by Lee Hollis
She pulled up in front of the three-story mansion and got out to take in the breathtaking view of the Atlantic and the boats that dotted the harbor, bobbing up and down. She had lived on the island all her life, but still marveled at its unparalleled beauty.
She strolled up the gravel driveway to the front door and rang the bell.
It took almost a minute, but a young woman in a gray dress and white apron opened the door and invited her inside. She led Hayley to a parlor with large open windows that had clear views of the picturesque harbor and offered Hayley something to drink. Hayley politely declined and the young woman disappeared out the door, telling her that Ms. Olivia would be with her momentarily.
Hayley wandered over to the large wall-size bookcase and perused the titles that lined the shelves. Lots of classics and almanacs and books of maps. They were rather dusty and appeared as if they hadn’t been touched in decades.
She suddenly heard faint shouting coming from down the hall.
It was a man’s voice.
That persistent little voice inside her told her she should stay firmly put. Wait for Olivia to come to her as the young maid had clearly instructed.
But true to form, Hayley’s curiosity got the best of her.
She casually walked over to the door and opened it, poking her head out to make sure the coast was clear before quietly following the sound of the bellowing voice, which slowly grew in volume.
About halfway down the hall, she spotted a door that was open a crack.
The man’s tirade was at its peak and she could finally make out what he was saying.
“Olivia, you’re being absolutely unreasonable.”
“I wish you would calm down. Frankly, I’m afraid you’re going to hurt yourself with all this yelling.”
“Please don’t patronize me. I think I deserve better than that.”
“I just find your constant nagging tiresome, Thorsten, and you’re upsetting Pork Chop, so do try to lower your voice.”
“I have worked my fingers to the bone for this company. . . .”
“Playing tennis at the club and dining at expensive restaurants in New York every night on the company’s dime?”
“You know I’ve given my life to Redmond Meats. Starting out in the mail room, working my way up, proving to your father I would be a worthy successor some day. . . .”
“And I’m sorry I surprised everyone by choosing to take a more active role and unfortunately scuttling your plans.”
“It’s not that. I think it’s great you took over. You have a relaxed style and everybody loves you.”
“Not everybody . . .” Olivia said, an ominous tone in her voice.
“But I have been working on these expansion plans for years, with your father’s blessing I might add, and I strongly believe now is the time. We need to strike while we’re on top, and I just need your tie-breaking vote to make it happen.”
“And I’ve told you, I’m not quite ready to make a decision yet. I’m sorry you flew all the way to Maine to hear this—I wish you had just called—but I’m not going to change my mind. At least in the foreseeable future.”
“Olivia, I’m begging you. . . .”
“My grandfather built this company from the ground up, and my father was a very successful steward, and now that I am in charge, I’m not going to make any half-cocked decisions until I have carefully considered all the options. And I need more time.”
“Half-cocked? Is that what you think this plan is?”
“I’m sorry, Thorsten.”
Hayley felt a finger tapping the back of her shoulder.
“Are you lost, ma’am?”
Hayley whipped around, startled.
Mostly startled by someone calling her “ma’am.”
It was the fresh-faced young maid who had escorted her to the parlor.
Although now she didn’t look so fresh faced.
She looked pretty grim.
“I’m sorry, I was looking for the bathroom. . . .”
The maid cocked her head to one side, utterly unconvinced. “Would you please follow me back to the parlor, ma’am? As I told you, Ms. Olivia will be with you shortly.”
There it was again—“ma’ am.”
Hayley just wanted to slap her.
“What’s going on out there?” Olivia said from inside.
Hayley held her breath.
She was about to be fired as the company blogger and she hadn’t even started yet.
With a frown the young maid pushed past Hayley and eased open the door. “I’m sorry, Ms. Olivia. I just happened upon this lady hovering outside your office. I told her to wait in the parlor.”
There was a brief moment of silence.
Hayley couldn’t hold her breath anymore. On an exhale she popped her head inside the room and waved awkwardly at Olivia.
“Oh, Hayley, I’m glad you’re here. Come in.”
Olivia didn’t seem the least bit concerned that Hayley had been eavesdropping.
Hayley smiled at the maid and gingerly stepped around her into the office where Olivia stood behind a large oak desk. The man who had been yelling, this Thorsten, gazed out the window at the view, lost in his thoughts, grinding his teeth, hardly noticing there were more people in the room. He was tall and slim, with slicked back black hair and a handsome face. He was in a blue blazer, white shirt, and khakis and deck shoes.
Pretty much dressed for sailing.
“That will be all. Thank you.”
Grimacing, the maid backed out, not taking her eyes off Hayley.
And Hayley didn’t blame her one bit.
“Hayley, I’d like you to meet Thorsten Brandt, our senior vice president of Business Development,” Olivia said.
Thorsten turned his attention to Hayley, put on the biggest, brightest smile he could muster, and bounded over and grabbed her hand. “Pleasure to meet you, Hayley. Olivia has been singing your praises. I think it is an excellent idea to have you write recipes for our Web site, give it a personal touch. Welcome to the Redmond family.”
This one certainly was a charmer when he wanted to be.
