Secrets of the Lost Summer

by Carla Neggers

  “I’m lucky I can get him to go to Boston for a Red Sox or Bruins game once in a while.” There was no edge to her words, or she hid it well. “I found some old chairs and a couple of small tables at the sawmill that might interest you. I can help paint them. We can have our own little painting party.”

  Olivia loved the idea and they started making plans as they walked around to the front of the house. After Jess left, she stood in the driveway and noticed the quiet, noticed how alone she was out on her dead-end road, but she reminded herself that the location, not just the house, was part of the attraction of The Farm at Carriage Hill.

  There was just no broad-shouldered ex-hockey player up the road to whisk her off for a hike or come to dinner.

  A week later, Olivia hadn’t heard a word from Dylan. Not that she’d expected to hear anything. His life was in San Diego, not in little Knights Bridge. At least the house Duncan McCaffrey had mysteriously left his only son wasn’t looking as shabby with the landscape greening up in a stretch of warm weather. She headed to Boston for her first face-to-face meeting with Jacqui Ackerman since her departure almost a month ago.

  “Marilyn’s starting work with us,” Jacqui said when she and Olivia sat down at a table in the small conference room.

  “Marilyn Bryson? She’s moving to Boston?”

  “That’s right, Olivia. We’re thrilled she’s decided to join us. Thank you for paving the way. She’s bringing Roger Bailey back, plus she’ll bring in new clients.”

  “I’m sure she will,” Olivia said dully.

  “She starts on Monday. We’re all excited. It’s the right move for us.”

  “That’s great. What does it mean for me?”

  Jacqui hesitated, then said, “Nothing for the moment. You’re doing a fabulous job freelancing. You and Marilyn are friends. This can be a positive for everyone.”

  Olivia mumbled something agreeable. What else could she do? She needed the freelance work. Jacqui seemed relieved, and they moved on to a discussion of designs, which ultimately was what they both loved most about what they did. Afterward, Olivia skipped her plan to have dinner with friends and spend the night at her apartment. Instead, she drove back to Knights Bridge. As the city gave way to the quiet winding roads of her hometown, she decided to do what she had to do to meet her expenses but to concentrate on making The Farm at Carriage Hill a success.

  When she arrived at her house, her father’s truck was in the driveway, and he was out front with Buster.

  He threw a stick across the front yard. “No word from your neighbor?”

  “Nope.”

  “I didn’t realize he was that Dylan McCaffrey. Jess told me. She thought I knew.”

  “There was no reason for me to say anything, Dad.”

  “I saw him play against the Bruins when he was a rising star. He had some great years, then some okay years after injuries. He was a solid player, well liked. Funny he’d end up owning Grace Webster’s old place.”

  Buster went after the stick but immediately flopped down in the grass and started chewing on it. Olivia laughed. “He’s not a golden retriever. So, do you like Dylan better now that you remember you saw him play?”

  Her father toed loose a rock in the driveway. “I don’t know. Should I?”

  She changed the subject. “Grace says she met Duncan McCaffrey. Could she be mistaken?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “There’s not much that goes on around town that you don’t know about. And if you don’t know, Mom does. Where is she?”

  “Home. She’s working in the garden. She says she’s coming out here to help paint those chairs and tables Jess found.”

  “We’re having a painting party, sort of a girls’ night out.”

  Her father tossed the rock over to Buster. “I’ll contribute the wings and beer.”

  Olivia laughed again, feeling less stressed after her trip to Boston. After he left she extricated the rock and stick from Buster and went inside. She started a fire to take the chill out of the air, then sat in front of the flames with Buster’s head on her lap. But she was restless, her mind spinning with worries, possibilities, questions about Duncan McCaffrey and his good-looking son, and what had happened between her and Dylan on his trip to Knights Bridge.

  “Nothing,” she muttered, jumping up and heading into the kitchen. “Nothing happened.”

  What was one little kiss to a man like Dylan? Ex-hockey player, multimillionaire business executive.

  She watered the herbs in the window and rummaged in the fridge, but she wasn’t hungry.

