay isn’t the only shuttered building. The tearoom is dark, as is the tiny bookstore. So, too, the jewelry shop, where Ruby had an account.
I shouldn’t care about any of it. Tavistock isn’t my home anymore. Hell, I’m not sure it ever really was, but there’s still an oily sensation in my stomach that I’m pretty sure is guilt.
“Did you actually need to raise the rents?” I ask Ben now, and he shoots me another one of those sideways glances.
“If we didn’t want to ask you for more money, then yeah.”
Tavistock itself is another one of those complications in Ruby’s will. Big chunks of the town still technically belong to me, but back in the early 2000s, Ruby sold a couple of blocks of downtown to Nelle. Howell wanted to open a brewery or something, and Nelle had a bunch of money after her husband died. I hadn’t paid much attention to the details because I’d been only about twelve or so, but Ruby had still made me go down to the lawyer’s office with her, dressed in a fucking suit and tie like I was the world’s youngest Realtor.
I can still feel the cool weight of her hand slipping into the crook of my elbow as we left that office, smell her perfume as she leaned in and muttered, Sometimes it’s fun to give people enough rope with which to hang themselves, my Camden.
I hadn’t understood what she meant, but the words had made something twist in my gut. By then, I knew about all the “Mrs. Kill-more” stuff, the string of dead husbands. I’d found out accidentally the summer before, an offhand comment sending me to the internet, and when I’d asked Ruby about it, she’d taken me to the Jay, to our favorite booth, and calmly told me the story of each of them.
Duke, killed in a robbery.
Hugh, electrocuted in the barn.
Andrew, sick with some mystery ailment.
Roddy, partying too hard and going over the side of a boat.
It all made sense when she laid it out, a series of unrelated incidents, bizarre, sure, but nowhere near as sinister as it had been made out.
I believed her.
Then, at least.
Ben pulls his truck into a parking place just in front of one of the few stores still open along this stretch, a sign reading HENDERSON’S HARDWARE AND SUNDRY GOODES swinging faintly in the breeze.
There are two men at the counter when we step in, one behind, one in front, and they’re smiling as they chat, the familiar accents sliding over my ears and into my heart in a way that makes me feel homesick even as I stand in my hometown.
They stop talking as we come in, and I watch something in both their faces change when they see Ben standing there.
He smiles brightly at them, lifting a hand. “Steve, Hank. How’s it going?”
The guy behind the counter—Steve Henderson, I recognize him now despite the paunch and the gray hair—nods at us. “Mr. McTavish,” he says, and then his eyes slide over to me.
The tightness fades from his expression and his eyes widen slightly. “Holy shit, Camden,” he says, and then he’s coming around the counter, pumping my hand and slapping my back. “How the hell are you, boy? Hank, you remember Ruby’s son, don’t you? Camden? Lord, what’s it been? Ten years now?”
“Something close to that,” I reply, smiling back at him as Hank leans on the counter and takes off his cap, running a hand over his thinning hair.
“Tell you what, son, we still miss your mama something fierce around here,” he says, and I can tell he means it. Ruby was a celebrity in this town, their magnanimous benefactor. If people in Tavistock ever whispered about all those husbands, they did it behind firmly closed doors.
No wonder she never wanted to leave.
“I miss her, too,” I tell him, and I am surprised to realize that’s true. I’ve spent the past ten years trying not to think about Ruby, and when I have, I’ve remembered only the bad things.
There was a lot of bad to remember, after all.
But there had also been good. The meals at the Jay. The standing account at the local bookstore, how Ruby encouraged my love of reading and always let me buy any book I wanted. The way she would ruffle my hair and say, You and me against the world, whenever Nelle or Howell or Ben was being a dick.