“Wouldn’t do any good.”
Her sister, Olivia realized, was in a mood to vent, not to work on solutions. “I can always help.”
“You have your hands full as it is.” Jess sighed, calmer. “It’s going to be a long day.”
“Why don’t you stay in Boston and not kill yourself to get back here tonight? You can stay at my apartment. I have it until the end of the month. I left the couch. It’s not bad to sleep on.”
“That’d be great.” Jess gave a wry smile. “What if I run into your friend Marilyn?”
“You won’t run into her.”
“I know she did something to you—”
“She looked after herself. That’s what Marilyn Bryson does. Maybe we should, too.”
They walked up to the parking lot together, the mill’s handful of employees arriving for the day. Olivia noticed green shoots on the bank of the brook and remembered that her mother had planted a hundred daffodil bulbs there last fall, turning down help from anyone. She’d wanted to do the work herself.
Jess stopped at her truck, one hand on the driver’s door as she squinted back at her older sister. “You love Boston, Liv. Are you sure you’ll be happy living in Knights Bridge full-time?”
“So far, so good, Jess. Really. I’m fine.”
“You have big plans for Carriage Hill. Between it and freelancing you’re already working long hours. Unless you’re very lucky or get some major backing, this first year’s going to be tight financially and grueling in terms of workload. I can help—I want to—”
“You have your hands full with your work here.” There was also whatever was going on with Jess and her almost-fiancé, Olivia thought. The last thing Jess needed right now was to worry about her sister. Olivia gave her a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry about me, okay? I was ready to make a change or I wouldn’t be here.”
“Dad says Dylan McCaffrey’s shown up. Your note about the mess in Grace’s yard must have gotten to him.”
“It’s his yard now,” Olivia amended.
“He reminded you of that, did he?”
“That’s one old house that should be condemned,” Mark Flanagan said, emerging from behind an SUV. He was angular and long legged, his dark blond hair cut short. He wore pricey jeans and a black windbreaker over a flannel shirt, his usual outfit even through a good chunk of summer. “There’s no point in sinking money into trying to renovate it.” He stood next to Jess. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to eavesdrop.”
“When did you get here?” Jess asked, regaining her composure.
“A few minutes ago, but I’m not staying. I just need to check on an order. I saw you two talking and figured I’d say hi.”
She yanked open the door. “What were you doing, sneaking up on us?”
He gave Jess a mystified look. “You probably couldn’t hear me over the water.” He left it at that and turned to Olivia. “I ran into Dylan McCaffrey at breakfast this morning. I understand he’s the new owner of Grace Webster’s old house, but I can’t believe he’s staying there. That place is a dump. I’m not sure it’s even safe there.”
For no reason that could possibly make sense to her, Olivia felt her cheeks flame. “He looked alive and well an hour ago. He was digging out a drain, and the house was still standing.”
“What’s he doing here?” Mark asked.
Jess either hadn’t noticed his mystified look or was pretending she hadn’t. “Olivia wrote to him.”
Mark raised his eyebrows at Olivia. “You wrote to him? Why?”
“I asked him to clean up the yard,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “It’s an eyesore. It sends a bad message to people passing by—”
“What people passing by?” Mark asked, amused.
“No one now, but I am opening a business. My clientele will want a picturesque country setting. They won’t want to go by rusted appliances and cast-off mattresses.”
“Relax, Liv,” Mark said. “People who want to eat chive soup won’t mind passing the Webster place. You can tell them it’s authentic country.”
“Not funny, Mark,” Olivia said good-naturedly as he continued across the parking lot to the mill entrance. “Not funny at all. And it’s not chive soup. It’s potato-leek soup sprinkled with chives.”
He laughed. “I feel so much better.”
Jess watched him disappear inside the mill. “Don’t mind him, Liv. He’s getting to be as big a stick-in-the-mud as Dad. I can’t wait to try your soup.”
“Thanks, but he was just teasing. Jess—”
“I have to get going. I’ll see you later. Good luck with McCaffrey.”
She climbed into her truck. Olivia shook her head with bemusement and returned to her car. She drove the short distance into the village, turning onto another of Knights Bridge’s narrow roads, this one dead-ending at a popular gate that fishermen and hikers used to access Quabbin. She pulled into Rivendell, a small assisted living facility situated on open land dotted with sugar maples and white pines, with views of the waters of the reservoir in the distance. Audrey Frost, Olivia’s grandmother, lived in a one-bedroom apartment down the hall from Grace Webster.
Grace had been entirely unhelpful in tracking down the new owner of her house, which Olivia had attributed to her advanced age. Grace was, after all, in her nineties. With Dylan’s arrival, Olivia was no longer as sure age had anything to do with it. The story of how he’d ended up with the house had too many unanswered questions.
Maybe Grace was hiding something. Maybe whatever she was hiding had brought Duncan McCaffrey to Knights Bridge—and now his son.
“Or maybe I didn’t get enough sleep last night,” Olivia muttered under her breath as she passed the sunroom. She spotted Grace in a chair, alone in front of a wall of windows, and went in. “I thought that was you. Good morning, Miss Webster.”
Grace beamed, her eyes sparkling at her visitor. “So good to see you, Olivia. You know you can call me Grace now. I was always ‘Miss Webster’ to my students, but I’m no longer a teacher. We live in a more casual age than when I was younger.” She set a small but powerful pair of binoculars on her lap. She was a tiny woman with snow-white hair she kept neatly curled, and light blue eyes that added charm to what could be a stern demeanor. Her attention was on birds fluttering at feeders outside. “I just saw a male cardinal. We’ll have to take the feeders down soon, though. Now that the weather’s warming up, they’ll attract bears and mountain lions.”
“Mountain lions, Grace?” Olivia asked with a skeptical smile.
“Darn right,” she said, clutching the binoculars with her arthritis-gnarled fingers. “I heard that catamount scat was
