A Killer Plot (A Books by the Bay Mystery) by Ellery Adams Read Free Book Online

summer!”
    Blake grabbed her roughly by the arm and propelled her past Olivia and Camden’s table. “It’s not drugs, babe, so get off your high horse. It’s something much more dangerous than that,” he muttered darkly. “And since I’ve gotta protect your precious rep, I won’t tell you anything else, except that my plan is going to make me a shitload of money.”
    Camden stared after them, a greedy gleam in his eyes. “I wonder what bar he could be referencing?”
    “If Heidi thinks it’s gross and fishermen hang out there, then there’s one likely choice. Blake is conducting his illicit business at Fish Nets. The establishment where Millay works.”
    “Olivia my dear, after we’re done with our dessert, how would you like to—”
    “Not a chance,” Olivia cut him off. “Later this evening, after we’re done here, I will be in my lovely house, clad in a pair of silk pajamas, cocktail in hand, watching Masterpiece Theater . I confess to having enjoyed myself tonight, but I have no intention of spending a single minute in a foul-smelling bar filled with men whose cologne is a mixture of smoke, sweat, and fish or with women whose clothes are either three sizes too small or veritably see-through. Nothing you say will convince me to change my mind.” She placed her empty mug against its saucer with a firm clink. “I will never set foot in that disgusting place.”
    “Never say never,” Camden said with an expressive wink.
    Olivia felt an inexplicable tinge of anxiety as she headed into the kitchen to collect her thoroughly gorged poodle.

Chapter 3
     
    The fog comes on little cat feet.
    —CARL SANDBURG
     
     
     
     
     
    T he fog had always brought gifts to Olivia Limoges.
    They were infrequent. And odd. Yet she knew they were meant for her. An aloof child, ever drifting along the shoreline near the lighthouse keeper’s cottage, Olivia had spent endless hours turning over the slick husks of horseshoe crabs or collapsing holes dug by industrious coquinas. She poked at sand crabs with sticks and taunted seagulls with crusts from pimiento cheese sandwiches.
    Olivia kept her gifts in pickle jars. She labeled each jar with the year on a piece of masking tape. Even now, at forty, she loved to twist the lid from one of the glass jars and pour the contents out onto the saffron and cobalt scrolls of her largest Iranian rug, releasing the scents of seaweed and ocean dampened sand. She’d lean over, her shock of white blond hair aglow in the lamplight, and finger a marble, a wheat penny, a star-shaped earring with missing rhinestones, a rusty skeleton key. Then, another year: a yellow hair barrette in the shape of a dragonfly, a fishhook, a one-shot liquor bottle with no label, a tennis ball, a steel watchband, a shotgun shell.
    Today she took the metal detector along on her morning walk. She went out early, as soon as the fog rolled back, dressed in cotton sweats and Wellingtons. Haviland danced through the surf beside her as they marched north by northeast, Olivia swinging the detector back and forth like a horizontal pendulum as she inhaled the salt-laden breeze. Her Bounty Hunter Discovery 3300 issued a cacophony of vibrating clicks and murmurs that sounded more like the language of dolphins than something constructed of metal and electrical wire.
    Haviland barked at a low-flying gull as the digital target identification on the Bounty Hunter’s LCD display screen leapt toward the right, showing a full arc of black triangles. Olivia paused, removed her trench shovel from her backpack, and began to dig. She could have ordered a top-of-the-line detector—one with an attached digger, incredible depth perception, and the ability to function underwater, but she preferred the challenge offered by the simpler model.
    “Help dig, Haviland,” Olivia commanded her dog in much the same tone she used on the employees of her restaurant or the tenants of the buildings she owned downtown.
    Haviland responded