Haunting Olivia (18 page)

“Kayla’s back to school today,” he said. “So I figured we’d drop her off, then wait for Johanna at the cottage and trail her for a while, see what she does.”

All business,
she thought. Granted, she was pleased that he was more concerned than the police seemed to be, but there was nothing in his face or expression that said: “You didn’t dream last night.”

If someone else were there in the room with them, he or she would have no clue that the two of them had made love just hours ago, had been through an emotional wringer together.

HAUNTING OLIV IA

167

“What if all she does is go to her shop?” Olivia asked. “We can’t exactly trail her there.”

“The shop doesn’t open until ten,” he said. “So that’s two hours.”

Olivia nodded. “And when it opens, one of us can pretend we’re looking for a cashmere sweater and snoop around.”

“I don’t want you alone with her in there. Just until we can rule her out.”

“
If
we can rule her out,” she said.

“Dad, where are you?” came Kayla’s voice.

“We’re down here,” he called back.

“
We’re?
” Kayla said as she came into the guest room.

Kayla’s eyes widened. She glanced at the bed, which Olivia hadn’t had a chance to make yet. “You slept over here last night?”

Olivia nodded. “I heard noises in my house last night and was afraid to stay there alone, so I slept here.”

Kayla smiled. “Are you two getting back together?”

Zach turned red. He opened his mouth to speak, but absolutely nothing came out.

Olivia took Kayla’s hand and squeezed it. “I’ve only been back in your lives for a few days.”

Kayla nodded. “Will you feel like my mother soon?”

Olivia’s heart squeezed. “I hope so.”

“Do I feel like your daughter to you?” Kayla asked.

Olivia nodded. “Yes.”

“Good,” Kayla said, and with that she flitted out of the room.

“I’m making eggs this morning if you’re interested,” Zach said, turning to go.

168

Janelle Taylor

Almost like one big happy family,
she thought. It was a start.

She glanced around the living room, surprised at how homey the place was. Zach had chosen big, functional pieces that could withstand a toddler’s sticky hands and a kid’s somersaults and a teenager’s after-school naps. The sofa was huge and slip-covered in durable red cotton, throw pillows everywhere. A large kilim rug added color and warmth to the wide-planked wood floors. One wall was devoted to Kayla’s artwork over the years, from preschool finger paints to a self-portrait dated last year. And there were photographs everywhere. Of Kayla. Of Zach and Kayla.

Her favorite was in an antique frame on the piano, Zach and Kayla, around five or six, climbing a mountain. Kayla had on her little hiking boots and held a canteen, and her smile was as big as the land. Zach looked happy and healthy. Olivia wondered who’d taken the picture. A girlfriend maybe.

Or a passerby.

But the thing she noticed most of all was that of all the pictures of father and daughter, there was no mother. She could imagine Kayla going through these rooms over the years glancing at her family photographs and noticing the same thing. There was no mother.

I’m here now,
she said silently to the room.
I just
hope I’m not too late.

“No smoking, right?” Zach said to Kayla as they pulled up in front of Blueberry Middle School.

“I’m totally over smoking,” Kayla said. “Bye, Olivia!

HAUNTING OLIV IA

169

See you at the Inner-Beauty meeting!” she added, then disappeared among the students.

Zach was about to head to the cottage, but Olivia touched his arm.

“Can you wait just a minute?” she asked, glancing around at the hustle and bustle of a school morning. “I’d like to watch.”

“Watch kids walking into school?”

She nodded. “This is Kayla’s world. I want to know all about it.”

He smiled. “On Kayla’s first day of preschool, after the teachers assured me she was fine and I could go, I sat in the car in the parking lot for the entire two and a half hours, staring at the front door of the school.”

Olivia laughed. “How about the second day?”

“One hour. By the third week, I was able to actually drive away.”

“I guess I’m feeling a little like that,” she said. “I don’t want to let her go now that I have her.”

He was about to say, “There’s all the time in the world,” but everything felt so up in the air. And once again he’d put sex in the mix. Until he knew how he felt about any of this, he needed to keep his hands to himself. Not easy. Olivia was so beautiful, and their strange history—just a couple of weeks of a teenaged love affair so long ago, and thirteen years of estrangement—was too strong a force.