He quickly looked her up and down, his smile dissolving into a wolfish grin, but then it was gone as fast as it came, and he turned back to Olivia.
“I would like to continue this conversation at dinner, if you do not mind, Olivia,” he said.
“But I do mind, Thorsten. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. This discussion is over,” Olivia said, her back arched, her voice dripping with a haughty rage that Hayley had first seen at the Blooming Rose.
When Olivia Redmond had run out of patience, the best thing you could do was run for cover.
Thorsten nodded, too angry to speak, and marched out of the room in a huff, slamming the door behind him.
Olivia watched him go and then turned back to Hayley with a warm smile. “Now, sit down, Hayley. I want to hear all your ideas about what you’re going to write about and—Oh, I almost forgot. . . .”
Olivia tore a check off a register and handed it to Hayley. “Here’s your advance for the first month.”
Hayley glanced at the amount.
Sixteen hundred dollars.
She looked again.
The amount was still sixteen hundred dollars.
“We agreed on two hundred dollars a column twice a week. This is for the first month. I hope that’s sufficient,” Olivia said.
Hayley guessed that if she said it was not sufficient, Olivia would be writing her an even larger check.
But at the moment, Hayley could barely speak. She was already spending the sixteen hundred dollars in her head.
She couldn’t believe her luck.
She stayed well over an hour talking about her favorite bacon recipes. Olivia laughed and clapped her hands and was delighted with all her ideas. It was a great meeting of the minds. Olivia owned a company that sold bacon and Hayley loved any dish with bacon in it.
They were going to make an unbeatable team.
/> Olivia wrapped things up around six-thirty because she wanted to sit on her porch and have a cocktail before dinner.
Hayley took her cue and left.
The young maid held the front door open for her, glaring at her as she walked out of the house and to her car. As she slid into the driver’s seat still under the watchful gaze of the suspicious maid, who was determined to make sure she actually left, Hayley noticed she had left her cell phone on the passenger’s seat.
There were nine messages from Liddy.
She called her back as she drove off the Redmond Estate and Liddy picked up on the first ring.
“Where the hell have you been? I’ve been calling you for the last hour.”
“I had a meeting with Olivia Redmond. What is it? What’s going on?”
“You are not going to believe this,” Liddy gasped.
“What? What?”
“You know my favorite earrings? The ones with the ladybugs that I bought in Paris, not the butterfly ones I picked up in London last summer?”
“Yes, what about them?
“Well, one of the clasps came loose so I took it into Dawson’s Jewelry Store on Main Street to see if they could fix it, and guess who was there.”
“I really don’t have time to guess, Liddy, it’s been a long day. . . .”
She didn’t even wait for Hayley to try. “Aaron!”
“My Aaron?”
“Yes! And he was looking at engagement rings! When he saw me come in, he pretended he wasn’t, but I saw him standing right in front of the case pointing to one and talking to Mr. Dawson.”
“So you think . . . ?”
“We were right, Hayley! He’s going to pop the question!”
Chapter 10
Hayley poured the last of the coffee into her mug, the one with a picture of her dog, Leroy, on the side, and shook the round glass pot to make sure she got every last drop.
Boy, did she need caffeine this morning.
She had been up all night writing her first blog for Olivia Redmond.
Writing a paragraph.
Then deleting it.
Writing it again.
Deleting it again.
She wanted her first blog entry to be eye catching and interesting, with an appetizing recipe to get a fevered discussion going online. If she banged out a hurried, run-of-the-mill column and posted it, and it just lay there garnering very few hits, then she would be done working for the Redmond Meats Web site barely after she had begun. This wasn’t the Island Times.
Sal was very forgiving if on occasion one of her columns was rushed.
Besides, she was also juggling office manager duties in addition to serving as the paper’s food-and-cocktails writer.
But Redmond Meats was big business. This was a Fortune 500 company. Screw up once, and she would be out. Despite the CEO’s fondness for her recipes.
Hayley had settled on a Bacon Strip Pancakes dish, one she was certain Olivia would drool over. She wrote about how her grandmother used to make them back when Hayley was a teenage girl worried about her weight and yet still couldn’t resist them.
It was a sentimental and sweet story, and there was an aching in Hayley’s heart as she wrote it because she still missed her father’s mother, who had died way back in 1997. She knew Olivia wanted to approve the story before it was posted on the site because she had sent Hayley an e-mail around dinnertime the night before requesting she get it by morning so it could be up on the site by noon eastern time.
So Hayley had e-mailed the blog entry to her at six-thirty in the morning after polishing it one last time. Now it was after eight and she was trying to stay awake to make it through the day.
When she hadn’t heard anything by lunchtime, Hayley sent Olivia another e-mail to confirm she had received her original e-mail with the attachment.
She didn’t hear anything back.
By three o’clock, she checked the Redmond Meats Web site.
No sign of her tasty Bacon Strip Pancakes recipe.
There was a brief bit about Hayley joining the Redmond Meats family with a small, amazingly flattering photo of her off to the right, but that was it.
Hayley picked up the phone and called the Redmond Estate.
No one picked up.
Not even the maid.
