"Listen to me," he said to her in a controlled fury. "Alison is dead. Whether Leary killed her or the milkman did it, Alison will still be dead. How can you think of putting her through the indignity ... the desecration ... on the slim chance that you can disprove a dead man's guilt? She's the victim here—not Leary. And it makes me sick to think that you can't seem to understand that."
But you have an agenda, Olivia couldn't help thinking. You want Quinn to suffer in any way he can. So how can I be convinced by your all-too-emotional argument?
Olivia wanted so badly to say that out loud, but she was far too aware that if she hadn't shot off her mouth earlier, she wouldn't have provoked her father into telling them about Quinn's intentions. As it was, her mother was now in a state, her brother was aghast, her father was more outraged than ever, and worst of all—Alison.
"I'm sorry," Olivia said humbly, recoiling at the inevitable images induced by the thought of exhumation. To disinter a human being ... it was something you read about in Gothic novels or in newspaper accounts of mass graves; it wasn't something that happened to a member of your family.
Olivia remembered her cousin—gorgeous, dreamy, naive, and yet so obviously secretive and troubled—and tried to fix a positive image in her mind to blot out thoughts of her grave. Her memory obliged with a snapshot of Alison smiling and happy at the animal shelter. Alison loved animals, and before her father made her quit her job as a volunteer at the Keepsake Kat Shelter, she had lived for Tuesdays and Thursdays when she could groom the animals, clean their cages, and change their water.
A smiling, gentle Alison coaxing an abused, hand-shy cat out of its cage—that was what Olivia wanted to remember.
She kept the mental photo propped up against her wineglass all through dinner, which ended up being a grim affair. The adults said little and the children, picking up on it, were almost scarily well behaved. There was no talk at all of the New Year's gala. Olivia's mother kept her red-rimmed eyes aimed at her plate and every now and then let out a sigh. Much to Rand's chagrin, the sporadic discussion that did take place was all about Mexico.
Olivia's parents left directly after dinner, but Olivia couldn't make herself go. Home was alone. Home was dark. Home was cold.
In contrast, the children seemed to explode with pent-up energy the minute their subdued grandparents walked out the door. Hoping somehow to inhale their high spirits, Olivia volunteered to help Kristin with her bath and then to bed.
The bath was a noisy and splashy affair; both aunt and niece ended up getting scolded for making a mess. After that, Olivia kicked off her shoes and sat on top of the pink-quilted bedcovers with Kristin—all clean-smelling and damp and so astonishingly innocent—nestled under her arm. They read together from The Book of Dinosaurs while Olivia absently stroked the child's damp hair, until finally, reluctantly, Olivia said, "Time to go to sleep now."
She hugged her niece—clung to her, really—and said, "I just love you so much I could smoosh you."
Kristin's squeaky giggle was light and rippling and so enchanting that it brought tears to Olivia's eyes.
What happens? What happens between her age and ours?
She buttoned a missed button in Kristin's Madeline pajamas and pulled the cover up to her niece's chin. Then she stole one last kiss, one last hug, to last her through the dark, cold night. On a whim, she reached for the American Girl doll that sat in a child-sized rocking chair and said, "How about if we let her sleep with you tonight?"
"No, I don't like dolls," Kristin said succinctly.
"Oh! I didn't know that." This was new. "Well... your mom can save them until you have babies of your own someday who can play with them."
There was no answer. Olivia turned off the bedroom light and was about to close the door when she heard Kristin say, "No babies."
"No babies?"
The child's voice was very firm. "Babies are messy. Too much work. You hafta change their diapers... and they're always crying... and pooping some more... and you can't even hear the TV sometimes. I want to be like you. No babies. I want to be a doctor. I asked my mom how can I not have babies, but she won't tell me."
Oh boy.
"Well, you won't have to worry about that for a long, long time yet," Olivia said, ducking the hint that had come sailing her way. "You just go to sleep now. Sweet dreams, Kristin. I love you!" she sang out softly.
