A Deadly Cliche (31 page)

Olivia was too busy focusing on the pain in her arm to speculate on her upcoming reunion, but as the island became visible to starboard, she began to feel an increased sense of panic. The urge to tell the captain to turn his boat around was strong. After all, Olivia’s father had abandoned her. It would serve him right if she did the same to him as he lay dying. Perhaps he wasn’t even aware that his caretakers had contacted her and would be upset to suddenly find the woman his little girl had become standing at his bedside.

Olivia had fled from hardship before, but she wouldn’t now. Instead, she swallowed her anxiety and stood tall in the prow of the boat as the shore grew closer and the shapes of houses and trees became visible.

The captain headed for Silver Lake, an inlet south of Mary Ann’s Pond. He eased back on the throttle, motoring slowly past the ferry dock.

The sun had moved lower in the sky and part of the island had been cast in shadow. Only the white walls of the lighthouse seemed undiminished by the encroachment of evening and Olivia drew comfort at the sight of the old structure.

Earlier, Olivia had told the yacht’s captain that she needed to be dropped off at the dock closest to Hudson’s Raw Bar, being that she’d made no arrangements for transportation once she reached the island.

“Hudson’s is right in the village,” he’d told her. “They’ve got their own dock. I’ll just let you hold the wheel steady while I throw a line over and get us secured. My wife has a rug on hold over at The Island Ragpicker and they’re staying open late so I can pick it up. Think you can man the helm with your arm in a sling?”

Olivia had nodded.

Now, as the yacht’s motor decelerated from a deafening roar to a steady drone, the captain deftly maneuvered the
JoFaye
into an open slip, gave Olivia a few instructions, and leapt from the boat to the dock with feline agility. Securing the bowline, he told her to cut the engines as he lassoed the stern line to the dock’s iron cleat. He then set out a pair of disembarkation steps and offered his hand to assist Olivia down. She accepted reluctantly, but Haviland disregarded the steps altogether and jumped onto the dock with an anticipatory bark.

“Yes, Captain,” Olivia whispered to him. “Another adventure awaits us.”

Shouldering her overnight bag, Olivia hastily thanked the yacht’s captain, eager to be alone for a moment to gather courage. He said good-bye and hurried off, eager to complete his wife’s errand.

From her vantage point on the dock, Olivia could see the brown clapboard walls of the eatery and the second-story windows of the house that the Salters had converted into guest rooms.

Olivia stared at the windows, watching the waning light dance upon the panes. On the other side of one of those sheets of glass, behind the glimmering farewell of daylight, was her father. Her throat tightened and she looked away, taking in the tranquility of the village and the sleepy inlet. She stood like this for several minutes, drawing courage from the clang of mooring lines and the gentle rocking of sailboats at anchor.

Finally, she walked forward, her eyes returning again and again to the lighthouse. It was incredibly strange that her father had taken up residence so close to another lighthouse. He had deserted his home, his daughter, and the memories of his wife. And yet here he was, still tied to the ocean, working in a town interdependent on the sea, living in the lee of another lighthouse.

“Did you really escape?” Olivia wondered aloud. “Or did our voices float to you across the water? Mother’s and mine. Did you see our faces in the tidal pools? In the glassy water before you pulled the shrimp nets in?”

Olivia fell silent, knowing that she was describing how she’d been haunted by the ghosts of her past.

She gave Haviland a brave smile and then stepped into the restaurant.

The décor was casual to the point of neglect. There were scarred wooden picnic tables and chairs, mismatched barstools, old fishing nets slung across the rafters. A few customers were at the bar, getting an early start on a long night of drinking. A television set was tuned to ESPN, and a woman stood at the end of the bar, refilling catsup bottles and saltshakers.

Upon seeing Olivia, she wiped her hands on her apron and murmured something to the old man sitting closest to her.

“Can I help you?” she asked with guarded friendliness.

Olivia examined the woman. She was barely thirty, but toil and worry made her appear older. Her brown hair hung limply down her back and her watery blue eyes were wary. Glancing at Haviland, she placed a protective hand on her swollen abdomen.

“Are you Kim Salter?”

