The Last Word

hands, she began to type.

The tent of Ramses II was richly decorated. Lush carpets covered the ground, and chairs, tables, and a bed made of ebony and gold stood against the rear wall. Servants had laid out bowls of honeyed dates and pitchers of water and wine. Incense burned in every corner, and Kamila felt a little dizzy as she fell to her knees and prostrated before the Living God.

“Come,” he told her in his rich voice. He gestured at a rug made of leopard pelts. “Sit.”

Kamila did as Pharaoh commanded, keeping her shift drawn demurely over her legs. She was a concubine and belonged to the king, but since he had never claimed his right, she felt like a shy child in his presence. It was true that Ramses called her to his bedchamber more than any of the other girls, but he never touched her. Instead, she sang to him, told him the palace gossip, or was defeated by him in games of senet.

The concubines knew the king was besotted with his beautiful wife, yet it was also his duty to sire as many heirs as possible to strengthen his legacy and the greatness of Egypt. Kamila had watched with ill-disguised envy while the bellies of other girls swelled with the king’s child and had tasted a bitterness she’d never known before when confronted with these fortunate concubines. They’d languish in the women’s quarters of the palace wearing smug, contented smiles, knowing their futures were secured.

“Your thoughts are as distant as Ra’s chariot,” the king said, drawing Kamila’s attention to his desert-tanned face, his dark eyes, and strong jaw. “Will you sing for me?”

Kamila nodded and did her best to conceal her disappointment, for the request meant that the king was ready to retire for the evening and that, once again, she’d return to her own sleeping pallet without having known his touch.

Deciding to take matters into her own hands, Kamila opened her mouth and began to sing a love song. As she sang, she swayed her body enticingly, her honey-colored eyes never leaving the king’s face. She loosened her shift, and by the end of the song, she was again kneeling before her king, only this time, her clothes were a pool of linen at her feet.

The king’s eyes revealed his desire as they traveled down the smooth skin of her elegant neck to her supple breasts, flat belly, and finally, to the soft curve of her hips. Then, at long last, he reached out and pulled her down onto the bed.

Olivia’s cell phone rang. Startled out of her narrative, she cursed. She’d been fully prepared to write a sex scene between Kamila and Ramses and had been thinking about how to proceed for days. In fact, ever since Rawlings had touched her at The Bayside Crab House, she’d been focused on little else.

As she frowned at the numbers identifying the caller, Dixie appeared to refresh her coffee. Instead of skating away when she was done, she set the coffeepot down and waited to see if Olivia would answer her phone.

“I’ll go outside,” Olivia said and stood up. “I don’t want to be rude.”

“Oh, sit on down, Emily Post,” Dixie commanded. “If that’s your brother I wanna know if their new baby’s made his way into the world.”

Olivia gently rolled her friend backward. “It’s Harris,” she said while simultaneously answering the phone and stepping out the front door into the May sunshine. “This had better be good,” she growled before Harris had the chance to speak. “I was working on my chapter and was completely in the groove.”

“Sorry, but I didn’t know who else to call.” Harris sounded excited, but not alarmed. “Remember I told you that Nick Plumley was coming over today and that the floor guys would be here, too?”

“Yes.”

“Well, right after Nick left—he stayed a long time and even helped me paint—the guys took out some of the rotten treads on the staircase. Apparently the wood was so deteriorated that it was only a matter of time before I put my whole foot through the steps.”

Shifting impatiently, Olivia frowned. “Can we skip the Bob Vila details, please?”

“I’m trying to give you a bit of backstory here, okay? Build up the dramatic tension,” Harris stated good- naturedly. “Anyway, about fifteen minutes ago, one of the workmen removed a tread near the landing and guess what?”

Olivia didn’t enjoy guessing games. “He got a splinter?”

“He found a secret compartment carved in the step. The preexisting hollow space had been enlarged, and inside, there was a metal thermos. An old one, from the forties or fifties. You could tell just by looking at it that it had some serious age to it.”

Harris had managed to capture Olivia’s attention. Kamila and Ramses were forgotten in the face of such interesting news. “Was there anything inside the thermos?”

“Yep. I unscrewed the top half thinking I’d discover some sixty-year-old petri dish of mold and gunk, but I found an unbelievably well-preserved painting instead! A beautiful landscape of a snowy forest was rolled up and tucked into that metal thermos. There are some words on the back too, but they’re pretty faint and I need to look at them more closely.” Harris’s words were tumbling out. “That’s why I called you. What should I do about the painting? What if it’s valuable?”

Glancing at her watch, Olivia decided she had plenty of time to write later that afternoon. “I’m coming over.”

The two workmen from Clyde’s crew were taking an early lunch break when Olivia pulled up in front of the bungalow. Recognizing Haviland, the men offered him a few slices of turkey and ham, which the poodle wolfed down as though he hadn’t already eaten a full breakfast at Grumpy’s.

“Don’t be a glutton,” Olivia scolded fondly and then told him he was free to explore the woods surrounding the bungalow. Despite her desire to rush inside the house, she paused to exchange small talk with the workmen. Acquaintances in Oyster Bay never passed one another by without demonstrating this courtesy. Often the cause of slow-moving shop lines, traffic jams, and other such delays, it was simply the way things were in the small southern town.

Finally, Olivia used the pretense that she was eager to check out their handiwork in Harris’s kitchen to get away.

“Your money’s been well spent, Ms. Olivia,” one of the men called after her. “Looks like a whole new room now.”

Olivia thanked him and hastened into the house, where she found Harris at his desk in the living room, the painting spread out on the clean wood surface. He’d used some heavy books as paperweights, but Olivia could still see the creases in the painting as a result of being rolled up for so many years.

Harris moved to the side to give Olivia room. Instead of bending over the painting, which reminded her of an ancient Japanese scroll in its dimensions—it was at least two feet long but no more than a foot wide—she sat down in the desk chair and slowly absorbed the scene.

At first, it didn’t seem very remarkable. Olivia wouldn’t normally find a snowy forest, a frozen stream, and a small cabin in the distance compelling, but the painting was multilayered.

The artist had made the left-hand side feel hostile and cold. Glacial blues blended into desolate gray, and the stark tree branches were sharp and brittle. Shards of ice poked at sinister angles from the rock-strewn stream, but as the viewer’s eye traveled to the right, the forest grew more inviting. The pine trees were enveloped in cloaks of feathery white snow, and the frozen water was glassy and calm. Then, on a slight rise toward the upper right, was the cabin itself. Smoke curled from the chimney and light poured from the single window. There was also a sliver of yellow beneath the door, casting a welcoming beam onto the packed snow.

Olivia could imagine a weary traveler raising his eyes to the sight of home. She could almost feel the heat of a wood-burning stove and the scents of bread baking or a stew bubbling over an open flame. A loved one waited within. Sanctuary could be had there, in the cabin on that gentle slope.

The painting could have been set anytime within the century, and though Olivia was no expert, even her untrained eye could see that it was clearly not the work of an amateur.

She noticed a symbol in the bottom right-hand corner but couldn’t make sense of it. “Did you try to look this up on the computer?”

Harris nodded. “Couldn’t find a thing, but I’ll try again later. Check out the back.”

Carefully removing the books from the painting’s corners, Olivia turned the paper over. She accepted a flashlight from Harris and swept the beam across its surface. Along the top, someone had lightly written a few words in pencil. The cursive looked masculine to Olivia, but the sentiment could have been expressed by either gender.