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It wouldn’t be for Ophelia. Though she still adored her beloved bed and breakfast, she borrowed Lucas’s old sledgehammer and knocked down the long-standing sign in a fit of temper.
She couldn’t stand it anymore. The deadbolts hadn’t kept her safe. The elaborate locking system hadn’t kept Mason from tricking her, from drugging her, from using her as bait to get to both GraceandTessa. Add in the heartache she suffered when Sly’s ex came to stay for a week in the Rose Room before Véronique snuck into Sly’s old house to make it seem as if she slept with him instead, and it wasn’t only the gulley that seemed to mock Maria these days.
Her old sign did, too:
Ophelia of Hamlet
Cozy Bed & Breakfast
Open to All
She believed that once. Hopefully, she would again. For now, the only bit of relief she found in the weeks since her captivity was in removing the sign.
It wouldn’t be a bed and breakfast for her to cater to the whims of the odd outsider. Not anymore. The De Angelis family home would belong to Maria and Sly, and the family they created together in a village that would do anything to get past the shadows hanging over the last few years.
That was where the new sign came in.
At first, Sly thought Maria wanted to post a warning in front of the gulley. For more than eighty years, the sharp stop and the fork in the road had been enough to keep unlucky outsiders from taking a swan dive inside with only a few exceptions.
But that’s not what she had in mind. And when she explained what she was thinking, Sly kissed her on the forehead and promised to take the proposal right to the town council.
Maria still wasn’t sure how much the elders knew about what happened the night she was rescued—or the four days she was trapped with Sergeant Boone. If Valerie Walsh had convinced any member of the town council that her son was innocent, or just Caro and Willie, it didn’t matter.
Mason kidnapped one of Hamlet’s own, then threatened to kill the former doctor’s wife if she didn’t choose to leave with him instead of Lucas. He died a guilty man, and a tragedy that Maria refused to look too closely at.
Instead, she thought of Lindalee Murphy, a girl from their year in school who escaped Hamlet as soon as she could because she couldn’t handle Mason’s obsessive attention. Of Gloria, who confessed that she felt like the eager deputy had stalked her before he accepted that she was seeing Franklin. Until she married the village mechanic, the sweet ice cream shop owner was the object of Mason’s attention, whether she wanted it or not.
And then, three years ago, a deceptively innocent-looking young woman drove into town one rainy September evening with her husband. By the next morning, the man was dead, the woman distraught, and Mason thought that—this time—maybe he would find his happy-ever-after in an outsider the same way that Maria had…
As Sly parked the car, killing the engine before he shoved open the driver side door, Maria had to admit that not all outsiders were bad. Just like not every Hamlet local was good; poor Mase was proof of that. But there was no denying that, when there was trouble in Hamlet, it usually came on the heels of someone finding their way to the secluded community and throwing a wrench in the works.
An artist before anything else, the first sign that Maria painted was the town’s welcome sign. It cemented her reputation as the village signmaster, and she’d lost track of how many times she’d redone the familiar design to freshen up the sun-faded paint or update the population count.
Sly had popped open the trunk of the cruiser. Once she heard it slam shut again, Maria climbed out to join her fiancé in front of the sign.
She read:
Welcome to Hamlet
est. 1941
Population: 194
~ Hamlet Helps ~
The reflective paint was still pretty fresh. After Susannah Hart was born in February, the count had gone back up to 193. There hadn’t been any deaths since then, though Therese Johnson had a bouncing baby boy in June. Baby Jack brought the population to 194, making the count still accurate four months later.
Of course, if she’d known that Mason Walsh had returned to Hamlet at the end of August, it wouldn’t have been. And though it was a fairly morbid thought, now that the former deputy was undeniably dead, there was no need for her to update the sign again.
Not that she had any intention to.
Two years ago, a ballerina on the run from her stalker of an ex passed that sign on her way to freedom. These days, Grace Hart was included in the population, though the trouble that followed behind her little grey car had led to a few months where the ‘Welcome to Hamlet’ sign had been removed.
In its place—and at Sly’s insistence—stood the infamous ‘No Outsiders Allowed’ sign. It didn’t last very long, mostly because Maria threw her weight behind the idea that everyone should be welcome in their small village, and the town council finally agreed to put the ‘Welcome to Hamlet’ sign back.
And now they’d voted to replace it with a different one.
In one hand, Sly held Lucas’s sledgehammer. In the other, holding it up by its sanded post, was the sign that Maria had spent that morning painting.
