“How’s Cosmo?” Olivia asked Annie.
“Better. He took a nice long walk on the beach this afternoon and the sea air did him good. I laid out a nice afternoon tea for him.” She colored. “We don’t normally fix food other than breakfast for our guests, but I feel like Mr. Cosmo is more like family than some sightseer. Besides, I just couldn’t send him out in search of a snack in the state he’s in.”
Olivia admired the innkeeper’s generous spirit. “Your care is exactly what he needs right now.” She turned her body slightly in order to include Roy and the unfamiliar man in the conversation. “How are you, Roy?”
“Good, but busy,” he replied. “We’re into the season full-swing now. Booked solid until October.”
Roy didn’t appear inclined to linger any longer, but Olivia’s inquisitiveness prompted her to thrust out her hand toward the man standing next to Roy. “I don’t believe I’ve seen you around town before. I’m Olivia Limoges.”
“Atlas Kraus, Roy’s brother,” he answered, briefly squeezing her hand.
Annie gave her brother-in-law a nervous smile. “Atlas is staying with us for the season. We just can’t handle all the work so it was a real blessing when he called Roy and said he’d like to stay with us awhile. Atlas is real good with his hands. He can build, repair, or restore almost anything!”
Olivia could sense a current of unease underlying Annie’s praise. Atlas dipped his head in acknowledgment of the compliment while Roy shifted on his feet. He was obviously eager to get on his way.
They don’t want Atlas too involved with the inn,
Olivia thought, listening as Annie described the breakfast she had planned for the next day.
She watched the body language of the three people. Annie was gripping her own fingertips as though trying to hold on to a sense of control, Roy’s eyes shifted everywhere but avoided looking at his brother, and Atlas was studying Olivia, his dark gaze alert and unblinking. Of the three, he was the most composed. He leaned against the wall, pressing his wide shoulders onto the cool cement, his muscular arms folded over his chest.
“Roy says that you’re one of the five people who’ll vote on this thing next week,” he said. “Must be pretty exciting to be so important.”
“Like the mayor stated, Oyster Bay is certainly growing,” Olivia answered enigmatically. “Did you relocate from a similar town or are you a city man?”
“I’ve lived in both,” Atlas replied with equal ambiguity.
“And have you always been a fix-it man?” she asked, hoping to provoke more information from him.
Roy’s brother remained unfazed. “Construction jobs, mostly. I go where the towns are experiencing a building boom like this one. I’ve moved around a lot.”
Olivia didn’t like the picture the term “building boom” called to mind. She loved Oyster Bay the way it was. Sometimes the lack of amenities was an inconvenience, but the coinciding absence of traffic jams, monolithic superstores, and ugly office parks more than made up for the occasional long-distance errand.
“Do you plan to work at The Yellow Lady and do construction jobs as well? That’ll be quite a full plate,” Olivia said.
Atlas shrugged and looked away. “There aren’t any openings with the crew building the condos on the bluff, but I might be able to land a spot if this new development goes through. I plan to be the first guy in line when they hand out the job applications.” He turned back to her and smiled. “So keep me in mind when you vote, okay?”
“Sure,” Olivia replied and bid the Kraus family good night.
She passed the teacher’s lounge and noted a crack of light at the bottom of the closed door. Pausing, she heard the even bass of the chief’s voice followed by Jethro’s angry rumble. The words were unclear, however, so Olivia didn’t linger.
Outside, she was met by a pleasant breeze. The humidity had receded, leaving in its wake a clear sky filled with crisp stars and a bright sickle moon. As Olivia drove beyond the town limits and later turned off the paved road onto the sandy track leading to her home, she noticed the bank of luminous clouds hanging just above the horizon.
Their silver hue seemed especially celestial against the ebony sky. Upon reaching her house, Olivia opened the sliding door to the deck, released Haviland, and together the pair meandered through the dunes to the beach.
For a long while, Olivia stared at the moon-illuminated clouds, thinking they looked like an ideal setting for a fairy tale castle, or the colossal abode of Jack in the Beanstalk’s giant, or perhaps the pristine, white-marbled temples of Olympian gods.
