“Yeah. Right he—” Her words were cut short. “Well, there used to be a light. The bulb’s been smashed.” She kicked at some fragments with the tip of her boot.
Olivia didn’t like the sound of that.
“Someone did that recently?” Laurel knit her hands together. Her voice sounded shrill and small in the darkness.
Millay shrugged, as though acts of vandalism were a natural part of the bar environment. “It was fine as of two this morning. I should know.
Harris turned to the right and began to walk the length of the building. The others followed, but Olivia moved off to the left. Something propelled her in the opposite direction.
Around the corner of Fish Nets, in a narrow alley separating the bar from the pizza parlor next door, she found Camden.
His back was against the wall and his head sagged over his chest. Even in the dark, Olivia knew that the black stain spread across the center of Camden’s shirt was blood. For a moment, she couldn’t shake the thought that the slick blemish covering his upper torso resembled a pair of distorted butterfly wings.
The amount of blood and the slackness of Camden’s body told Olivia that her friend was dead—that his throat had probably been slit. She waited for a powerful feeling of horror or grief or anger to flood her, but she was completely overtaken by numbness.
Suddenly, she was a girl again. She saw the police car pull in front of the house, saw the pair of solemn officers remove their hats, heard the exchange of mumbles in the hall as the news was delivered to her father. She watched from her bedroom window as he walked down the path to the dock, heading toward the dinghy—a bottle of whiskey in one hand and her mother’s purse in the other. He rowed away without even glancing up at the cottage where his daughter was facing the greatest shock of her young life. Alone.
Olivia shook herself free from the grip of memory but couldn’t move a muscle. She was paralyzed by the numbness, trapped between the past and the present.
She didn’t know how long she stood staring down at Camden’s body when Millay’s voice finally pierced the stillness. After releasing a string of high-pitched expletives, the younger woman grabbed on to Olivia’s arm, hard.
“Olivia!” She tugged until the older woman blinked and pulled away. “Don’t lose it on me! There’s something written here! Look!” Millay flicked a lighter and tiptoed closer to the wall.
Olivia watched as a weak circle of light illuminated three lines of text, written in glistening black spray paint. The two women read it to themselves.
“What the hell is that?” Millay spluttered indignantly.
“Haiku. A Japanese-style poem following a set of strict rules,” Olivia answered robotically and then, her mind regaining a sense of focus, sent Millay away to forestall the others from seeing Camden’s corpse and to call for help.
Forcing her eyes on the glossy, spidery letters, Olivia tried to detach herself from the knowledge that the body of someone she liked and admired was slumped on the ground before her. As if Camden were still alive, she whispered to him, “Your murderer is a member of the literati.”
She dug out a pen and a small notebook from her purse and copied down the poem. Even when heavy footfalls alerted her that she was no longer alone, her eyes—flickering with a bright anger—remained fixated on the words on the wall.
His words are silenced?
An orchard in winter, where
Apple seeds slumber
Chapter 5
Olivia felt a blanket being draped over her shoulders. It was made of coarse, gray wool and its semi-stale odor reminded her of the horse blankets she’d placed on the curved back of her favorite mare at boarding school.
Clutching the rough fabric together at the base of her throat, she turned to meet the solemn stare of Chief Rawlings.
“I understand you found Mr. Ford’s body. Do you feel up to answering a few questions, Ms. Limoges?”
After a pause, Olivia nodded. “Yes.”
The chief placed a strong hand on her upper arm and pivoted her, so that her line of sight fell away from the gossip writer’s sprawled form. His touch made her aware of the other people milling around the alley. It seemed that suddenly, like a colony of ants erupting from underground, uniformed men and women were everywhere. They were accompanied by bright lights and sharp noises—the cacophony of expressionless professionals doing their jobs in the midst of a scene that had rendered Olivia Limoges completely immobile in its awfulness.
Camera flashes erupted like lightning, footsteps echoed in the tight space between the buildings, and a dozen voices spoke in low, urgent whispers as radio crackles from the hips of the policemen fired into the night air like gunshots from a small-caliber weapon.
“Did you see anyone else here with Mr. Ford?” the chief asked her.
“No, just him, the way he is now.” Olivia looked toward the end of the alley, where the lights from a police cruiser cast blue shadows into the narrow opening. “We only came down to the bar because he didn’t show up for our writer’s group meeting.” Her confident and straight-backed posture sagged by a fraction. It was subtle, just a marginal slump in the shoulders, but Chief Rawlings was the type of man to notice such a small detail.
He studied her on the sly, but Olivia could sense his scrutiny and she shrunk a little further inside herself. She knew he was aware that this was not the first time someone had discovered her, all alone, in the middle of a frightening tableau. She had been found by a passing fishing trawler when her father disappeared, shivering in the bottom of a rowboat, and when they brought her back to Oyster Bay’s docks, half the town had been there to witness her pathetic disembarkation from the vessel. Her grandmother had been among those waiting onshore. After giving Olivia a cold, unpracticed embrace, she swept the orphan into her chauffeured Lincoln and drove right out of Oyster Bay.
Olivia knew the chief had lived in Oyster Bay for most of his life, and for a moment, she wondered if he recognized her as the bedraggled, towheaded, and barefoot girl plucked from the fog. If so, he made no indication, his features creased in genuine concern. “Look here, Ms. Limoges. My boys and I are going to have our hands full questioning the bar patrons,” he remarked gently, his eyes sweeping over his industrious officers. “Why don’t you run on home and get yourself something warm to drink? Maybe a hot cup of spiked coffee or some brandy? I’ll send someone by to take your statement later. You’ve been through enough for one night.”
“I could certainly do with some scotch,” Olivia murmured in relief. She removed the blanket from her shoulders and folded it into a neat square. “Thank you, Chief. I really have nothing useful to tell you at the moment, but I’ll gather the other writers and try to come up with a comprehensive statement.” She pushed the blanket toward him and gazed at him intently, her navy blue eyes black, mournful pools. “Please find out who did this to Camden.” She didn’t let go of the blanket even as his hands reached up to accept it. “I didn’t know him that well,
