“Of course. I won’t sell anything I haven’t read myself. Wouldn’t feel ethical. I’m Paula. Are you visiting from somewhere?”
“Ruth and Jane,” Ruth replied. “We’ve just moved to Maine, actually. From Los Angeles.”
“Some great mystery books set in Los Angeles. The Big Sleep being one of them, of course. Lots of true crime, too. Are you settling in Kennebunkport?”
“We have a bit farther to go,” Ruth replied. “Bells Hollow.”
Paula smiled. “Bells Hollow. Sure.”
“You’ve heard of it?” Ruth asked.
“My two areas of expertise: mystery books and Maine. All these little towns have mysteries, you know. I could tell you a thing or two about Bells Hollow.”
“No. Thank you,” Ruth said quickly. Then her face softened. “We should probably get going. It sounds like the rain is letting up a bit.”
“I’ll get this, thanks,” Jane said, handing Paula Killer in the Rain.
Paula slid behind the counter and Jane spotted an end shelf of books she hadn’t noticed before—Agatha Christie.
“Oh, here we go,” Ruth said, smiling as Jane started pulling out paperbacks. “Agatha Christie’s number-one fan right here.”
“Poirot or Marple?” Paula asked, referring to Agatha Christie’s two most famous characters.
“Poirot, of course,” Jane said.
“My kind of girl,” Paula replied.
“I’ll get this, too.” Jane put a copy of Destination Unknown on the counter. “Can’t pass up this cover.” It featured a robed figure standing in the middle of a confusing background, all swirls of color and shapes. It looked like something Dalí would paint.
“Do you judge a book by its cover?” Paula asked as she picked up the Agatha Christie book and recorded its price.
“Guilty,” Jane said.
“Sometimes you can’t help it,” Paula said, winking. “Especially when they’re as good as this one.” Paula slid the two books across the counter and said, “Nine fifty-seven.”
Jane pulled her credit card out of her wallet and handed it to her. Ruth opened the front door and stepped outside.
“It’s definitely slowed down,” she called back.
Paula took the credit card and ran it through her machine, then paused to look at the name.
“North,” she said softly. “That’s an interesting surname.”
Jane shrugged. “My mom’s side.”
Paula handed the credit card back to Jane. Something had come over her face, a sort of shadow. “You be careful up there,” she said, just quiet enough so Ruth wouldn’t hear. “In Bells Hollow. These old towns all have histories. Some of them are darker than others.”
“Oh. Okay. Thanks.” Jane took the card and the books. She opened her mouth to say something else, but Ruth stuck her head back in the store.
“Come on, honey, let’s make a run for it,” she said.
With a last glance back at Paula—who was still looking at her strangely—Jane shoved the books inside her jacket and followed her mom to the car.
Her stomach gave a weird little flop when she passed the U-Haul trailer they’d pulled all the way from California. Her entire life was in there. Well—what was left of it. Six years of journals. Her sizable collection of mystery books, largely made up of Agatha Christies, diligently collected over the years, old and fragile pulp paperbacks she adored for their often-silly covers and turquoise- and red-edged pages. Whatever clothes she could squeeze into her allotted three boxes. They’d been driving for a week, but it hadn’t gotten less strange seeing the entirety of what they owned shoved into this tiny trailer.
Ruth had cried when they’d reached the large blue sign that said, in three-foot-high letters: WELCOME TO MAINE.
She’d pulled over in front of it and Jane had said, “I guess we’re here?”
“Maine is a big state. It will take another few hours.”
“Hours,” Jane repeated.
WELCOME TO MAINE.
And then it had started pouring.
Jane let herself into the passenger seat and tossed her new books in the back.
“She was kind of weird, huh?” Jane said.
“She runs a mystery bookshop out of her garage,” Ruth said. “I think ‘weird’ is exactly what she’s going for.”
“You’re probably right.”
Jane looked at her mother, then back at herself.
They were both a little worn and rumpled around the edges from a weeklong drive across the country. A week’s worth of diner meals and takeout and fast food that had left Jane’s body feeling heavy and slow. Too many carbs, not enough vegetables. Too much coffee and not enough water. Too much time sitting, feeling shaky and off whenever she had to walk somewhere. Rotating the same two T-shirts and the same two pairs of jeans. She was ready to be out of the car for good. She was ready to burn the car. And the clothes.
“Fuck,” Ruth whispered next to her. Then, “I’m sorry. It just hits me sometimes.”
Jane understood exactly, because it just hit her sometimes, too, even though it had been five weeks since her father’s heart attack and four weeks since the funeral and three weeks since Ruth had revealed they were broke and two weeks since she had announced they were moving across the country and one week since they had set off, all their worldly possessions sold except the precious little they had managed to cram into the trailer.
“Fuck is right,” Jane said, and for a moment she felt washed in anger, a sticky, red-hot anger that threatened to explode out of her like a scream. But she couldn’t lose it now. She had to keep it together, for her mother’s sake. She took a slow, quiet breath and said, in a voice that fell just short of any real emotion, “We’ll feel better when we get there. Just a few more hours.”
“A few more hours,” Ruth repeated.
They hadn’t been using GPS on their cell phones; instead Ruth had stopped at a gas station in every new state they drove through and bought a map, and sat in the car for a moment studying it, planning the route that would bring them farther and farther away from California, the only home Jane had ever known (the only home she had ever wanted to know, and for that reason just the sight of a paper map would, for the rest of her life, create an aching, lonely feeling in the pit of her stomach; she had learned to hate maps, to hate street signs, to hate the mile markers that appeared and then disappeared in the passenger-side mirror).
And so they’d made the entire trip, sometimes listening to podcasts, sometimes to the radio, sometimes to books on tape, sometimes to nothing at all, because something would end and neither Jane nor Ruth would realize it was over because neither Jane nor Ruth had really been listening to it anyway.
But silence in a car wasn’t really silence at all. The whoosh of opposite traffic. The errant horn. The pavement disappearing underneath them. The engine roaring away. The soft huff of air coming out of the vents. It all blended together to create something almost like music.
WELCOME TO MAINE.
Jane didn’t feel welcome at all.
Instead, she felt ambushed—like even the week’s worth of driving hadn’t been enough to prepare her for the inevitability of actually arriving.