There was a daughter between them.

“We’d better get to the cottage before Johanna calls your father’s lawyer and gets you kicked out,”

Zach said.

Olivia nodded. “I wouldn’t put it past her.”

“And I want to make sure we get there before she 170

Janelle Taylor

does so that she doesn’t see me,” he said, pulling away from the curb.

“Do you know Johanna?” Olivia asked, glancing at him. “From around town?”

He shook his head. “I’ve seen her before, but we’ve never spoken. Every time I see her in town she’s walking fast or has her head down. Odd for someone who owns a shop. You’d think she’d be friendly, cultivating customers.”

“Has she always been that way?” Olivia asked. “Or just in the past month, since William died?”

“Don’t know,” he said, turning in to the cottage’s driveway. “I can’t say I’ve really noticed her much at all.”

Olivia was staring up at the cottage. She was nervous, he realized. She wasn’t easy to read, never had been, but he could tell that she was scared.

“I’ll be with you,” he said, squeezing her hand.

She glanced at him and held his gaze. “I just don’t know what’s coming next or from whom.”

“I’ll be with you,” he repeated.

She took a deep breath. “I can’t stay with you every night, Zach.”

“There’s no reason why you can’t move into the guest room,” he said. “You’ll be closer to Kayla, more available to her. It makes sense. We can drive here in the mornings for Johanna. It’s a short drive.”

And I want you closer to me anyway,
he added to himself.

Her heart surged. “I appreciate it, Zach. The idea of sleeping in this house, knowing that someone out there wants me dead . . .” She took a deep breath. “I can’t stay here anymore.”

“It’s settled, then.” He glanced at his watch. “It’s five to eight. We’d better get inside.”

HAUNTING OLIV IA

171

No broken windows. No nasty messages scrawled across the front door. And inside, nothing seemed out of place. They checked all the rooms. Nothing was disturbed.

When the doorbell rang, Zach headed into the kitchen, which was within earshot of the front door, but out of view.

“Receipts and sign here,” he heard Johanna say, her voice clipped. She was angry, that was for sure.

“Is that a bruise on your forehead?” Olivia said, her voice cracking a bit.

A bruise. Olivia had mentioned that she’d thrown a glass pitcher of water at the assailant and that she’d gotten a grunt of pain in response. Suddenly Johanna had a bruise on her forehead? A bruise that wasn’t there yesterday?

“I bumped into a door in the middle of the night,” Johanna said. “Your concern is touching,”

she added, her tone dripping with sarcasm. “Now give me your receipts and sign this sheet or I’m calling the lawyer to tell him you didn’t keep up your pathetic enough end of the bargain.”

“Johanna, do you want to keep up these barbs back and forth for three more weeks, or do you want to sit down and really talk and hear the truth?

I’m hoping you’ll want to talk.”

“The truth? What truth? Yours? I already got the truth from William. He was my fiancé. I think I’ll believe him over you, thank you very much.”

“And there are two sides to every story,” Olivia said. “I’d like to tell you mine. Come in, and let’s have some coffee and talk about William Sedgwick.”

“What’s the point?” was Johanna’s response.

“He’s dead.”

172

Janelle Taylor

“But you loved him.”

“You didn’t,” Johanna snapped.

“Actually, that’s not true,” Olivia said. “As a child I loved him even though I saw him for just two weeks a year. I had all these daydreams and fantasies of him magically deciding that he did want me in his life. But it never happened.”

Zach knew how true that was. He and Olivia had talked a lot about that during those two weeks they’d shared. And then over the years, he and Kayla had had similar conversations about Olivia.

“Whatever,” Johanna said. “I’ll need your receipts for yesterday’s items. And sign here.”

Interesting, Zach thought. Johanna wasn’t willing to give Olivia an inch.

“I just want to know one thing, Johanna,” Olivia said. “Given that I didn’t have a relationship with my father—and that was his choice—why do you resent me so much?”

Good job, Olivia. Get information. Get her to open up, Zach silently encouraged.

“Just show me your receipts,” Johanna said coldly.

“You’re wasting my time.”

