A Deadly Cliche (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

He’d landed on its flat shores, been received and cared for by the locals, and had come to marry one. Olivia felt freshly abandoned, but most of all she felt betrayed. She believed he might have lost his memory for a time, but eventually he had remembered that he had a daughter and that the woman he had loved was dead. He’d simply decided to do his best to forget them both.
    Suddenly, Olivia wanted evidence of his other life. Assuming the room had been her father’s before his illness, she began to open drawers. It never occurred to her that it wasn’t right for her to rifle through his belongings. She’d had no chance to lay claim to this man for thirty years, but now that she was here, Olivia planned to exercise all the authority that a blood tie granted her.
    If she’d expected to find a neat file of important documents, personal letters, or photographs, she was to be disappointed. Her father’s room was Spartan. The drawers and closet contained clothes. There were a few books and magazines, but Olivia’s father had never been much of a reader. She found a wooden toolbox filled with his whittling tools in the dresser and on top of a nightstand, a tin of tobacco, matches, and a pipe. The walls were decorated with vintage blueprints of famous sailing vessels.
    Frustrated, Olivia paced around the room, stealing nervous glances at her father as though he might awaken to find her snooping through his things. She was certain he wouldn’t approve of that. Like her, he’d always been fiercely protective of his privacy.
    “Didn’t anyone matter to you? Isn’t there a single piece of evidence that you shared your life with other human beings?” she addressed the motionless form in the bed. Strangely, it was all she could say to him. She no longer felt like ranting at him, accusing him, or trying to make him feel guilty for leaving her. She just wanted to know who he was, one adult to another, and it was far too late for that.
    Olivia paused at the window, which faced west toward Oyster Bay. She wondered if Rawlings was back at the station tying up loose ends, how Laurel was handling Steve, whether Harris had been missed at his work meeting, and if Millay truly believed Olivia’s blood test meant that she was pregnant.
    “I’m going to have to clarify that little detail as soon as I get back or Rawlings will think I’m carrying Flynn’s child,” Olivia remarked drily to Haviland.
    Kneeling down to pet the poodle, Olivia furtively stuck her arm under her father’s bed. Her hand came in contact with something solid. It was a struggle to pull the object out with only one arm, but once her fingers closed around a handle she was able to drag it into the light.
    It was an old suitcase. Olivia tried to pop open the central latch but it was locked.
    Undeterred, she grabbed one of her father’s whittling knives and began working on the lock. It was difficult going with only one hand and she cursed aloud more than once, but eventually, the knife blade pried the lock loose and the latch snapped open.
    She wasn’t prepared for what she found. Inside the suitcase, stacked in a tidy pile and tied with a piece of string, was a collection of letters written by Olivia’s grandmother. Olivia read the first one, which dated back to her first year in boarding school. Her grandmother had written to her son-in-law about Olivia’s recent activities. She’d even included a school photo of Olivia in her uniform, looking lovely and poised but far too serious for a girl her age. And so it went. Every six months there were updates, photographs, report cards, and occasionally, one of Olivia’s charcoal sketches or a copy of a poem she’d written for English class.
    Olivia was floored by the realization that her grandmother had been communicating with her father throughout Olivia’s childhood. A fresh, hot wave of anger swept through her. Why hadn’t her grandmother told her that her father was alive? She’d let her grow up believing she was an orphan. It was so cruel, so heartless.
    “I bet you didn’t want Daddy to get his hands on the Limoges trust fund,” she hissed at her grandmother’s perfect cursive. “You never liked him. You never wanted him to marry my mother. I bet you told him he could never raise me properly and he agreed. Maybe you were even right about that, but to let me believe, for all those years, that I had no family except for you . . .” Tears burned her eyes. “How could you do that to a