Secrets of the Lost Summer

by Carla Neggers

  “Mark Flanagan. Architect specializing in old buildings.”

  Olivia brightened. “Very good. You’re getting to know the locals.”

  They returned to the kitchen. Buster had flopped on the floor under the table. Olivia scooped up a bit of bark or something that had fallen off the pussy willows. “You were an NHL hockey player for ten years—a defenseman. Now you work with Noah Kendrick, one of the tech-world geniuses.”

  “We’re friends. Did you look me up on Google yourself, or did someone else in town do it and give you the results?”

  “My friend Maggie stopped by and we couldn’t resist. I didn’t have any reason to check you out. I just wanted you to clean up your yard or let me do it. Then…” Olivia walked over to the table. “Then someone said something, and I decided to look into your background.”

  “Ah. ‘Someone said something.’ Small towns.”

  “Your father was a treasure hunter.”

  “You and your friend Maggie looked him up, too?”

  “Not yet. Maggie went home and I haven’t had a chance—”

  “Then how do you know he was a treasure hunter?”

  “That’s the something I heard that got me to fire up my laptop and look into you.” Olivia walked over to the counter and flicked the bark into the sink. “Do you think your father bought Grace’s house because of lost treasure? Is that why you’re here?”

  “I don’t care about lost treasure.” Dylan kept his tone even as he watched her from the kitchen door. “I never got caught up in my father’s adventures. I didn’t pay much attention to what he was up to, and he didn’t tell me.”

  “Did you two get along okay?”

  “Leaving me the house wasn’t a way to get back at me, if that’s what you’re thinking. We butted heads from time to time but we got along fine. We didn’t see that much of each other. I guess we both thought he’d have more time.”

  Her changeable eyes seemed bluer in the midday light. “What happened? Do you mind if I ask?”

  “He had a heart attack on some adventure in Portugal. He fell, but almost certainly because of the heart attack. It’s how he wanted to go out. He told me he wouldn’t have wanted to live past the time he could travel and do things. He wasn’t destined for a rocking chair.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Olivia said quietly.

  Dylan was surprised when he felt his throat tighten. “My father was a good guy. That doesn’t mean he was perfect, but I hope everyone in town knows he wasn’t responsible for throwing that junk in the yard.”

  “Everyone I know says that it was definitely kids. This house was empty at the time. Two unoccupied houses on a quiet country road must have been too much to resist.” She leaned back against the sink and angled him a look. “Do you have any reason to believe Knights Bridge or specifically Grace’s house had anything to do with your father’s treasure hunting?”

  Dylan shook his head. “No.”

  “But you think it’s possible. You’re curious, aren’t you? That’s why you came out here yourself. You can easily afford to have sent someone to check out the town, your property—me.”

  Dylan shrugged, his eyes half-closed on her. “I wanted to come here myself.”

  “Because of your father. You’re an only child?”

  He nodded. “My parents divorced when I was five.”

  Buster got up from under the table and sniffed Dylan’s hand. Dylan petted him, the softness of his coat surprising him given their meeting. Somehow a snarling dog and a soft coat didn’t go together. He glanced up at Olivia, still by the sink, a ray of sunlight shining through the window striking her hair. He noticed golden highlights. They were a surprise and matched the gold flecks in her eyes.

  Time to get out of there.

  He yanked open the door, welcoming the brisk air as he stood on the threshold. A night on a makeshift bed in the pitch-dark listening to water drip into a bucket had left him ragged. Hauling junk and digging ditches hadn’t helped. He was bound to overfocus on his neighbor’s feminine qualities, as his friend Noah would put it.

  Olivia wasn’t giving up. “Did your father have a connection to Knights Bridge?”

  “He grew up in a Chicago suburb and moved to Los Angeles after college. He had no connection with Knights Bridge, or with New England, that I know of. He did well in business, but he was a nomad at heart, especially in his later years.”

  “He never lived on the East Coast?”

