The Last Word (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

have ridden her bike into town in search of information. The people she’d known for all of her nineteen years would be unable to meet her desperate eyes. Instead, they’d murmur something about the Whites having to move in haste because of a job offering or a sick relative or some other acceptable untruth.
    Racing home to ask her mother, Mabel would be forced to consider the real reason the Whites had left town. For the last two months, Evie had been acting strange. At first, Mable thought her friend had grown pallid and despondent due to a broken heart. Heinrich was now gone and worse, he was a fugitive. Evie hardly left her room, and each time Mabel went to visit, she complained of being sick to her stomach and too wounded by Henry’s disappearance to face the judgmental stares of the townsfolk.
    Naturally, Mabel would have tried to comfort her friend. She’d hold Evie while she cried, pass her tissues, and try to distract her with the latest gossip. But inside, she’d begin to wonder. Had Evie gone too far with the German boy? Could she truly have been that reckless? That foolish?
    Out of loyalty and fear, Mabel would have dismissed the notion, for if Evie were pregnant, then her reputation would be ruined forever. It was already stained by the fact that she was besotted by a foreigner capable of stabbing a local man in the back, but the community would end up forgiving her by blaming it on her youth and naivete. They’d dole out a measure of this blame to her parents as well for allowing Evie to receive art lessons from a prisoner, regardless of his talent.
    A shiver ran down Olivia’s neck. She picked up Mabel’s hand and stroked it lightly, caught up in the tide of heartache. A young couple in love, a childhood friendship, the White family’s place in the community—all torn asunder by one event, the murder of a guard on the night Heinrich Kamler and Nicklaus Ziegler escaped.
    If Heinrich were truly innocent, then he’d lived an entire lifetime separated from the girl he’d dreamed of marrying and the child his lover had born in secret in some town far from Oyster Bay.
    “Damn it,” Olivia murmured, tears pricking her eyes. Her throat tightened, and she could not stop herself from seeing right through the canvas tote back to the cabin on the hilltop, to the hope of home, knowing now that the traveler had never made it up the narrow path. The loved one within had waited and waited for the familiar footfall outside the door and no one had come.
    The war ended, the prisoners were sent overseas, the Whites’ house was sold and relocated and sold again. And the children of wartime, like Evelyn and Mabel and Ray Hatcher, grew older, bearing the weight of their memories like women carrying heavy jugs home from the well.
    At some point, Billinger appeared and rejoined Olivia on the bench. The nurse came to collect Mabel, and Olivia was deeply sorry to release the older woman’s hand. She bent over and placed a wisp of a kiss on Mabel’s forehead before letting go. Mabel smiled, the pain evaporating from her features like a shadow chased off by a bright moon.
    Billinger had the good grace to wait until they were in the car before asking, “What happened back there?”
    “I believe Evelyn White might have had a baby out of wedlock. Her family left town abruptly, but I have no idea where they went or what became of the child.” She turned to the professor in appeal. “Can you find out?”
    He touched her arm. “I’ll do my best. You have my word on it.”
    Olivia nodded. She instinctively knew that Billinger would work relentlessly to help her.
    The afternoon was on the wane as she drove west toward the ocean, toward home, toward a killer.

    When she stepped into the welcoming cool of her house, she noticed that her answering machine was blinking furiously. Rawlings had called an emergency meeting of the Bayside Book Writers for that evening. Olivia checked her watch. She had less than an hour until her friends would arrive at the lighthouse keeper’s cottage and she desperately wanted to take a shower, to rinse off the fine dust of sadness that coated her body.
    Slipping her feet from her shoes, she picked up the phone, dialed The Boot Top, and paced across the floor, relishing the feel of the tiles against her skin. Olivia politely interrupted the hostess as she began her honey-tongued greeting and asked that Michel pick up the kitchen phone. Moments later, his voice ricocheted down the line, a