“I’m feeling so inspired by this meeting!” Laurel squealed excitedly as she bid everyone farewell. “But Steve will be waiting up for me. It’s bad enough he had to babysit while I hung out at a posh restaurant drinking Manhattans.” She hiccupped and quickly covered her mouth with her hand. “I hope he lets me come to our next meeting at Olivia’s cottage,” she said from behind her palm. “I’ll have to detail his truck in exchange for being able to go out
four
nights in one month!”
“Don’t forget to critique my chapter!” Camden called after her and then stroked his smooth chin thoughtfully. “Do you think she’s serious about not being allowed to attend?”
“Or having to detail her husband’s truck?” Olivia glanced at Laurel’s vacant stool and frowned. “I’m greatly relieved to have no one telling me what to do.”
Shortly following Laurel’s departure, Flynn also left and the exuberant fellowship among the remaining writers seemed to deflate. Soon afterward, Harris and Millay drained the remains of their glasses and headed for home—or in Millay’s case, the beginning of her nine to two o’clock shift at Fish Nets.
Camden kissed everyone on both cheeks, chiding them about being punctual and fulfilling their homework assignment by critiquing his chapter, and then turned back to Olivia.
“I think things went well, don’t you?” And then, before she could answer, “Good God, it’s Blake Talbot! And hanging onto his ropy arm is his latest conquest, Heidi St. Claire. Oh, am
I
ever at the right place at the right time!” He rubbed his hands together with relish. “Miss St. Claire is quite lovely in person, most unlike the freshly scrubbed, severely dressed character she plays on television.”
“She’s only a girl!” Olivia declared. “Really, Camden, she can’t be more than sixteen.”
“Just eighteen, but
this
girl, this rising star from Iowa, is about to burst onto the Hollywood scene like a supernova! By this time next year, there’ll be Heidi St. Claire dolls, a Heidi St. Claire clothing line, and a Heidi St. Claire fragrance. I am
clair
voyant about these things!” He wiggled his eyebrows. “I saw the trailers for her upcoming movie releases. She’s going to win armloads of awards for her role opposite Russell Crowe. Remember this conversation come Oscar night!” Camden eyed the young woman discreetly using the mirror behind the bar. “Oh! Olivia, darling! They’re here to have dinner. Can we please sit down at that little two-seater behind them? We can have coffee and dessert and I can eavesdrop to my heart’s content?
Pul-lease!”
“Don’t they know who you are?” Olivia asked as she nodded at the maître d’. She gestured at the table behind the couple and allowed her suave employee to place a napkin on her lap with a flourish.
Camden perused the dessert menu. “Of course they don’t know me,” he whispered. “Blake Talbot, like everyone in Hollywood and across our little blue planet, believes that I am a
woman
named Milano Cruise, remember? Shall we partake of the chocolate crème brûlée?”
Olivia only needed to raise her eyes and a waiter instantly appeared. She ordered Camden’s dessert along with two decaffeinated cappuccinos.
“Now the trick,” Camden whispered, “is for us to pretend to be engaged in an important and intimate conversation. We lean in like so, and we move our lips every now and again, and we nod. Nodding’s good. And then, we listen to every word they say.”
Although she was skeptical of Camden’s plan, Olivia was too interested in discovering more about a member of the Talbot family to offer any dissent. As she concentrated on stirring cinnamon curls into her cappuccino, she overheard Heidi pleading with Blake.
“But I want this to be
official.”
Her plaintive tone was distinctly juvenile. “If you come to my screening, then we’ll be in all the magazines. It’ll make a huge statement. My mom and stepdad will see that you’re serious about
us
, and of course you’ll sell a bunch of CDs just by being in
People.
Come on, Blakey. Do this for me.”
“Heidi.” Blake spoke her name with an undercurrent of scorn. “It’s not like I haven’t been in
People
before. Besides, I told you that I need to keep up the appearance of being single. Girls don’t want to listen to the tunes of some whipped loser. They like to dream, to hope that they’d have a chance with me. I’ve gotta stay a fantasy. Being your
boyfriend
doesn’t fit with that whole picture. Don’t you get that?”
Heidi’s disappointed sigh seemed to blow across the room. She raised a flute filled with the restaurant’s finest champagne to her lips but then placed it on the table again. “It’s not
fair.”