The woman nodded. “You must be Olivia. My husband said you would probably come.” Her tone was apologetic. She pointed at Olivia’s sling. “What happened to you?”

“That’s not important.” Olivia clenched her jaw, her blue eyes darkening with intensity. She disliked being short with the woman, especially since she was both tired and pregnant, but it couldn’t be helped. “I came to see my father and I want to see him
now
.”

“I’ll get Hudson.” Kim turned and hurried through a swing door leading into the kitchen.

Olivia didn’t wait around for Hudson Salter to emerge from within. She didn’t trust the man and she didn’t want to give him the chance to manipulate her in any way.

Bursting into the kitchen, she found him boiling a pot of stone crab claws while a little girl carefully cut a lemon into tidy wedges. Hudson, whose back was to the door, had been speaking to his wife but immediately broke off and swung around to face Olivia. His cheeks were flushed from the steam billowing out of the stockpot and his eyes were hooded and unreadable. He glanced between Olivia and Haviland and then wiped his hands on his apron.

“Caitlyn,” he said in a deep, authoritative tone. “Take those lemons out to the bar. Kim, you go on too.”

Kim seemed about to protest, but a steely glare from her husband silenced her. Putting a gentle arm around Caitlyn’s bony shoulders, she led the girl out of the kitchen. They both gave Haviland a wide berth.

“I suppose we need to come to terms before you’ll let me see my father,” Olivia stated, dropping her purse on an unused cutting board. She pulled out her checkbook and wiggled it impatiently. “How much?”

Hudson was clearly taken aback. “This isn’t the time to talk about money. I’ve gotta fill this order and then I’ll bring you upstairs. And for the record, I don’t like animals in my kitchen. I take pride in my cooking.” He shot Haviland a distasteful look and then fixed his gaze on Olivia again. “Your daddy’s been sleeping most of the time. He’s pretty doped on morphine. Got a local lady to watch him while we work. He doesn’t have much life left in him now.” His voice had suddenly lost its edge. “You should expect the worst.”

Olivia put her checkbook away and watched Hudson finish with the crab claws. After draining them, he dumped them into a bowl and then untied his apron. “Follow me.”

“As you might imagine, I have many questions,” Olivia said, struggling to remain civil.

Hudson continued walking. “He started getting sick about three months back. It came on real quick. Got a bunch of scans on the mainland and found out about the cancer. Those tests ’bout bankrupted us. Kim asked him if there was anything he wanted, you know, before it was all over, and he wanted us to find this lady named Olivia Limoges. So we got on a computer and tracked you down.”

Following him through a hallway connecting the restaurant to the first floor of the house, Olivia tried to absorb what Hudson had said. “He asked about
me?
” She hated how much it mattered to her that her father had initiated the chain of events that had led her to Okracoke.

“Yeah. First we ever heard about you—that he had a daughter.”

“And how long have you known him?”

Hudson gave a wry chuckle. “My whole life, lady.”

Olivia didn’t answer. She was trying to rein in her anger, but failed. “So you found me and someone else decided to blackmail me into coming out here just in time for my father’s last days on earth?”

Hudson stopped and turned to face her. “I didn’t send you that letter. Kim and I were going back and forth over how to tell you about your daddy, but Betty did it for us, behind our backs.”

“Who the hell is Betty?” Olivia demanded.

“She’s his nurse. The woman we hired to take care of him when we’ve gotta work.” He frowned. “I don’t blame you for being mad, but she swears she did it because it’s his dying wish. She didn’t care how she had to make it happen, she just wanted you here.”

Olivia rolled her eyes. “Feed me another lie. She could have just called me. Why did she ask for cash?”

Hudson dropped his gaze to the ground. “For us. This whole place is going down like a ship with a cracked hull. Betty’s known Kim and me since we were in diapers. She delivered Caitlyn. She’s our closest family friend.” He reached out his hand to touch Olivia’s arm, but he let it hover in the air near her shoulder without making contact. “I’m sorry about how you ended up here, but you’re here, and that’s what matters now.”

Every muscle in Olivia’s body constricted when Hudson put his hand on the knob of the guest room at the very end of the hall. Olivia keenly wished there were no witnesses to this moment, but she knew she had no control over the situation. Pushing aside her dread and fear, she followed Hudson inside, unable to see around his broad back.

