Cover

Title Page

Dedication

For Lexi, who will be so very missed. (Don’t worry; she’s not dead. She’s just in Pittsburgh.) I’ll see you at the falls.

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Chapter One

Chapter One

Great-Aunt Lucille always used to say that life is twistier than the Miskwimin River, and Eve Abbott had always filed that adage away as cute but ultimately meaningless. No one’s life was twistier than the Miskwimin River. It made so many zigs and zags on its way to its outlet in Moonflower Bay that tourists were always getting lost. Locals, too, if they’d had one too many at Lawson’s Lager House. One second the river was behind you, then bam, there it would be in front of you, and you’d be scratching your head and thinking, “Didn’t I just cross that sucker?”

So basically, you’d have to be living in a soap opera for your life to be twistier than the Miskwimin River. And Eve’s life was most decidedly not a soap opera. If a water metaphor had to be made, it was a nice, linear canal. A man-made canal—a woman-made canal, thank you very much—that stretched out in a gloriously straight line as far as the eye could see. Eve’s life was hard won. Predictable. Not twisty. Not even gently curved.

Lucille’s life, though, had been twisty, and she had usually been the cause of the twists. For example, there was that time Eve’s father—Lucille’s nephew—idly suggested she start thinking about retiring, about selling the inn and moving to an old-folks home, because he thought she was “slowing down,” and she’d responded by going out and getting her first-ever driver’s license at age seventy-two.

Lucille must have thought Eve’s life needed more twists. Because a few days ago, Eve had been contentedly living her life in Toronto, a plant-lady librarian living the dream, and today she was standing on the roof of the Mermaid Inn in Moonflower Bay because she owned it.

Eve could still see the eight little words that had upended her life so utterly: “Last Will and Testament of Lucille Frances Abbott.”

Eve sighed. Well, at least she had found the source of her immediate problem—her immediate problem being that it had been raining inside when she arrived yesterday. There was a big bare spot on the tarred roof.