River's End by Nora Roberts Page A

chest.
    It was a cherry wood chest with a domed lid and polished-brass fittings. It was always kept deep under the overhang, and always locked. She noticed such things. Her grandfather said she had eyes like a cat, which had made her giggle when she’d been younger. Now it was something she took pride in.
    Today, the chest wasn’t shoved back under the roofline, and neither was it locked. Grandma must have put something away, Olivia thought and strolled casually over as if she weren’t particularly interested.
    She knew the story about Pandora’s box and how the curious woman had opened it and set free all the ills upon the world. But this wasn’t the same thing, she told herself as she knelt in front of it. And since it wasn’t locked, what was the harm in opening it up and taking a peek inside?
    It was probably just full of sentimental junk or musty old clothes or pictures turning yellow.
    But her fingers tingled—in warning or anticipation—as she lifted the heavy lid.
    The scent struck her first and made her breath come fast and hard.
    Cedar, from the lining. Lavender. Her grandfather had a sweep of it planted on the side of the house. But under those, something else. Something both foreign and familiar. Though she couldn’t identify it, the waft of it had her heart beating fast, like a quick, impatient knocking in her chest.
    The tingling in her fingers became intense, making them shake as she reached inside. There were videos, labeled only with dates and stored in plain black dust covers. Three thick photo albums, boxes of varying sizes. She opened one very like the box her grandparents used to store their old-fashioned Christmas balls.
    There, resting in foam for protection, were half a dozen decorative bottles.
    “The magic bottles,” she whispered. It seemed the attic was suddenly filled with low and beautiful laughter, flickering images, exotic scents.
    On your sixteenth birthday, you can choose the one you like best. But you mustn’t play with them, Livvy. They might break. You could cut your hand or step on glass.
    Mama leaned over, her soft hair falling over the side of her face. Laughing, her eyes full of fun, she sprayed a small cloud of perfume on Olivia’s throat.
    The scent. Mama’s perfume. Scrambling up to her knees again, Olivia leaned into the chest, breathed long and deep. And smelled her mother.
    Setting the box aside, she reached in for the first photo album. It was heavy and awkward, so she laid it across her lap. There were no pictures of her mother in the house. Olivia remembered there had been, but they’d disappeared a long time before. The album was full of them, pictures of her mother when she’d been a young girl, pictures of her with Jamie, and with her parents. Smiling, laughing, making faces at the camera.
    Pictures in front of the house and in the house, at the campground and at the lake. Pictures with Grandpop when his hair had been more gold than silver, and with Grandma in a fancy dress.
    There was one of her mother holding a baby. “That’s me,” Olivia whispered. “Mama and me.” She turned the next page and the next, all but devouring each photo, until they abruptly stopped. She could see the marks on the page where they’d been removed.
    Impatient now, she set it aside and reached for the next.
    Not family photos this time but newspaper clippings, magazine articles. Her mother on the cover of People and Newsweek and Glamour. Olivia studied these first, looking deep, absorbing every feature. She had her mother’s eyes. She’d known that, remembered that, but to see it so clearly, to look with her own into them, the color, the shape, the slash of dark eyebrows.
    Excitement, grief, pleasure swirled through her in a tangled mass as she stroked a finger over each glossy image. She’d been so beautiful, so perfect.
    Then her heart leaped again as she paged through and found a series of pictures of her mother with a dark-haired man. He was handsome, like a poet, she