When Ash moved here from Texas about six weeks earlier, our relationship flip-flopped between flirty one minute and contentious the next—or more accurately, Ash had. He came to Tuttle Corner to run his family’s funeral home after his grandfather had a debilitating stroke. He was just out of law school and had given up his dream job at a law firm in Austin to take over the family business, so he was understandably conflicted about the new direction his life had taken. We’d met when I was doing a story about a murder victim whose body had gone unclaimed, and he’d quite literally slammed a door in my face on Monday; by Friday he suggested we go out for a drink. It nearly gave me whiplash.
Ash Campbell was smart, witty, and good-looking—and he knew it. I’d found his arrogance both appealing and repellent, and when you combined that with his mercurial nature, I wasn’t sure how close I wanted to get to a guy like that. But for all of his volatility, when I showed up blearyeyed and overwhelmed at Campbell & Sons to make the arrangements for Flick’s funeral, Ash had been amazing. He’d walked me through everything, helped simplify my choices, and literally held my hand through the tough decisions. He’d shown me more compassion than I would have expected from him.
We started talking every day because of funeral stuff, but somewhere along the way we’d settled into a pattern. Calls, texts, pop-in visits to each other’s work, offers to walk Coltrane or bring over pizza. And yes, over the past few weeks there’d been a few moments when if circumstances had been different—if I hadn’t been mired in grief—something might have happened between us. But as of now Ash and I were just friends. Pretty much.
“They were out of Cubans so I got you a turkey club,” Ash said, pulling a foil-wrapped sandwich from the bag. “Hope that’s okay.”
“Perfect. How much do I owe you?”
“Don’t worry about it.” He shrugged.
“No, seriously. You don’t have to pay for my lunch…”
“I know I don’t have to.” He smiled. “I want to.”
“Fine,” I said, looking down to conceal the involuntary blush I could feel spreading across my cheeks. “My treat next time.”
“How was this morning? Did you tell Kay you were ready to go back to full speed?” Ash had been gently encouraging me to get back into my normal routine. He said that was one of the best ways he found to move forward after his mom died.
“Uh-huh,” I said, my mouth full of sandwich. I held up one finger as I chewed. Ash waited with an amused look on his face as I swallowed the way-too-big bite I’d taken. “She was great about it. Classic Kay. Gave me a handful of assignments and plugged me right back in.”
“That’s good. There’s nothing like being busy to keep your mind off…” he let his sentence trail off. “By the way, did you find anything in Flick’s office about your grandfather’s book?”
I’d recently found out that at the time of his murder, my granddad was putting together a collection of obituaries about people who had died and had no one to bury or mourn them. The working title was The Lonely Dead, and his goal, according to Flick, was to find out what happened in these people’s lives to isolate them so thoroughly—and then to give their story a voice. It was so like Granddad to want to shine a light on the less fortunate among us. As a journalist, he’d spent many years tuned into the imbalanced distribution of privilege in our country. It was one of the many things I’d admired about him. Flick’s theory was that Granddad had been killed because of something he found out while researching that book.
“No,” I said. “Not that I can make sense of anyway.”
Flick had never been able to find a shred of evidence that Granddad had been working on this book. The only reason he knew anything about it was because Granddad mentioned it in passing during one of their morning coffee sessions. It was like the entire project—his notes, files, source lists—just evaporated the moment he died. Even his laptop had been destroyed. Sheriff Tackett told me at the time that Granddad must have knocked over a glass of water and fried the system, but the computer expert I’d taken it to said, based on the amount of damage, it looked to him like the machine had been submerged in water “for a significant length of time.” Flick was the only person with whom Granddad had discussed the book, so no one else knew anything was missing. His notes in the file were messy, disjointed, and cryptic. I’d been working my way through Flick’s file every chance I got, trying to make sense of what was in there.
“I’ll keep on looking, though,” I said. “Hopefully, I’ll find something eventually.” I changed the subject and asked Ash about how things were at the funeral home, and if there’d been any change in his grandfather’s condition.
“Not really. He eats just enough, opens his eyes just enough, squeezes my grandma’s hand just enough…but he’s not getting any better.”
Franklin’s sudden illness had been hard on the whole Campbell family, perhaps Ash most of all. With his mother gone, his father in and out of prisons and rehab centers, and his sister living out in California as a single mom to three kids, Ash was the only member of the family in a position to take over the 143-year-old business. But it didn’t come without a cost.
“Have you decided when you’ll go back to Texas to get your stuff?”
He sighed like he always did when we talked about Texas. “I’d like to go before the end of next month, so I can stop paying for the storage locker. I’ve just been putting it off, I guess. I’ve been busy, but really I think I’m just delaying the inevitable.” He let out a small laugh that was one part humor and three parts regret. Making the decision to leave behind his career in Austin had been a very difficult one, fueled more by obligation than choice.
“But you like your new place, right?”
“Yeah, I really do,” he said. “I love being on the water. It’s so peaceful out there. I can just sit out on my back porch, have a beer, and watch the sun set. I still can’t believe that place was available.”
Debbie Forrester, a retired P.E. teacher from Tuttle Middle School, had decided to take up a second career as a cruise ship dance instructor. She was a widow and said she’d always loved to dance, so she couldn’t think of a better way to spend her post-retirement years than dancing while out at sea. “It’ll be just like living on the Love Boat!” she told Ash when they’d met to sign the rental agreement for her cabin on the James River. Debbie signed a ninemonth employment contract with the cruise line, “with an option to extend indefinitely,” so Ash did the same.
“You need to come out and see it,” Ash said. “We could watch the sunset…open a bottle of wine…”
This wasn’t the first time Ash had invited me over to see his new place. He’d suggested I come over a few times over the past couple of weeks, but I’d always made some vague excuse to get out of it. It just seemed like going over to his house to watch a movie or have a drink was more of an official date than meeting for lunch or seeing each other at Campbell & Sons. I liked Ash and was learning to trust him but wasn’t sure I wanted to take that next step. And given how his amber eyes sparkled under my kitchen lights, I didn’t trust myself to resist them during a Virginia sunset.