  She went up to bed early and read more of The Three Musketeers, imagining Grace immersing herself in tales of swashbucklers and adventurers as a teenager, her world changing around her.

  In the morning, Olivia took herself to breakfast at Smith’s, Knights Bridge’s only restaurant, tucked on a side street off the common in the heart of the village. She sat at a booth across from Albert Molinari, the real estate agent, she’d discovered, who’d handled the sale of Grace’s house to Duncan McCaffrey. Al was in his early sixties and semiretired, having left a law practice in Worcester several years ago and moved to Knights Bridge. He spent most of his time biking and kayaking.

  “McCaffrey blew in and out of town. A lot of energy. I remember that about him.”

  “Did he look at a range of properties?” Olivia asked.

  “Just the Webster house. It was the only one that interested him.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say. I didn’t ask. No one else was going to buy the place. I was worried Grace would get stuck with it and sit out there until the roof caved in around her.”

  “Did he give you a hint of his plans for the property?”

  “I tried, Liv, but I didn’t get a thing out of him.”

  After breakfast, she headed over to Rivendell and found Grace on her feet in the sunroom with her binoculars. “I was just going out for a walk,” she said.

  “Would you like some company?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  They went through a glass door out to the yard. Grace explained that they hadn’t refilled the bird feeders now that spring was on the advance, not in full retreat as it had been when Dylan had arrived in town.

  “I’ve been reading The Three Musketeers,” Olivia said as they walked past a bank of forsythia, their yellow blossoms waving in a light breeze. “When Dylan McCaffrey was here I borrowed the copy you left behind in your house.”

  “I love that book. I’ve read it many times. The library here has a copy.”

  “You’re not going to let me read the book you wrote?”

  “After I’m gone.”

  Olivia smiled as they circled back toward the sunroom. “Do you reveal any juicy secrets?”

  “We all have our secrets,” Grace said quietly.

  “Would yours have anything to do with the McCaffreys?”

  Grace stopped, gazing out at the surrounding hills, the reservoir glistening in the distance. When Olivia was born, Quabbin was already well-established, already a fact of life in her part of New England. She saw its beauty and had only old photographs and stories to imagine life there before the valley was flooded. When Grace looked at Quabbin, what did she see? The houses, lanes, farms and gardens of her childhood? The friends who’d moved to other towns? Post offices, ice-cream shops, sawmills and Grange Halls that no longer existed? Even the dead, Olivia thought, had been cleared out of the valley.

  “I don’t know the McCaffreys,” Grace said finally.

  Olivia didn’t want to push the older woman to say anything she would later regret, or to upset her. They returned to the sunroom. Her grandmother had arrived to take Grace to one of their exercise classes. Olivia got out of there, not sure why she’d stopped in the first place. She only knew that she was now madly curious about Duncan McCaffrey’s reasons for turning up in Knights Bridge.

  His son had to be, too.

  Olivia started her car. Dylan would be back. Even
if their kiss had been a passing moment not to be repeated, he had unanswered questions about his father.

  He wasn’t finished with Knights Bridge.

  After a long run on the beach, Dylan met Noah and Noah’s date, an aspiring actress, at the Hotel del Coronado down the street from his house. They had drinks on the sundeck behind the romantic landmark hotel, with its red-shingled Victorian domes and white-on-white exterior. Dylan stayed through a glowing sunset over the Pacific, then left Noah and his date to enjoy dinner on their own and walked back to his house.

  He ate a sandwich and dragged out his father’s trunk again. His search wasn’t as cursory this time, and he wasn’t as impatient. He’d spent his first few days back putting out fires for Noah and trying to convince himself that he didn’t need to know any more than he already did about his father’s house in Knights Bridge.

  “Just get rid of that house,” Loretta had told him upon his return from Massachusetts. “Get rid of it and forget about Knights Bridge.”

  Not so easy to do, Dylan realized now. Dreaming about kissing Olivia Frost again didn’t help. He’d woken up thinking about her every night since he’d been back in San Diego.

