Written in Stone (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

compliment with a dip of her chin. “Do you usually attend the festivals? They seem rather unsophisticated for a Fortune Five Hundred CEO type.”
    He smiled. “You got me there. I only came to this one because it was so close to Oyster Bay. To the last place Camille and I—” He halted and then began again. “I looked her up about ten years ago only to discover that she was dead. Until then, I’d forced myself to forget about her. I had a wife and children and a fulfilling career. I told myself I’d never look back, but Camille was a difficult woman to forget.”
    Suddenly, Olivia understood. “So you were already married when you had an affair with my mother. Did she know about your wife?”
    Charles gave her a dark look. He probably wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to so bluntly. “Not at first,” he said, recovering his affable manner. “Camille and I met at a museum fund-raiser in Raleigh, but even then I knew I wanted to move to New York. My wife’s father had promised me a job at his network after I proved myself at the local station. I worked my ass off. I didn’t have the advantageous upbringing that my wife or your mother had, so I had to learn how to polish my rough edges and shed all traces of where I’d come from.”
    “Including your brother?” Olivia asked, feeling a rare pang of sympathy for Willie Wade.
    “He and I never got along. He never wanted to be more, to be better than our father or all the Wade fishermen before him,” Charles said, his voice rising slightly. “And he wasn’t better. He was
worse
. Flunked out of high school, got arrested for a dozen petty crimes, starting drinking at fourteen. How Camille could stand it, I’ll never know.”
    Olivia stared at him. “You got her pregnant, that’s how!” she snapped. “And my guess is that you told my mother about your wife and your big career plans at about the same time she discovered she was carrying your baby.”
    All the color drained from Charles’s face. “What?
My
baby?”
    Dixie arrived with Olivia’s coffee and grits. She shot Olivia a worried glance and then glided away to check on the customers at the
Evita
booth. Olivia poured a splash of cream into her coffee and tried to calm down. “How did my mother meet Willie?”
    Charles searched his memory. “She wanted to be introduced to my family, and even though I knew there was no point in it, she could be very convincing and so I brought her to Oyster Bay. I figured once she saw the place, she’d be turned off and would drop the subject of meeting my folks. But she loved it. She fell in love with every inch of this dinky, little town. With
this
!” He made a sweeping gesture. “Unfortunately, we also ran into my brother that day. He invited us out for drinks, probably because he wanted to see me squirm, and he and Camille got along just fine. Still, I never imagined she’d marry him.”
    Olivia fought to contain her indignation. “She couldn’t have you, so she took the closest thing. And your brother accepted her even though she was probably carrying your baby. He was more honorable than you could ever hope to be, high school dropout or not.” Olivia’s voice was cold and hostile. “My mother tried to protect me from having to grow up a fatherless bastard. She couldn’t have predicted that Willie could barely look at me, that he saw his brother’s child every time I walked into the room. She couldn’t have known that none of us would ever be happy.”
    Charles Wade rubbed his chin nervously. “I’m sorry. I had no idea she was pregnant, and the last time I saw my brother, he told me never to step foot in Oyster Bay again—that I wasn’t wanted here anymore. Believe me, I was glad to leave it all behind. I didn’t even come back when my parents died.” He looked at Olivia plaintively. “Listen, I love my wife. We have a good life together. I loved your mother too, but . . .” He threw out his hands. “What can I do to make you see that I’m not a bad guy? How can I make amends?”
    Narrowing her eyes, Olivia leaned over and said, “You can keep your promise. Leave this town and never come back.”
    Startled, Charles reached for her hand. “But you’re my daughter, aren’t you?”
    Olivia drew away as if his touch would burn her skin. “Biologically? Maybe. Maybe not. In any case, I had a father. His name was Willie Wade. Now I see that he loved a woman who was in love with his own brother and that he raised a kid who