  “No.”

  Olivia joined him at the door. “Have you decided what you’re going to do with the house?”

  “I haven’t thought beyond cleaning up the yard. Where will you live once this place is up and running?”

  “Here. Eventually I want to open up to overnight guests—not as a bed-and-breakfast. I’m thinking in terms of dedicated getaways for small groups. Mini reunions, girlfriend weekends, weddings, small conferences. I might hold my own workshops and conferences.”

  “On what?”

  “Herbs, furniture painting, design. Lots of possibilities. I can enlist friends who are experts in different areas. It’d be fun but I’m being careful, since it’s just me and I have to make a living.”

  “You’re a successful graphic designer.” Dylan smiled. “I looked you up on Google, too. Why give that up? Is opening The Farm at Carriage Hill a dream of yours?”

  “In a way, yes, although I didn’t think about giving up Boston until recently.” She averted her eyes and pointed toward the mudroom behind her. “Would you like to see the gardens?”

  Why not? He shut the front door and smiled. “Sure.”

  He and Buster followed Olivia outside. The air was still, almost warm with the resurgent sun. Green shoots poked out of the wet dirt in cleaned-out beds carved between muddy paths that, she explained, she would soon be mulching. “I thought about small rocks, but then I decided they’d never stay in the paths and I’d end up with them everywhere.” She glanced back at Dylan with a smile. “And Buster likes to chew rocks.”

  Buster would, Dylan thought. He found himself picturing his house on Coronado. He and Olivia Frost lived very different lives.

  She bent down and pulled sopping, dead plant matter from a corner of one of the beds, leaving it on the path. She pointed victoriously at frothy green sprouts underneath. “There. Purple sage.”

  “Ah.”

  She grinned at him. “You don’t care about purple sage.”

  “I can see that it’s not chives.”

  “It’s easy to think nothing happens until all the snow has melted and the trees have leafed out, but look at the signs of spring. Seeing the new growth puts everything into perspective, doesn’t it?”

  Her mood had shifted, and she seemed more pensive as she stood straight. Dylan was beginning to suspect that something had happened in Boston, and whatever it was, it wasn’t good. She didn’t want to talk about it with him—maybe not with anyone. Olivia Frost, he was discovering, was straightforward but also reserved, and proud. He thought the contradictions made for an intriguing combination.

  And whatever had brought her back to Knights Bridge to convert her little house into a getaway had also prompted her to contact him.

  If she could guess what he was thinking, she pretended not to and proceeded down another path. “I envision having a destination herb garden, one that people will want to see. The previous owners gave me a good start, especially with kitchen herbs. They loved cooking and gardening. I want to add beds for medicinal herbs, aromatic herbs, maybe do an entire section of meditative herbs.”

  “Herbs meditate?”

  She rolled her eyes but was clearly amused. “You know what I mean.”

  He didn’t, actually. “How are you going to do everything? Gardening, mulching, painting, slipcovering, freelancing—it’s a lot.”

  “I’ll manage.” She gave him a bright smile. “I love this work.”

  Dylan had another dozen questions he could ask her just off the top of his head. Did she have
a business plan? Was Carriage Hill incorporated? Did she have an attorney? What about loans, investors, partners, employees?

  Three tiny foxgloves that had returned for the season caught her eye. After she pointed them out, she led him across sodden grass to an old fieldstone wall. On the other side of the wall was an open field, with a wooded hill beyond another field and another stone wall.

  “That’s Carriage Hill,” Olivia said, pointing. “There’s a trail to the top. It has amazing views of the reservoir and the valley. You and I own the field and the woods at the base of the hill. The rest is state forest. Quabbin’s on the other side. You can see part of it from your house. I’m too low here. How long are you staying in Knights Bridge? Will you have time to see any of the area?”

  “I leave tomorrow,” Dylan said.

  She continued to look out across the field, no patches of snow in sight. “That doesn’t leave you much time to figure out why your father bought Grace Webster’s place.”

