The Last Word

Chapter 13

It is singular how soon we lose the

impression of what ceases to be constantly

before us. A year impairs, a

luster obliterates. There is little distinct

left without an effort of memory, then

indeed the lights are rekindled for a

moment—but who can be sure that the

Imagination is not the torch-bearer?

—LORD BYRON

Rawlings was a step ahead of Olivia regarding Harris’s safety. He’d already established a rotation of drive-bys during the day and had offered overtime pay to any officers willing to sit in a squad car outside Harris’s house during the night.

“I can’t afford to do this much longer,” Rawlings admitted. “Don’t have the budget for it. If I can’t break this case soon, Harris might be living with me.”

Olivia would fund the cost of overtime herself if need be and told the chief as much. “Especially after dark. He’s more vulnerable then.”

“Except that he always has company,” Rawlings said after a discreet pause. “It’s one thing to incapacitate a single person in order to search the house for hidden artwork, but to take two people out requires more planning.” Olivia heard a rustling at the other end of the phone as if the chief was sifting through sheaves of paperwork. “But the killer’s had enough time to plan, and that puts me on edge. I feel like Mr. Plumley’s murder only partially fulfilled his agenda and that he or she is ready to make a move. I believe that the countdown was initiated by that murder but is racing toward another act of violence.”

Olivia had experienced the same prickling of unease, an unidentifiable sense of urgency that pushed at her like a wind at her back. Even now, on a wooded road north of Chapel Hill, Olivia felt the pressure building and intensifying like a wave preparing to crest. She tried not to fume at the ancient Chevy pickup in front of them, even though it forced them to drive below the speed limit.

Billinger was lost in his own thoughts, but Olivia found his presence comforting. She hadn’t expected to have formed an immediate alliance with the professor, yet here he was, having put aside whatever plans he might have had for the rest of the afternoon, taking a chance on an old woman with an inconsistent mental state.

Mabel was in a wheelchair in the garden of The Sunrise Retirement Community. Olivia almost made a caustic remark about the nursing home’s name, but held it back. She recognized a need to step into this insulated world with a positive attitude and could see that Billinger was well practiced in walking with soft footfalls and wearing a bright smile. He raised his hand and waved to a nurse watering a ceramic urn filled with red geraniums before approaching Mabel.

“Good to see you, Professor!” The nurse greeted him warmly. “Mabel’s havin’ a good day. She’ll be right glad for some company.”

The woman they’d come to visit was a tiny thing. Her body was so slight that it seemed as though she couldn’t hold herself upright without the support of the wheelchair. Mabel had tufts of white cotton-candy hair and rheumy blue eyes, but when she heard Billinger’s voice, she smiled and blinked away the fog of memory and held out a fragile hand, marked with age spots and swollen rivulets of blue veins, and reached for him.

Billinger squatted down and looked at Mabel with genuine affection, accepting her hand and gently placing his over the thin flesh. He wheeled her alongside a nearby bench and gestured for Olivia to join them.

The professor had told her that Mabel was only in her seventies, so Olivia was caught off guard by the woman’s appearance. She wore all the marks of someone who’d struggled, kicking and clawing, through life. The years had shrunken her and bit away at her curves until she had the body of an undernourished child—all sharp angles and skin stretched tight across the bones. Her face was carved with deep wrinkles, like those on a walnut shell, but there were many fanning from the corner of her eyes, indicating that she’d born her troubles with a healthy dose of good humor.

“How lovely to meet a friend of Emmett’s,” Mabel said to Olivia in a voice as insubstantial as a leaf pushed about in the breeze. “He’s such a dear.” She gazed at Billinger fondly.

Instead of taking a seat next to the professor, Olivia stood directly in front of Mabel. “May I show you something?”

As the older woman nodded in assent, a stray shaft of sunlight broke through the protective boughs of the oak tree to the northwest and illuminated Mabel’s face, erasing away the decades. For a fraction of a second, Olivia saw how handsome this woman had been in her youth and that the ghost of this beauty coexisted with her brittle bones and mottled skin.

Olivia froze for a moment. Had her mother survived, would she be like Mabel? Would her radiance have shone through the sea blue eyes she shared with her daughter? Or would a lifetime spent growing old alongside an erratic man have robbed her of all her softness and grace, replacing them with furrows of worry and hard edges of regret?

