poodle shot over the dunes ahead of her. Kicking off her sandals, she rushed into the waves, droplets of salt water stinging her eyes. She pumped her arms and legs, going deeper and deeper. When she could no longer touch the sandy bottom, she began to swim. Eyes closed, she struck out toward the cold, dark blue water well offshore.
Haviland yipped from the beach and then dove in after his mistress. An excellent swimmer, the poodle was beside her in a matter of minutes. When Olivia finally became aware of his presence, she stopped her forward progress and began to tread water. She turned toward the shore and watched her house bob up and down in the distance. Her gaze then shifted to the lighthouse keeper’s cottage.
“Come on, Captain,” she said breathlessly, and together, the sodden pair returned more leisurely to the beach.
Back on dry land, Olivia twisted water from her cotton skirt and then walked slowly to the cottage, dripping as she walked. She’d hired her regular contractor to repair the building’s flood damage and, stepping inside, she could see that he’d made decent progress. The carpet had been removed and the floors and baseboards were primed. Without the furniture, it was easy for Olivia to picture the rooms as they’d once been during her girlhood. She could picture her father seated in his favorite chair, whittling a pipe bowl. He often worked on pipes during winter evenings while Olivia and her mother worked a jigsaw puzzle or played card games for pennies.
“It’s you, isn’t it?” she asked the empty room, her voice bouncing off the bare walls. “I can feel it. You’re alive on that island and you can’t die because you’re waiting for me.” Her eyes filled with tears and her lips trembled. “I waited for
Haviland whined, nosing Olivia’s hand with his nose.
Olivia was crying freely now. “Why didn’t you love me enough to come back for me?”
Her tears fell on the pristine white floor, mingling with the salt water pooling from her clothes.
She stood in that puddle of salt and water and felt as insignificant and alone as she had as a little girl, the healed scars within her heart pulling apart.
Chapter 14
Olivia dropped her drenched clothes in the washing machine, showered, and dressed in black yoga pants and a loose, russet-colored cotton shirt. She escorted Haviland to the Range Rover, buckled him into his canine seat belt, and then sped inland toward New Bern.
At the first red light, Olivia examined the blue vein lying just beneath the skin in the crook of her right arm. Her eyes traveled over the freckles on her forearm to her long, graceful hands. They were her mother’s hands. Though several inches taller than her mother, Olivia favored the Limoges line. The women were all naturally thin and graceful. Most had eyes the color of Delft blue pottery, but Olivia and her grandmother’s were of a darker shade and tended to change hue like the shifting colors of the ocean. Olivia looked nothing like her father. The only attributes she’d inherited from him were a strong jaw and a forceful will.
She pondered her parentage on the drive to New Bern, which took far longer than usual. Obstacles seemed to appear from nowhere and Olivia was forced to plod forward below the speed limit for the majority of the trip. On the two-lane highway leading out of town, she got stuck behind a logging truck. When it finally turned off, a line of school buses from the neighboring county got onto the road in front of the Range Rover while Olivia sat helpless beneath the unyielding glare of a red traffic light. She cursed and struck the steering wheel.
Despite maintaining a distance of several car lengths behind the last bus in the row of electric yellow vehicles dispensing clouds of black smoke from their exhaust pipes, Olivia had nowhere else to look but at the children pulling faces at her through the rear windows. They poked out their tongues, stretched their eyes into slits, and wiggled their fingers behind their ears. Taking clear enjoyment in their antics, Haviland bobbed excitedly in his seat. He’d stick his head out of his window, his tongue flapping in the breeze as he smiled at the children, and then he’d come back inside and start the whole routine again.
This comical exchange reminded Olivia of the thieves and the possibility that something about their appearance marked them as being obviously different. She then recalled overhearing one of the chief’s men mention the name Pampticoe High toward the end of her phone conversation with Rawlings yesterday.
Her mind began to churn. Had the victims attended Pampticoe High? Had the thieves? She pictured the school, a squat, worn brick building surrounded by scraggly bushes and sandy parking lots. Out front was a rusty flagpole flying Old Glory and the flag of North Carolina. There was also a set of park benches facing a magnificent bronze sculpture of a Pampticoe Indian paddling a dugout canoe. Olivia knew the county had been using the funds from its coffers—fuller than in the past as a result of several resoundingly successful tourist seasons—to improve roads, the business district, and the public beach areas, but the school was in dire need of attention.
“That building requires refurbishment,” Olivia told Haviland. “It hasn’t been updated at all while I was away. The town needs to look after its youth, create a sense of pride of place or they’ll all move away.” Making a mental note to raise the issue at the next Board of Education meeting, another thought occurred to her. Laurel had gone to Pampticoe High. She must have several yearbooks sitting around. Perhaps one of the thieves was even a classmate.
“Unlikely,” she mused. “But it’s worth a look.”
Once in New Bern, Olivia drove to an off-leash dog area and allowed Haviland a few minutes of freedom. She tried not to be too impatient as he greeted other dogs and sniffed the base of every tree and garbage can. Finally, she called him to get back in the car and promised to return to the park as soon as she was through at the lab.
She pulled the Range Rover beneath the shade of a massive oak tree, put the windows down, and poured Haviland some water. Then, because she wasn’t sure how long she’d be inside, she gave him a large bone.
“Be back soon, Captain,” she promised, but the poodle was too interested in his treat to so much as glance up in acknowledgment.
Inside the lab’s office, it was obvious that she wasn’t going to be breezing in and out of the lab quickly. A dozen names were listed on the receptionist’s clipboard. Once she’d added hers, Olivia asked the receptionist for an estimate on the wait time.
The woman shrugged. “’Bout thirty minutes.” She handed Olivia another clipboard. “Please complete these forms and make sure to sign and date them at the bottom.”
Retreating to an empty corner of the waiting room, Olivia raced through the paperwork and handed the pile back to the receptionist. The woman scooped up the forms, asked Olivia for payment in advance, and then called an elderly man forward and began to chide him for not having an updated insurance card. He searched through his wallet with trembling, age-spotted fingers but could not find anything to satisfy the receptionist.
Everyone in the room looked bored and miserable. A television mounted on the wall nearest the exit was turned to CNN, and an anchorman droned on about the state of the nation’s economy. Rumpled magazines sat untouched on veneered end tables, and a plastic display case filled with health pamphlets covered a coffee table in the center of the gray- and mauve-speckled carpet. The patients waiting to be taken into the back looked like zombies. No one met anyone else’s gaze, but each person took regular turns glancing at the large clock above the receptionist’s desk.
Olivia had paid in cash, slipping two extra twenties into the receptionist’s plump hand in hopes of being able to cajole the woman into seeing that Olivia was seen quickly. The attempt was unsuccessful. The woman counted out the bills and then called Olivia up to her window. Raising her pencil-drawn brows, she said, “You gave me too much money.”
She spoke loud enough for the rest of the room to hear and her tone was replete with disapproval. Olivia had no choice but to apologize, take back her cash, and return to her seat. She could feel the receptionist’s accusatory eyes on her back, but felt no shame. Haviland was waiting outside, so she had a valid reason to try to expedite her stay at the lab.
The minutes dragged on as one person after another passed into the next set of rooms. These patients moved deeper into the lab with slow and heavy steps. Olivia shared their feelings of reticence. She was not fond of having blood drawn and tended to become dizzy and nauseated during the experience.
Finally, a woman wearing purple scrubs encasing wide shoulders and a solid bulk resembling that of a NFL linebacker called Olivia’s name. “Olivia . . .” She frowned over her clipboard. “Limodges?”