"I love you, too, Auntie Liv."
Olivia closed the door gently and hightailed it out of the children's wing. No, no, no. Uh-uh. Eileen could handle that one. Wow. Five years old, and she wanted to know about birth control.
I want to be like you. No babies.
Somehow, that stung. Olivia had to wonder whether she gave off such strong vibrations. True, she was obsessed with her business, but that didn't mean she didn't ever want children. Necessarily.
Did she? When she came right down to it—did she?
Her mother certainly didn't think so. They'd argued many, many times about the just awful implications of Olivia remaining an old maid. The best furniture would go to the sibling who was married with children, not to the one who lived alone in a townhouse. The folder bulging with recipe clippings would go—naturally—to the daughter-in-law who cooked, not to the daughter who didn't. And as for the estate house at the top of upper Main—that house was meant to stay in the family, which meant that there had to be an actual family in order to stay there. So far, Olivia was a little light on that front.
Because she was nowhere near ready. It would be absurd—immoral—to have children just because her mother's clock was ticking, even assuming that Olivia had a sperm donor lined up for herself. Which she did not.
Blame it on the American Girl doll. Olivia drove home in a mood as dark and brooding as the starless sky that hung overhead.
Chapter 7
On Christmas Eve, Olivia closed Miracourt at noon, gave her employees at Run of the Mill the rest of the day off, and drove her trunkload of trophies, packed as carefully as Dresden china, over to Mrs. Dewsbury's house.
How ironic, she thought. Keepsake's keepsakes were all but ruined, while Quinn's looked good as new. Well, Quinn could do whatever he wanted with his trophies—use them for target practice or eat Cheerios out of them; it made no difference to her. As long as they were out of the cottage and out of her life.
She'd saved those keepsakes for seventeen years. He could have been more grateful. He could have been more pleased. He could have been a lot of things, but mostly he could have called. Olivia had just spent five of the most miserable days of her life waiting for the phone to ring.
At first she thought, he doesn't want to seem eager. Then she thought he was visiting his uncle in Old Saybrook. After that she began grasping at straws: He has laryngitis; he's forgotten my name; he's in a coma. But she spotted him, alive and well, driving his rental truck through town that very morning, and that's what had prompted her to close the stores early and load the trunk of her car.
The obvious reason that he might be avoiding her wasn't a reason at all. Olivia had learned from her father that the district attorney, a man indebted to her father for his reelection, had immediately denied Quinn's request to have Alison's body exhumed, making it a non-issue. Everyone in the family was relieved, especially Olivia. It was Christmas, for pity's sake. Did Quinn have no sense of the season at all? He and his father had lived under a cloud for seventeen years. Was it really necessary to go off on a rip right now?
She was wasting her time on him. He wasn't worth defending, and he was an ingrate besides. The hell with him. He was making a shambles of her good will toward men.
Forty-eight, forty-six, forty-four—forty-two Elm. Yes, there it was, a big white house, great bones, needed paint. It looked very much like the home of a pensioned and widowed schoolteacher. Olivia hadn't been down Elm in years; she was surprised to see how tired Mrs. Dewsbury's old house was looking, but she was glad to see an evergreen wreath with a big red bow hanging on the black panelled door. Be
sides giving the house a much-needed shot of color, it told the world that Mrs. Dewsbury hadn't abandoned her Christmas spirit.
Olivia pulled into the drive, genuinely disappointed that Quinn's truck wasn't there. She would have enjoyed seeing the look on his face when she dumped the box in his arms. Unwilling to leave the trophies at risk on the wraparound veranda, she decided to go around to the back and leave them there instead. With an effort, she slid the heavy box out of the back of her minivan and lugged it up the half dozen steps to the small back porch.
