Secrets of the Lost Summer Page 8

  Time, Olivia thought, to figure out a game plan.

  Maggie O’Dunn’s mud-splattered van was parked out front when Olivia got back to the house with Buster. Her friend was crouched in front of the crocuses, but she pointed at several healthy mounds of chives. “Wow, no wonder you went with chives on your stationery,” she said, rising. “You could supply half of Knights Bridge with just this lot. More out back?”

  Olivia smiled. “Tons more.”

  “This place looks fabulous,” Maggie said, tightening a long, silky, deep teal scarf in her curly strawberry hair. She had taken off to the city herself for a few years but was back in Knights Bridge with her two young sons, running a catering business out of her nineteenth-century “gingerbread” house in the village. “Right now everyone’s talking about your neighbor. What do you know about him?”

  “Next to nothing.”

  Her turquoise eyes gleamed with mischief. “Shall we do a little investigating?”

  They made a pot of tea, grabbed Olivia’s laptop, set it up on the kitchen table and hit the internet.

  “Oh, my,” Maggie said after a few minutes, pointing to a page she’d found through Google. “He’s a former defenseman with the NHL.”

  “As in National Hockey League?”

  “Uh-huh.” Maggie clicked a few keys on the laptop. “Here’s a picture of him in his hockey uniform. He was with L.A. then. Whoa, huh? Studly. Same guy who’s up the road?”

  Olivia stood behind Maggie with a mug of tea and leaned closer to the laptop screen, studying a smiling Dylan McCaffrey in uniform and skates, hockey stick in hand. “Same guy,” she said.

  “Let’s see if we can figure out what he’s up to now.”

  Two minutes later, they had the answer. Dylan helped run childhood friend Noah Kendrick’s NAK, Inc., which had gone public a few months ago.

  Maggie gave a low whistle and poured more tea. “Noah’s worth a billion. Even if Dylan’s worth a tenth of that—”

  “That’s higher math,” Olivia said lightly.

  “No, it’s not. It’s a hundred million. Even if Noah’s net worth is exaggerated, it’s still got to be a lot more money than either of us has ever seen. Why is Dylan bothering with a crumbling house in Knights Bridge?” Maggie sat back with her tea, the midday sun streaming through the kitchen windows. “Because of you, Liv?”

  “That’s what he said.”

  “Liv?”

  “Because I wrote to him,” Olivia amended.

  “And he came, just like that?”

  “I’m being careful, Maggie.” Olivia sighed, averting her gaze from the laptop screen. “Do I tell Mom and Dad about him, or do I just keep my mouth shut?”

  “Are you kidding? They probably have a dossier on Dylan on their desk by now. You know how they are.”

  Olivia did, indeed. She wanted to find out more about Dylan’s father but she didn’t want to keep Maggie from her work. They shut the laptop, cleaned up the tea dishes and headed outside.

  “I can’t believe how much you’ve got done in such a short time,” Maggie said as she opened the door to her van. “It’s shaping up even better than I thought it would. You’ll get people to come out here, Liv. No question. I’ll bet you have your own kitchen soon, but let’s have fun in the meantime, shall we?”

  “My mother-daughter tea seems awfully close.”

  “It’ll be great. I’ll come by in the next day or two and we’ll nail down a menu. In the meantime, I have two rascals to pick up from school. Wait until they hear a hockey player’s in town.”

  “Maggie—”

  She laughed. “Kidding. Mum’s the word until you figure out what Mr. McCaffrey’s really up to. I doubt it’s just to move an old refrigerator.”

  As Maggie climbed into her van, Olivia debated, then said, “I saw Grace Webster this morning. She’s doing well. She’s into bird-watching and she’s taking yoga with my grandmother.”

  “Good for her. I saw her a few weeks ago when I catered a hundredth birthday party for one of the residents. She looks great.”

  “Did she tell you she wrote a book?”

  Maggie’s eyes sparked with interest and humor. “Oh, yes. She won’t let a soul read it until she’s gone. Makes you wonder what’s in it, doesn’t it? Probably not just essays on Latin verbs and Shakespeare.”