Olivia could imagine her pursing her pretty lips. “But I can’t keep lying to my parents. You know how close my mom and I are. What if she calls Lila’s house? What if—” “Look. I’m going to meet with some people late tonight and then, tomorrow morning, we’re outta here. The Gulf-stream is all gassed up. We’ll climb aboard, pop a bottle of Moët, and...” Blake mercifully lowered his voice to an inaudible whisper, which was followed by a theatrical squeal from Heidi’s side of the table. “After one night in Vegas, we’ll be back in LA. You’ll be home in time for dinner.”
Olivia leaned toward Camden, whose gaze was fixated on the painting behind her shoulder. He waved a spoonful of crème brûlée in the air with his right hand. “Delicious!” he suddenly pronounced.
“He obviously doesn’t care about her at all. Poor girl,” Olivia murmured to Camden, shooting a sideways glance at the young man. She had to admit he was good-looking in a scruffy, rebellious sort of way. His black hair, dark eyes, and square jaw certainly lent him a masculine air, though he was far too reedy for Olivia’s tastes. However, she could see that other women in The Boot Top were also casting covert looks in his direction, for there was a magnetism about Blake Talbot, a mixture of conceit and coarse beauty, that most women found destructively fascinating.
Camden was unsympathetic to Heidi’s plight. “He never cares about any of them. Deep down, they all know it too, but we
all
deceive ourselves, do we not?”
“That we do,” Olivia agreed. “And you’ve got foam on your lip.”
Heidi continued her argument as Olivia and Camden fell silent again. “Why can’t I meet your friends? I don’t want to be in that beach house all by myself at night. I came out here to be with
you.”
Her pout was as extreme as a toddler’s.
“These men are not the kind of people you’re used to,” Blake answered flatly, grabbing the bottle of champagne from the silver ice bucket in the center of the table. He filled his glass to the brim and then jammed the bottle back into the chilled bucket without offering to replenish his date’s empty flute. “You wouldn’t fit in.”
“Just because I play a minister’s daughter on TV doesn’t mean I am one! You have no idea what I’ve lived through. I haven’t told you
everything
about my life!” Olivia and Camden found Heidi’s indignation amusing and they both smiled and nodded as though one of them had just received the punch line of a rousingly good joke.
“Well, you sure don’t act like a choir girl between the sheets,” Blake said huskily. “If everyone knew how wild Miss Junior Idaho or Indiana or whatever redneck state you’re from really was, you’d be on the cover of
all
the magazines.”
“Shut up!” Heidi hissed. “Oh, let’s just go. I’m not hungry anymore.”
“Oh, babe,” Blake purred. “I’m just messing with you. You know I think you’re the most smoking-hot chick in the whole world.”
“Notice he didn’t mention brains,” Olivia commented.
Camden smirked. “Or anything about her
burgeoning
talent.”
Unaware of the acute attention being paid to her, Heidi slipped her thin arms into a white silk cardigan and then folded the garment across her high breasts. “Then why won’t you introduce me to the guys?”
“The guys are not like my bandmates, Heidi,” Blake growled. “They’re not my posse—they’re a bunch of ex-con fishermen and knife-carrying scumbags who’ll do anything for a buck. Got it?”
“Then why are you hanging out with
that sort?”
Heidi asked and Olivia was pleased on behalf of her gender that the young woman had finally exhibited a hint of intelligence.
“Let’s just say I’m making an investment in my future.” Blake waved his hand in the air, rudely signaling for the check. “That’s the end of the subject, Heidi. We’re going.”
“Well, I just hope you’re not buying drugs,” Heidi said with a sulk. “I don’t approve of them, and besides, there’s plenty of those back home.”
“Right, like
you’re
such an expert on the subject.” Blake was openly derisive.
“You’re
not the one who has to rock your ass off in front of thousands of people. You get to sit around between takes, getting manicures and drinking mocha soy lattes.”
“No matter how much pressure I’m under, I’ll
never
take drugs!” Heidi whispered as she stood. “So I hope that’s not what your
big, secret
meeting at that gross bar is all about. If rumors about drugs or anything illegal affect my reputation, I’d be kicked off the show and my marketing value would go way downhill. I’m supposed to be a role model. Don’t you care about
my
future? I have
two
films debuting this summer!”
