Secrets of the Lost Summer

by Carla Neggers

  “Is that what you think this is? A dark quest?”

  “I don’t know what it is. The daughter would be in her seventies now. She could have children and grandchildren of her own. Would she want to know her father was a thief? Her uncle was a bastard?”

  “Maybe she already knows.”

  “Anyway, it doesn’t make sense that he would end up out here. There’s just no reason.”

  “To hide and to heal.”

  His eyes held hers and Olivia realized he wasn’t talking about the Brits and the jewels. He was talking about her. “This is my home.”

  “I know, but you think you’re here to hide and to heal.”

  “I think I’m here to survive.”

  “Maybe that’s the same thing.”

  “To live, then.”

  He smiled. “Better.”

  “What about you? You’re not here to hide or to heal—or to live. You’re here to finish your father’s treasure hunt. Maybe it’ll help you understand him, make your peace with him. Then what? Leave Knights Bridge and never return? Go back to your life in San Diego?”

  “Olivia—”

  Olivia touched his lips, silencing him. “I know you can’t answer that right now.”

  “I’ll quit this treasure hunt right here and now.”

  “I’d never ask that, and I don’t want you to.” She smiled. “I’m curious about the missing Ashworth jewels now, too.”

  Dylan kissed her fingertips, and she knew she was lost. “I can make love to you here in front of the fire,” he said, “or we can go upstairs. If you want to get rid of me, say so in no uncertain terms. Otherwise, I’m not going anywhere. You could fall down the damn stairs this time, and I swear I’d just pick you up and carry you to bed.”

  “That sounds downright tempting, but I won’t fall.”

  And she didn’t. She got all the way up the stairs to her bedroom before she faked a swoon and collapsed into his arms. He swept her up and laid her on the bed. “I can’t promise I won’t tear off buttons getting these clothes off you.” His voice was low, teasing, deliberately sexy. “I suppose, though, if you can grow herbs, paint furniture and make soap, you can sew on buttons.”

  “Grandma Frost taught me herself.”

  “Grandma Frost.” He cupped her hips and eased her pants lower. “Please let’s not mention her for a while, okay?”

  Olivia laughed, but Dylan was intent on one thing and one thing only and it had nothing to do with sewing. Her pants disappeared, and she helped with the rest of her clothes. By the time it was his turn, her hands were shaking with so much anticipation that she fumbled unclasping his belt.

  He put his hand over hers. “Olivia. I’ll do it.”

  “No, I want to.”

  She tried again, succeeding this time, and when she loosened his belt and lowered his jeans, she heard him take in a sharp breath. For a moment, she thought he was about to tell her he’d come to his senses and needed to get out of there, fast. But it wasn’t that kind of breath. It was the kind of breath that said he was at his limit and wasn’t going to torture himself with more delays.

  Which was good, Olivia thought, because she was in the same place.

  When his clothes were scattered on the floor with hers, she knew that would be her last coherent thought for a while. He rolled onto her, whispering her name as he slid a hand between her legs, kissing her, his tongue and fingers sharing the same rhythm. She cried out his name and grabbed his hips, and in the next second, he’d pulled away his hand and was driving himself into her.

  That was just the beginning.

  It was a clawing, nipping, wild lovemaking, with nothing held back, nothing denied. Olivia took, demanded, gave and surrendered, throwing her arms over her head as he lifted his chest off her, his eyes locking with hers as he thrust deeply into her, again and again. Finally she was spinning, spiraling, coming with such abandon and ferocity that she thought she might wear him down, but then he was pounding into her, bringing her again to a peak and keeping her there until she couldn’t breathe. She gasped, screaming his name as he drove into her once more.

  Afterward, they held each other, hearts still racing. Olivia smiled, rolling onto her side and tracing a fingertip across his chest. “It’s going to be a long night, isn’t it?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, taking her hand. “We’re just getting started.”

