Secrets of the Lost Summer (5 page)

“That’d be great, Mom. I know you’re busy planning your trip—”

“California,” she interrupted, almost as if she were gulping. “I’m going. No matter what.”

She made the trip—one she wanted to take—sound like an impending biopsy, but Olivia felt her own throat tighten at the prospect of her parents flying across the country. “I’ve seen pictures of California’s Pacific Coast Highway. It looks beautiful.”

“Yes. Right. I’ll call you later, Liv. Be careful out there alone in this freezing rain.”

“I will, Mom. I’m not that far from town, and I have Buster here with me.”

“You’ve had the vet look at him? He could have worms—”

“Yes, and he got a clean bill of health.”

“Your dad should be walking in the door any minute. Oh—I just looked out the window. I can see the ice forming on my car. Freezing rain is the worst.”

“Do you want me to stay on with you until Dad gets there?”

“No, no. He’ll be here any minute.”

Her mother was close to hyperventilating as she hung up. Olivia took a breath, suddenly feeling anxious and unsettled herself. She jumped up from the couch and went into the kitchen. The freezing rain had ended her raking for the day. She’d clean up the lunch dishes and work on a design project.

She stood at the sink and noticed the raindrops on the window, the glistening film of clear ice on the grass, the gray mist swirling in the woods.

The house was so quiet.

“Buster,” she said. “Buster, where are you?”

She checked the living room, but he was no longer asleep by the fire. She checked the cellar door, in case she’d left it open and he’d gone down there, but it was shut tight.

She called him again, but received only silence in return as she headed back to the kitchen.

She felt a cold draft and went into the mudroom.

The door was ajar.

She grimaced. “Damn.”

Buster was gone, and she was going to have to go out into the freezing rain to find him.

Less than an hour after arriving in little Knights Bridge, Dylan found himself up to his calves in a patch of snow and mud next to a rusted, cast-off refrigerator and face-to-face with one seriously mean-looking dog.

The dog had bounded out of the trees as if he’d been lying in wait, planning his attack on the unsuspecting new arrival to his quiet country road. His wild barking had subsided to intermittent growls.

“Easy, pal,” Dylan said. “Easy.”

Olivia Frost had to be the dog’s owner. Hers was the closest house; in fact, from what Dylan had seen, it was the only other house in the immediate vicinity. Freezing rain was coating everything in a film of clear ice. Prickly vines, pine needles, bare tree branches, exposed grass, last year’s dropped leaves. The old fridge. The mean dog. Dylan.

“You should go home.” Dylan pointed in the direction of The Farm at Carriage Hill. “Go. Go home.”

The dog barked once, growled and didn’t budge.

Dylan debated his options, none of them good. The freezing rain showed no sign of letting up. He was trapped out here in the middle of nowhere until it did. His flight from San Diego had been long but unremarkable, putting him in Boston late yesterday. He’d stayed with a hockey player friend, Alec Wiskovich, a Russian who had passed muster with Boston’s discerning fans as a forward with the Bruins. Alec had never heard of Knights Bridge, either. Dylan rented a car in the morning, typed “Knights Bridge” into the GPS system and went on his way.

Whether it was jet lag, the freezing rain, the mean dog or thinking about his father, he felt at least slightly out of his mind. If he were sane, he thought, he would indeed have sent Loretta to deal with Olivia Frost instead of coming himself. He was a busy man. He could afford to pay someone to sort out a misunderstanding about an old house and junk in the yard.

“Buster!”

It was a woman’s voice. Keeping the dog in the corner of his eye, Dylan shifted his gaze slightly and peered through the mist and rain at the one-lane road. The many potholes were filling with water and ice, but he didn’t see anyone else out there.

“Buster!” the woman again called. “Buster, where are you?”

Dylan turned back to the dog. “You must be Buster.”

A note of panic had crept into the woman’s voice. Maybe with good reason, Dylan thought, noting that the dog was on alert, his head jerking up at the sound of her voice. She was probably less worried about Buster getting hurt than doing the hurting, although who she thought might be out here was a mystery.

Well. Dylan grimaced.
He
was. But he hadn’t told her he was coming.

A slim figure materialized around a slight curve in the road.

Olivia Frost. Had to be. She was hatless and coatless, as if she’d bolted out of her house in a hurry—probably when she realized her dog was missing. Dylan wasn’t wearing a hat or gloves but he had on a canvas three-quarter-length coat.

As she stepped off the road into the patches of snow and soaked, cold, muddy brown leaves, the big dog again became agitated, snarling and growling.

Dylan figured he had seconds to live unless he thought fast.

He put up his hand in front of him in a calm but assertive gesture that stopped any advance the growling dog had in mind, then called to the woman. “Buster is right here.”

