A Killer Plot (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

future.” Blake waved his hand in the air, rudely signaling for the check. “That’s the end of the subject, Heidi. We’re going.”
    “Well, I just hope you’re not buying drugs,” Heidi said with a sulk. “I don’t approve of them, and besides, there’s plenty of those back home.”
    “Right, like you’re such an expert on the subject.” Blake was openly derisive. “You’re not the one who has to rock your ass off in front of thousands of people. You get to sit around between takes, getting manicures and drinking mocha soy lattes.”
    “No matter how much pressure I’m under, I’ll never take drugs!” Heidi whispered as she stood. “So I hope that’s not what your big, secret meeting at that gross bar is all about. If rumors about drugs or anything illegal affect my reputation, I’d be kicked off the show and my marketing value would go way downhill. I’m supposed to be a role model. Don’t you care about my future? I have two films debuting this summer!”
    Blake grabbed her roughly by the arm and propelled her past Olivia and Camden’s table. “It’s not drugs, babe, so get off your high horse. It’s something much more dangerous than that,” he muttered darkly. “And since I’ve gotta protect your precious rep, I won’t tell you anything else, except that my plan is going to make me a shitload of money.”
    Camden stared after them, a greedy gleam in his eyes. “I wonder what bar he could be referencing?”
    “If Heidi thinks it’s gross and fishermen hang out there, then there’s one likely choice. Blake is conducting his illicit business at Fish Nets. The establishment where Millay works.”
    “Olivia my dear, after we’re done with our dessert, how would you like to—”
    “Not a chance,” Olivia cut him off. “Later this evening, after we’re done here, I will be in my lovely house, clad in a pair of silk pajamas, cocktail in hand, watching Masterpiece Theater . I confess to having enjoyed myself tonight, but I have no intention of spending a single minute in a foul-smelling bar filled with men whose cologne is a mixture of smoke, sweat, and fish or with women whose clothes are either three sizes too small or veritably see-through. Nothing you say will convince me to change my mind.” She placed her empty mug against its saucer with a firm clink. “I will never set foot in that disgusting place.”
    “Never say never,” Camden said with an expressive wink.
    Olivia felt an inexplicable tinge of anxiety as she headed into the kitchen to collect her thoroughly gorged poodle.

Chapter 3
     
    The fog comes on little cat feet.
    —CARL SANDBURG
     
     
     
     
     
    T he fog had always brought gifts to Olivia Limoges.
    They were infrequent. And odd. Yet she knew they were meant for her. An aloof child, ever drifting along the shoreline near the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, Olivia had spent endless hours turning over the slick husks of horseshoe crabs or collapsing holes dug by industrious coquinas. She poked at sand crabs with sticks and taunted seagulls with crusts from pimiento cheese sandwiches.
    Olivia kept her gifts in pickle jars. She labeled each jar with the year on a piece of masking tape. Even now, at forty, she loved to twist the lid from one of the glass jars and pour the contents out onto the saffron and cobalt scrolls of her largest Iranian rug, releasing the scents of seaweed and ocean dampened sand. She’d lean over, her shock of white blond hair aglow in the lamplight, and finger a marble, a wheat penny, a star-shaped earring with missing rhinestones, a rusty skeleton key. Then, another year: a yellow hair barrette in the shape of a dragonfly, a fishhook, a one-shot liquor bottle with no label, a tennis ball, a steel watchband, a shotgun shell.
    Today she took the metal detector along on her morning walk. She went out early, as soon as the fog rolled back, dressed in cotton sweats and Wellingtons. Haviland danced through the surf beside her as they marched north by northeast, Olivia swinging the detector back and forth like a horizontal pendulum as she inhaled the salt-laden breeze. Her Bounty Hunter Discovery 3300 issued a cacophony of vibrating clicks and murmurs that sounded more like the language of dolphins than something constructed of metal and electrical wire.
    Haviland barked at a low-flying gull as the digital target identification on the Bounty Hunter’s LCD display screen leapt toward the right, showing a full arc of black triangles.