  Twenty-Three

  I was in despair. My home was gone, finally razed by state workers. After days and days of rain, the valley once filled with life was now a muddy, barren wasteland. The relentless work on the reservoir proceeded. I hitched a ride with a young couple also displaced by Quabbin and visited the new cemetery where the bodies were being taken. It was a beautiful spot, just like Gran said, and great care had been taken with relocating the graves, but I threw up. I couldn’t bear to think about my mother getting dug up, and my grandparents, and Gran’s babies.

  The Websters had arrived in the Swift River Valley two hundred years ago, but Gran reminded me they’d come from somewhere else. They hadn’t been wealthy. They’d fled famine, disease, persecution, poverty. Some had come as indentured servants who had to work off debts. They’d begun a new life in a new place, and that’s what we had to do.

  I’d fallen in love with a man who wasn’t what I wanted him to be. He wasn’t an aristocrat. He wasn’t a Scarlet Pimpernel. He was what he’d told me he was that first day: a scoundrel.

  A thief.

  I would never live in a castle. I would never have stately gardens and wear pretty jewels.

  There was talk of world events. Another war in Europe.

  I asked the couple to drop me off at our old house. It wasn’t there anymore, of course, but the land around it hadn’t been cleared yet. The air was oppressively hot and humid for late September. The light was green. I blamed the work going on in the valley. I knew that before long the spot where I was standing would be flooded forever.

  No one would ever stand here again.

  It was as if the rivers were rising already. I knew it would take years for the reservoir to fill to capacity. It wouldn’t be like a flash flood. Yet as I stood on that scraped, exposed land on that dismal summer day in 1938, that last day of our last summer in the valley, I could feel the waters rising. I looked up at the clouds and saw nothing but water, water too deep for me to swim to the surface before I ran out of air.

  I couldn’t breathe. I was drowning there on the edge of a cellar hole, all that was left of Gran’s old house and our lives there. The elms and maples and chestnuts had been cut down and chopped up. The rosebushes, the lilacs, the white irises. All were gone. The tire swing and the white picket fence and the lanes…gone, gone, gone.

  I gasped for air but I knew there was no one to save me.

  If I was to survive, I had to save myself. Gran was from another time. She didn’t know if she would live to see what the valley would become. Daddy had a new job in Knights Bridge but he was angry and bitter, and for him the valley would always be what it had been. Only the past was good. There was no hope in his world for the future.

  One of the stones on the edge of the foundation dislodged, and I slipped but regained my balance before I fell. If I did, who would ever find me in that old cellar hole?

  “No,” I said aloud. “I’m not going to die here. I’m going to live.”

  I ran and ran and ran. The green sky darkened and opened up with rain and wind like I’d never experienced before. I knew I couldn’t stop. If I did, I’d drown for sure. Raindrops pelted me. The wind ripped at my dress. My wet shoes came off in a muddy puddle and I ran on, barefoot.

  I don’t know how I made it to my hideaway cabin, but I did. I didn’t want to go inside. I knew Philip would be gone and I was terrified that the howling wind would tear apart the cabin.

  The air smelled of the ocean, and I knew then that I was in the middle of a hurricane.

  And I was alone.

  “Grace!”

  A tree down by the
pond cracked and fell onto the boulder where I liked to sit and read. I didn’t know if I’d turned the wind into a voice calling my name.

  “Grace! Grace, where are you?”

  Philip.

  Now I knew I was losing my mind, making things up. I couldn’t stand up straight in the wind. I couldn’t get to the cabin now. Soaked, my skin raw from the pounding rain and wind, I huddled against my boulder, putting its hard granite between me and the direction of the storm. I grabbed sodden field grass and dug my fingers into the mud, searching for something firmer to grasp—tree roots, anything.

  I felt strong arms around me. “Grace. Gracie, love, it’s Philip. I won’t hurt you. I will never hurt you.”

  He carried me to the cabin and dried me off. I wasn’t cold. I just wanted the storm to end.

  “It’s a hurricane,” I said.

  “I know. It’s a bad one.”