  “Probably not,” Olivia said, watching her friend pull the van door shut and start up the road back toward the village.

  Five

  My name is Grace Webster, and as I start this book, I am ninety years old, living my last days in my adopted town of Knights Bridge, Massachusetts. I was born in the back bedroom of my family’s house, gone these many years, torn down to make way for the vast Quabbin Reservoir. The house’s foundation is all that remains, and it’s now under fifty feet of water. It was made of rocks my great-grandparents and their neighbors collected when they cleared the land for farming. It’s just one of the countless old cellar holes in the woods and under the waters of Quabbin, silent reminders of the lost towns of the Swift River Valley and the people who lived there.

  The valley towns of Prescott, Dana, Enfield and Greenwich were already doomed when I was born, and so was my mother. She died in childbirth. I don’t know what happened but I remember stains on the worn floorboards. I expect she hemorrhaged. We didn’t discuss such things in my family.

  As a teenager, I watched as our house was razed by strangers, but that gets ahead of my story. My grandmother—my father’s mother—was the first to explain to me what would happen. Dottie Webster was a gentle soul, a self-educated woman who had never known another home and seldom left the valley. My father, Isaiah Webster, was her only surviving child. She’d lost two babies before he was born. She would only say they died of a fever. My father was the strong, silent type who hid his pain and anger with work and a kind of mental toughness that a young girl can find unforgiving.

  I was ten when Gran and I were snapping beans in the shade of a sugar maple her ancestors had planted and she told me about the reservoir. It was a hot summer afternoon, and we’d spread an old quilt on the grass. We’d picked the beans ourselves that morning.

  “The state wants the valley for the reservoir—for water for Boston,” Gran said.

  I grabbed a handful of beans, still warm from the sun. “The valley? You mean Greenwich?”

  “Not just Greenwich. They want Prescott, Dana, Enfield, several villages, parts of other surrounding towns. Everyone and everything has to go. People, houses, shops, mills, churches. Even the trees will be ripped out of the ground. The work’s already started—”

  “Then it has to stop. It’s not fair, Gran.”

  “Fair or not, we don’t have a choice. The state can take the valley by what’s called eminent domain. It’s for the public good.”

  “What about our good?”

  “The people in Boston need drinking water. It’s a big city, Grace. We can’t stand in the way of progress.” Gran’s tone was firm and pragmatic, but her eyes misted with tears. “I don’t know how long before we’ll have to move. Some people are already taking the state offers for their homes and leaving the valley.”

  “Where would we go?” I asked.

  “Most people will move to one of the surrounding towns that aren’t being flooded. The engineers have calculated to the inch where the water will go. Many of the hills in the valley will become islands as the reservoir fills.”

  I flicked an ant off the quilt. “I hate engineers.”

  “It’s not their fault, Grace. They’re decent men doing the best they can. They’re charged with building a safe reservoir that will provide clean water to Boston for the foreseeable future. There’s nothing we can do.”

  As Gran and I snapped beans, she told me about the two dams that would plug the valley like a bathtub and allow it to fill with water, creating the largest lake in southern New England and one of the largest man-made reservoirs in the world. An aqueduct almost a hundred miles long would take the water to Bo
ston.

  “Where we are sitting now,” Gran said, “will be under fifty feet of water.”

  I couldn’t listen to another word. I jumped up and ran to the stream behind the house, plunging in to my knees. I imagined everything around me gone, under water. I couldn’t breathe. It was as if I were drowning along with everything I knew. I’d never left the valley. I’d only seen pictures of other places.

  Gran stayed in the shade, snapping beans as if nothing would ever change.

  A few days later, I followed her as she walked to the small cemetery where my mother and multiple generations of the Websters were buried. I hid behind a tree while Gran sank to her knees at the graves of her husband and babies. She didn’t know I was there, or she pretended not to know. Later she told me that the state was moving all the graves in the valley, most to a new cemetery on the southern edge of the reservoir. It was supposed to be a beautiful place. Gran would still be able to be buried with her family.

