Page 15 of Beachfront Pages

Then she started reading from the top of the chapter, the way she should have the night before, and the cottage went quiet around her, the coffee went cold, and she didn't notice either thing.

The lighthouse had been lit for the first time in 1885. She hadn't known that. She'd assumed—the way you assumed about things that had simply always been there—that it had appeared more or less whole, the way it stood now. But it had taken three years to build, hauled up stone by stone by men who'd died before they saw it finished, and Winnie's great-grandfather had been the one to climb up and light the first lamp, a young man then, the first keeper of a light that barely had a town to guide anything into.

After him, his son. After the son, his son again. Generations of them, the light handed down the way other families handed down a name. A whole family organized around the single proposition that the light would not go out, not on their watch, not while there was a Lockhart left to climb the stairs.

And then the government had stopped paying for keepers. Automation, the book said, in the flat way the book said everything. The Coast Guard had wanted to decommission it, and there'd been some wrangling Fiona didn't fully follow, and at the end of it the Lockharts ended up owning it rather than let it go dark or fall into the sea. And they'd kept it private ever since, and they were keeping it still, in the person of a silver-haired woman who brought soup to strangers.

Fiona sat back.

Her pulse had picked up. She noticed it the way she noticed things in other people, from a slight distance, with interest. My pulse is racing. Why's my pulse racing?

Because this was a story. Not a fact, not a pamphlet, not a Wikipedia stub. A story, with a shape to it, with that particular charge a story had when it was true and nobody had bothered to tell it right. A family who'd given a century to a light. A child who'd moved in a hundred-year-old photograph and would never be named now. There was a novel in this. There were three novels in this. She could feel it the way she used to feel the books coming, that low hum behind her breastbone, the one that had gone silent months ago and that she'd assumed was gone for good.

It wasn't gone for good.

It had just been waiting for something worth the trouble.

She opened the laptop again. Not for Hank. Hank could keep waiting in his alley. Hank had been waiting for months. Another hour would not hurt him.

She opened a browser instead and typed Lockhart Lighthouse Starlight Shores history and hit return, and the afternoon disappeared.

The internet, it turned out, knew very little, which was its own kind of fascinating. A historical-register listing with a paragraph of dry facts. A maritime-society page that hadn't been updated since 2009. A handful of tourist photos. A genealogy forum where someone calling themselves GulfCoastGran had been trying for years to trace the keepers and people involved with the lighthouse and kept hitting a wall, where the records got thin in a way the poster found "frustrating" and Fiona found, professionally, electric. Records didn't go thin by accident. Records went thin because somebody made them thin.

Now where had that thought come from?

She was being a mystery writer. She knew she was being a mystery writer. Forty years of training your brain to find the hidden body and you couldn't walk past a thin patch in the historical record without wanting to dig. It probably meant nothing. A small-town lighthouse with a paperwork gap was not a conspiracy. It was just a paperwork gap.

But she opened a new document anyway. A blank one. The same blank that had mocked her all morning over Hank's body, except this time the blank didn't mock. This time her hands knew what to do.

LIGHTHOUSE — notes, she typed at the top, and then she started.

Built 1885. First keeper, Lockhart—find the first name. How the Lockharts ended up owning the lighthouse. The records thinning. Winnie's great-grandfather as a young man with the first match. The blurred child in the 1911 photograph, the one who'd moved, the one nobody would ever know now had been laughing or crying or simply unable to hold still.

She wrote a paragraph about the child. It had nothing to do with research. It was just good. She kept it.

The notes got longer.

She told herself it was procrastination, and it was, obviously it was, she had a contracted manuscript and an agent with good news she couldn't bear and a detective stuck in the rain. This was the worst possible use of an afternoon she'd already half-wasted. A grown woman with a deadline did not spend her afternoon chasing a dead lighthouse keeper through a genealogy forum because the blurred white child in a hundred-year-old photograph had ignited something inside her.

She typed another line.

She told herself she'd stop after this one. She didn't.

Outside the window the light was going gold over the water. Somewhere across the courtyard Winnie was probably baking something, and Hank Carson stood patiently in his alley in a city that didn't exist. Fiona Wells sat in the writer's nook of Sea Glass Cottage with cold coffee at her elbow and wrote three pages of notes about a story she had no business starting and absolutely no intention of writing.

The phone buzzed once more, late in the afternoon. She didn't look up to see who it was.

Chapter 6

Winnie woke before the light, the way she had every morning of her life, and lay still a moment listening to the lighthouse. People thought a lighthouse was a quiet thing. It wasn't. The old tower talked all night if a person knew how to hear it. The tick of the lens turning. The settle of the stairs. The wind finding the same gap in the gallery rail it had found for a hundred and forty years. She'd learned the language of it as a girl, sitting on her father's knee. She could still tell weather by the sound, the way some people told it by their knees.

Though her knees told her plenty too, these days.

She sat up, waited for the ache in her hip to decide how the day would go, and decided it would go fine. It always went fine. She didn't have time for it to go any other way.

The robe first. Then the slippers she kept by the bed, because the floors of the keeper's quarters held the night chill long past dawn. She'd had Clint look at the heating twice. Twice he'd told her it was working perfectly and the house was simply old. Which was Clint's way of saying she was getting old, though he'd never in a hundred years say such a thing to her face.

"Working perfectly," she said to the empty room. "We'll see about that come January."