Mabel turned her hands over, showing Olivia her palms and inviting her to come back to the present moment. Happy to obey, she unwrapped Kamler’s painting and, keeping it anchored on a piece of cardboard, tenderly placed the watercolor on Mabel’s lap.

The woman slipped on a pair of bifocals that had been hanging from her neck on a chain of finch yellow and gasped. “This is one of Henry’s!” Then, assaulted by doubt. “Isn’t it?”

Olivia and Billinger exchanged looks.

“Henry?” Billinger prompted in a patient voice.

Mabel covered her mouth as though she’d let loose a secret entrusted to her long ago by a dear friend. “I sometimes forget that Henry wasn’t his real name, but Evie called him that instead of Heinrich. Almost from the beginning. To her, he was Henry.” Mabel’s eyes drank in the winter scene. It was almost a tangible thing, to see her slip away from the senior center’s garden and travel back to Camp New Bern, to her girlhood, to Evelyn White.

Barely breathing, Olivia imagined she could follow Mabel through this wormhole of time, spying the pair of teenage girls in starched dresses and Mary Janes, schoolbooks clutched against their chests as they giggled at the sight of a group of cute boys hunched over glasses of cherry cola at the drugstore counter.

“Evie’d never been sweet on a boy before,” Mabel said. “It was like she was waiting for that German boat to get sunk, waiting for those young men with their strange language and their strange uniforms to wash up onto the beach like a group of mermen. Henry was the best looking and the sweetest. He never acted like a prisoner. It was more like he’d come to visit distant relatives. The first time Evie and I went to take lunch to our daddies, she spotted Heinrich through the chain fence, and it was . . .” She trailed off, nostalgia tugging her lips into a grin.

Billinger tried to finish her thought. “Love at first sight?”

Mabel’s finger rose, hovered over the cabin, trembling a little. “No. Evie was so pretty that her parents fretted over her. She was raised to be careful, modest, to not even talk to older men outside the family. But when their eyes met, Henry’s and hers, it was as if they recognized each other. Something deep inside each of them reached out to the other. No power on this earth could’ve stopped it, no matter how foolish folks thought they were. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it was a long, long war.”

Her finger came so close to touching the painted cabin that Olivia almost moved to interfere, but she merely held her breath and waited.

“The way they were when they were together . . . so easy, so sure. They were just like this little house—all light and laughter and warm rooms in the middle of a crazy, cold world that couldn’t seem to comfort any of us, especially when the food started running out and then telegrams came and half the town dressed in black.”

Olivia met Billinger’s eyes. Mabel, who’d known both the players in this drama, had taken one look at the browns and yellows that Kamler had blended together to create the cabin and had immediately recognized it as a pledge from one lover to another.

“Then why did Henry leave Evelyn?” Olivia asked, reluctantly playing devil’s advocate. “Why try to escape? Were they planning to elope?”

Mabel put her hand back on the armrest of her wheelchair and shook her head firmly. “She would have told me. Evie was . . . broken by what happened that night. On the last day I saw her, she swore on her Bible that Henry didn’t want to escape, that he’d never kill that guard . . . Oh, I can’t remember his name . . .” The realization that there was a gap in her memory disconcerted Mabel so greatly that she stopped speaking, only making soft scratching sounds in the back of her throat.

Billinger tried to coax Mabel back by asking after her family, but her eyes had grown misty again, her thoughts blanketed by a fog too thick to be shaken off by the professor’s voice speaking the cherished names of children and grandchildren.

Gently, Olivia turned the painting over and placed it back on Mabel’s lap. “I think Henry wrote this note to Evie.” She read it aloud and watched for a reaction. Nothing.

“Mabel?” Billinger whispered and then shook his head at Olivia. “This is how it’s been. She fades in and out.”

The professor left the bench and strolled away to exchange a few words with the nurse. Olivia lifted Kamler’s watercolor from Mabel’s lap, but the older woman didn’t even seem to notice when the weight of it was no longer there.

