“There’s no need for you to go to all this trouble, Mrs. Orson.” Ruby set her box on the kitchen counter and watched as the older woman bustled around the kitchen, putting hot water on to boil and pulling out a Tupperware container of various tea bags that Ruby knew for a fact had been left by the previous resident. “It’s, like, eighty degrees outside. I don’t think hot tea is going to help with my rash.”

“Hot tea always helps,” she said firmly. “Especially if you grab the whiskey from inside the flour canister to give it an edge.”

“The flour canister? Really?”

Mrs. Orson glanced over her shoulder. “My ex-husband never liked to see a woman drink, so I got in the habit of keeping it hidden. To this day, I have no idea what he thinks I was doing alone in the kitchen every night.”

Ruby was shaken and reeling from her interaction with Spencer, but she followed Mrs. Orson’s orders. Although she wanted to get home to lick her wounds—both metaphorical and literal—in peace, she had to admit there were worse things in the world than being coddled by a sweet, elderly woman with a penchant for—

“Wait a minute.” She paused in the middle of popping the top off the flour canister. “Did you say your ex-husband?”

Mrs. Orson shuddered. She’d given up on the quilt she’d been wrapped up in—for effect, no doubt—and was swathed in a chic paisley scarf instead. The ends of it quivered with her body’s movements. “Yes, thank goodness. Didn’t I tell you? The divorce came through earlier this week. That’s why the girls and I were hitting the banana bread so hard. We were celebrating.” She turned to find Ruby’s hand still suspended on the canister and took it from her. Assuming Ruby was having a hard time with the lid, she gave it a strong-gripped twist and pop. “There you go, love. Pour with a heavy hand. You look like you could use it.”

Mrs. Orson finished pouring the cups of stale tea and held them out for Ruby to add hard—and expensive—liquor.

This time, Ruby didn’t do as she asked.

“Mrs. Orson, what do you mean, you got divorced from your husband? He’s alive? You’re not a widow?”

Mrs. Orson shook her head, a mischievous, dangerous smile playing on the edges of her lips. “I thought about it all the time, if that helps. Arsenic in his pot roast. A snip to his brake line. A long walk on a cliff’s edge when the wind was rising.” She took the bottle from Ruby and poured. “Despite my dreaming, I could never make myself go through with it. Pity. I would have looked so good in black.”