  “I thought you were gone…”

  He didn’t answer. He pulled me close to him, and we clung to each other as the wind howled and roared. The cabin was in a protected area, and it held. I was terrified, but I felt safe with Philip’s arms around me.

  Never before and never again would I feel as safe as in the middle of that raging, vicious hurricane.

  Twenty-Four

  Jess banged on Olivia’s front door at noon the next day. “Grace Webster borrowed Grandma’s car this morning and hasn’t come back. It’s been three hours, Liv.” Her sister gulped in a breath. “Grace hardly ever drives but she still has her license. She told Grandma she was going to the library.”

  “You checked there?”

  “Phoebe O’Dunn said Grace went up to the stacks—to the same files Duncan McCaffrey asked about and then you asked about. I don’t know how she managed the stairs. She stayed a few minutes, then she left. That was more than two hours ago.”

  Dylan eased in behind Olivia. “I’ll get my car. I can look for her.”

  “I’ll go with you,” she said. “We should start out here. Grace lived on this road for more than seventy years.”

  Jess nodded. “Sounds good. Keep me posted and I’ll do the same. I have my cell phone. Mom’s beside herself. She doesn’t want us going off half-cocked. You know the drill.”

  “We’ll be careful, Jess. I’ll see you later.” As her sister left, Olivia turned to Dylan. “We can take my car. I’ll grab the keys.”

  “I didn’t hear a car on the road this morning. Did you?”

  “No, but…” She didn’t finish. No way would either of them have noticed a car, but she knew what he was getting at. “Dylan, if Grace decided to return to the site of her old cabin, she’s in way over her head. You saw what it’s like out there.”

  He gave a grim nod. “Let’s go.”

  They drove the short distance to the end of the road. Olivia took in a sharp breath when she saw her grandmother’s twelve-year-old Volvo parked under the trees by the Quabbin gate. She managed to get two bars on her cell phone and texted Jess about the car. Jess would inform the police and they would get a search team out here. In the meantime, Olivia ducked under the gate. Dylan had already started on foot down the worn, narrow road that had once served the lost towns.

  “How’s Grace’s health?” Dylan asked.

  Olivia kept up with him. “She’s old and frail—”

  “Heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, dementia?”

  “As far as I know she’s fine mentally. Anything else—I wouldn’t know.”

  They maintained a brisk pace through the woods, veering off onto the unmarked trail to the pond. “This was mostly open farmland when Quabbin was built. It’ll look different than what Grace remembers from when she was a teenager.”

  “She knows that, even if she hasn’t been back to the pond since then.”

  “None of this is your fault, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Olivia said. “Grace isn’t a child. She knew what she was doing when she borrowed my grandmother’s car. No matter what happens, she wouldn’t want us to think otherwise.”

  “Let’s just find her.”

  They crossed a stream, no sign of Grace’s footprints on the muddy bank. When they reached the pond, Olivia scanned the woods, looking for anything that could suggest a cabin had once been there. An old lilac, a bit of myrtle, a well, a cellar hole—any visible remnants of the lives of the people who had lived here.

  She glanced at Dylan. “This must have been an idyllic spot a hundred years ago.”

  “Yeah. Must have.”

  “Dylan…”

  He stepped closer to the water. “Grace! Grace!” His voice was strong, forceful.

  Olivia stood on a small boulder and scanned the immediate area. Grace had to be there. Where else could she be? Olivia pushed back the worst-case scenario answers that swarmed into her head and focused on finding her.

  Dylan crouched by a trio of white pines close to the water. Across the pond, a family of ducks emerged from the marsh grasses, as if they, too, were searching for Grace.

  “Do you see anything?” Olivia asked.

  “The grass is matted here. Someone must have gone through. Whether it was Grace…” He grimaced, stood up. “She has to be here.”

  Olivia jumped down from the boulder and stopped abruptly, thinking she’d heard a moan in the pines. She saw that Dylan had heard it, too. Athlete that he was, he reacted immediately, springing to his feet, moving fast as he pushed back pine branches. Olivia followed him, catching the branches as they swept back toward her.