  I was horrified but I didn’t say anything. Gran would only tell me that we mustn’t be bitter, and we must bear with dignity what we had no other choice but to bear. I didn’t want to hear it. I don’t think my father did, either, because he never talked about the coming of the reservoir, at least not in my presence in those early days.

  I just wanted everything to stay the same, even as the world was changing around me.

  Six

  Dylan called a private trash removal outfit to come by for the junk he’d collected and heaped at the bottom of the driveway. If Grace Webster had sold her house just two years ago and the refrigerator and washing machine had belonged to her, she wasn’t one to update appliances for the fun of it. Apparently if they still worked, they stayed.

  The trash removal outfit turned out to be a big, middle-aged guy named Stan. As Stan loaded the junk into the back of his truck, Dylan tried to engage him in conversation. “Do you know Grace Webster?”

  “Miss Webster? My dad had her for English. Said she was tough.”

  “She lived out here alone?”

  “It’s not that far from the village.”

  Depended how one defined “far.” Dylan could walk to shops, restaurants and the beach from his place on Coronado. “Any family in the area?”

  Stan shrugged. He had broad shoulders and wore a Red Sox cap and a Bruins shirt. “I don’t know. She never married. She’s from one of the Quabbin towns.”

  “Brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews?”

  “Don’t know.”

  Stan didn’t seem to care why Dylan would want to know, either, which was good, because he wasn’t sure himself—except that the previous owner’s family might provide clues as to what his father had been after when he’d bought the house.

  “What about Olivia Frost?” Dylan asked casually as he tossed a tire into the truck.

  Stan pointed a gloved hand down the road. “She lives about a half mile that way.”

  It was pulling teeth to get the guy to talk. Dylan lifted an old toaster oven he had found under some soggy brush and added it to the accumulating junk in the truck. “She asked me to clean up this place.”

  Stan grinned. “That sounds like Olivia.”

  For a split second, Dylan thought Stan would continue, but he didn’t. “She has a lot to do before she opens The Farm at Carriage Hill to the public.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Think it stands a chance?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “Any old stories about this house?”

  “What?”

  “Old stories. What’s its history?”

  Stan paused and adjusted his baseball cap. “It’s just an old house.”

  “I understand Grace Webster moved here when Quabbin was being built.”

  “Yeah, the state took their house. She lived here with her grandmother and father. Then they died. She’s just a normal person. Tough teacher but everyone I know who had her appreciated how tough she was after the fact. You know how that is.”

  Dylan had had a tough algebra teacher. He still hated him. He’d had a few tough coaches he appreciated, though. “I get your point.”

  “They say Miss Webster mellowed some after she retired. She took up bird-watching.”

  Bird-watching. Dylan nodded to the run-down house. “Who tossed this place?”

  Stan dumped the rotting mattress into the back of the truck. “Punks.”

  “Were there any arrests?”

  “Nope.”

  “Were they looking for anything or just trashing the place?”

  “Drunk.” He turned to Dylan. “Anything else you want hauled out of here?”

  “Not for now.”

  Dylan paid him in cash and watched the truck rumble down the road. All in all, the place looked better, but it still needed landscape work. He had a feeling he could call Stan, and he’d come with a shovel and weed whacker and get that job done, too.

  Unsettled and restless, Dylan found a pair of clippers in an attached shed that smelled faintly of mud and axle grease.

  Knights Bridge wasn’t growing on him.

  He made his way down to a tangle of brush at the back of the house and started cutting briars. There was no snow there, at least. He came to a slender tree sporting what he thought might be pussy willows. He’d had no idea where or how pussy willows grew, just that people liked it and regarded it as a pleasant harbinger of spring.

  He rubbed his fingertips over the smooth gray buds.

  “You have to get out of here,” he said to himself.