Olivia repackaged the work of art, slipped it into the canvas tote, and sat back on the bench with a sigh. Thinking that Haviland would be delighted that their visit had been so short, she waited for Billinger to wrap up his conversation with the nurse.

Noises spilled out of the closest set of double doors, and a family of five stepped onto the sun-dappled patio. A little boy of five or six came running over the flagstones, his arms outstretched as he raced toward an elderly man leaning on a walker.

“Jimmy!” the man called in a cheery albeit tobacco-rough voice and smiled as the child hugged his skinny leg. His family encircled him, and the three adults began to chat as the two children tried to one-up each other in volume and enthusiasm. There was a baby too, held in the protective cradle of the mother’s arm. Olivia assumed he was quite young, for his small limbs were encased in a blue cotton sleeper with feet, as if the parents feared the effects of the light on the fragile, new skin.

Using his right hand to steady himself on the walker, the grandfather reached out with his left to touch the baby’s plump cheek. The mother pivoted the child so that his face was turned toward the old man. Their eyes met, the two males separated by a gulf of age, united by blood. The baby held still and then sucked in a great breath only to release it in an ear-splitting wail.

The mother laughed, embarrassed, and unobtrusively comforted her child. Next to Olivia, Mabel stirred in her chair, somehow awakened by the child’s cry.

“Oh, Evie!” The older woman’s eyes pooled with tears. “After they sent you away, things were never the same. I missed you so much. I still miss you . . .”

Olivia looked from the baby, who was quickly responding to his mother’s kisses and hushed assurances that all was well, to Mabel’s stricken face, her eyes focused on the infant. Billinger had turned when he caught the sound of Mabel’s grief floating through the honeysuckle-scented air of the garden, but Olivia shook her head, silently warning him not to move.

“I’m sorry Evie was sent away,” she whispered and laid a hand on Mabel’s. “What happened to her child?”

The tears overflowed, ribbons of water wetting the older woman’s cheeks. “She never came back. I never saw her again. My Evie . . .”

Mabel clammed up again, adrift in the painful memory of losing her best friend. Her lip trembled, but her tears quickly ran dry and her eyes fastened on an iridescent blue gazing ball in the garden bed opposite the bench.

Olivia could picture Mabel as a young woman, filled with hope that the war was coming to an end, rushing to the Whites’ house to share some piece of news with Evelyn, only to find no one at home.

Bewildered and more than a little afraid by the sense of emptiness clinging to Evelyn’s home, Mabel might have ridden her bike into town in search of information. The people she’d known for all of her nineteen years would be unable to meet her desperate eyes. Instead, they’d murmur something about the Whites having to move in haste because of a job offering or a sick relative or some other acceptable untruth.

Racing home to ask her mother, Mabel would be forced to consider the real reason the Whites had left town. For the last two months, Evie had been acting strange. At first, Mable thought her friend had grown pallid and despondent due to a broken heart. Heinrich was now gone and worse, he was a fugitive. Evie hardly left her room, and each time Mabel went to visit, she complained of being sick to her stomach and too wounded by Henry’s disappearance to face the judgmental stares of the townsfolk.

Naturally, Mabel would have tried to comfort her friend. She’d hold Evie while she cried, pass her tissues, and try to distract her with the latest gossip. But inside, she’d begin to wonder. Had Evie gone too far with the German boy? Could she truly have been that reckless? That foolish?

Out of loyalty and fear, Mabel would have dismissed the notion, for if Evie were pregnant, then her reputation would be ruined forever. It was already stained by the fact that she was besotted by a foreigner capable of stabbing a local man in the back, but the community would end up forgiving her by blaming it on her youth and naivete. They’d dole out a measure of this blame to her parents as well for allowing Evie to receive art lessons from a prisoner, regardless of his talent.

A shiver ran down Olivia’s neck. She picked up Mabel’s hand and stroked it lightly, caught up in the tide of heartache. A young couple in love, a childhood friendship, the White family’s place in the community—all torn asunder by one event, the murder of a guard on the night Heinrich Kamler and Nicklaus Ziegler escaped.

If Heinrich were truly innocent, then he’d lived an entire lifetime separated from the girl he’d dreamed of marrying and the child his lover had born in secret in some town far from Oyster Bay.

