The Last Word (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

before you were born. Why does this affect you so much?”
    Olivia expected Hatcher to explode with rage, but he seemed to welcome the question. “Agnes Hatcher adopted me when I was only a few weeks old. She’d gone to the orphanage looking for a sweet little girl. A pretty thing to take her mind off her grief, but she picked me instead. She and Dave were the only family I’ve ever known. Times were real tough for the Hatcher clan after James was killed, but I don’t remember much of that. All I know was that Kraut Kamler stabbed their husband and daddy in the back like a yellow-bellied coward. I watched that loss tear them up inside with every year that passed.”
    Olivia watched as Hatcher’s fingernails dug into the bar and a deep, slow-burning rage surfaced in his eyes. She could see that Plumley had awakened sleeping demons by contacting this man. Hatcher had gone silent for a moment, but then he directed his ire at Olivia. “Because of Kamler, I never had a chance to have a father. And you people are almost as bad—you write your books and make money off of James Hatcher’s murder. Money nobody in the Hatcher family ever sees! You’re a bunch of leeches!”
    Olivia shrank back in the face of his anger, yet she agreed with Raymond Hatcher. Nick Plumley had become rich and famous fictionalizing James Hatcher’s violent death, while Ray hadn’t received a single benefit except for an invitation to speak at the school’s annual fund-raiser.
    “You’re right,” she said softly. “I’ll try to amend that. Is Dave still around?”
    Hatcher shook his head. “His number came up in Korea. He was in the prime of his life. And he had nothing to leave me but his stories, and that’s why I’m not going to give them away. What happened to his daddy haunted him every day of his life. It haunted my life. That’s why folks owe me for what I know. A price was already paid, you got it? Now it’s my turn to get paid.”
    “I do understand. Thank you for agreeing to see me, for sharing this much. It can’t have been easy,” Olivia told Hatcher with as much sincerity as she could and then watched his towering form disappear through the doorway, where it merged into the night shadows.
    Millay handed one of her customers a beer and then put her forearms on the bar, bending at the waist to get closer to Olivia. “I hope you didn’t piss him off. That man could strangle you with his pinkie.”
    “A sobering thought.” Olivia pushed her nearly full bottle of beer into Millay’s hand. “He may have gotten angry enough at Nick Plumley to have done exactly that.” She dug out her cell phone. “I’d better call Rawlings from outside. Thanks for your help.”
    Sliding a new beer down the bar, where it was expertly caught by a shrimper Olivia recognized from her weekly trips to the docks, Millay frowned in puzzlement. “Why thank me? I didn’t do squat.”
    Olivia placed a twenty on the bar. “But you would have. You had my back. That matters to me more than you know.”
    Embarrassed, Millay began to wipe the bar with a frayed rag. “Somebody has to be your wingman when Haviland isn’t around. It was smart of you to leave him with Michel and the kitchen staff instead of bringing him in here. I’m not sure if he would have responded well to Hatcher’s body language. And I am not paid enough to mop up blood.” Millay pointed a finger at Olivia. “Keep me in the loop, okay?”
    On her way to the door, Olivia stopped to exchange small talk with a few of the fishermen she knew from either her childhood or as suppliers to her restaurants. Several offered condolences on the loss of her father, saying that he was a fortunate man to have died in his bed with his family gathered around when all of Oyster Bay believed he’d been claimed by drink and the sea more than forty years ago.
    “Part of him did die that night,” Olivia said to one of her father’s former crewmembers as she stood beneath the exit sign, a nimbus of neon red illuminating her pale hair. “That storm took my father and gave him another life, another family. And because of that, I gained a brother. I guess we made a good trade, the ocean and I.”
    The man had met Hudson at the docks a few weeks before The Bayside Crab House had opened and now knew him as well as anyone. “You can tell he’s Willie’s boy from a mile off. Both of ’em got thunder in their eyes, but your brother has heart too. He’ll stick by you when you need him