Secrets of the Lost Summer

by Carla Neggers

  “You’re glad he purloined a copy of your book.”

  “He had a chance to read it before he died.” Grace stared out the window, then took a breath and continued without looking at Olivia. “There was a hand-dug well behind my cabin. It might have caved in by now. I used to worry it would get covered up by leaves and someone would fall into it. I mention it in my book, in passing.”

  A well. Olivia studied the older woman. “Grace…did you tell Dylan about this well?”

  She smiled, a spark of mischief in her eyes. “Thirty minutes ago.”

  “He’s here? He’s in Knights Bridge?” Olivia couldn’t hide her surprise. “Has he gone out to Carriage Hill Pond to look for this well?”

  Grace sat in her seat and arranged her shawl around her, then lifted her binoculars. “Look, Olivia. A bluebird.”

  Olivia found Dylan at the pond, tossing a stick into the quiet water, and she wondered if all those years ago young Grace had responded to her jewel thief the same way, with a breathless gasp and a sense that this man was the only man she would ever want to be with.

  He grinned at her. “Think I just stole millions in missing British jewels?”

  “You wouldn’t be standing here throwing sticks if you had.” Olivia pushed through ferns to him. “I didn’t know you were back.”

  “I rolled into town this morning. I had this unfinished business to settle before I saw you.”

  “Looking for Grace’s well. I have a feeling your father got a shot of his wanderlust from her.” Olivia felt a welcome breeze on what had turned into a warm spring day. “I have something I want to tell you.” She pushed back a flutter of anxiety. “Before we go treasure hunting.”

  He stepped up onto Grace’s rock. “All right. What’s up?”

  Olivia faced the water so she wouldn’t be distracted by her reaction to him. “My sister and I were in a car accident when we were teenagers. I was driving. We were on our way to pick fiddlehead ferns.” She held up a hand before Dylan could ask. “Fiddleheads are like wild asparagus. You eat them. Jess and I were a one-lane road that dead-ended at Quabbin. It’s a lot like our road. Hardly anyone’s ever on it.”

  “Except that day,” he said quietly.

  Olivia nodded. “A car came straight at us out of nowhere, going way too fast. I swerved and went off the road.”

  “The other car?”

  “I’m not sure the driver even realized we’d gone off the road. I remember Jess screaming, ‘Car, car,’ and—well, we careened between two trees, down a hill and into a stone wall. We were lucky. We weren’t seriously injured—bumps, and a few scrapes—and we never lost consciousness, but we couldn’t get out.” Olivia paused, focused on the rustling of the trees in the light breeze, the rich smells of the damp ground and greenery around her. Finally she continued, “We were wedged in tight. We couldn’t open our doors. We couldn’t climb into the back and get out that way. We could barely move. I remember…” She took a shallow breath. “I remember thinking we’d die of thirst.”

  “How did you get out?” Dylan asked.

  “My mother found us. She and my father were in separate cars, driving all over town looking for us. She noticed a tire mark on the road and investigated. When she saw our car, she thought Jess and I were dead. She scrambled down the hill....” Olivia forced herself to take a few breaths before she went on. “I’ve never seen her so pale, but she didn’t cry or scream or anything once she realized we were alive. But she couldn’t get us out, either. She had to wait for my father to get there with the fire department.”

  “That had to be tough for all of you.”

  “We were fine, though. As I said, we were lucky. My mother was always a worrier, but she had a hard time after the accident. After a while, we thought things were better, but I realize now we all adjusted to doing what we could to keep her from having to worry.”

  Dylan toed a stone loose from the mud. “And you don’t like feeling trapped.”

  “Like on an airplane,” she said. “It doesn’t do any good to tell myself it could have been so much worse that day. It was what it was, and I didn’t like being stuck in that damn car, with my sister in pain and upset, knowing my parents were crazed with worry. I don’t play that moment back as much as I used to, but the end result is that I don’t like to fly.”

  “It was go into the ditch or have a head-on collision?”

  Olivia nodded.