“So I see,” she said, coming closer, freezing rain visible on her dark hair.

“He and I just met. He seemed surprised to find anyone here.”

Olivia came to an abrupt stop. She was obviously surprised to find him there, too. Up close, Dylan could see her eyes were definitely hazel, and even prettier than in the photographs Loretta had sent him. Incredible eyes, really, with their deep blues and greens and flecks of gold. Maybe they stood out because of the bleak surroundings, or maybe because he was just happy to have survived his first hour in Knights Bridge.

She frowned at him as her dog trotted to her side. “Did you decide to pull off the road and wait out the freezing rain?”

“No, although it sounds like a good idea.” With Buster visibly calmer, Dylan dared to lower his hand. “I’m your neighbor. You wrote to me about the junk in the yard.”

“
You’re
Dylan McCaffrey?”

“I am.”

“I’m Olivia Frost. I thought—” Her frown deepened as her eyes narrowed on him. As cold as she had to be in her black corduroy shirt and jeans, she wasn’t shivering. “Are you sure you’re the right Dylan McCaffrey? I didn’t get in touch with the wrong one? You own this place?”

“Right McCaffrey, and yes, I own this place.”

He was obviously not even close to what his Knights Bridge neighbor had expected. Buster growled next to her. She made a little motion with her fingers and he quieted. She recovered her composure and nodded to the refrigerator in the muck. “Then you’ll be cleaning up this mess. Excellent. It’s turned into quite a junkyard, hasn’t it?”

“No argument from me.”

He glanced at the mess behind him. The cast-off washing machine was farther up the slope, in more prickly vines. Between it and the fridge were tires, hubcaps, a rotting rake with missing tines, bottles, beer cans and—oddly—what was left of a disintegrating twin mattress.

“There was never a report of a break-in,” Olivia said. “We suspect kids partied out here and got carried away.”

“Hell of a place to party.”

She seemed to take no offense at his comment. “As I explained in my note, I live just down the road.”

“The Farm at Carriage Hill,” Dylan said with a smile.

“More like The Soon-to-be Farm at Carriage Hill.” She brushed raindrops off the end of her nose, then motioned vaguely up the tree-lined road, toward the village. “My family lives in town. They’ll be checking on me with this nasty weather. It’s not as remote out here as you might think. People come by at all hours.”

Dylan realized her comment was a warning—a self-protective measure, given that the two of them were the only ones out on the isolated road. He didn’t want to unnerve her, but he didn’t think he looked particularly threatening standing there in the mud, mist and freezing rain, especially when she was the one with the big dog.

Nonetheless, he made an effort to give her an innocuous smile. “You’re lucky to have family close by in this weather.”

She returned his smile. “Spring can’t come soon enough, can it? As I mentioned in my note, I can help with the yard if you need it.” She glanced at his rented Audi parked on the partially washed-out driveway, then shifted back to him. “I also have access to a truck.”

“Good to know.”

“I should get Buster back to the house. You’re not…” Olivia grabbed her dog’s collar. “I thought you’d be older.”

“You were expecting my father, Duncan McCaffrey,” Dylan said, figuring it was a good guess. “He died a few months after he bought this place. I didn’t know about the property and didn’t realize he’d left it to me until I received your note.”

“Really? How could you not know?”

“Long story. You’re not wearing a coat. Why don’t you take mine? You don’t want to get hypothermia—”

“I’ll be fine. Thanks, though.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to come inside and dry off? Looks as if I won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

“That’s nice of you to offer, but Buster and I will be on our way. He’s not good with strangers.”

Another warning, Dylan decided as he watched Olivia turn with her badass dog and head through the ice-covered patches of grass, snow, dead leaves, mud and muck. He noticed she was wearing close-fitting jeans and had mud splattered on her butt and the backs of her thighs. She must have tripped or stumbled in the freezing conditions while chasing Buster up the road.

It was sunny and seventy-five degrees when Dylan had left Coronado yesterday.

He hadn’t been kidding; he wasn’t going anywhere until the weather cleared, and he certainly wasn’t hauling junk. He didn’t entirely understand Olivia Frost’s fuss over her neighbor’s makeshift dump and overgrown yard. Her place wasn’t visible through the trees. It wasn’t as if she were right next door. Managing not to slip, he made his way to his nondescript little New England house. Loretta had given him the keys. He’d done a quick walk-through already. The front door was on the left side of a roofed porch and opened into an entry with green-carpeted stairs leading up to three small bedrooms and one bathroom on the second floor. To the right of the front door on the first floor was a living room with tall windows and a double doorway to an adjoining dining room with a bay window overlooking the side yard opposite the spot with the junk.

Off the dining room was the kitchen, with doors to the cellar and backyard.

That was it.