“Damn it,” Olivia murmured, tears pricking her eyes. Her throat tightened, and she could not stop herself from seeing right through the canvas tote back to the cabin on the hilltop, to the hope of home, knowing now that the traveler had never made it up the narrow path. The loved one within had waited and waited for the familiar footfall outside the door and no one had come.

The war ended, the prisoners were sent overseas, the Whites’ house was sold and relocated and sold again. And the children of wartime, like Evelyn and Mabel and Ray Hatcher, grew older, bearing the weight of their memories like women carrying heavy jugs home from the well.

At some point, Billinger appeared and rejoined Olivia on the bench. The nurse came to collect Mabel, and Olivia was deeply sorry to release the older woman’s hand. She bent over and placed a wisp of a kiss on Mabel’s forehead before letting go. Mabel smiled, the pain evaporating from her features like a shadow chased off by a bright moon.

Billinger had the good grace to wait until they were in the car before asking, “What happened back there?”

“I believe Evelyn White might have had a baby out of wedlock. Her family left town abruptly, but I have no idea where they went or what became of the child.” She turned to the professor in appeal. “Can you find out?”

He touched her arm. “I’ll do my best. You have my word on it.”

Olivia nodded. She instinctively knew that Billinger would work relentlessly to help her.

The afternoon was on the wane as she drove west toward the ocean, toward home, toward a killer.

When she stepped into the welcoming cool of her house, she noticed that her answering machine was blinking furiously. Rawlings had called an emergency meeting of the Bayside Book Writers for that evening. Olivia checked her watch. She had less than an hour until her friends would arrive at the lighthouse keeper’s cottage and she desperately wanted to take a shower, to rinse off the fine dust of sadness that coated her body.

Slipping her feet from her shoes, she picked up the phone, dialed The Boot Top, and paced across the floor, relishing the feel of the tiles against her skin. Olivia politely interrupted the hostess as she began her honey-tongued greeting and asked that Michel pick up the kitchen phone. Moments later, his voice ricocheted down the line, a frantic blend of passion and protestations.

“Michel!” Olivia cut him off with a bark. “I do not care to discuss your infatuation with Laurel at the moment. I’m calling because she and the other writers are coming over tonight and I have nothing to offer them by way of an impromptu dinner. Can you help?”

Vowing that he’d see to it personally, Michel cried, “I love her, you know!” and slammed the phone down.

Olivia rolled her eyes to the ceiling, fed Haviland his supper, and then trudged up the stairs. She shrugged out of her clothes and into the warm embrace of the shower stream. After washing her hair, she ran conditioner through the short strands and waited the recommended thirty seconds before rinsing it out. The glass panels of her shower stall fogged over completely, and she could barely make out Haviland’s black form as he sank onto the bath mat for an after-dinner repose.

Closing her eyes, she arched back into the rush of water, feeling the tension ebb from her shoulders, the images of Kamler’s cabin and Mabel’s stricken face receding.

Suddenly, she heard a sharp crash followed by a violent thump from the first floor. Haviland leapt to his feet and was off in a blur of black fur and angry barking. Olivia knew from the hostile tone that the poodle was genuinely alarmed. She turned the water off with a jerk, stuffed her arms into a robe, and raced to the landing.

Haviland was going wild in the kitchen. She could hear his enraged barks and snarls bouncing off the cabinets and terra cotta tiles. Without another second’s hesitation, Olivia grabbed her Browning BPR rifle from the coat closet, loaded it, and raised it to eye level. If someone were foolish enough to be in the kitchen when she turned the corner, they’d come face-to-face with the yawn of a gun barrel and a woman who was fully prepared to fire her weapon.

But no one was there.

Olivia lowered the gun but did not set it down. Tucking the stock under her right armpit, she approached the jagged hole in the glass of her closed kitchen door. She rapidly shuffled her feet into the shoes she’d discarded earlier and whipped the door open, crunching shards of glass beneath her heels. A large brown stone sat overtly on the welcome mat, discarded haphazardly by the intruders in their haste to gain entry to her house.

Realizing what this meant, Olivia swung around, her eyes targeting the wide pine table upon which she’d laid the canvas tote bag containing the watercolor before heading upstairs to shower.

It was gone.