Stepping away from the man, Olivia crossed her arms protectively over her chest and rubbed at the goose bumps that had sprouted across the surface of her skin. The man drank his beer and stared at her. She never thought she’d be so relieved to see the indigo tint of Millay’s hair appear before her.
“Mack didn’t see Camden himself. He was too busy, but he heard Camden was in the alley, which seems kinda weird,” Millay said with a frown. “There’s nothing back there but the Dumpster, empty kegs, and the scratch, scratch of mongo rats slinking around.”
Laurel uttered a little groan. “I’m not too fond of rats.”
“I’m not either,” Olivia sympathized. “But we’ve come this far. Lead on, Millay.”
Avoiding the sharp, curious eyes of the fishermen, she propelled the young woman forward and then trod closely on Millay’s heels as the crowd parted before them, casting unfriendly looks their way.
The back door was unlocked. As Millay pushed on it, the solid metal slammed against the exterior brick wall with a loud clang. A cloud of smoke escaped from within and quickly mingled with the salt-tinged night air. The rear of the building was dark and the sky was moonless. Olivia could barely make out the shape of the Dumpster twenty yards away and she certainly saw no sign of Camden. All was silent.
“There’s no one here now,” Harris pointed out, looking to the left and right.
Laurel repeated the motion. “Are there any lights back here?” she asked Millay.
“Yeah. Right he—” Her words were cut short. “Well, there used to be a light. The bulb’s been smashed.” She kicked at some fragments with the tip of her boot.
Olivia didn’t like the sound of that.
“Someone did that recently?” Laurel knit her hands together. Her voice sounded shrill and small in the darkness.
Millay shrugged, as though acts of vandalism were a natural part of the bar environment. “It was fine as of two this morning. I should know. I’m the one who took out the trash.”
Harris turned to the right and began to walk the length of the building. The others followed, but Olivia moved off to the left. Something propelled her in the opposite direction.
Around the corner of Fish Nets, in a narrow alley separating the bar from the pizza parlor next door, she found Camden.
His back was against the wall and his head sagged over his chest. Even in the dark, Olivia knew that the black stain spread across the center of Camden’s shirt was blood. For a moment, she couldn’t shake the thought that the slick blemish covering his upper torso resembled a pair of distorted butterfly wings.
The amount of blood and the slackness of Camden’s body told Olivia that her friend was dead—that his throat had probably been slit. She waited for a powerful feeling of horror or grief or anger to flood her, but she was completely overtaken by numbness.
Suddenly, she was a girl again. She saw the police car pull in front of the house, saw the pair of solemn officers remove their hats, heard the exchange of mumbles in the hall as the news was delivered to her father. She watched from her bedroom window as he walked down the path to the dock, heading toward the dinghy—a bottle of whiskey in one hand and her mother’s purse in the other. He rowed away without even glancing up at the cottage where his daughter was facing the greatest shock of her young life. Alone.
Olivia shook herself free from the grip of memory but couldn’t move a muscle. She was paralyzed by the numbness, trapped between the past and the present.
She didn’t know how long she stood staring down at Camden’s body when Millay’s voice finally pierced the stillness. After releasing a string of high-pitched expletives, the younger woman grabbed on to Olivia’s arm, hard.
“Olivia!” She tugged until the older woman blinked and pulled away. “Don’t lose it on me! There’s something written here! Look!” Millay flicked a lighter and tiptoed closer to the wall.
Olivia watched as a weak circle of light illuminated three lines of text, written in glistening black spray paint. The two women read it to themselves.
“What the hell is that?” Millay spluttered indignantly.
“Haiku. A Japanese-style poem following a set of strict rules,” Olivia answered robotically and then, her mind regaining a sense of focus, sent Millay away to forestall the others from seeing Camden’s corpse and to call for help.
Forcing her eyes on the glossy, spidery letters, Olivia tried to detach herself from the knowledge that the body of someone she liked and admired was slumped on the ground before her. As if Camden were still alive, she whispered to him, “Your murderer is a member of the literati.”
She dug out a pen and a small notebook from her purse and copied down the poem. Even when heavy footfalls alerted her that she was no longer alone, her eyes—flickering with a bright anger—remained fixated on the words on the wall.
His words are silenced‒
An orchard in winter, where
Apple seeds slumber
Chapter 5
Dying is a very dull, dreary affair. And my advice to you is to have nothing whatever to do with it.
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Olivia felt a blanket being draped over her shoulders. It was made of coarse, gray wool and its semi-stale odor reminded her of the horse blankets she’d placed on the curved back of her favorite mare at boarding school.
Clutching the rough fabric together at the base of her throat, she turned to meet the solemn stare of Chief Rawlings.
“I understand you found Mr. Ford’s body. Do you feel up to answering a few questions, Ms. Limoges?”
After a pause, Olivia nodded. “Yes.”
The chief placed a strong hand on her upper arm and pivoted her, so that her line of sight fell away from the gossip writer’s sprawled form. His touch made her aware of the other people milling around the alley. It seemed that suddenly, like a colony of ants erupting from underground, uniformed men and women were everywhere. They were accompanied by bright lights and sharp noises—the cacophony of expressionless professionals doing their jobs in the midst of a scene that had rendered Olivia Limoges completely immobile in its awfulness.
Camera flashes erupted like lightning, footsteps echoed in the tight space between the buildings, and a dozen voices spoke in low, urgent whispers as radio crackles from the hips of the policemen fired into the night air like gunshots from a small-caliber weapon.
“Did you see anyone else here with Mr. Ford?” the chief asked her.
“No, just him, the way he is now.” Olivia looked toward the end of the alley, where the lights from a police cruiser cast blue shadows into the narrow opening. “We only came down to the bar because he didn’t show up for our writer’s group meeting.” Her confident and straight-backed posture sagged by a fraction. It was subtle, just a marginal slump in the shoulders, but Chief Rawlings was the type of man to notice such a small detail.
He studied her on the sly, but Olivia could sense his scrutiny and she shrunk a little further inside herself. She knew he was aware that this was not the first time someone had discovered her, all alone, in the middle of a frightening tableau. She had been found by a passing fishing trawler when her father disappeared, shivering in the bottom of a rowboat, and when they brought her back to Oyster Bay’s docks, half the town had been there to witness her pathetic disembarkation from the vessel. Her grandmother had been among those waiting onshore. After giving Olivia a cold, unpracticed embrace, she swept the orphan into her chauffeured Lincoln and drove right out of Oyster Bay.