A minute later, the door closed. Olivia came into the kitchen, shaking her head. “She grabbed my receipts, shoved the clipboard in my face so I could sign it, and left.”

“Well, let’s see if we can find out what’s bugging her,” Zach said.

Johanna was in a hurry. She practically ran down the road and got into a beat-up car parked at the opening to the main road.

HAUNTING OLIV IA

173

“Why doesn’t she park in front of the cottage every morning?” Olivia asked as she and Zach got into Zach’s truck and headed at a snail’s pace down the road. “I mean, why walk a half a mile and back every morning in the cold?”

“Add that to our five pages of questions for Johanna,” Zach said, turning onto Blueberry Boulevard. Johanna passed the center of town and then turned left onto Mayfair.

“What’s out this way?” Olivia asked.

He glanced at her, surprise mixed with suspicion in his eyes. “Marnie.”

“Johanna and Marnie are friends?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ve never met any of Marnie’s friends. And I never see Johanna out and about.”

“I’d love to be a fly on the wall in Marnie’s house right now.”

“Maybe I could be,” Zach said. “Let me drop you off at a safe place, the Eat-In Diner. I’ll go over to Marnie’s to apologize again and try to get invited in.”

“Be careful,” Olivia said.

Zach stood on Marnie’s porch and rang the doorbell, but there was no answer. He heard a door close behind him and he turned around; Marnie and Johanna were coming out of the barn, which was really just a garage.

They stopped dead in their tracks when they spotted him.

“What are you doing here?” Marnie said.

“Can I talk to you for a few minutes?”

“No.”

174

Janelle Taylor

He headed toward them, his arm outstretched toward Johanna. “I’m Zach Archer. I don’t think we’ve met.”

She glanced at Marnie and kept her hands in her pockets. “No foe of Marnie is a friend of mine,” she said.

“Well, I can understand friends sticking by friends,” he said. He turned to Marnie. “I really wish you’d talk to me, Marnie. Let me explain myself as best I can.”

“There’s nothing to say, Zach. You made your bed. Now you’re going to have to lie in it.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Meaning?”

“Meaning cheaters get what they deserve.”

Oh, brother. “Well, I hope we can talk things through one day,” he said. “You know where to find me.”

“At that greedy little bitch’s house?”

Her anger now seemed over the edge. They’d dated for a month, never talked about an exclusive relationship. Yes, he hadn’t been honest with her when she’d asked about Olivia, but Marnie’s bitterness struck him as excessive.

Cheaters get what they deserve. . . .

You’ll be sorry. . . .

Olivia was the one being targeted, though. Not him. Was Marnie trying to get to him through Olivia? Hurt him by hurting her?

He thought of her in the diner, sitting there alone, vulnerable. Not that anything could happen to her at the Eat-In Diner. Still, he had this need to be with her, to make sure she was safe.

Because, as he knew without a doubt last night, he did love her. And not with the innocence of a HAUNTING OLIV IA

175

seventeen-year-old boy, unfettered. He loved her the way he’d been waiting to love someone again.

He simply had no idea that person would be Olivia herself. He shook his head at the irony of it. The magic of it.

He glanced at Marnie, her eyes shooting sparks.

“All I can do is apologize, Marnie.” With that he got back into his truck and drove to the diner to pick up Olivia.

He saw her through the plate-glass window; she was poking at a salad and looking ner vous. Worried. He went in and sat across from her and filled her in.

“So Johanna must have told Marnie what she knows about me. What she
thinks
she knows, anyway,”

Olivia said.

He leaned close. “All I know is, Johanna has something against you. Marnie has something against both of us. And suddenly the two of them are fast friends. I’m glad you’re going to be staying at my house from now on. There’s no way I’d leave you alone, especially at night. Stay in town until it’s time for your meeting. And keep your cell phone on you at all times. Okay?”

She nodded. “The tension in the town hall auditorium should be pretty scary tonight. Hopefully, Marnie will focus on her daughter and not on me. I don’t doubt she’ll want Brianna to win at all costs.”

Which was what worried Zach.

Chapter 14

All the contestants and their mothers were early.

At a quarter to six, Pearl was able to take the stage to welcome everyone to the meeting for contestants to enter the thirty-first annual Inner-Beauty Pageant.