Secrets of the Lost Summer (20 page)

By evening, Olivia and Maggie had moved the hutch out of Maggie’s cellar at her gingerbread house in the village and into Olivia’s back room, where she’d set up her painting supplies and lined up her to-be-painted furniture. The hutch was made of pine, scarred and weathered, absolutely perfect for painting and then displaying anything from teapots and herbal teas to artisan soaps and potpourri sachets. After Maggie left, Olivia cleaned it off and now was debating her options for painting it, whether to do a smooth, glossy finish or go with layers of colors. Clouds had moved in, and the warm, sunny spring day had changed quickly into a drizzly evening, but she didn’t mind. Best she stayed in tonight. She didn’t need to be tempted to check on her neighbor and see what he’d been up to all day.

“Olivia—Olivia, it’s me,” Jess said, bursting into the kitchen, a large sketch pad tucked under one arm. “You’re game, right, Liv?” Without waiting for an answer, she set the pad on the table and tore off two sheets. She glanced back at Olivia. “You must have crayons or something.”

Olivia saw that her sister was agitated and determined, and didn’t argue. She went into the living room and returned with a box of oil pastels. “I came in late to Mom’s explanation about the dots.”

Jess dumped the pastels out on the table and pointed to the two sheets of blank white paper. “First you take a crayon or whatever and make a dot that represents you.”

“Middle of the page?”

“Anywhere that works for you. I think deciding is part of the process. Then you pick out colors for the people in your life and make a dot for them in relation to you.”

Olivia considered the assignment. “Okay, Jess. I can do that.”

“I want to be green, though. A rich, deep-forest green. We can’t be the same color. That’d be too weird.”

“I’ll be magenta, then.”

They grabbed pastel crayons. Jess angled her shoulders so that Olivia couldn’t see her page, but she stood straight and frowned. “It’d probably be more effective if we were doing this not knowing the point of the exercise,” she said.

“I’m not sure I
do
know the point.”

“It’s a physical demonstration of where the people are in your life in relation to yourself. Mom keeps us all very close. She has everyone clustered around her one little dot. Never mind what it does to us, what does it do to her? She can’t move. She can’t breathe. You can keep everyone on the page and still give them all and yourself room.”

“Jess, have you had wine?”

She grinned. “Just do the exercise, will you?”

Olivia looked at the array of pastels and considered all the different people in her life. This could take forever, she thought.

“Marilyn Bryson doesn’t get to go on the page,” Jess said. “You put her there and I’m going to erase her or white her out or something.”

“You’re interfering with my page.”

“I guess my dot’s going close to you?”

“Right. You’re suffocating me.”

They laughed but drifted into silence as they did the exercise. Olivia debated what to do with Roger Bailey—should he go on her page? What about future guests of Carriage Hill? But she was getting ahead of herself. First came family—her parents, Jess, her grandparents.

Mark Flanagan?

Olivia glanced at Jess, no engagement ring yet on her finger, and picked out a sturdy brown for Mark and made a dot close—but not too close—to her sister.

She had dots for Maggie O’Dunn and a few other friends in town and in Boston.

As instructed, she had no dot for Marilyn Bryson. She put a faint yellow one high up in a corner for Jacqui Ackerman.

A steel-gray crayon made her think of Dylan. She cleared her throat. “We’re not going to tell each other who our different dots are, right?”

Jess nodded. “Right. That would never work. You don’t even have to show me your sheet.”

“Okay, good.”

Olivia picked up the steel-gray pastel and placed a dot near her dot. It felt too close, and yet at the same time not close enough. She was surprised the effect the exercise was having on her. Definitely a strange experience.

“I’m running out of colors,” Jess muttered. “We have a lot of family and friends.”

Olivia had just been thinking she had far more colors than she needed. “You’re doing a dot for everyone? Cousins, uncles, aunts?”

“They’d be offended if I didn’t, wouldn’t they?”

“Jess, we’re not showing our papers to anyone. We can burn them in the fireplace after we’re done.”

“Oh. Maybe I should rub out Uncle Richard.”

They laughed, and when they finished, they silently folded their sheets into squares, hiding the dots. Olivia got down glasses and poured chilled pinot grigio.

“Where’s Buster?” Jess asked.

Olivia thought he was in his bed in the mudroom but he was gone. She groaned in frustration. “He must have slipped out when you came in, or when Maggie and I carried in the hutch she gave me. For a big, noisy dog, he can be very quiet when he wants to be.”

“Old habits from his life before he adopted you,” Jess said.

They started out back with their wine, the drizzle now a light but steady rain. Dylan was at the mudroom door with her soaking wet, muddy dog. He got Buster inside, pulled the door shut and let go of her misbehaving dog’s collar.