  Nonetheless, he cut several thin branches, spacing the cuts so that they didn’t warp the look of the tree, then stood back, sinking into mud and wet leaves. What would his former hockey teammates think of him standing out here in the woods holding a bouquet of pussy willows?

  What would Noah and Noah’s enemies, who were Dylan’s job to identify and keep at bay, think?

  “Damn,” he said with a laugh and headed down the road to The Farm at Carriage Hill. He found his neighbor sweeping off her front walk. He held out the pussy willows. “I don’t have a vase, but I thought you might enjoy them.”

  Olivia smiled as she took them. “Ice one day, a sure sign of spring the next. Thank you.” She nodded toward the door to the ell, not the front door he’d knocked on last night. “Would you care to come inside? I can give you the grand tour.”

  “Where’s Buster?”

  “In the mudroom. He decided to dig up my lavender. He only adopted me a couple of weeks ago. We’re learning, but it’ll take time and patience.”

  “Does Buster have time and patience?” Dylan was teasing but Olivia’s hazel eyes darkened, and he could see something else was on her mind besides her misbehaving dog. “I’d like that grand tour if you—”

  “Sure. Let’s go.”

  They entered a cozy kitchen with butcher-block counters, a rustic island and dark green painted cupboards. Buster barked from behind his gate in the mudroom but without the snarls and growls of yesterday. Olivia let him out, and he bounded over to Dylan as if they were now best friends.

  “You must have made an impression on him,” she said, retrieving a blue pottery pitcher from an open shelf.

  “A good one, I hope.”

  She placed the pussy willows in the pitcher and added water at the porcelain sink, then set the pitcher on a square table in front of a double window that looked out on the backyard. Dylan noticed a large garden, half raked clean, the other half still covered in fallen leaves and small branches that had been whipped out of nearby trees over the winter.

  Olivia followed his gaze. “I bought this place last fall. I didn’t have a chance to clean it up the way I would have wanted to before winter. It was a cold one. Most of the perennials survived. The chives in particular have come back with a vengeance.”

  “So my friend Noah was right and those were chives on your note card?”

  Something in her expression told him she knew just who he meant by “my friend Noah.” She nodded as she turned from the tab
le. “That’s right. Chives.”

  “I thought they were clover. I’m not much of a gardener.”

  “I tried various herbs, but I liked the chives best.”

  “Then you drew them yourself?”

  “Yes, with watercolor pencils. I’m a graphic designer, but I can manage a drawing of chives.”

  “What are those in the window?”

  “Parsley, rosemary and dill. I started them at my apartment in Boston and took them with me when I moved in here. Long story.” She cleared her throat but showed no sign she regretted inviting him in. “This part of the house was added on in the 1920s.”

  “Where’s the center chimney you mentioned in your note?”

  “In here.”

  She led him into the adjoining living room and dining room, both with painted wood wainscoting and brick fireplaces. The furnishings were sparse and obviously not new, but fabric swatches and paint chips were laid out on a coffee table.

  “There are five fireplaces off this one chimney,” Olivia said. “Three downstairs and two upstairs. The wainscoting and wide-board floors are original. My family’s mill did replacement windows for the previous owners—they look just like the original windows but are considerably more energy efficient.”

  “They’re also not rotted and don’t have cracked panes.”

  “As is the case with your house?”

  Dylan gave her a wry smile. “As is the case.”

  Olivia took him through a library, which had one of the five fireplaces, and a small study that was obviously her main workspace. He noted the computer, calendar board, filing cabinet, art supplies and stacks of graphic design books. She winced at the clutter. “I just shoved everything in here and figured I’d organize bit by bit. I left a full-time job to start Carriage Hill.”

  From the tightness of her expression, Dylan guessed her departure from her job hadn’t been without stress, but she rallied as she explained that she planned to use the downstairs rooms for her get-togethers, arranging tables as necessary depending on the size and type of event.

  “Money’s tight,” she said, “but I can do so much of the work myself—painting, slipcovers, decorating. My sister, Jess, will help. You met her boyfriend this morning at breakfast.”