  He dug his father’s old laptop out of the trunk and fired it up out on the porch. The night was warm and still, the tide out as couples walked hand in hand on the silver sand of the beach. Dylan stifled an unbidden image of himself with Olivia and focused on the laptop screen. He’d never wanted to dip into his father’s life. He’d died suddenly, with no time to prepare—no time to burn the classified papers, as it were. Dylan had quickly discovered he needn’t have worried. If his father had secrets, he hadn’t bothered to write them down or put them onto his computer. His “official” treasure hunts had all been taken over by his partners and colleagues. He wasn’t the type to get bogged down in details. He would gather what information he needed, then establish a clear mission and take action.

  Dylan had checked with his mother when he’d arrived back in San Diego, but she was of little help. During their brief marriage, she and his father had focused on the present. “I wasn’t meant to be part of his life forever,” she’d told Dylan. “I think I always knew that.”

  He noticed a file cryptically named “1938” and sat up straight as he opened it and scanned the brief entry:

  In early September, 1938, a private luxury hotel on Arlington Street in Boston was broken into and an aristocratic stash of three rings and a necklace, some or all reputedly given to the Ashworth family by Queen Victoria, were stolen. The owner of the jewels, Lord Charles Ashworth, was knocked unconscious but later brushed off the theft, offering only a modest reward for return of “several family heirlooms.”

  Rings: diamond-and-sapphire; diamond cluster; diamond-and-ruby. Necklace matches the diamond-and-sapphire ring.

  A major hurricane struck New England three weeks after the theft. Then came the Munich Pact, the Nazi German invasion of Czechoslovakia and the start of World War Two.

  Ashworth survived the war. The Ashworth jewels have never been recovered.

  Dylan put his feet up on the porch railing. “Well, well.”

  He couldn’t remember his father ever going after stolen jewels, but why not? The Ashworth jewels had to be worth a fortune. He did a quick internet search of Lord Ashworth. He was a British viscount who’d died forty years ago. One marriage, no children.

  No mention of the jewels, never mind the heist in Boston. Too distasteful? Too obscure? They didn’t exist?

  A quick search wasn’t going to do it and he needed to do more digging?

  Dylan reread the file as Noah walked up the porch steps, his black suit coat hooked on one finger over his shoulder. He nodded back toward the Hotel del Coronado. “I took her home. She said she had to read Alice in Wonderland for a graduate course. You don’t think she was blowing me off, do you?”

  “She’s a graduate student?”

  “English.”

  Dylan supposed it was possible. “Does she know you’re rich?”

  “No. At least I don’t think so. Alice in Wonderland, Dylan?”

  He grinned. “She was blowing you off, whether or not she knows you’re rich.”

  Noah sighed and sat up on the porch rail, draping his coat next to him. He had on a black shirt, too. “I think I’m depressed.”

  Noah wasn’t depressed. Dylan gave him a beer.

  “How the hell old is that laptop?” his friend asked.

  “It’s an original. Still runs.”

  Noah took a long swallow of the beer. “What’s on your mind, McCaffrey?”

  Dylan handed over the laptop and let Noah read.

  Noah set the laptop on a small porch table. “How did old Duncan come across the news of this heist?”

  “No idea. I don’t know of any other unsolved jewelry thefts that caught his eye.”

  “Why do you think this one did? The history of the jewels? The amount they’re worth? The Ashworths? Could they have hired him to find the jewels?”

  “He wasn’t a private detective.”

  “What’s a jewelry heist in Boston in 1938 got to do with a falling-down house in Knights Bridge?”

  “That’s what I want to know.”

  “And the reason would be…what?”

  A good question, Dylan thought, suddenly restless as he dropped his feet back to the porch floor.

  Noah drank more of his beer and studied his friend. “Let’s be honest here, Dylan. You don’t care about an obscure jewelry theft. You care about your father, and you’re attracted to this woman, Olivia Frost.”

  Dylan didn’t argue with him, but he didn’t explain himself, either. He thought of Grace Webster’s collection of novels. “Maybe I’m just ready for my own adventure.” He rose, welcoming the breeze off the water. “You’re in good shape here, Noah. You have a team you can trust in place. You can manage without me.”

