Read This Must Be the Place: A Novel for Free Online Page B

In the awkward silence that followed, Mona offered to show him his room and he agreed—a little too quickly, Oneida thought, for a man who claimed he was just tired. She wasn’t sure which mystery bothered her more: what Arthur Rook was doing in Ruby Falls, or what her mother had said to make him look like he wanted to cry.

3
Will and Testament
    Stepping into the Darby-Jones was like walking into a movie. Arthur had occasionally visited Amy on set, and each time he’d been struck by how unconsciously discomfited he became around Hollywood people. Even the crew seemed hyper-real and hyper-constructed: the grips too muscled, the PAs too loud and neurotic, and the effects team—of which Amy was an utterly devoted member—too wild-eyed and berserk. The air would thicken and spark with anticipation as the crew waited for scenes to be set up, for directors to be happy with camera angles, for stand-ins to be lit, and for stars to be made up. Arthur, the observing husband, would hover on the periphery, grateful for the insulation of his camera. The telephoto distance granted him immunity from the shared delusion that keeps a movie set pulsing: the conviction that all involved are creating something that is, in any way, real.
    Ruby Falls also felt like a shared delusion and Arthur, again, immune. It was too atmospheric to have occurred naturally: the shadows too deep, the clouds calculated, too puffy and too perfectly slate-gray. The roadside forest was aggressively bucolic out the window of his taxi. The town center, anchored by a single blinking red light at a single intersection, spiraled out into the requisite townie bar and grill, small convenience mart, and post office with photogenically fluttering American flag. It was Mayberry. It was Stars Hollow. There would be irascible widows who solved clever murders. He had traded the alien terrain of Los Angeles for a land that was no less imaginary—absolutely unreal and cute as hell.
    The town was nothing compared to the Darby-Jones itself. The house loomed out of the leafy darkness, four stories tall, wide and ramblingand tucked into the woods like the haunted Victorian mansion it probably was. Arthur blinked as his taxi driver pulled around to the front. There’s nothing inside, he thought: nothing but bare timber and studs holding up magnificently ominous exteriors. All interiors would be shot in a featureless concrete box in Studio City or Burbank. Real people didn’t live in places like this, because real places like this didn’t exist.
    And Amy had grown up here? No wonder she believed in make-believe.
    Amy had told him very little about her childhood. He knew she’d watched hundreds of movies. Her father, who died when she was very small, had introduced her to the Saturday afternoon matinee, to Toho International pictures,
The Seven Voyages of Sinbad
—and to the works of her idol, Ray Harryhausen. He knew she spent her earliest years dreaming of making monsters and had started small—with modeling clay and toothpicks—before finding an erector set at a flea market and discovering the beauty of the hinge, the joint, the electricity that would one day kill her. Arthur had met her grandfather, a quiet man who wore green suspenders and sock garters at all times, even with shorts, when he came out to California—only once—to visit. He flew in to San Francisco and they all drove to Monterey for the day, where the old man was overwhelmed by every public place they went. It was the first time in his life he’d ever been in crowds that large, and they flustered him; he spent his last two days in town watching the PGA Open from the safety of his hotel room. He’d raised Amy after her parents were killed in a car accident and died himself shortly after Amy and Arthur were married. Amy didn’t fly east for the funeral because, she said, “He doesn’t care. He’s dead.” She had never given any indication that this place—this
Ruby Falls
; even the name sounded