Poisoned Prose (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

while.”

Chapter 7
    Injuries may be forgiven, but not forgotten.
    — A ESOP
    O livia and Rawlings settled on opposite ends of the living room couch. Paperwork was strewn across the surface of the coffee table along with a bottle of sparkling wine and a glass of chocolate milk.
    After waiting patiently to be let out, Haviland pushed the door to the deck open using his nose and front paw, and then looked back over his shoulder at Olivia.
    “Go ahead,” she told him, momentarily glancing from the papers in her hands. Haviland wormed his head through the crack he’d made, widened it with his shoulders, and disappeared outside. Still holding on to the paper, Olivia got up, shut the door, and poured herself some wine before returning to her seat.
    “Do you want me to tell you when I’ve come across something interesting?” she asked Rawlings.
    He removed his reading glasses, rubbed his eyes, and shook his head. “No. Just make a note of it and we’ll talk later.”
    She watched him circle a phrase in Hicks’s case file. A frown had appeared on his face, and a trio of deep lines were etched across his forehead.
    He’s spotted an inconsistency
, she thought, having seen the expression before. Rawlings had discovered a detail that probably seemed insignificant to the sheriff’s department. But for some reason, Oyster Bay’s police chief thought it demanded closer scrutiny. He tapped his pen against his lips and stared off into the middle distance, and Olivia sensed he was on a snow-covered mountain on a cold January night, peering about in the moonlight in search of answers.
    She returned her attention to the documents Laurel had brought to the station. The majority were press releases and reviews of Violetta’s performances, and though Olivia skimmed them, they were all similar. The reporters who’d attended one of Violetta’s shows were amazed by her ability to transport the listener to another place and time. But Olivia had experienced that for herself. She wanted to know what Violetta was like offstage.
    “No wonder Laurel was so eager to obtain an interview,” she muttered under her breath.
    Rawlings looked up from his file. “Not finding what you’re looking for?”
    “No. I want to know why Violetta left home so soon after Elijah’s death. Was the grief too much? Was she haunted by his memory? I also want to know if she insisted on performing at night in order to hide her blue skin. And most of all, I want to know about the treasure she alluded to. It’s got to be the reason she was killed.”
    “You’re making assumptions. Try to pick a question you can actually answer,” Rawlings suggested. “Take the treasure, for example. Lowell claims that Professor Hicks was following Violetta’s haint tale—that he was searching for the hollowed-out tree trunk where silver coins were hidden. Hicks believed he was close to finding the spot. He was so convinced that he was willing to stay on Beech Mountain alone on a cold and snowy night after Lowell and the guide, a local man named Dewey Whitt, had called it quits.” He tapped his chin with the pen. “Let’s say that Hicks actually did find the right tree trunk and someone wasn’t happy about that. So that someone pushed Hicks off the cliff to protect the secret location.”
    Olivia tried to envision the scene. “Or to keep the coins for himself.”
    “Are silver coins that valuable? Are they worth the price of murder? Now that’s a question you might be able to answer,” Rawlings said and turned back to his reading.
    Reenergized, Olivia grabbed her laptop from her desk. She noticed Haviland at the deck door and slid it open. A waft of ocean-scented air snuck inside, and Olivia heard the faint
whoosh
of a wave curling onshore. She didn’t dare linger there, or the rhythm of the water would pull her out of her work and coax her to come closer in the manner of the moon manipulating the tide. Inhaling a deep breath of salt and sea, Olivia closed the door.
    She launched an Internet search on the values of silver coins but was given too many results, so she narrowed the field by looking for rare silver dollars. After writing down some notes on the mint years and current market values, she paused to take another sip of wine.
    “Find anything?”
    Olivia shrugged. “The coins are worth as little as fifty bucks to as much as fifteen thousand for an uncirculated silver dollar from 1801. It’s pretty unlikely that the Devereaux family had one of