She dropped the box with a thud next to the door, then in an attack of conscience, peeled off the green bow that she had mockingly stuck to the cardboard and stuffed it in her coat pocket. Just because Quinn Leary possessed no apparent Christmas spirit, it didn't mean that she had to go and get snotty about the season. She was halfway down the steps when she realized that music was coming from inside the house. Nuts. Mrs. Dewsbury must be at home. Olivia couldn't very well skulk away like a Keepsake vandal, so she came back up the steps and knocked dutifully at the back door.
"Door's open!"
He was home.
Nuts!
Annoyed that he didn't have the courtesy to come to the door for her, Olivia opened it herself and peeked around it into the kitchen. She was prepared for many things—for embarrassed glances, awkward hellos, muttered excuses—but she wasn't prepared for the sight of Quinn Leary up to his elbows in flour, rolling out pie dough on a pastry board.
"Uhhh... hi," she said, wracking her brain for an excuse to be there.
"Hey," he said in greeting. He looked surprised, but hardly sheepish.
Quinn Leary was a stonemason. The realization came home to Olivia, big time, when she took in the heavily muscled arms that were working the rolling pin. Quinn's chest, clad in a navy T-shirt dusted with flour, was definitely the chest of a stonemason. His hands, thickly veined and doughy-fingered, were the hands of a stonemason. Even his waist, tucked all around inside his jeans with a big baker's towel, had the taut circumference of a man who didn't sit around on his duff all day.
So why did he give off the irresistibly warm vibrations of a Julia Child?
"Is ... is Mrs. Dewsbury around?" Olivia asked stupidly, trying not to gawk.
"Nope. She's gone off to New Hampshire with her son for the holidays. You just missed her."
"Are you—?" Olivia fluttered her wrist at the row of empty pie shells waiting on the counter. "Subcontracting, or something?"
Quinn laughed out loud at that, and all of Olivia's hostile resolve slid away on the sound of his mirth. She was ready to fill the pies, sell the pies, buy the pies, eat the pies—whatever it took to hang around him for just a little bit longer.
"I'm baking these for Father Tom's Christmas dinner at the church tomorrow," he explained, still chuckling at the notion of being mistaken for a professional pie man.
God, his teeth were white. It was so nice to just stare at them. "Can I sit down?" she asked. To stare at your teeth and everything else?
"I'm sorry—sure, pull up a chair. My hands—"
"Are all sticky." Olivia wondered what it would be like to lick the raw dough off them and immediately blushed down to her ankles. She cleared her throat and said, "You seem pretty good at that."
"Yeah," said Quinn, rolling out a fat edge to match the rest of the circle. "My dad couldn't stand seeing excess harvest go to waste. He was always bringing produce home from the job and doing something or other with it; I guess I learned by osmosis. I also put up a pretty mean jar of preserves," he added with a grin.
He looked unbearably attractive to her. "A stonemason who bakes," she said a little giddily. "Women must line up outside your door."
Aaackk! Wrap your arms around his knees and cling to him, why don't you?
Mercifully, he pretended not to have heard the fawning remark. "So how come you're looking for Mrs. D.?" he asked as he somehow slipped the circle of dough from the floured board to the pie pan, where it lay draped over the sides like ivory Ultrasuede.
"Who?" she asked.
"Mrs. Dewsbury?"
"What about her?"
He brought those terrifically sexy brows down in a squint of puzzlement and simply waited. Clearly he thought that Olivia had purposely removed one of her oars from the water so that she could row her boat in circles for a while.
"Because—your car was gone!" she blurted out, which made absolutely no sense at all, even to her.
"Yep," he said, expertly fitting the dough to the pan. "I gave up the rental and bought myself a new truck. It'll be delivered this afternoon, with any luck."
That made no sense, either, unless...
"It sounds as if you plan to stay awhile."
"Yep." He took up a knife and began cutting away the extra crust.
"And that's because—?"
"Yep."
Shit. Because of what?
He gave her an annihilating look that was clearly intended to put her out of her misery. "Because of you," he said matter-of-factly as he crimped the edge with his thumb and forefingers. "Among other reasons."