  “I won’t be surprised if I never know.” He squinted out at the hill rising across the field. Had his father hiked to the top? What, exactly, had he been doing in Knights Bridge? Dylan put aside his questions and smiled at the woman next to him. “I’d like to hike up Carriage Hill. I have time. Care to join me?”

  “I would,” Olivia said, almost as if her answer surprised her.

  Twenty minutes later, Dylan was climbing over a stone wall with Olivia. “This was all farmland in the nineteenth century,” she said as they walked across the field, its tall grass matted down from winter but starting to show signs of life. “If you see a stone wall in the woods, you know the land around it used to be cleared. Imagine hauling all those rocks.”

  “It must have been backbreaking work.”

  “There’s something to be said for physical work. You do it, and it’s done.” They came to a trail that led into the woods, the ground soft and muddy from last night’s rain and the spring runoff. “Rocks don’t grumble or stab you in the back.”

  Dylan thought he heard an undertone of regret, even anger, in her voice, but she kept her eyes on the trail as it curved past a gnarly evergreen—a hemlock, she said. He noticed the shape of her hips in her cargo pants and the mud crusted on her functional trail shoes as she moved with energy and confidence up the hill. She wasn’t wearing a hat, and the intermittent breeze would catch the ends of her long, dark hair.

  “So, Olivia,” he said after a few yards, “did you get your ass kicked in Boston?”

  She spun around at him. “Did you learn to be blunt as a hockey player, or working with Noah Kendrick?”

  He shrugged. “I came that way.”

  “Sometimes things sort themselves out the way they’re meant to.”

  “True, but it’s also true, as the saying goes, that sometimes you’re drinking the wine one day and picking the grapes the next.”

  “Was that you and the NHL?”

  “You’re changing the subject.”

  She took a steep section of the trail at a fast clip, then stopped and waited for him. “We’re technically in the Quabbin watershed right now. The understanding of how to ensure water purity has changed somewhat since the 1930s, but the basic approach is to use the land as much as possible as a natural filtration process.”

  “No chemicals needed, then,” Dylan said, deciding not to push her further on her reasons for leaving Boston.

  “Not for water treatment. Fluoride and a small amount of chlorine and lead suppressant are added at the end for health reasons. Building Quabbin was a decades-long process. Boston engineers and politicians started talking about flooding the Swift River Valley as far back as the 1890s.” Olivia climbed onto a small boulder near the top of the hill and squinted out at the view. “You can see why.”

  Dylan stood next to her and looked out at the sprawling valley, a finger of the reservoir sparkling in the afternoon sun. More hills dotted the landscape, and not a house or a boat or a road was in sight. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

  “This area is part of the New England uplands. We’re higher than the land on the coast. Even the floor of the valley under Quabbin is higher. Engineers realized they could easily dam the Swift River, build an aqueduct and let gravity take pure, unfiltered water to the residents of Boston.”

  “The locals were outnumbered.”

  “Badly. A hundred years ago, we’d be looking out at small New England villages instead of water and wilderness. Dana, Prescott, Greenwich and Enfield, and several villages—Doubleday, Packardsville, Millington—were wiped off the map. The reservoir takes up about forty square miles. There’s over a hundred miles of shoreline. For a small state like Massachusetts, that’s a lot.”

  “And none of it’s occupied?”

  “There are offices, a visitors center and a lookout tower in Quabbin Park at the south end of the reservoir. That’s where Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike are—they keep the water in the valley.” She sighed, her hair blowing in her face with a gust of wind. “This is Daniel Shays country. Have you heard of him?”

  Just barely, Dylan thought. “Some kind of revolutionary, wasn’t he?”

  “He was a hero of the American Revolution who came home to chaos after the end of the war. He organized local farmers and led a controversial revolt against unfair and impossibly high taxes. They were routed, but their revolt helped lead to the Constitutional Convention.”