She just got a voice mail message asking to leave her name and number.
By five, it was quitting time. It had been an unusually quiet day. No fires or arrests or car accidents on Route 3.
Sal had spent most of the day in his office on the phone following up on a corruption tip surrounding a state senator.
Bruce had been out all day presumably following leads in the missing Jackson Lab scientist story.
The rest of the staff was out as well, including the sales reps hustling business and the reporters and staff photographers covering local stories and snapping pictures at the girls’ softball team’s home game.
So no one was around when Hayley cleared out her in-box, shut down her computer, grabbed her purse, and fled out the door to her car.
Remarkably, the engine roared to life on the first turn of the key, which was rare these days, and she drove out of town to the Redmond Estate.
When she pulled up in front of the main house, she spotted the young maid with whom she had tussled earlier. The girl was locking the front door with a key. She turned in time to see Hayley jump out of her car.
“Hi . . . Excuse me, I forgot your name,” Hayley said, trying to be as pleasant as possible since the maid wasn’t exactly a fan.
Sure enough, she grimaced and said flatly, “Caroline.”
“Yes, Caroline. How could I forget?”
“Because you never asked before and I never told you.”
Hayley let that one slide by because the girl was right.
“Could you tell me if Olivia is inside? I know I didn’t call first, but I’ve been trying to reach her all day and it’s kind of important.”
Caroline shrugged. “I don’t know. She was in her office this morning—I heard her on the phone when I was dusting—but then I think she took Pork Chop out for a walk. I didn’t hear her come back, so I just assumed they went into town and haven’t returned yet.”
Hayley scanned the grounds, settling on a detached garage opposite the main house. The garage doors were open, revealing a silver Rolls Royce parked inside. “Isn’t that her car right over there?”
Caroline glanced over at the Rolls and she suddenly looked slightly unsettled. “Yes.”
“So she probably didn’t drive into town.”
“She could’ve gotten a ride with one of the groundskeepers. They usually quit around three and sometimes she’ll have one take her to the market so she doesn’t have to go to the trouble of taking the Rolls out and finding the right parking spot. She’s very particular about where she parks her Rolls because she’s afraid of someone parking too close to it and scratching the side.”
“I see. That’s probably it,” Hayley said.
The girl wanted to leave, but was unsure if she should leave Hayley unsupervised given what had happened the last time, when she caught her poking around where she wasn’t supposed to.
“Is there anything else?” she asked, eyeing Hayley suspiciously.
“No. But I think I’m going to hang around out here for a while and wait to see if she comes back. Like I said, it’s kind of important.”
Caroline nodded and then reflexively turned to make sure the door to the main house was locked tight. After firmly jiggling the large brass knob, she brushed past Hayley and walked to a small, beat-up maroon Honda Accord that was parked around the side of the house. It took three tries before the girl got the tired, wheezing motor running. She then shifted the car into reverse and backed out, nearly knocking Hayley down before peeling away—the tires kicking up small pebbles from the gravel driveway, one nearly taking Hayley’s eye out—before she drove up to the main road, turned right, and disappeared.
Hayley wondered
where Olivia and Pork Chop could have gone. Even if she had taken her pet pig into town with one of the groundskeepers around three o’clock, it was already past five-thirty.
Unless she had never gone to town.
Caroline had told her Olivia had taken Pork Chop for a walk earlier that morning and she had not heard them come back.
So what if she hadn’t come back? What if she was still wandering around in the estate gardens somewhere?
Hayley strolled over to the expansive gardens that made up over half the property, a woodland and flower oasis with azaleas, rhododendrons, and lilacs lining the small dirt path that led to the center, and a white gazebo next to a natural pond all with the crystal blue Atlantic ocean as a backdrop. It was stunning, and with a light breeze, it was quiet and peaceful.
Hayley paused for a moment and stared at the view. She still couldn’t believe sometimes she actually lived in the heart of such incredible natural beauty.
She felt something cold and wet on her leg, snapping her out of her reverie.
She didn’t jump this time because she was now familiar with this particular feeling and the low grunting that accompanied it.
Hayley looked down to see Pork Chop sniffing her leg. He was covered in dry mud and still wore the diamond-studded collar with the leash attached, which was also caked in dirt.
“Pork Chop, what happened to you?”
She bent down to pet the pig, whose eyes were wide with panic. As she reached out with her hand, the pig backed away. But he wasn’t frightened of her.
He was upset.
He waddled in the opposite direction, dragging the leash behind him.
Hayley stood up and followed him deeper into the gardens.
The sun vanished behind a thicket of trees as Hayley came upon a small patch of grass in a shaded area away from the blooming spring flowers.
Pork Chop ran so far ahead of her she lost sight of him momentarily, but then she heard a wailing sound. It was an agonizing cry, as if the poor pig was in pain. She followed the sound and came upon a muddy area where a sprinkler system was timed to shower the foliage and grass. There she saw Pork Chop circling around a body lying facedown in a mud puddle.
It was a woman.
Her long flower print skirt was hiked up just above her knees, her short-sleeved white blouse was stained and dirty, and her bare arms were akimbo.