  She heard another moan.

  Whoever was there was alive.

  She and Dylan emerged from the pines, onto a wet spot a few feet from the shore of the pond. Just ahead, Grace was sitting on a rock, staring at the water, a book clutched in her hand. A gentle breeze caught the ends of her white hair. She wore a hooded gray sweatshirt, knit pants and sturdy shoes with lightweight wool socks. A half-dozen mosquitoes buzzed around her but she didn’t seem to notice them.

  Dylan eased in close to her. He gently took the book from Grace and handed it back to Olivia. She saw that it was a ragged copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel.

  “Grace,” Dylan said softly, touching her trembling hand.

  She looked up at him, tears in her eyes. “I knew you’d come, Philip. I knew you’d come.”

  Twenty-Five

  I thought it was my last night on this earth. I could see from Philip’s expression that he did, too, but the only words he spoke were ones of reassurance. When the wind and rain calmed, I knew enough about hurricanes to realize we were in the eye of this monster. At that moment, nothing seemed more natural than reaching out to another person for love and comfort.

  The Hurricane of 1938 swept over Long Island and churned up the Connecticut River, killing more than seven hundred people and leaving a path of catastrophic destruction. In the Swift River Valley, the newly finished Winsor Dam and Goodnough Dike held.

  I knew none of that as Philip and I held each other in the eye of the storm. Then, I only knew that I wasn’t alone. I was with the only man I would ever love.

  I didn’t care about the stolen jewels.

  “I love you, Gracie Webster,” Philip whispered in that eerie calm.

  I knew that everything he said, everything we did together through that long, terrible storm, would remain embedded in my heart for the rest of my days.

  Even now, as I watch the birds and look out at Quabbin as an old woman, I can hear his voice and feel his touch.

  The calm of the eye gave way to more ferocious wind and rain. We reached for each other, and only when it was quiet and still, when a cool breeze touched our overheated skin, did Philip tell me what I had already guessed.

  “My wife died of a fever almost three years ago. I have a daughter in England.”

  “How old is she?” I asked.

  “She’s three. Her name is Philippa. She’s with my parents right now.” He was as serious as I’d ever seen him, a mature father and lover, not the rakish thief who’d stolen j
ewels from a British lord, not the amused and irreverent swashbuckler of my fantasies. “I’m a pilot with the British Royal Air Force. I have to go home, Gracie. There’ll be war with Hitler. If I live—”

  “You’ll live! You have to live! You have a child.”

  “And I have you. I’ll come back to you, Gracie. I promise you.”

  The next day, after the hurricane, I had to go back to our new home in Knights Bridge. Gran and Daddy would be terrified I’d been swept away by the hurricane. I knew that Philip couldn’t go with me, but I ached at having to leave him.

  I remember his eyes as I left him. “I love you, Gracie,” he said over and over, until he was out of sight as I climbed over fallen trees and branches on my way to Knights Bridge on the other side of Carriage Hill.

  With all the damage and disruption in the aftermath of the hurricane, I couldn’t return to my hideaway cabin for several days. I sat on my rock by the pond just in case Philip would call my name, but he didn’t. This time, he really was gone.

  The state finally came for the cabin. They didn’t expect to find anyone there, but I talked a worker into letting me clear out my things. I packed my books and my blankets and drawings. As I folded up the cot, a small royal-red velvet bag fell onto the floor. It must have been tucked under the mattress.

  I swear my heart stopped beating, but I recovered myself, swept up the bag and faked a little laugh. “I almost forgot I had this.”

  “What is it?” the worker, a portly man in his forties, asked me.

  “Would you believe a gift from the queen of England?”

  He laughed, too.

  Only later did I understand that Philip had left the jewels with me because he didn’t dare take them with him to England and risk being branded a thief. He would make peace with his brother-in-law, and then he would come back for the jewels, and for me.