Secrets of the Lost Summer (9 page)

Her blunt question didn’t surprise Olivia. Grace Webster was famous in town for being probing, straightforward and, if herself a private woman, interested in her friends and neighbors in Knights Bridge.

Noticing the cardinal had returned, Olivia said, her voice even, “I don’t know anything about him. I didn’t get the impression he was married, but I don’t really know.”

“Why would a single man bother with my old house? Why doesn’t he just sell it?”

“I don’t think he’s planning to move in. He’s just checking it out after I wrote to him and he discovered he’d inherited it from his father. I only met him for a few minutes in the freezing rain. Did you meet his father?”

“Yes, I met him. I didn’t want to.”

“Why didn’t you want to?”

“Because I didn’t want a picture of the man who was buying my house stuck in my head.” She again raised her light blue eyes to Olivia. “Then I discovered that he was a treasure hunter. All treasure hunters are scoundrels.”

“I don’t know much about treasure hunters. What ‘treasure’ could anyone hope to find at your house?”

“None,” the old woman answered without hesitation.

Olivia’s head was spinning. “Then what difference does it make that he was a treasure hunter? If it wasn’t the reason he bought your house—”

“I don’t know why he bought my house.”

“What was he like? Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember. Just because I didn’t tell you doesn’t mean I don’t remember. He was charming.” Grace watched the bright red cardinal flutter at the feeders. “I’ve written a book.”

A book?

“Did your father tell you?” Grace asked, matter-of-fact.

“No, Grace, he didn’t.”

“I told your grandmother, and I gave her permission to tell him.”

“I haven’t heard about your book. What’s it about?”

“My life. I wrote it by hand before I moved out of my house and then I typed it onto a computer here in the computer lab. It took forever. I had ten copies printed, but I don’t want anyone to read it until I’ve passed. I’ve set aside one for Audrey, should she outlive me, and one for the library. I’m not sure what to do with the rest of them.” She smiled. “You could always sell them at Carriage Hill. Your grandmother tells me that’s what you’re calling it. People love local color, and I’m one of the last residents left from the lost valley towns.”

“That’s a little morbid, don’t you think?”

She gave Olivia a cool look. “If I were getting married, would you think it morbid to plan my wedding?”

“Of course not, but—”

“Then it’s not morbid to plan my passing. I didn’t say I was going to drink hemlock or sprinkle monkshood on my oatmeal. You know monkshood is poisonous, don’t you?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “You’ll want to be careful about planting any near children.”

“I will,” Olivia said. “Does your book have anything to do with the McCaffreys?”

“No. Nothing at all to do with them.”

“Treasure?”

“It’s about a long-ago summer,” she said. “A lost summer of my lost youth.”

“Grace…”

Olivia didn’t go on. The older woman’s eyelids were drooping, and the binoculars fell out of her hand into her lap as she nodded off. She woke up almost immediately, but Olivia said goodbye and headed down the hall to see her grandmother.

“Oh, she worked on that book for months,” Audrey Frost said as she rolled up her yoga mat in the living area of her little apartment. Her hair was snow-white and cut short, and she had on a dark pink tunic over black ankle tights and Nikes. “She locked the copies in her safe-deposit box at the bank.”

Olivia noticed a slender vase of forsythia on the small dining table. Her grandmother almost never cooked. She liked to tell people she’d have moved into assisted living sooner if she’d realized she didn’t have to cook unless she wanted to.

“Grace said she won’t let anyone read it until she’s gone.”

“She means it, too. She wouldn’t let me near it when she was writing it. I’d stop by, and she’d shut her notebook the minute she saw me. Then when she was typing it up after she moved here, she would only use one of the computers near the door, so no one could sneak up on her or peek over her shoulder.” Audrey Frost looked just like her son, Olivia’s father, when she rolled her eyes. “You would think she was writing the secret biography of the Queen of England.”

“Do you think she told secrets? About herself? About other people in town?”

“I don’t think anything.”

Olivia considered the news of Grace Webster’s book as her grandmother, eighty-six, clasped her hands behind her and did a quick stretch.

She raised her arms above her head for another stretch. “Some secrets are best taken to the grave. Not that I have secrets,” she added quickly. “How could I in this town? And your father. You know him, Liv. He doesn’t believe in secrets. He doesn’t go around telling people intimate details about his life or putting his bank account numbers up on Facebook—but those aren’t secrets.”

Olivia smiled. “Surprisingly enough, I know what you mean. Do you think Grace has secrets?”

“She’s lived alone all these years, and the people she grew up with were scattered when the valley towns were depopulated to make way for Quabbin. She could just have bottled-up memories, and now they’ve become secrets.”

“How long have you known her?”