He stood straight. Olivia saw that he was almost as wet and muddy as Buster, just a lot better looking. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I had no idea he’d sneaked out.”

“Look at it as an opportunity. Wolf dog and I are getting to know each other. We didn’t come back here with my left arm in his teeth.”

Jess leaned against the counter, observing Dylan, Buster and Olivia as she sipped her wine. “Where was he?”

“I spotted him in the field and caught up with him in the brook.”

Olivia frowned. She hadn’t yet touched her own wine. “I didn’t think he liked water.”

“He was after a rock.” Dylan glanced from her to Jess and back again. “I don’t want to interrupt a sisterly wine-and-laugh session.”

Buster bolted past him and shook off in the middle of the kitchen. Jess set her glass on the counter and subtly held her page of dots at her side. “I should get going before I have too much wine. I’m meeting Mark for dinner, anyway. The place looks great, Liv. The Farm at Carriage Hill is just what this area needs. Before long you’re going to have more bookings than you can handle.”

She breezed out through the front door, shutting it firmly behind her. Olivia suspected her sister wouldn’t have stayed even without Dylan arriving with Buster or her dinner with Mark. The dot exercise had gotten to Jess.

Dylan sighed. “Buster and I are tracking mud. I’ll clean it up.”

“No muddy woods at home on Coronado Island.”

“Not like here.”

“Don’t worry about the mud. I’ll let it dry and sweep later.” Olivia took her wineglass with her and set it on the table as she put away the pastels. “What’s up, Dylan? You look as if you have more than muddy paw prints on your mind.”

“I have to go back to San Diego for a few days on unexpected business. I’ve been on the phone most of the day. It can’t wait.”

“When do you leave?”

“I head to Boston tonight for an early-morning flight.”

“You fly as if you were driving.”

He shrugged. “It’s safer than driving, statistically. I don’t think about it.”

“That’s good. You had to fly all the time as a hockey player. It must have become routine for you. Your father was a world traveler. Flying is what you know.”

He picked up a dark blue crayon. “It gets me where I’m going.”

“When I was growing up, flying was a big deal, at least among the people I know. They would plan trips for months. They didn’t just buy a ticket one day and fly the next. They still don’t.”

“You’re spooling up, Olivia,” he said, setting the crayon in her box.

She shut the lid, set the box back on the table and sipped her wine. He was right. She could feel the anxiety building in her. She wanted to blame Jess and her dots, but she knew if they were playing a role, it was only a small one. “Sometimes just thinking about flying gets me going.” She ignored the tight twist of anxiety in her stomach. At least her hands weren’t shaking and she didn’t spill any wine. She gave a small, fake laugh. “I know wine doesn’t help.”

Even with the gloom and fading daylight, her house felt cozy and cheerful. The colors and furnishings she’d chosen so far worked, creating just the right atmosphere, she thought, trying to focus on anything except the panic mounting inside her. She was aware of Dylan watching her as if she might fall into pieces at any moment.

“Thanks for fetching Buster,” she said. “If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

“Don’t call the fire department too fast if my house catches on fire.” Dylan gave her an irreverent smile. “Not that I’ve deliberately left any fire hazards.”

“You wouldn’t want the place to burn down if any treasure is there. Imagine a volunteer firefighter bashing down a wall and discovering a fortune in gold.”

“I don’t think that’s likely to happen.”

“And you don’t need a fortune in gold,” Olivia said, then immediately wished she hadn’t.

Dylan didn’t seem to take any offense. “If my father was on some kind of treasure hunt, there’s a good chance he figured out whatever he was after was a lost cause.”

“That could explain why he more or less abandoned the house and never mentioned it to you.”

“Or he just ran out of time.”

“Dylan, if you discovered something new—you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”

He gave her a quick, unreadable smile. “Hypotheticals get me in trouble every time. I should get rolling.”

“Nice sidestep.” She let it go, at least for now. “You’ll let me know if you decide to stay in San Diego? Who knows, I might want to buy your house.” She added lightly, an attempt to ease her own tension, “I could use the acreage for more herbs.”

“Just what you need. More herbs.”

“Whatever you decide to do, I’ll still be right here.” She finished off her wine a little too quickly and took the glass to the sink. “I’d like to visit San Diego one day. I wonder if I’ll end up like my mother, planning trips…” She turned back to him. “Safe travels, Dylan.”

The rain shifted to a heavy downpour, lashing at the windows. His expression—unsmiling, his eyes narrowed, his jaw set—hinted at the intensity of a man who had been a top athlete, who had helped grow and manage a successful corporation.

Then the intensity was gone, a smile playing unexpectedly at the corners of his mouth. “Does that mean you don’t want me to kiss you?”