Because of you.
Among other reasons.
She kicked away the "other" and clung to the "you."
"Then why haven't you called?" she demanded, regaining her footing on the slippery slope of their cryptic conversation.
The heartstopping smile turned serious. "I assume you know how I've been spending my spare time?"
She looked away and said, "Yes. Up to no good."
"Mm. I figured you'd hear, sooner or later." He carried the pie shell over to the side counter and laid it next to four other ones waiting for fillings, then came back to the table and scooped another ball of dough from the huge, very old cracked bowl he was using.
"Did you have to go that route, Quinn?" she almost begged to know.
For an answer, he said, "I guess it won't surprise you to hear that I ran smack into a brick wall at the D.A.'s office."
"Well, what did you expect?" she asked, disappointed that he was disappointed. "The courts don't go to lengths like that to prove someone is innocent, not if he's no longer living. Not if he's not in jail. Why should the district attorney do anything?"
"How about because it's the right thing to do?" Quinn suggested, sprinkling flour on the pastry board and slamming the ball of dough just a little too hard onto it.
Olivia didn't know what to say to that, especially since part of her agreed with him. But she wanted him to understand all sides of the scenario, so she said, "The thought of ... of doing something like that to Alison hit my parents very hard, Quinn. I can only imagine how my aunt and uncle felt if they heard. I know it's just a scientific procedure—"
"That's all it is," Quinn said flatly.
"—but this is Alison," Olivia argued softly. "Someone real. Someone we all knew. The same Alison that you helped out in geometry. The same Alison you played badminton with during our family picnic that time."
"That one time."
"But still."
"Obviously I don't see this the way you do, Liv."
She watched in disheartened silence as he worked quickly, almost impatiently, to form the last pie shell. In his haste he tore the circle of dough as he transferred it from the board to the pan. He let out a sound, the barest hint, of exasperation and started over. The second crust went smoothly; she could see that he was focused on the task. It was the Quinn she remembered—cool, deliberate, unflappable. A star at everything he did, even pie crusts.
He broke the awkward silence by saying, "How is it that you don't know how your own aunt and uncle feel?"
"Our families aren't on speaking terms anymore," she said forthrightly. "They were strained even before Alison's death. You didn't know that? I guess we were better at keeping up appearances then. You have to remember, reality shows hadn't been invented yet and people still had a sense of decorum. It was a different age."
"Oh, to have it back again," Quinn said in a wry, musing voice.
"You don't sound very resigned to it," he said, which she thought was perceptive. He took a pot of filling—pumpkin, by the look of it—from the stove to the counter and began glopping it into the first pie shell.
"To be honest, I don't even know why they're not speaking," Olivia admitted with a sigh. "My parents have always refused to tell me. It's about money, I'm sure. My father's brother went through his inheritance in no time; right there is a cardinal sin."
"Doesn't sound like much of a reason to me," Quinn said, glancing at her between fillings.
She shrugged, uncomfortable with the notion of talking about other people's spending habits. She'd been brought up never to discuss either money or sex, and she was feeling a vague but very definite unease talking about her aunt and uncle. Especially her uncle.
"I do see my aunt in church now and then," Olivia said in her own defense. "I try to get a conversation going, but ... she never has much to say."
"You go to church?" Quinn asked her.
"Once in a while. Why? Do I strike you as the heathen type?"
He smiled. "Maybe a little."
Heathen apparently meant "nymphomaniac" in his mind. It was the only possible explanation for the look he was giving her.
Dropping her gaze from his, Olivia splayed her hands against the edge of the table and self-consciously studied her neatly trimmed nails. Had she ever had flour under them? She was fairly sure not. She felt a sudden, very bizarre surge of regret. Flour and church and kids—she didn't have time for any of them. What a disaster she was as a woman so far. Her life had been all about the store, the store, the store. She was like her father, with his obsession with the mill, the mill, the mill.
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