Blake grabbed her roughly by the arm and propelled her past Olivia and Camden’s table. “It’s not drugs, babe, so get off your high horse. It’s something much more dangerous than that,” he muttered darkly. “And since I’ve gotta protect your
precious
rep, I won’t tell you anything else, except that my plan is going to make me a shitload of money.”
Camden stared after them, a greedy gleam in his eyes. “I wonder what bar he could be referencing?”
“If Heidi thinks it’s gross and fishermen hang out there, then there’s one likely choice. Blake is conducting his illicit business at Fish Nets. The establishment where Millay works.”
“Olivia my dear, after we’re done with our dessert, how would you like to—”
“Not a chance,” Olivia cut him off. “Later this evening, after we’re done here, I will be in my lovely house, clad in a pair of silk pajamas, cocktail in hand, watching
Masterpiece Theater
. I confess to having enjoyed myself tonight, but I have no intention of spending a single minute in a foul-smelling bar filled with men whose cologne is a mixture of smoke, sweat, and fish or with women whose clothes are either three sizes too small or veritably see-through.
Nothing
you say will convince me to change my mind.” She placed her empty mug against its saucer with a firm clink. “I will never set foot in that disgusting place.”
“Never say never,” Camden said with an expressive wink.
Olivia felt an inexplicable tinge of anxiety as she headed into the kitchen to collect her thoroughly gorged poodle.
Chapter 3
The fog comes on little cat feet.
—CARL SANDBURG
T
he fog had always brought gifts to Olivia Limoges.
They were infrequent. And odd. Yet she knew they were meant for her. An aloof child, ever drifting along the shoreline near the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, Olivia had spent endless hours turning over the slick husks of horseshoe crabs or collapsing holes dug by industrious coquinas. She poked at sand crabs with sticks and taunted seagulls with crusts from pimiento cheese sandwiches.
Olivia kept her gifts in pickle jars. She labeled each jar with the year on a piece of masking tape. Even now, at forty, she loved to twist the lid from one of the glass jars and pour the contents out onto the saffron and cobalt scrolls of her largest Iranian rug, releasing the scents of seaweed and ocean dampened sand. She’d lean over, her shock of white blond hair aglow in the lamplight, and finger a marble, a wheat penny, a star-shaped earring with missing rhinestones, a rusty skeleton key. Then, another year: a yellow hair barrette in the shape of a dragonfly, a fishhook, a one-shot liquor bottle with no label, a tennis ball, a steel watchband, a shotgun shell.
Today she took the metal detector along on her morning walk. She went out early, as soon as the fog rolled back, dressed in cotton sweats and Wellingtons. Haviland danced through the surf beside her as they marched north by northeast, Olivia swinging the detector back and forth like a horizontal pendulum as she inhaled the salt-laden breeze. Her Bounty Hunter Discovery 3300 issued a cacophony of vibrating clicks and murmurs that sounded more like the language of dolphins than something constructed of metal and electrical wire.
Haviland barked at a low-flying gull as the digital target identification on the Bounty Hunter’s LCD display screen leapt toward the right, showing a full arc of black triangles. Olivia paused, removed her trench shovel from her backpack, and began to dig. She could have ordered a top-of-the-line detector—one with an attached digger, incredible depth perception, and the ability to function underwater, but she preferred the challenge offered by the simpler model.
“Help dig, Haviland,” Olivia commanded her dog in much the same tone she used on the employees of her restaurant or the tenants of the buildings she owned downtown.
Haviland responded immediately, his front paws burrowing into the soft, damp sand. Olivia waited until the poodle had created a pile behind his hindquarters the height of a termite mound and then she began to shift through the sand too.
“Nothing. Let’s see if we need to look deeper.” Olivia leveled the detector over the hole and it chirped excitedly. She turned the volume down and nodded at her canine assistant. He resumed his work.
Then, Olivia saw a flash of metal beneath Haviland’s right paw. “Whoa, Captain.”
Haviland’s liquid brown eyes were sparkling in the morning sun. Olivia grinned at the poodle, her blood quickening in anticipation of their find.
Rubbing clots of sand from the rectangular metal object, which was slightly larger than a matchbook, Olivia held her new treasure flat on her palm so that it might be bathed in the newborn light.