Secrets of the Lost Summer (29 page)

“A Boston paper.
Isaiah Webster, Knights Bridge,
is written on the margin of the article. It looks like a woman’s handwriting. Who’s Isaiah Webster, Olivia?”

“Grace’s father. Do you think it’s her handwriting?”

“I can’t tell if it matches the handwriting on Grace’s bookplates. She could have put it into one of her books as a bookmark and forgot about it.”

“Then how did your father end up with it?”

“He could have found it after he bought her house and was going through her old books.”

“That would have been after he came to Knights Bridge. It wouldn’t explain why he was interested in her house in the first place.”

Dylan shifted his gaze to the fire. “No.”

He didn’t continue. Olivia frowned at him. “Dylan?”

“I think my father had the article before he bought the house. I think the article is why he came to Knights Bridge.” He shot to his feet, the explosive force with which he moved a reminder of the athlete he was. He touched her arm, a gentle, brief touch. “I’m sorry if I had no business coming onto you like that.”

“I didn’t exactly object.”

“No, you didn’t. That’s good. Olivia…” He lowered his hand, his expression serious, tortured. “I should see if the roof at my house leaked in that rain.”

“What’s wrong, Dylan?”

“Noah said my presence here could change everything for all of you. He’s right. I have to let this go—”

“You can’t.”

“Not if I stay, no. I know myself, but I’m also getting to know you. You won’t let it drop, either, and I’m starting to wonder if either of us really is ready for what we’ll find.”

As she followed him to the front door, Olivia noticed she was warm now, if also drained from her mini panic attack, running in the rain, getting soaked and now nearly making love to this man. She touched his hand. “We can talk to Grace. She could be waiting for us to ask her what she knows. Maybe we’re not protecting her by not saying anything.”

“Maybe. I’ll see you in the morning.” Dylan kissed her again, just a brush of his lips on hers. “Sleep well.”

After he left, Olivia stood by the door and listened to the fire crackle in the quiet house. She would let it die down for the night.

She groaned. What was she thinking?

She headed for the door and yanked it open, the cool draft unexpectedly reenergizing her. There were no streetlights on her road. She couldn’t see Dylan in the dark but he couldn’t have gotten too far. “Don’t you even want to borrow a pillow?” she called to him.

She heard the crunch of small stones and then saw his silhouette out on the road. “I bought one at the general store.”

“If you change your mind about the guest room, call. Unlike everyone else in Knights Bridge, I lock my doors.”

A moment’s silence. “What about your windows?”

Olivia laughed as she shut the door. They both needed time and they knew it. Whatever was going on between them was intense and exciting, but also real, not just some opportunistic, fleeting attraction that they knew would go nowhere.

That didn’t mean it couldn’t easily unravel.

She went upstairs and cleared off her bed, discovering her wet sweater on the floor.

She let out a long, slow breath. “Maybe I should lock the damn windows,” she said, smiling to herself as she crawled between the cool sheets and tried to think about something else. Fresh herb recipes, designs for potting sheds and walled gardens, moving the astilbe—anything except Dylan getting on an airplane again and leaving her behind in Knights Bridge.

The kitchen ceiling was leaking onto his clean floor when Dylan returned to his house. “To hell with it,” he muttered, and headed upstairs. His bed was cold, hard and lonely, but he was where he needed to be—at least, he thought, for tonight.

Fortunately during his hockey years he had learned how to sleep anytime, anywhere. He’d also learned that sometimes he made good plays and bad plays, and sometimes the refs made good calls and bad calls. It was all part of the game and he’d had to figure out how to deal with success, failure, frustration and satisfaction.

He didn’t know if leaving Olivia had been a good call, but it was too late now.

He woke up early after a particularly bad night on his camp bed, but he welcomed the sunlight streaming through the windows. It was the kind of beautiful spring morning that had seemed out of reach in March. He got dressed and struck off down the road to his neighbor’s house.

Beyond that, he didn’t know anything.

Olivia was out brushing off a window screen. He grinned at her. “What did you do, lock the windows and discover a dusty screen?”

“A bat in the screen.”

He had a feeling she might be telling the truth. “I thought you might like to go on a picnic.”

“To Quabbin?”

“That’s right. I thought we could check out the pond Grace mentioned.”

“And I get to pack the picnic?”

“I’ll pack it,” he said, approaching her with a wink. “You just have to provide the food.”

Twenty minutes later, they set off on foot down the road and onto Quabbin land. Countless old roads, lanes and trails laced the protected watershed. Streams that once wound their way into the Swift River now emptied into the reservoir. Stone walls and cellar holes were reminders of the valley’s past. Dylan focused on the great weather and scenery and the attractive woman beside him. The unmarked trail to Carriage Hill Pond wasn’t easy to find, just a narrow, overgrown footpath that led deep into the dense woods. They followed it over a stream, then up and down a relatively shallow ravine, until finally the woods opened up and he and Olivia came to a small pond and, across the still water, glimmering in the spring sunshine, a freshwater marsh.

She stood on a boulder at the water’s edge. “If I were injured and on the run with stolen jewels, I’d hide out here. I’d heal here.”

Dylan shrugged off his hip pack. “What would this area have been like in 1938?”

“Different. This part of the valley had a number of summer cabins. Most of the ponds and lakes are under Quabbin water now. We went over one of them yesterday in the boat.” Olivia squinted out at ducks on the opposite bank, almost into the marsh. “I didn’t find anything in the library that suggested the police searched for the jewelry robber this far west of Boston. I don’t know how a robber would even know about the work on the reservoir.”

“Coincidence. He—or she—heads west to escape the police and discovers a massive reservoir is under construction.”

