Page 20 of Beachfront Pages

She pulled the thought up short. Drake didn't get to come in here too. He took up enough rooms already.

"Find anything?" Marty asked from the doorway.

"A lot of things. None of them what I came for."

"What'd you come for?"

She didn't have an answer that wouldn't give her away, so she gave him a different one. "The lighthouse. Sentinels had a chapter on it. Made me curious."

"Ah." He came in and leaned against the shelf, arms crossed. "Everybody gets curious about the lighthouse eventually. It's the town's favorite ghost."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning it's been here longer than any of us, and people like to fill the gaps with stories." He nodded at the far corner. "Bottom shelf, left. Anything local I've got is shoved down there. Town histories, a few society pamphlets, some academic things nobody's opened since the Eisenhower administration."

She crouched. The bottom shelf was a graveyard of the unloved, fat church directories and thin stapled committee reports and one cracked leather album with no title at all. She worked through them with her thumb, the way she went through anything, half her brain reading and half of it already asking what doesn't belong.

"You catalog any of this?" she asked.

"Define catalog."

"That's a no."

"That's a someday." He crouched beside her, knees cracking, and made a face about it. "I keep meaning to. Then a customer comes in wanting the new whatever, and someday gets later."

Her fingers stopped on a journal near the back. It was the wrong size for everything around it, taller and thinner, bound in faded gray board with a number stamped on the spine. Coastal Linguistics Quarterly. The date on the cover read 1954.

"What's this one?"

He took it, tilted it toward the lamp, pushed his glasses up to read without them, then gave up and pulled them back down. "Academic journal. Linguistics, looks like. Universities used to send these to anyone who'd take them. I think this came with a lot I bought from an estate. Honestly never read it."

"Linguistics." She took it back. "About what?"

"Regional speech, probably. Dialect studies. The way people on the coast talk versus inland." He shrugged. "Dry as a cracker. Why?"

"No reason." But she was already turning pages.

The journal was exactly as dull as he'd promised, for eleven pages.

Fiona skimmed an article on vowel shifts in fishing communities, another on loanwords from Spanish and French along the Gulf, a third so dense with phonetic symbols it might as well have been a code. Her eyes glazed. She kept turning anyway, because that was the other half of how she read, the part that didn't trust a quiet room to stay quiet.

"Told you," Marty said from the doorway, a box of inventory braced on his hip. "Dry as a cracker."

"It's not dry. It's hostile."

"That's academic writing. Hostility you have to subscribe to." He set the box down. "Want me to put it back?"

"Not yet." She waved him off without looking up. "Give me a minute."

"Take ten. I've got a shipment to lie to myself about."

She turned another page, and the next, half-listening to him scuff around the front room. Then a name in a footnote stopped her cold.

Lockhart.

She went back a paragraph and read it slow. The article was about coastal place-names and the people who studied them, and there, tucked into the middle of a sentence about field research sites, was the Lockhart Lighthouse. Described, in that flat scholarly way, as "a notable site of linguistic interest." No more than that. One clause, dropped and abandoned, the writer already moving on to a tide chart in the next line.

A notable site of linguistic interest.