Written in Stone (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

and shiny lipstick. Her dark eyes had been rimmed with black eyeliner and were framed with a sweep of curled lashes. She wore a liberal amount of blush and her shiny lip gloss captured the light.
    Olivia couldn’t stop staring at the stunning young woman. Natalie held her chin high and her gaze was both wary and challenging. She didn’t have a beauty queen’s smile. Her face didn’t glow like the other girls’ and her expression was more serious, conveying a blend of pride, strength, and determination. She reminded Olivia not of a pageant princess but of a warrior maiden.
    It was easy to see where Talley’s good looks had come from. But while Talley resembled Munin, Natalie did not. Natalie had a softer mouth, a sharper nose, and a less intense stare. Perhaps Talley’s father was related to Munin.
    “How do you fit into this puzzle?” Olivia asked the beautiful woman wearing a rhinestone tiara. As she stared at the Natalie of long ago, Haviland bounded up the stairs to the deck and sniffed at the door. He was ready for bed.
    “One more minute,” Olivia promised the poodle.
    Opening a new window on-screen, she tried to discover more about Natalie Mitchell both before and after she became Natalie Locklear, but came up dry. She then searched for Munin Cooper and struck out. Olivia closed the laptop’s lid with an irritated sigh.
    She was too tired to sort through more clues, and the rows of lovely, unlined Lumbee faces on her computer screen made her think of Willis.
    As she washed her face and brushed her teeth, Olivia wondered what would have become of Willis had he lived. Would he have stayed at The Boot Top while the casino was being built? Did he dream of becoming the head chef of the Golden Eagle’s restaurant? She could easily picture him doing just that—running a kitchen built on the piece of land that had belonged to his family. He might have even incorporated traditional Lumbee dishes into the menu.
    After pulling on a soft nightgown and slipping between her crisp, cotton sheets, Olivia ran her fingers through Haviland’s curls. Eventually, her eyes closed and her thoughts became random and disjointed. She fell asleep to an image of Talley Locklear holding the cottonmouth puppet aloft, its giant mouth glowing and its long fangs slick with venom.
    More than once, Olivia’s hand reached out, seeking the comforting warmth of Rawlings’ body. And though Haviland slept in a ball by her feet, he could not soothe her when she cried out in the night as oversized serpents and men in white hoods invaded her dreams.

Chapter 12
    All our progress is an unfolding, like the vegetable bud, you have first an instinct, then an opinion, then a knowledge, as the plant has root, bud, and fruit. Trust the instinct to the end, though you can render no reason.
    —R ALPH W ALDO E MERSON
    O livia woke to a cloudless, heron blue sky.
    After opening the deck doors to invite the sea-scented air inside, she brewed coffee and transferred four cups’ worth into a small thermos, served Haviland breakfast, and stuck a peach and a granola bar into her backpack. Pulling her metal detector from the storage closet beneath the deck, she climbed over the dunes, her fingertips reaching out to touch the tufted heads of the sea oats as she and Haviland made their way to the water’s edge.
    Though it hadn’t rained for the past few days, the Carolina coast was often hit with an afternoon thunderstorm during the summer months. Heavy banks of fierce gray clouds would amass with surprising speed, and within minutes, a hard rain would fall, pockmarking the sand and sending people scurrying for cover. Sheets of lightning would illuminate the sky, and the sound of water falling from the rooftops and splattering against the roads and sidewalks was nearly deafening.
    But then, as if someone flipped a switch, the storm would stop. The skies would clear, the sun would reappear, and the tourists would breathe a sigh of relief. These brief storms kept the gardens of Oyster Bay green from March until November. They also stirred up the ocean, coaxing the sand from the lightless bottom to roil and shift. Other things would move then too. Shells, seaweed, trash, and trinkets would become dislodged from the wet sand’s possessive grasp and find their way onshore.
    There were dozens of treasure hunters in Oyster Bay, but Olivia had a stretch of beach virtually to herself. She owned a significant portion of the spit of land called Tern’s Point.