“I met a man named Atlas tonight,” Olivia said to Haviland. “Either his parents shared a love of maps or they expected him to have enough strength to hold up the world. It’s some name.”
Haviland barked and held his nose high, sniffing the air.
Olivia had always adored Greek mythology and reread Bulfinch’s collection every two or three years. “Atlas was the son of a Titan, brother to Prometheus and Epimetheus,” she spoke to the night-darkened waves. “As punishment for joining in the war against the Olympians, he was condemned to bear the weight of the sky on his shoulders for all time. Because of his assignment, the Titans Earth and Sky would never again be able to meet. Never again would they embrace.”
She glanced above the ridge of clouds to the star-sprinkled heavens.
“What is Atlas Kraus’s burden, I wonder?”
Olivia stood at the edge of the surf, reviewing the evening’s events. Would the next day see the resolution of Camden’s case? What might Jethro Bragg’s anger reveal? Why had he been talking to Camden? Why were Annie and Roy on edge? How would the Planning Board vote next week?
“Let’s go in now, Haviland. We’ll come back bright and early tomorrow. Perhaps we’ll take out the Bounty Hunter and dig for treasures. For now, I just want sleep.”
That night, she had the dream—the dream in which her mind returned to the last time she saw her father. These were not photograph-clear images, but flickered scenes stretched and bent and distorted by time.
The dream walked a tightrope between memory and nightmare.
Olivia was nine years old. There were her tan, skinny limbs, her favorite blue boat shoes with the untied laces stained by mud and grass, and the T-shirt with the unicorn iron-on—faded and cracked from repeated washes. Her hair was stringy and tangled, hanging down the sides of her face like a fisherman’s net. It hid the fear in her dark blue eyes.
She was on her father’s trawler heading toward the open sea. It was the eve of her tenth birthday and the night sky was clouding over. Her father stood at the helm, guzzling cheap whiskey and grumbling to himself. He seemed to have forgotten she was there. Cold, Olivia wrapped an old sweatshirt around her shoulders. It was pink and smelled of salt and fish, but it was still a comfort.
The night wore on.
Suddenly, her father swiveled, his hands leaving the wheel as his eyes flashed with rage. Snatching the sweat-shirt from Olivia’s grasp, he cursed her, using language she’d never heard him speak until after her mother’s death. But every time the whiskey flowed, he searched for words that would wound his daughter. Words that would form scar after scar.
“It’s your fault!” he snarled at Olivia. “She’s dead because of you.”
The black sea seemed to rise with his anger, and for the first time, Olivia was terrified he would strike her. He’d raised his calloused and weathered hand above her many times, but the blows never landed.
Springing out of his reach, Olivia scrambled into the dinghy tied to the side of her father’s boat. She jerked the rope securing it to the larger vessel from its cleat and leapt aboard. Ignoring her father’s wrathful threats, she pulled in the wet mooring line and began to row in the opposite direction.
The clouds multiplied, obscuring the little craft in a shadow of dense, protective fog. After rowing until her arms ached and the blisters erupted on her palms, Olivia slept. When she woke, she looked around at the dark and unreadable ocean. It still felt like night, but there were no stars, no moon, no horizon line to distinguish the ocean from sky. There was only the fog.
Hours later, a shrimper heading out with the dawn light found the drifting dinghy and brought the mute girl back to dry land.
She never saw her father again.
Chapter 10
When one’s character begins to fall under suspicion and disfavor, how swift, then, is the work of disintegration and destruction.
T
he dream clung to Olivia like a sweater slung over the shoulders. Though night was long over and the dawn had brought light and heat and a high tide, Olivia couldn’t wait to get out of bed and escape the air of her room. The darkness might be gone, but the space was crowded by the memories the dream had conjured.
Gathering her metal detector and the bag holding her folding trench shovel and nylon dishwashing brush, Olivia followed Haviland as he raced to the beach in a blur of black fur.
As she walked past the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, Olivia glanced at the window of her childhood room, half expecting to see her child self gazing back at her. But the glass only reflected twinkles of sunlight. The day was simply too fresh and full of promise to be held captive by the past, so Olivia turned her face toward the ocean, slipped on her headphones, and felt the presence of the dream dissipate.