  “Habits of thinking and reacting can be hard to break. You did good, Olivia. You survived, but you weren’t uninjured.”

  “Jess says we suffered a traumatic stress injury. I say we were lucky.”

  “Maybe you’re both right. A guy I know took a hard hit in hockey and was permanently disabled. He was ‘lucky’ because he wasn’t paralyzed, but he’ll walk with a limp for the rest of his life and he had to give up his dream of being in the NHL. It was one of those unintentional hits that went wrong. I wasn’t involved, but I watched him get hit. I was sure he’d never walk again. I got stuck in that moment for a while. I held back because of it. I wasn’t all in. I had to rearrange my thinking in order to get back to the game.”

  “Did your family attend your games?”

  “Some. Not always. They had their own lives. I wasn’t living out their fantasies.”

  “But you felt supported?”

  Dylan grinned suddenly, sexily. “Yeah, sure.”

  Olivia smiled. “We can go treasure hunting now.”

  They found the well by an old stone wall in the woods behind the spot where Grace’s cabin had once stood. The opening was covered in wet, rotted leaves, mud, twigs and cobwebs. A beetle scurried past Dylan’s foot, and he saw a fat, brown slug oozing through the muck.

  He grinned at Olivia. “I’m not that big on slugs. I’ve lived in a dry climate for a long time.”

  “They’re gross but at least they’re harmless.”

  He got down on his hands and knees at the edge of the well, then angled a look up at her. “Do you want to dig in first?”

  “No way. Whatever’s in this well has nothing to do with me. Grace, Philip Rankin, your father—these are your people, my friend.”

  He grabbed a fistful of sodden leaves and tossed it onto the ground next to him. “Right. My people.”

  Olivia knelt on the opposite side of the well, wishing she’d brought work gloves. She dug in, and in a matter of minutes, she and Dylan had uncovered the top section of the well’s stone-lined interior.

  He looked across the opening at her. “I suppose you don’t want to stick your hand in there, either?”

  “Nope. You’re the son of the treasure hunter. You go right ahead.”

  With a grimace, he reached into the well, leaning forward as he lowered his arm past his elbow, deep into the dark muck.

  “It’s a long shot that the jewels are still there,” Olivia said, suddenly wanting to dip her hand in there after all and see what she could find.

  Thirty seconds later, Dylan lifted out a dented, rusted, filthy tin box. “It was embedded in the stones about ten inches into the well. I didn’t have to stick my arm in so damn deep.”

  He took a breath and set the tin on the ground, then shook off some of the mud that had collected on his arm. Not that it did much good. Mud had splattered on his face and soaked into his jeans. Olivia knew she wasn’t in much better shape.

  “It’s a biscuit tin,” she said, staying focused on their discovery. “British.”

  Dylan managed to open the tin’s stiff, creaky lid.

  Inside was a small package wrapped in dark oilskin. He lifted it out of the tin and set it on a path of dry ground, carefully unrolling the oilskin, exposing the remains of a royal-red velvet drawstring bag.

  He handed the bag to Olivia. “You open it.”

  “Dylan—”

  “Go ahead. You’ve known Grace all your life.”

  Olivia loosened the frayed gold drawstrings and emptied the contents onto the oilcloth.

  Three rings and a necklace
, perfect, caught the afternoon sun gleaming through the trees.

  She sat back on her heels. “Grace knew the biscuit tin was in the well. Did she hide the jewels herself?”

  “I imagine she did,” Dylan said.

  “With Philip gone, with their baby gone, with no way to prove how she came by the jewels, with no way to clear Philip’s name, she left them here and never came back.” Olivia held back tears. “All these years, Dylan. She kept these secrets....”

  “They were her secrets to keep. No one else’s.” He frowned down at the tin, his eyes narrowed. “Hold on.”

  With the pads of two fingers, he lifted out a tiny metal replica of a sword that might have belonged to Porthos, Aramis or Athos, or one of the other swashbucklers on Grace’s bookshelves.

  Dylan laughed. “I’ll be damned.”

  Olivia shook her head in amazement. “Your father got here before we did.”

