The Last Word (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

the players in this drama, had taken one look at the browns and yellows that Kamler had blended together to create the cabin and had immediately recognized it as a pledge from one lover to another.
    “Then why did Henry leave Evelyn?” Olivia asked, reluctantly playing devil’s advocate. “Why try to escape? Were they planning to elope?”
    Mabel put her hand back on the armrest of her wheelchair and shook her head firmly. “She would have told me. Evie was . . . broken by what happened that night. On the last day I saw her, she swore on her Bible that Henry didn’t want to escape, that he’d never kill that guard . . . Oh, I can’t remember his name . . .” The realization that there was a gap in her memory disconcerted Mabel so greatly that she stopped speaking, only making soft scratching sounds in the back of her throat.
    Billinger tried to coax Mabel back by asking after her family, but her eyes had grown misty again, her thoughts blanketed by a fog too thick to be shaken off by the professor’s voice speaking the cherished names of children and grandchildren.
    Gently, Olivia turned the painting over and placed it back on Mabel’s lap. “I think Henry wrote this note to Evie.” She read it aloud and watched for a reaction. Nothing.
    “Mabel?” Billinger whispered and then shook his head at Olivia. “This is how it’s been. She fades in and out.”
    The professor left the bench and strolled away to exchange a few words with the nurse. Olivia lifted Kamler’s watercolor from Mabel’s lap, but the older woman didn’t even seem to notice when the weight of it was no longer there.
    Olivia repackaged the work of art, slipped it into the canvas tote, and sat back on the bench with a sigh. Thinking that Haviland would be delighted that their visit had been so short, she waited for Billinger to wrap up his conversation with the nurse.
    Noises spilled out of the closest set of double doors, and a family of five stepped onto the sun-dappled patio. A little boy of five or six came running over the flagstones, his arms outstretched as he raced toward an elderly man leaning on a walker.
    “Jimmy!” the man called in a cheery albeit tobacco-rough voice and smiled as the child hugged his skinny leg. His family encircled him, and the three adults began to chat as the two children tried to one-up each other in volume and enthusiasm. There was a baby too, held in the protective cradle of the mother’s arm. Olivia assumed he was quite young, for his small limbs were encased in a blue cotton sleeper with feet, as if the parents feared the effects of the light on the fragile, new skin.
    Using his right hand to steady himself on the walker, the grandfather reached out with his left to touch the baby’s plump cheek. The mother pivoted the child so that his face was turned toward the old man. Their eyes met, the two males separated by a gulf of age, united by blood. The baby held still and then sucked in a great breath only to release it in an ear-splitting wail.
    The mother laughed, embarrassed, and unobtrusively comforted her child. Next to Olivia, Mabel stirred in her chair, somehow awakened by the child’s cry.
    “Oh, Evie!” The older woman’s eyes pooled with tears. “After they sent you away, things were never the same. I missed you so much. I still miss you . . .”
    Olivia looked from the baby, who was quickly responding to his mother’s kisses and hushed assurances that all was well, to Mabel’s stricken face, her eyes focused on the infant. Billinger had turned when he caught the sound of Mabel’s grief floating through the honeysuckle-scented air of the garden, but Olivia shook her head, silently warning him not to move.
    “I’m sorry Evie was sent away,” she whispered and laid a hand on Mabel’s. “What happened to her child?”
    The tears overflowed, ribbons of water wetting the older woman’s cheeks. “She never came back. I never saw her again. My Evie . . .”
    Mabel clammed up again, adrift in the painful memory of losing her best friend. Her lip trembled, but her tears quickly ran dry and her eyes fastened on an iridescent blue gazing ball in the garden bed opposite the bench.
    Olivia could picture Mabel as a young woman, filled with hope that the war was coming to an end, rushing to the Whites’ house to share some piece of news with Evelyn, only to find no one at home.
    Bewildered and more than a little afraid by the sense of emptiness clinging to Evelyn’s home, Mabel might