Written in Stone (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

animals know things we don’t.”
    Everyone nodded in agreement and then one of the women turned to Captain Fergusson. “What’s the sea been tellin’ you?”
    “She keeps her secrets close, but the moon says plenty.” He put his whiskey down. Cupping his left hand, he raised it into the air, palm up. “We got a crescent moon right now and she’s lyin’ on her back like she’s waitin’ for her man to come to bed. We won’t see a drop of rain until she gets up again. Mark my words.”
    The women tut-tutted and murmured about summers gone by. Summers of unrelenting heat. Long days of dry wind and parched ground. They talked of how the land had gone thirsty even though the ocean was close enough to touch. The salt had clung to people’s skin, making them sticky, short-tempered, and lethargic.
    Olivia spotted a local farmer, Lou Huckabee, on the fringes of the group. He’d been listening to the exchange closely. “I’ll still get you all your produce, Miss Olivia,” he said above the music. “Don’t you fret.”
    “I know you will, Lou. And every piece of fruit will taste like it was plucked from the richest soil on earth, washed, and delivered straight to my kitchens. That’s why I won’t serve my customers anything else. You have a feel for growing things like no one I’ve ever met.”
    He dipped his head at the compliment, flushing from neck to forehead. “It’s a callin’, to be sure.”
    “To farmers,” Olivia said, and held up her glass.
    “To farmers!” the men and women around her echoed.
    Next, they toasted fishermen, fishermen’s wives, an array of different types of laborers, Millay, Olivia’s mother, and on and on until Olivia was dangerously close to being drunk. Despite the close air and the way the whiskey made her feel overheated, she was too content to leave. And when Captain Fergusson began to tell a tale about a pod of dolphins changing into mermaids, she became as instantly enraptured as the rest of his inebriated audience.
    While the old man spoke in a voice as weathered and worn as his face, Olivia thought about the note Flynn had given her. She glanced around at the people in the bar, reflecting on how each and every one of them had grown up listening to the stories of their parents and grandparents. Their elders passed down folklore on the weather, animal husbandry, treating ailments, courting, raising children, and more. And here they were now, sharing those same stories. Old, well-loved, and oft-repeated stories.
    They are as much a part of us as our DNA
, she thought. She knew that in the small, coastal town of Oyster Bay, the local legends focused mainly on the sea. She’d heard them over and over since she was little, but now she was suddenly curious to hear what tales Flynn’s storytellers would bring to share with them.
    A burst of laughter erupted as Captain Fergusson reached the end of his story. The woman in the tank top took a long pull from her beer and said, “Them mermaids might not be real, but my daddy saw the flaming ghost ship last September. Said it came out of the fog like somethin’ sneakin’ through the gates of hell. He was supposed to bring his catch into Okracoke that night so it’d be fresh for the mornin’ market, but he sailed home with it instead.”
    No one laughed at her. Millay wiped off the bar and poured another round. “I’ve heard about that ship before. Would you tell me the whole story?”
    The woman nodded solemnly, but there was a gleam of excitement in her eyes. Olivia saw it and smiled to herself. She’d seen the same spark in her mother’s eyes every night at bedtime. Without fail, Olivia was sent to sleep with a spectrum of wonderful images and words floating through her mind. And though her childhood was long gone, a good story was no less magical to her now.
    “A long time ago, a ship full of folks from England sailed to Okracoke,” the woman began.
    Olivia turned away from the storyteller so that she wouldn’t see her take out her phone. She quickly sent a text to Flynn, telling him she’d be glad to help defray the costs of the retreat, and then turned the phone off and put it back in her purse.
    When the woman was done with her tale of murder, robbery, and revenge, the talk returned to the weather, as it so often did at Fish Nets
.
    “It’s hard to prepare for a dry season,” Lou Huckabee told one of the fishermen. “I can irrigate, but nothin’s the same as real rain.”
    “That’s true