  “Leave it to Duncan McCaffrey, treasure hunter.”

  “Grace suspected he’d sneaked a copy of her book.”

  Dylan held up the sword to the sunlight. “He must have done a little late-night reading about her life and times. Even if she doesn’t say she hid the jewels in the well, it’s the only intact structure out here. He’d have figured it out.”

  Olivia carefully returned the jewels to the worn bag, then rolled them back up in the oilcloth and handed them back to Dylan. He placed them in the tin with the toy sword and got to his feet.

  She brushed mud off her hands and stood. “You’re not going to put the tin back in the well, are you?”

  He didn’t answer. Instead, he started back through the woods with the tin. After a moment, Olivia followed him, found him standing on the rock where they’d found Grace with her copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

  More than seventy years ago, a teenage Grace Webster had come upon a swashbuckler of her own, out here on Carriage Hill Pond.

  Olivia stood with her toes almost in the still, clear water. “You know what you have to do.”

  He nodded. “Yeah. I do.”

  She smiled past the twist of anxiety in her gut. “Nothing like having a private jet at your disposal if you’re smuggling a fortune in stolen jewels.”

  He winked at her, and they walked back through the woods to the Quabbin gate. Olivia watched him climb into his expensive rented car. First Duncan McCaffrey, then Dylan McCaffrey. Their presence in Knights Bridge had changed her little hometown forever.

  And me, too, she thought, climbing into her beat-up Subaru.

  She brushed mud off her hands and noticed a mosquito had followed her inside. She rolled down her window and ushered it back into the wilderness. She blew Dylan a kiss as she rolled up her window again.

  The man she loved blew her a kiss back, then grinned and drove up their quiet one-lane road, off to finish the mission his grandfather had started so long ago.

  Thirty

  “I’m not that wild about Beverly Hills,” Randy Frost told his older daughter; it was his first call to her since he and his wife of thirty-plus years had left for the airport. “We drove past where they filmed the opening to the Beverly Hillbillies. I feel a little like Jed Clampett myself. Next we’re having brunch at the Polo Lounge.”

  “Sounds fun,” Olivia said as she put down her paintbrush in the back room, the last of her collection of cast-off tables and chairs almost finished. “How’s Mom?”

  “Wondering why she didn’t run away from home at eighteen.”

  Olivia laughed. “It’s like a second honeymoon.”

  “It’s like a first honeymoon. We went to Cape Cod for the weekend for our first honeymoon. How are you, kid?”

  “I’m on my way to England.” Olivia liked the confidence she heard in her voice. “Don’t tell Mom. I don’t want her to worry.”

  “I’m not playing that game anymore, Liv. She worries about you so you don’t have to worry about yourself and blah, blah, blah. My head starts to spin. Go to damn London. I assume it’s got something to do with Dylan and those missing British jewels. Have a great time.”

  “Where are you and Mom off to next?”

  “Leaving Beverly Hills behind and starting our drive up the coastal highway. Your mother has a notebook of things for us to do. We’ll see you when we get back. How long will you be in London?”

  “I don’t know,” Olivia said truthfully. She hadn’t thought past finding Dylan. “Jess and Mark say they can hold down the fort here.”

  “Good. Your mother and I have flights back home in two weeks, but who knows.”

  Randy Frost watched the faint worry in Louise’s eyes dissipate as she smiled from the plush chair in their room at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Noah Kendrick, Dylan’s friend, was taking good care of them. He was different, but Randy liked him. His wife stood and took his hand. “I’m glad I didn’t wait any longer for this trip.”

  He grunted. “I wouldn’t have wanted you to make it as a widow.”

  What he heard from her next was genuine laughter, not laced with anxiety, not faked just so he wouldn’t feel like a heel. The woman, he thought, was having the time of her life.

  “This is all good,” he said. “The hotel, the scenery, everything. You’ve planned a hell of a trip, and we’re having a fine time for ourselves, but there’s only one thing in this world I want, Louise, and that’s to be with you.”

  “Randy…”

  He slung his arms around her and grinned. “I want to be the last dot on that damn page with you.”