“She moved to Knights Bridge before the war. I was thirteen or fourteen, but I didn’t get to know her until I started to work at the school. I was the bookkeeper there for forty-two years. Some days I can hardly believe I’ve been retired for twenty years.”

“But you and Grace Webster were friends—”

“All these years, yes, but I couldn’t tell you if she has anything to hide or not.”

Olivia pictured the old woman looking at birds in the sunroom. “If Grace does have secrets, I don’t know if I can see her revealing them in a book for people to read after she’s gone.”

“Good point.” Her grandmother glanced at the clock on her spotless stove. “I have a few minutes before yoga class. Come. Sit. Tell me about this man who’s moved into her house.”

“It’s temporary, and how did you know?”

“People talk and I listen. He’s very good-looking, I hear.”

Word about Dylan’s appearance at breakfast must have spread to the assisted living center a mile away. “Grandma, I didn’t come to bug Grace because Dylan McCaffrey is good-looking—”

“So he is?”

“He’s strongly built and…I don’t know. Yes, I guess you could say he’s good-looking in a rough-and-tumble sort of way.”

“You’re blushing. Whatever happened to that man of yours in Boston?”

“Peter moved to Seattle.” Olivia wasn’t going further than that. “I should go. I have a million things to do. It’s good seeing you, Grandma. Enjoy your yoga class.”

By the time Olivia drove back through the village and onto the road to her house, the temperature had risen into the fifties. Dylan’s car was still in his driveway, but he wasn’t outside. He—or someone else—had gathered some of the smaller pieces of junk from the yard and stacked them at the end of the driveway. Slowing to a crawl, Olivia saw that the washer and refrigerator were still in the blackberries. Even as strong as he looked to be, Dylan would need help moving them.

She picked up speed and continued down to her house. As she got out of her car, she noticed that a cluster of a dozen purple crocuses had opened up by her kitchen steps.

Buster greeted her at the door, eager for a walk. Luckily, he hadn’t torn up the place. She snapped on his leash and headed out, deliberately turning down the road toward Quabbin, away from Grace’s old house. She didn’t want to run into Dylan. Not right now. She needed to think. She wanted to know more about him and his treasure-hunting father, but without doing anything that would upset Grace, who clearly remembered more about the man who’d bought her house than she’d initially let on.

Time, Olivia thought, to figure out a game plan.

Maggie O’Dunn’s mud-splattered van was parked out front when Olivia got back to the house with Buster. Her friend was crouched in front of the crocuses, but she pointed at several healthy mounds of chives. “Wow, no wonder you went with chives on your stationery,” she said, rising. “You could supply half of Knights Bridge with just this lot. More out back?”

Olivia smiled. “Tons more.”

“This place looks fabulous,” Maggie said, tightening a long, silky, deep teal scarf in her curly strawberry hair. She had taken off to the city herself for a few years but was back in Knights Bridge with her two young sons, running a catering business out of her nineteenth-century “gingerbread” house in the village. “Right now everyone’s talking about your neighbor. What do you know about him?”

“Next to nothing.”

Her turquoise eyes gleamed with mischief. “Shall we do a little investigating?”

They made a pot of tea, grabbed Olivia’s laptop, set it up on the kitchen table and hit the internet.

“Oh, my,” Maggie said after a few minutes, pointing to a page she’d found through Google. “He’s a former defenseman with the NHL.”

“As in National Hockey League?”

“Uh-huh.” Maggie clicked a few keys on the laptop. “Here’s a picture of him in his hockey uniform. He was with L.A. then. Whoa, huh? Studly. Same guy who’s up the road?”

Olivia stood behind Maggie with a mug of tea and leaned closer to the laptop screen, studying a smiling Dylan McCaffrey in uniform and skates, hockey stick in hand. “Same guy,” she said.

“Let’s see if we can figure out what he’s up to now.”

Two minutes later, they had the answer. Dylan helped run childhood friend Noah Kendrick’s NAK, Inc., which had gone public a few months ago.

Maggie gave a low whistle and poured more tea. “Noah’s worth a billion. Even if Dylan’s worth a tenth of that—”

“That’s higher math,” Olivia said lightly.

“No, it’s not. It’s a hundred million. Even if Noah’s net worth is exaggerated, it’s still got to be a lot more money than either of us has ever seen. Why is Dylan bothering with a crumbling house in Knights Bridge?” Maggie sat back with her tea, the midday sun streaming through the kitchen windows. “Because of you, Liv?”

“That’s what he said.”

“Liv?”

“Because I wrote to him,” Olivia amended.

“And he came, just like that?”

“I’m being careful, Maggie.” Olivia sighed, averting her gaze from the laptop screen. “Do I tell Mom and Dad about him, or do I just keep my mouth shut?”

“Are you kidding? They probably have a dossier on Dylan on their desk by now. You know how they are.”