A Killer Plot (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

persistent wind. The trees branches swayed like the arms of a dancer, and the tiny Confederate flags shivered as though cold.
    Olivia opened the gate and stepped onto the soft grass with care. She noticed someone had gathered wild phlox and placed a single stem at the foot of each of the seven graves. The purple, tissuelike petals were crinkled with thirst but still gave off a faint sweet scent.
    Someone else besides Jethro Bragg cares about this place , Olivia thought.
    She got on her knees in front of Henry Bragg’s head-stone and stroked the smooth rock. There was a stillness to the place, a sense of deep peace Olivia rarely experienced anywhere but at the water’s edge and within the confines of her home.
    The wind curled under her white blond hair and flipped it upward. It felt like the flutter of bird’s wings against her face. A feathery caress. It was as if the souls of the men buried beneath her had descended on a current of warm air and, moments before the rain began, blessed her with their presence.
    “I won’t let them destroy this place,” Olivia whispered, her fingers tracing the shallow letters carved into the stone.
    In her mind, she was seeing another name on another tombstone.
    Olivia was still kneeling there when the rain came.

Chapter 12
     
    I think that I shall never see
a billboard lovely as a tree.
Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,
I’ll never see a tree at all.
     

—OGDEN NASH
     
     
     
     
    A ren’t gryphons part lion and part snake?” Laurel asked Millay later that evening.
    Millay took a sip of coffee and shook her head. “That’s a chimera. A chimera has a scaly tail that ends in a serpent’s head. On the other end, you’ve got a lion’s head and a goat’s head kind of growing out of the back of the neck. I think chimeras are way cool, but for my story, I needed an animal with only one head. It’d be tough for Tessa and the others to find room on a creature’s back if it had two heads.” She waved her hands around as she spoke, her silver thumb rings catching the light. “Besides, I like the gryphon’s combination of the lion and the eagle. What’s a goat head going to do in the middle of a battle? Ravish a flower garden?”
    The writers laughed.
    “You know your mythological beasts and you did a great job describing the gryphon as both a potential weapon and a possible friend.” Harris turned to the third page of Millay’s first chapter. “I really like this part, after Tessa’s been pushed and her gryphon catches her in his talons and flies her into his cave.”
    He held up Millay’s second page and read, “Despite the piercing light of the full moon, the cave was mostly in shadow. The gryphon’s gold eye gleamed as he assessed his new rider. He watched the blood seep into her gauzy white dress where his scythelike claws had bit into the flesh of her waist. The coldness of his gaze sparked a flicker of fear in Tessa’s belly. She had heard tales of what happened to girls who did not instantly bond with their gryphons. Trembling, Tessa moved toward the creature, awed by his tawny fur, the shimmering feathers of his wings, the massive legs and muscular back, and the daggerlike curve of his beak. She sunk to one knee and bowed to him.”
    The group let the words settle over them for a moment. It seemed a fitting segment to listen to as the light waned outside the cottage. Laurel had requested an early evening meeting, as her parents were coming to town after dinner and she wanted to make sure the twins were presentable before their arrival. Millay’s shift at Fish Nets began at eight, so she seconded the motion to begin the meeting at five thirty instead of six thirty. Olivia had left a message about the time change with Chief Rawlings the day before, but he had neither returned her call nor showed up for the meeting. She was surprisingly disappointed by his absence.
    Returning her attention to the notes she’d written beside the passage where Tessa dropped to her knees near the gryphon’s nest of dried grass, Olivia raised a question. “The bones scattered about the corner of the gryphon’s cave—animal or human?”
    “Eeew!” Laurel squeaked. “You can’t have Tessa’s rescuer be a flying, feathered, people-eater! This is a young adult book, not a Stephen King horror novel!”
    Millay patted Laurel’s knee. “Relax, Mama Bear. It’s a pile of cow bones. I’ve got a scene in the fourth chapter that shows the gryphon feeding. I