She walked along the flat sand for three quarters of a mile and then headed away from the water’s edge into the dunes. It was more challenging to walk there, but she hadn’t hunted this deep around the grass-covered sand before.
Swinging the Bounty Hunter’s disc back and forth, Olivia listened carefully to the chirps and blips, ignoring the low sound signaling pull tabs or nails. Finally, a high-pitched bleep indicated the possibility of a buried coin and Olivia removed her trench shovel from her bag and began to dig up the heavy sand. About a foot down, the tip of her tool struck something metal. Olivia tossed the shovel aside and reached into the damp hole with her fingertips.
Haviland appeared like a phantom from behind a dune and sniffed at the pile of displaced sand.
“Just a shotgun shell,” Olivia told him, placing the find in her bag. “That makes four this year.”
Standing up, Olivia surveyed the flat ocean. “I think we’ll bend the rules a bit this morning. Let’s walk back by the road and see if we can discover something more interesting.”
Trotting up to the unpaved track, Haviland happily searched the unfamiliar scents along the side of the road, his nose quivering with excitement.
Olivia hadn’t gone more than fifty yards before the metal detector indicated another coin possibility. However, after digging through the less yielding soil, she unearthed a second shotgun shell.
“Was someone picking off your relatives with a twelve gauge?” she demanded crossly of a curious gull and shoved the spent shell in her bag.
Overtly disregarding her customary rule to stop after a single find, Olivia continued to move the Bounty Hunter back and forth in a gentle sweep as she and Haviland turned toward home. A few hundred yards along the road, the buzz signaling yet another coin echoed in Olivia’s ears. She almost ignored it.
Haviland barked impatiently. He was ready for his breakfast, but Olivia wanted the ground to provide a distraction from Camden’s death, the upcoming Planning Board meeting, and her inability to complete the chapter describing Kamila’s reception by Pharaoh’s other concubines.
“We’ll go to Grumpy’s this morning, Captain.
If
you help me dig.”
Together, the pair set to work. After moving about a foot of dirt, Olivia sat back on her heels and wiped the sweat from her brow.
“Nothing!” she shouted in annoyance. Rising, she scanned the displaced soil with the metal detector and, when the panel blinked red, spooned the dirt into a sifter. Furiously shaking the dirt free, she ended up with several large pebbles, a twig, and a corroded circle the size of a penny.
Surrendering, Olivia dumped the unknown coin into her bag and increased her pace so that by the time she reached her house, she felt completely spent. After refreshing Haviland’s water bowl and taking a quick, tepid shower, Olivia grabbed her laptop and drove into town.
Dixie had a sixth sense when it came to her regular customers. She always seemed to know when they’d arrive and what they were in the mood to eat. Olivia’s usual table by the window had been wiped clean and set up with gleaming utensils, a spotless coffee cup, and a glass of tap water without ice.
Haviland jumped onto the booth across from Olivia and, after greeting Dixie with a toothy smile, focused his gaze on the passersby on the other side of the window.
“Florentine egg-white omelet for you, ma’am?” Dixie asked, her small hands looped under a pair of pink suspenders. The unlikely accessory was clipped to the waistband of a purple crinoline skirt, under which Dixie wore a pair of white spandex shorts. Frowning, she held up her pointer finger. “Nope. You don’t feel like eggs today. You want some comfort food. Something sweet and buttery. Am I right?”
“As usual,” Olivia agreed. “I’ll be decadent and have the Oyster Bay French Toast.”
“With a side of carcinogenic bacon?”
Olivia smiled. “Yes, please.” She examined the pieces of fabric covering her friend’s forearms and elbows. “Are those arm socks?”
“Arm
warmers
,” Dixie corrected. “They’re all the rage with the teenage girls. I borrowed my daughter’s just to see what all the fuss was about. Any luck on this morning’s treasure hunt?”
Haviland issued a muffled bark.
“Two shotgun shells and a coin. The coin’s soaking, but from what I could see, it’s an Indian Head penny. Can’t read the date yet.”