Poisoned Prose (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

brought up that plant. What were you thinking?”
    Glancing at the door, Olivia said, “I wanted to wait for Harris, but—”
    “There he is!” Laurel interjected. The women peered out the picture window as Harris jogged across the street.
    He burst into the shop, unslung his messenger bag from his shoulder, and sank into a chair. “That text you sent me earlier?” he said to Olivia. “I think you’re on to something. I got a reply from this geological—”
    “Hold that thought,” Olivia said as Shelley arrived with her mojito. Harris eyed it appreciatively.
    “Could I get one of those too?” he asked. “And a piece of that pineapple-kiwi cheesecake. I’m starving!”
    Millay smirked. “You’re feeling fruity this evening.”
    Before Harris could come up with a snarky reply, Laurel plunked her notebook on the table. “Can I have the floor, Harris? I think I discovered a pattern in Violetta’s stories. Not the Jack tales, but the ones she made up.”
    “Go on,” Olivia said excitedly.
    “Millay e-mailed me all the sentences and phrases she could remember from Violetta’s performance, and when I compared them with mine, I noticed that there were certain words that repeated in every story at least twice. All of those words were on the list the chief found in Lowell’s pocket.”
    Olivia slid her drink over to Harris and beckoned him to help himself. She was too caught up in what Laurel was saying to bother with her mojito. “And?” she prompted, believing that Laurel was about to confirm the theory she’d come up with that afternoon.
    “So if you and Harris remembered the same words, then we could be on to something. A pattern. A clue.” Laurel sounded breathless with anticipation.
    Hastening to pull his notes from his bag, Harris passed them to Laurel. Olivia followed suit, and they both watched, enraptured, as she got busy with a pink highlighter.
    When Shelley returned with Harris’s mojito, she looked hurt. “You didn’t care for your drink?” she asked Olivia.
    Olivia smiled at her, thinking how lucky Michel was to have won the affections of such a lovely woman. “No, no. I gave mine to Harris because he was so thirsty. I’ll take the one you made for him.” As soon as Shelley handed her the mojito, Olivia took a deep sip. The cocktail was cool and invigorating, and she sighed in contentment. “Perfection,” she said. Shelley flushed with pleasure and moved off to chat with a young couple sharing an enormous root beer float.
    Laurel capped her highlighter and put the pages in the center of the table. “We recorded all the words from Lowell’s list. Each of those words appeared two or more times in her stories. Along with these.” She circled a group of words written on her pad.
    Millay leaned over and read them aloud. “‘Secret, blue, curse, cold, Pa, ice, granddaddy, heart of trunk.’”
    “If we combine those with Lowell’s do we get a tangible clue?” Olivia asked hopefully. She quickly reviewed the words Rawlings had sent her yesterday: “silver, moonlight, stones, and heart.”
    “Half of these remind me of that annoying jewelry commercial we’re subjected to every holiday,” Harris said. “You know it, right?”
    Laurel nodded. “Yes. The one that says that now’s the time to invest in a diamond because investing in a diamond is investing in your future?”
    Olivia was grinning so widely that when Shelley arrived with Harris’s cheesecake she started to laugh. “Maybe I should fix you a pitcher of mojitos.”
    “They help me think.” Olivia raised her glass to Shelley. “Keep ’em coming.”
    Harris’s eyes went wide as he stared at his dessert. “Will you marry me?”
    “I’ve already had two proposals today,” Shelley said. “And like I told those other gentlemen, my heart belongs to another. That first taste of love . . . sometimes it remains for a lifetime,” she mused dreamily and walked away.
    Her remark made Olivia think of Flynn and Amabel. Flynn had clung to his affection for Violetta for two decades, and there was a possibility that Amabel had done the same thing. Flynn had admitted that he’d never recovered from Violetta’s betrayal, but he’d wooed Amabel first and then unceremoniously dumped her in favor of her sister. She was a woman scorned. And perhaps a woman who still harbored feelings for the man who’d hurt her so long ago.
    “Love or money. Which is the motive?” Olivia murmured, sipping her cocktail. She looked up