ABBM07 - Writing All Wrongs by Adams Ellery

Author:Adams, Ellery [Adams, Ellery]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: cThriller, epub-for-travel
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Olivia drove straight to Emmett’s house. Ignoring the yellow seal placed across the front door to warn trespassers against unauthorized entry, Olivia found the spare key in the duck decoy by the back door and entered Shifting Sands by the rear entrance. The moment she was inside, she called Caesar and Calpurnia.

There was no response. No barking. No clicking of nails on hardwood. The house was empty.

Olivia took out her phone, which she’d turned off at the police station, and noticed the string of text messages and missed calls. She dialed Rawlings’s number.

Rawlings didn’t bother saying hello. “Where are you?”

“I’m back on the island,” she said. “Emmett asked me to look after his dogs. Please tell me they weren’t taken to the county shelter.”

“Your father has them.” Rawlings was angry. “Damn it, Olivia. I’ve been trying to reach you for the past two hours. We all have.”

Olivia glanced around Emmett’s living room. “He didn’t do it, Sawyer. Give me five minutes. After that, I’ll meet you and explain everything.”

“Olivia—” The note of reproach in his voice was unmistakable, and Olivia had a bad feeling that he knew exactly where she was.

“Please, this is important,” she said. “Just tell the others that we’ll be spending most of the cocktail hour coming up with a game plan.”

Rawlings grunted. “Five minutes, Olivia, and don’t take anything from the professor’s house. You can’t help him if you’re in a holding cell.”

“I won’t,” Olivia said and hung up.

She went straight to Emmett’s bedroom to see if the book on Theodosia Burr was still on his nightstand. It wasn’t, and Olivia assumed the police had bagged it as evidence. What remained, however, were two nonfiction books about a nineteenth-century North Carolina merchant. Flipping through the hardbacks, Olivia spotted photographs of a plantation house overlooking the Cape Fear River. Emmett had also marked the pages detailing the drowning death of the merchant’s daughter with sticky notes. On one of the notes he’d written: Add death to chapter 10. Murder by slave? Servant? Jilted lover?

Olivia sank down on the bed. She hadn’t realized until this moment that a small part of her had doubted Emmett. She’d wanted to believe him, but she’d been deceived by people she cared about before. She also knew that Emmett’s story could be sprinkled with just enough truth to throw her off balance. And there was his bottle opener to consider as well. If Emmett hadn’t dropped it at the scene, then how had it gotten there?

“That’s almost as perplexing as the idea of your gaining access to the museum,” she said to the empty room. “How could you possibly have gotten inside and stolen that antique dress?”

Amy.

The name surfaced, unbidden, in Olivia’s mind.

She headed for the door. She needed to be with Rawlings and her friends. She needed to tell them everything so they could help her sort her addled thoughts and make sense of her contradictory emotions.

Moving past the kitchen, she caught sight of the empty food bowls on the floor.

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