  “Sounds like one of those damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t situations.”

  She hopped down from her boulder, one of countless hunks of granite scattered among the bare trees and evergreens on top of the hill. “His original homestead was on the bank of the western branch of the Swift River. It had to be torn down. The plans for Quabbin called for obliterating a number of major roads, so the state built new highways, including one on the western edge of the watershed—Daniel Shays Highway. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Dylan glanced at her. He wondered if she had a clue how attractive she was, even now—maybe especially now—up here in the wind, talking about revolutionaries, a lost valley, this place where time seemed to have stopped but, in reality, hadn’t. “I can see that you love this area,” he said.

  “It’s home. I love Quabbin, too. I might have fought tooth and nail against it if I’d been in one of the towns marked for destruction, but it’s an incredible place now. People call it the ‘accidental wilderness.’”

  “I understand that Grace Webster came from one of the valley towns.”

  “Her house wasn’t that far from here. It’s under water, but not all the houses that were taken and torn down were in the flood zone. Some were just in the watershed, but they had to go, too. A number of the people who were displaced moved to Knights Bridge.”

  Dylan shook off an image of his father, shook off his questions about how an adventurer and treasure hunter had ended up here, and turned from the view, facing Olivia as another gust of wind, colder than the last, blew through her hair. “My father was always one for living in the present, and he’s gone now. He bought his house here for his own reasons.”

  Her eyes narrowed as she stood back from him. “So you’ll put it on the market and dust the dirt of Knights Bridge off your feet once you leave?”

  “I wouldn’t put it that way, but—”

  “But it’s what you’ll do. I can’t say I blame you. I assume you’ll be flying back to San Diego?”

  “It’s a hell of a long drive across the country.”

  “Yes,” Olivia said half under her breath, then, with a sudden panicked, pale look, burst back down the trail.

  Dylan watched her retreating figure a moment before he headed down the trail himself, catching up with her. “You don’t like to fly?”

  “Does anyone these days?”

  “I don’t mind. I don’t think about it. It’s just a means to get where I want to go.”

  She moved quickly, seemingly oblivious to the steep, wet conditions. “Do you fly on private jets?”

  “Not often. Olivia
, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. I’m just curious.” She stepped over protruding tree roots. “The air feels good, but it’s still early to be out on the trails. I have to head straight back. I almost forgot that my parents are coming for dinner. You’re welcome to join us.”

  Dinner with the parents. Dylan didn’t think so. “Thanks, but I might go for a drive and see the area before it gets dark.”

  “There are stories of ghosts in Quabbin but I’ve never run into one.”

  She drifted into silence as they continued down the hill. When they reached the first of the two fields, he said, “I’m glad you wrote to me about the house.”

  “I didn’t realize you didn’t know about it. I thought I was writing to your father.” She climbed over the stone wall and jumped into the second field, her breathing shallow, rapid, her face pale. She turned to him with a strained smile. “I suppose I won’t see you again before you leave tomorrow. It’s been a pleasure to meet you. If I can do anything to help with your house here, don’t hesitate to let me know.”

  Something was off with her. Dylan couldn’t pinpoint what it was. “Thanks.”

  She tucked wild strands of hair behind her ears. “That’s what neighbors are for.”

  “Olivia, what’s wrong?” he asked again.

  She pointed a shaky hand toward her house across the field. “I’m going to pick up my pace.” She tried another faltering smile. “You’re an athlete. You’ll keep up.”

  Before she could get two steps, Dylan caught an arm around her middle. “Whoa. Hold on.” He turned her to him. “What’s going on?”

  She swallowed, licked her lips and took in a shallow breath. “Nothing. I’m fine.” She cleared her throat and looked up at him. “I got to thinking about too much at once. Boston, freelancing, all I have to do before my mother-daughter tea …”

  “My flying back to San Diego set you off. When’s the last time you flew?”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “‘A while’ for me would be a few weeks. What’s ‘a while’ for you?”