Olivia signaled Dixie angrily with her eyes. “That place has been uninhabited for years. It’s falling apart—utterly unsuitable for your purpose at this point in time.”
“At this point in time,” Camden repeated. “Dixie also relayed that your work in progress is historical fiction and that you’ve reached an impasse.” He looked at Olivia warmly. “We need one another, my dear. Join the dark side. Sweep the dust out of that cottage, share your manuscript, and let’s hit the bestseller list together.” He reached over and gave her forearm a playful swat. “Don’t pout, ma chérie. It’ll be fun. I’ll handle all the insipid, organizational stuff.”
Olivia was silent for a long time. It was impossible to remain unaffected by Camden’s charm. “I’ll think about both offers,” she promised sincerely.
“I have long since learned to take all I can get. Do call me if you’re willing to take a chance, my dazzling, halo-haired Duchess of Oyster Bay.” Camden placed a business card next to her water glass and then gently slid his foot out from beneath Haviland’s snout. “Excuse me, my fine sir.”
Olivia watched him walk away, strangely conflicted by the encounter. Camden was quite charismatic and she would enjoy spending more time in his company. But to commit to his group required some adjustments on her part. For one, such a change meant she’d have to walk into the home of her childhood. A structure haunted by loneliness and loss.
“Is Dixie right? Am I living with ghosts?” she murmured to the snoozing poodle. “Perhaps I am, or near enough anyway. Perhaps the time has come for an exorcism.”
Olivia examined herself in the reflection of the mirror lining the back wall. She didn’t see the handsome, confident woman her neighbors saw, but a skinny, frightened, and friendless child with white blond hair and eyes that spoke of the sea’s secret depths.
Blinking, Olivia passed her hand across her face, as though she were wiping it away in the mirror. She nodded to her reflection and Haviland stirred as his mistress squared her shoulders and came to a decision.
Her purposeful feet might not have carried her so lightly through the door had she known that one of the diners she’d seen at Grumpy’s that morning would soon be dead.
And it would be a death the likes of which the residents of Oyster Bay could never have imagined.
Chapter 2
Always do sober what you said youd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut.
—ERNEST HEMINGWAY
Olivia turned the skeleton key in the door and paused. After so much time she wondered what sights awaited her within the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, the home of her childhood. Thirty years had passed since Grandmother Limoges had descended on Oyster Bay, swooped up her only grandchild, and installed her in one of the country’s most elite, all-girl boarding schools.
Before then, she had been an unheeded and unhindered ten-year-old girl named Livie. A girl raised by her fisherman father. Or the girl who raised herself, as some of the townsfolk whispered.
Twisting the key farther, Olivia heard the click of the lock releasing. As she eased the door open, she half-expected a rush of whiskey-tinged air and lost dreams to burst out through the crack and knock her to the ground, but only a wisp of decay escaped from within.
“Come along, Haviland,” Olivia whispered, irritated by the hush in her voice. “Run ahead and make sure there are no vermin waiting to scurry across my feet.”
Pleased to obey, the poodle rushed into the house, barking a warning to any rodents or insects that would certainly have grown bold enough to claim proprietorship over the abandoned cottage.
Dust. Olivia walked over a solid film of the stuff, formed by layer upon layer of dirt, mold, spiderwebs, and time. Glad she had had the foresight to don her rubber boots before entering the house, she took several steps into the hall and turned right into the living room.
Olivia surveyed the room quickly, trying to keep the memories of moments spent in this space at bay. Her attempts were futile, of course, and the dark gloom seeped into her being and reduced her to the motherless child who spent her days in solitude, battling feelings of perpetual trepidation and oppressive isolation.
There was not enough natural light to banish the shadows. It took the full measure of Olivia’s arrested will to wrench the faded plaid curtains right off the rods. They pooled on the floor in clouds of dust, allowing the sun to illuminate the bloodred walls, the faded green fabric on the drooping sofa, the broken rung of the wooden ladder-back chair that had once been Olivia’s assigned seat, and her father’s prized collection of maritime art.
“How I hated these,” she told Haviland, yet she couldn’t refrain from reexamining the paintings. These were not scenes of pleasure cruises on flat, cerulean waters, but schooners with rent sails or shabby fishing trawlers being tossed about in angry oceans of black waves. An element of violence permeated each picture. Even in the few paintings depicting calm skies and still seas, the hint of a dorsal fin or a low bank of menacing thunderclouds implied imminent danger.
“I hate them still,” she murmured.
Olivia returned to the central hallway, the floorboards groaning as she stepped on their warped wood. The door to the back bedroom was closed and Olivia paused with her hand on the knob. She’d buried her girlhood history beneath layers of travel, education, a razor-sharp business acumen, and by keeping her relationships casual. A few weeks of dinners in five-star restaurants, an opera or a play, perhaps an art gallery opening and then, eventually, sex. But as soon as the man indicated an interest in taking things to the next level by producing a family member for Olivia to meet or a request that they spend the night at her place instead of his, she’d break off the relationship with the swift definiteness of an executioner. Thus, unwounded and thoroughly in control, Olivia would retreat to familiar solitude.
That won’t work in this town, she thought as she stared at the shut door. They already know my secret, so I’m vulnerable here. She sighed. If truly returned to exhume the past-scatter it like ashes—and get beyond chapter five once and for all, I must start with this room.
Another breath of imprisoned air swirled around her knees as she entered her old room.
With one glance, it would have been obvious to the most witless bystander that this space belonged to a neglected child.
There was a cot pushed against the far wall—the kind of cot that folds in half and can be stored in a closet, that squeaks each time one shifts during sleep, and that has probing springs to dig into one’s back and prevent sweet dreams from ever approaching too near. There was a comforter stained by mildew, a circle of black mold on the ceiling above the bed, and a lamp stalk filled by a cracked lightbulb positioned on top of an overturned wooden crate.
A three-tiered bookshelf near the door held an assortment of wrecked books. They were used to begin with, bought at library sales or from Goodwill, and reread so often that the pages were as supple as tissue paper. Below the single window, covered by an old crib sheet embellished by faded yellowed mermaids, was a dollhouse.
Olivia and her mother had built the dollhouse from a kit bought at the Five and Dime. During a rainy spring week, they’d glued, painted, and decorated the diminutive Victorian mansion. Now, its royal purple clapboard and ivory gingerbread had faded to a sickly lavender and brown.