“How’s he doing?” Hudson asked an older woman seated in a chair against the left wall. She was crocheting a pastel blanket and watching a cooking program on television.

Olivia heard genuine concern behind Hudson’s question and she knew he had told her the truth. The woman in the chair was the blackmailer. Hudson was just a cook trying to keep his family afloat while an old man slowly died in one of his rooms.

“Same as this morning,” the woman answered. Putting her needles aside, she switched off the TV and scrutinized Olivia. “This his daughter?”

Hudson grunted in assent and stepped aside. “Olivia, this is Betty. She’s a nurse. She’s been helping out since he got real bad.”

“Who can’t spell apparently,” Olivia said and shot the woman a hostile glance.

That was all the attention she had to spare for the blackmailer at the moment for the figure in the bed became the center of Olivia’s universe. The very walls could have fallen away from the house and she wouldn’t have noticed. She hadn’t laid eyes on her father’s face in thirty years, but she knew that the gaunt and bearded visage on the pillow belonged to William Wade.

Her face was a blank mask but her heart silently cried,
Daddy!

In a flash, Olivia Limoges was gone, replaced by skinny, tow-headed Livie Wade. She approached the bedside on the balls of her feet, as though the groan of a floorboard would break the spell and her father would disappear once and for all. But her adult eyes knew he was going nowhere. The painfully thin arms, the loose, jaundiced skin, and liquid, labored breaths made that clear. So did the IV bag dripping a steady supply of blissful morphine into his body.

Olivia knelt on the floor but did not touch her father. She cradled her hurt arm and stared at his hand. When she’d last seen it, it had been the hand of a man in his prime. Calloused and weathered, tough and powerful. This hand was all bones and swollen veins. The nails looked ragged and tissue-thin. It was easier to look at this than to gaze upon his sallow, wrinkled face.

Her father was an old man. Though Olivia knew his age and that he was very sick, she hadn’t been prepared to see him in such a reduced state. All the strength and forcefulness teeming beneath his skin was gone. He was a shell, a sinking ship, a pitiful thing.

“You can touch him, honey,” the nurse said gently. “That man had plenty of bite in him for most of his life, but he’s got none left now.”

Without glancing away from her father’s hand, Olivia said, “You knew him.”

“Shoot, I tended to him when he first came here. Half drowned, concussed, practically pissing whiskey.” Betty shook her head. “When he finally came ’round, he said he couldn’t remember what had happened and he was sure he didn’t want to remember. He sold his boat and started working as a shrimper and then ended up as the caretaker for this place. He met Meg not long after that, back when the grill was just a little hole-in-the-wall—a place to grab a cup of coffee and a sandwich.”

Now Olivia did look up. “Meg?”

“His late wife.”

Olivia turned to see if Hudson had anything to contribute to this string of revelations, but he was already gone. “A second wife,” she muttered.

Betty heard her and chuckled. “That was news to everybody. Meg had no idea. Nobody knew about your mama until a month or so ago. Didn’t know about you either. We thought the man was raving, but Willie wouldn’t let up and I took it upon myself to track you down. I figured you had enough money to share with the Salters, but I didn’t know if you’d part with it willingly. Those two have a precious child to raise and another one on the way and they’ve worked themselves to the bone trying to do right by the man you see lying in this bed.” She sent Olivia a defiant, sidelong glance. “I might have gone overboard with the block print and the weird grammar, but I just wanted to get your attention and I succeeded. I’d do it all over again too, because you’re here and that’s what Willie wanted.” She straightened a corner of bed sheet. “I only hope he wakes up one more time so he can see you in the flesh.”

Neither woman spoke for a moment. Olivia listened to the contradictory sounds of her father’s labored breath and the industrious, steady clicking of Betty’s needles.

“How long has it been since he was lucid?” she asked quietly, deciding that both Hudson and Betty were right. The letter and the doubt had put her through hell, but she was here. She hadn’t missed seeing her father, and if she was lucky, there’d still be time to find out the answers to the questions she’d waited her entire life to ask.