“Dylan, are you sure your father never mentioned Knights Bridge?”

“He wasn’t big on talking.”

“He was a man of action,” Olivia said.

Dylan noticed a trio of deer standing stock-still in a stand of white pine. The deer jumped, leaping through the woods and disappearing. He didn’t want to talk about a decades-old jewelry robbery, or his father. “It couldn’t have been easy for Grace to leave this place.” He turned to Olivia. “Let’s find a sunny spot and have lunch.”

Nineteen

I
knew I should tell Gran and Daddy about Philip but I didn’t. He was my secret, and he was healing quickly and regaining his strength day by day. I kept expecting to come to the cabin and find him gone. I wasn’t permitted to spend time with the out-of-town workers hired by the state to construct the dam, raze the houses and cut down the trees. We called the tree cutters “woodpeckers,” a derogatory term for men hired in Boston under political cronyism to clear the valley. Most didn’t know one end of an ax from the other. It was the ultimate insult in those days of high unemployment for the work of dismantling our towns to go to the people who would benefit from the waters of the reservoir and not the ones who were losing so much.

One afternoon, Philip helped me pick blackberries and make a cobbler on the old kitchen stove. We ate it steaming, fresh out of the oven, with cream I’d bought from a friend who still had a cow. She wanted to know where my hideout was, but I wouldn’t tell her.

After the cobbler, Philip and I sat in the shade together and this time he read to me. I loved his English accent. He would tease me about my swashbucklers but tell me that I’d make a great teacher.

The next day was brutally hot and humid, and I caught him swimming in the pond. I could tell he wasn’t wearing anything and tossed him a threadbare towel. He made me turn around while he dried off. Then he gave me the all clear, but when I turned back around, I saw that he wasn’t wearing a shirt or socks and shoes. The effect was startling. I don’t mind saying that Philip Rankin was the handsomest man I ever knew.

He’d finally told me his full name. Philip Rankin. It was a good name. He said he was from a village outside London, but it seemed as far away to me as the moon.

I remember how he laughed at my shock at his bare chest. I could tell he was a man who liked to laugh and I wanted to ask him why he didn’t more often.

He was healed. I felt a jolt of panic at the thought that he might leave. But we were all leaving the valley, weren’t we? Our time there was running out.

I left him reading by the pond and went inside. I found the jewels a little while later, while I was sweeping out the cabin. My broom hit something hard under the cot. I knew it wasn’t a book. I got down on my hands and knees, then on my belly as I reached under the cot all the way to the wall.

It was a cookie tin, one I didn’t recognize. “Biscuits,” the lid read. I hadn’t put it there. I’d never seen it before.

I opened it up and gasped when I saw a red velvet bag instead of cookies. I didn’t need to open the bag to know what the contents were. I knew the stolen Ashworth jewels were inside.

The screen door banged open. “What are you doing?”

I spun around. I had no protection. Philip could kill me with his bare hands if he wanted to, or he could grab a rock or a garden hoe and hit me on the head. But I knew he wouldn’t. I just knew, and I wasn’t afraid. “Where did you get these?”

“They’re nothing, Gracie, love. Nothing for you to worry about at all.”

“You don’t have to protect me. You just have to tell me the truth.”

He kissed me then, for the first time. I went weak at my knees. I’d been dreaming about what it might be like. “It’s a long story,” he said.

“Tell it to me.”

“Not now. Go home. Go to your father and your grandmother.” He held my hands closely. “Take them blackberries and tell them you lost track of time.”

“How old are you?”

He seemed surprised at my question. “Twenty-eight,” he said.

“You’re barely ten years older than I am. That’s not so bad. I’m not a child.”

“We come from different worlds. Go home, Grace.”

I set the tin on the foot of the cot. “Do you have a wife in England?”

He stared at me, not the tin with the jewels. “I did.”

My heart beat rapidly. He was older and more experienced, and he’d seen beyond the Swift River Valley.

“You’ll tell me what happened,” I said firmly. “Not today, maybe, but one day you’ll tell me why you have these jewels and how you ended up here on Carriage Hill Pond.”

I ran back through the woods and fields and got home just as thunderstorms hit, breaking the grip of the heat and humidity. My father was furious with me for being out on my own in such conditions, but Gran was there to stop him from getting the switch, as if I were still a small child. I knew he was afraid for me. He wanted to protect me from a future he couldn’t see.

Gran came to my room after I changed into dry clothes. “The daughter of one of the women in our study club is engaged to a Quabbin worker. No one blames her. We want the best for everyone. We have to go forward. We have no choice. We have to.”

“I never want to think of another place as home again, if it can just be taken from me.”

“People are suffering far worse fates now than we are. Let us count our blessings, Grace.”

“I’m not sneaking off to see one of the workers. I picked blackberries. I studied.”

“You’ll make a good teacher.”

“What if I don’t want to stay here? What if I want to leave and start a new life?”

“Where?”

That was Gran. Always pragmatic. I thrust out my chin. “England.”

The next day was unbearably hot and steamy. The storms the day before hadn’t brought in a cold front. I’d dreamed about scoundrels and thieves, and about a fortune in diamonds, gold and sapphires—enough for me to run away forever. I didn’t have to stay and watch the valley die. I didn’t have to watch it fill with water for other people to drink.

I ran all the way out to the cabin without stopping. I was terrified that Philip had taken the tin of jewels and gone. Why risk my returning with the police?

He was sitting on a rock in the shade above the pond, eating leftover cobbler as if nothing had changed. He was as handsome as ever.

“You’re a thief,” I said.

He nodded. “I am.”

“I hate you.”

“Good. That’s good, Grace. You should hate me.”