The Last Word (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

appearance. She wore all the marks of someone who’d struggled, kicking and clawing, through life. The years had shrunken her and bit away at her curves until she had the body of an undernourished child—all sharp angles and skin stretched tight across the bones. Her face was carved with deep wrinkles, like those on a walnut shell, but there were many fanning from the corner of her eyes, indicating that she’d born her troubles with a healthy dose of good humor.
    “How lovely to meet a friend of Emmett’s,” Mabel said to Olivia in a voice as insubstantial as a leaf pushed about in the breeze. “He’s such a dear.” She gazed at Billinger fondly.
    Instead of taking a seat next to the professor, Olivia stood directly in front of Mabel. “May I show you something?”
    As the older woman nodded in assent, a stray shaft of sunlight broke through the protective boughs of the oak tree to the northwest and illuminated Mabel’s face, erasing away the decades. For a fraction of a second, Olivia saw how handsome this woman had been in her youth and that the ghost of this beauty coexisted with her brittle bones and mottled skin.
    Olivia froze for a moment. Had her mother survived, would she be like Mabel? Would her radiance have shone through the sea blue eyes she shared with her daughter? Or would a lifetime spent growing old alongside an erratic man have robbed her of all her softness and grace, replacing them with furrows of worry and hard edges of regret?
    Mabel turned her hands over, showing Olivia her palms and inviting her to come back to the present moment. Happy to obey, she unwrapped Kamler’s painting and, keeping it anchored on a piece of cardboard, tenderly placed the watercolor on Mabel’s lap.
    The woman slipped on a pair of bifocals that had been hanging from her neck on a chain of finch yellow and gasped. “This is one of Henry’s!” Then, assaulted by doubt. “Isn’t it?”
    Olivia and Billinger exchanged looks.
    “Henry?” Billinger prompted in a patient voice.
    Mabel covered her mouth as though she’d let loose a secret entrusted to her long ago by a dear friend. “I sometimes forget that Henry wasn’t his real name, but Evie called him that instead of Heinrich. Almost from the beginning. To her, he was Henry.” Mabel’s eyes drank in the winter scene. It was almost a tangible thing, to see her slip away from the senior center’s garden and travel back to Camp New Bern, to her girlhood, to Evelyn White.
    Barely breathing, Olivia imagined she could follow Mabel through this wormhole of time, spying the pair of teenage girls in starched dresses and Mary Janes, schoolbooks clutched against their chests as they giggled at the sight of a group of cute boys hunched over glasses of cherry cola at the drugstore counter.
    “Evie’d never been sweet on a boy before,” Mabel said. “It was like she was waiting for that German boat to get sunk, waiting for those young men with their strange language and their strange uniforms to wash up onto the beach like a group of mermen. Henry was the best looking and the sweetest. He never acted like a prisoner. It was more like he’d come to visit distant relatives. The first time Evie and I went to take lunch to our daddies, she spotted Heinrich through the chain fence, and it was . . .” She trailed off, nostalgia tugging her lips into a grin.
    Billinger tried to finish her thought. “Love at first sight?”
    Mabel’s finger rose, hovered over the cabin, trembling a little. “No. Evie was so pretty that her parents fretted over her. She was raised to be careful, modest, to not even talk to older men outside the family. But when their eyes met, Henry’s and hers, it was as if they recognized each other. Something deep inside each of them reached out to the other. No power on this earth could’ve stopped it, no matter how foolish folks thought they were. I’ve never seen anything like it, and it was a long, long war.”
    Her finger came so close to touching the painted cabin that Olivia almost moved to interfere, but she merely held her breath and waited.
    “The way they were when they were together . . . so easy, so sure. They were just like this little house—all light and laughter and warm rooms in the middle of a crazy, cold world that couldn’t seem to comfort any of us, especially when the food started running out and then telegrams came and half the town dressed in black.”
    Olivia met Billinger’s eyes. Mabel, who’d known both