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“I know the basic details just like everybody else. But when it comes down to it, I know as much about what really happened to Jack Hudson as I do about what really happened to Jack Kennedy.”
* * *
The morning’s line of questioning takes it out of Ruby, but she’s game to keep talking. She needs to do this, and oddly, sharing her own thoughts and feelings with Dexter is proving oddly cathartic.
After their iced coffees and following his hard questions about Jack’s death, Dexter suggests a tour of the island and Ruby readily agrees to go along, even though she and Banks did the full drive the day before when they arrived. She hops into his golf cart, which is parked on Main Street right in front of an open air restaurant and bar called Jack Frosty’s. Dexter pulls away from the curb, taking the corner onto December Drive so quickly that Ruby whoops in surprise and reaches out for something to hang onto.
“You trying to knock me loose?” she shouts over the sound of the wheels crunching on sand and shells. She’s given Banks the morning off, and shockingly, he’s accepted it. Apparently he’s finding Christmas Key to be a relatively safe place with very few surprises, and Ruby is thrilled for the space to breathe. For the first time in more years than she cares to think about, she’s on her own, no Secret Service, no planned meetings, no one to report to. And it feels amazing.
“Sorry, boss,” Dexter says, leaning forward in his seat and resting his forearm on the steering wheel.
The wind whips through the open cart, lifting his shirt away from his body and blowing his hair back. It would be hard not to notice how handsome he looks with the blue of the ocean as his backdrop.
Ruby looks around at what feels like miles of untouched white sand and sea as Dexter nods up ahead of them. “Right around that bend is the cluster of tiny homes that Holly, the mayor, had built here. Did you hear about that project?” he asks.
Ruby shakes her head. “Banks and I drove past them, but I don’t know the story.”
“HGTV came out here and they did a reality show while the houses were being built. I bought one, and the other nine are all owned by various part-time residents.”
“How tiny are we talking?” Ruby looks at the perfect little houses that she’d only glimpsed the day before as they approach the miniature community.
“Mine is three hundred square feet,” he says, rolling to a stop in front of a white, two-story cottage with a silver light fixture hanging next to the door. “Wanna see?”
Ruby is tempted to make a smart comment about not being the kind of girl who goes into a man’s house on the first date, but she catches herself before it escapes her lips. There’s a freedom to being on Christmas Key and to talking about her life and her secrets, but Ruby doesn’t want to get too carried away.
“I’d love to see how a whole house fits into three hundred square feet,” she says, climbing out of the cart and smoothing her hair.
Even back here, on the quiet side of the island, there are obvious nods to the Christmas season. Each of the tiny homes bears a hand-painted wooden shingle with a holiday name on it. For instance, Dexter’s says Cocoa Cottage, and the one right next to his has a sign that designates it as Peppermint Palace.
“Cute,” Ruby says, tapping the sign with her fingertips as Dexter opens his front door to let her in.
“I didnotchoose that name,” he says, looking at her with mild disdain from under his brow.
"I'm going to pretend that you did," she jokes as she steps into the tiny foyer.
The little house stops Ruby in her tracks; it’s adorable. The front room is white with navy blue accents, the couch a comfy looking denim loveseat. The room merges right into a small but functional kitchen with white marble counters. The sink is a stainless steel farm sink that’s about half the size of a normal kitchen sink, and instead of cupboards with doors, dishes rest on open shelving with nautical ropes running the length of the shelves to hold plates and glasses in place.
In fact, there are nautical touches everywhere Ruby looks, including a rope handrail running up the stairs to the second floor loft, a rusty anchor hanging from the wall next to the bathroom door, and a small desk made of wood from a boat that folds down from the wall and holds a laptop and a few books. The slab of wood that forms the desk is covered in blistered paint and bears the stencil of a boat’s name:The Nickel and Dime. Everything feels just right, and Ruby loves seeing where the man who is digging so deeply into her life lives his own life—it gives her some insight into who he is and how he functions.
“This place is incredible,” Ruby says, walking over to the bathroom door. “May I?”
Dexter shrugs. “I brought you in and offered to show you around, so I guess that’s on me. Go ahead. Explore.”
Ruby takes him at his word, checking out the marble shower and the small sink with a cabinet beneath it. The mirror over the sink is ringed in seashells (“The whole place came decorated,” Dexter says loudly and somewhat defensively as she runs her fingers over the wainscoting in the front room), and there are small, hand-painted pictures of sailboats running up the wall next to the stairs. As she pokes her head into the loft, Ruby can see that he’s got a queen-sized bed on a low frame up there, with enough room for a nightstand and a lamp.
“This place is incredible. Are any of your neighbors selling their places?” she asks, holding onto the rope railing as she steps back down into the living space.
“Didn’t you just buy an enormous house on the beach on Shipwreck Key?” he asks, smiling at the way she’s picking up his miniature tea kettle and touching the half-sized blender on the kitchen counter.
Ruby shrugs and walks back through the open front door, which Dexter closes behind them. He seems relieved to be outside again. Ruby stands on his front porch and looks at the wooden walkway that winds amongst the tiny houses and ends at a hard-packed sand parking lot, where posts with charging stations sit ready to charge up golf carts at night. The charging stations are painted with red and white stripes like candy canes, and in front of several of the tiny homes are pink plastic flamingos with Christmas wreathes around their necks or Santa hats resting jauntily on their pink heads.
“This place,” Ruby says, shaking her head. “Although I guess Shipwreck Key does go a bit overboard on the pirate stuff.”
“But it suits you?”
“Oh, yeah. I love charming places. As soon as I set foot on Shipwreck Key years ago, I knew I wanted to live there. It’s not quite as small as this island, and it’s only about ten miles south of Destin, so it’s not difficult for me to be on an airplane within an hour or two, but it's removed enough from the real world that I can sometimes forget about everything else. It’s ideal.”
“You think you’ll stay there?” Dexter leans on the railing next to her, looking out over the plot of mini houses.