  Thirty-One

  Olivia went through her carry-on bag twice to make sure she didn’t have any liquids she’d forgotten to put into a clear plastic bag, anything in general that might trigger closer scrutiny. Not that she was hiding anything, like stolen jewels. She just didn’t want to give herself any excuse to turn around and go back home to Knights Bridge. She had to act fast, before she could change her mind. She put her vial of calming herbal drops into a clear plastic bag and threw in some eyedrops and hand cream because she didn’t want it to look as if she might go crazy on the plane, not that the TSA workers would even notice. She made sure any liquids were under the three-ounce limit.

  Dylan would come back to Knights Bridge, but it wouldn’t be the same if she didn’t do this. For her sake. On her own.

  Jess saw her off, arriving at Carriage Hill in her truck. “You’re flying to London, alone,” she said, clearly keeping her shock at bay.

  Olivia tossed her carry-on into the back of her car. “I’ve memorized the airport. I have my route planned. Logan’s big but I’ve been there enough times to pick up and drop off people.”

  “I can drive you over there.”

  “No. I have to do this myself. Start to finish.”

  “You’re sure Dylan’s there and not back in San Diego?”

  “Pretending we don’t exist? I’m sure, Jess.”

  Her confidence in her own judgment and herself in general was back to full strength. She had time before things got busy at Carriage Hill. She would have to hire a staff. She wanted to take the risk. She wanted the freedom to do things.

  To do things with Dylan, she amended.

  She climbed in behind the wheel, started the car and waved to her sister.

  She’d printed out her boarding pass at home. She arrived at Logan without incident, parked and got through airport security with no issues.

  She had chosen a window seat, as close to the front of the plane as possible. She wanted to see the scenery—even if it was just clouds or darkness—and she wanted as quick an exit as she could manage without traveling first-class. She figured she would do what she could to prevent a panic attack.

  Settling into her seat, pulling on her seat belt, she debated telling the flight attendant that she hadn’t flown in a while and didn’t like to fly at all, but she opted to keep her situation to herself.

  A businessman sat next to her. He was, to her eye, the classic bored, experienced flyer. Perfect, she thought. He yawned and tore open his plastic-encase
d blanket. “Where you headed?” he asked her.

  “To visit a friend just outside London. You?”

  “A few days in London and then on to Switzerland.”

  “Switzerland. I’d love to go to Switzerland one day.” Olivia thought she sounded like a twelve-year-old. Apparently so did he from the look he gave her. She smiled. “I’ve never flown overseas.”

  “Ah.”

  “I’ll be fine. I won’t freak out on you or anything.”

  He laughed. “That’s good. Where you from?”

  “A little town on the edge of the Quabbin Reservoir. Have you heard of Quabbin?”

  “That’s where we get our water, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. It was built in the 1930s. Four towns…” She stopped herself. “I won’t talk the whole trip. Promise.”

  “It’s okay. I fly so much, I forget what it’s like to be new to it. Nervous?”

  “Excited,” she said. She pointed to her eyes. “I have a happy place I go to if I start to get nervous.”

  “Where’s your happy place?”

  “I’m in the woods, following a rock-strewn stream on a hot summer day. I’m barefoot, jumping from rock to rock.” She didn’t say that Dylan McCaffrey was with her.

  “That’s a good happy place.”

  “Do you have one?”

  “I’ve never thought about it. I don’t think mine would be in the woods. I’d be on the golf course. Yeah, I like that.”

  Olivia fell asleep after dinner. She wasn’t interested in movies or reading. She put on eye shades and her iPod, with the range of music she’d chosen to help her relax.

  The big adventurer, she thought with a smile.

  The flight was smooth and not as interminable as she’d expected, and soon the lights were on, orange juice, tea and scones were being served and then they were landing.

  She’d figured out money and a taxi. She wasn’t going to rent a car and try to drive herself. She’d arranged to arrive early at a small hotel in the Mayfair section of London and checked in. She showered, changed and had breakfast, then walked to an address she had found in her own research on Philip Rankin.