  Noah was philosophical. “We’ve worked hard, and we’ve been lucky. Time to get our personal lives in order.”

  “My personal life’s just fine.”

  “But you are going back to Knights Bridge?”

  Dylan looked out at the ocean, dark under the night sky. “I am.”

  Fifteen minutes after Noah left, Loretta Wrentham breezed up the porch steps. Dylan had texted her about the laptop file. “I haven’t had any air all day.” She grabbed the last of the three beers Dylan had brought outside with him, one of which he’d drunk. She uncapped it and sighed at him. “You McCaffreys know how to drive a woman to drink. Not that I ever worked for your father. Just you.”

  “Lucky you,” Dylan said with a wry smile.

  She angled a skeptical look at him. She had on a crisp white shirt, slim jeans and red heels, as if she were coming from or going to dinner. “You aren’t getting into treasure hunting, are you, Dylan?”

  “Not if I can help it. I just want to know about this property in Massachusetts.”

  She glanced back at the beach, then again at him as she took a swallow of the beer. “I don’t have anything to add to what I’ve already told you. I wasn’t involved in your father’s purchase of the Knights Bridge house.”

  “But you knew about it.”

  “After the fact. He told me—because of you.”

  “Because you’re my lawyer and financial manager.”

  She eased out of her red heels and stood barefoot on the porch. “Correct.”

  Dylan rose, facing the ocean. “What about the Ashworth jewels, Loretta?”

  “You’ve been busy, I see.” She sank against the rail, next to him, her back to the water. “More nonsense. I didn’t know much about your father’s treasure hunts. While you were in Massachusetts I did some checking. Ninety percent of what he pursued came to a dead end—nature of the beast—or he just lost interest—nature of Duncan McCaffrey.”

  “Whatever he was up to in Knights Bridge was different,” Dylan said.

  Loretta studied him as she drank more of her beer. Finally she said, “Are you spec
ulating or do you know?”

  “Half and half.”

  She set the beer bottle back on the table. She’d drunk maybe a third. “He never mentioned the Ashworth jewels. Not to me.”

  Dylan shifted his gaze from the ocean and nodded to the old laptop, still open on the table. The screen had gone blank. “You can have a look at the file if you want.”

  “Dylan…”

  When she didn’t go on, he filled her in on what he’d discovered on his father’s laptop.

  Loretta shook her head. “Dylan, I don’t know what to say. A 1938 Boston robbery, missing jewels—I can’t help you.”

  “My father’s interest in Knights Bridge feels personal,” Dylan said, turning again to face the water. “I don’t think he bought the Webster house on a whim.”

  “Maybe not.” Loretta turned with him, the porch light catching the lines at the corners of her eyes. “It’s a beautiful night, isn’t it?”

  Dylan didn’t answer. It was obvious it was a beautiful night. “My father didn’t involve any of his usual partners and investors in whatever he was after in Knights Bridge.”

  “No, he didn’t.” She stared out at the water. “Sometimes it’s best to let sleeping dogs lie. You have a life here, Dylan. Your father’s gone. You can afford to walk away from this house.” She shifted her gaze, leveling her dark eyes on him. “Maybe you can’t afford not to walk away.”

  “The roof leaks but there are all these musty old books. Have you read The Count of Monte Cristo?”

  Loretta frowned at him as if he’d lost his mind and finally sputtered into laughter. “I’m not even going to ask what The Count of Monte Cristo has to do with any of this. I’ve seen the movie. That’s enough for me.”

  Dylan grinned at her. “Ever been to New England?”

  “No.”

  “This is the New England of historic houses, town greens, rolling hills—”

  “I like San Diego,” she said stubbornly. “You live in paradise. If you want, I can take care of this house in Knights Bridge for you. You don’t have to think about it again.”

  It wasn’t her tone that got his attention. It was the way she fidgeted, closing the laptop, lining up the beer bottles on the table, then twisting her hands together as if she were cold. She wasn’t cold.