Page 21 of Beachfront Pages

She read it again. What did that even mean? A lighthouse wasn't a site of linguistic interest. A lighthouse was bricks and a lamp and a family that kept it lit. People didn't travel to a lighthouse to study how anybody talked. They studied a town for that, a wharf, a church, a school. Not a tower on a spit of sand with one family living in it.

Her thumb found the byline at the top of the article. Two authors. The first name meant nothing to her, some professor at a college she'd never heard of.

The second name was J. Copeland.

She sat back on her heels.

"Marty."

"Mm."

"Who's J. Copeland?"

He looked up from his box. "Who?"

"There's an article in here." She held the journal open across her knees, finger on the line. "About place-names on the coast. It mentions the lighthouse. Calls it a 'site of linguistic interest,' whatever that's supposed to mean. One of the writers is a J. Copeland."

He set the box down and came over, took the journal, and read where she pointed. His lips moved a little, the old professor in him surfacing. "Copeland." He turned the name over. "Huh."

"You know it?"

"I know the journal. Or I know the type. There were a dozen of these little regional quarterlies back then, every state university ran one." He turned the cover over, checked the date, turned back. "Don't know the name, though. Why? It mean something to you?"

"No." She said it too fast. "I just… a lighthouse. Why would a linguist care about a lighthouse?"

"Could be nothing." He handed the journal back. "Could be the keeper let them use it as a base. Researchers do that, set up somewhere with a roof and a desk and work out from there. Maybe somebody studied the fishermen and slept at the lighthouse because it was cheap."

"Maybe." She didn't believe it, and she couldn't have said why. "But then they'd call the town the site of interest. Not the lighthouse."

Marty looked at her, and that careful, deciding look came back into his face. "You read footnotes like other people read the last page first."

"Occupational habit."

"What's the occupation?"

She'd walked right into it. "I read a lot," she said. It was the same dodge she'd used last time, and they both heard it.

He let it go. That was the thing about Marty, she was learning. He noticed everything and pressed almost none of it, and that was somehow worse, because it made her want to tell him things.

"You can borrow it," he said, when she finally stood and brushed off her knees. "The journal. Not the poet. The journal nobody wants."

"You're sure?"

"It's been on that shelf since before I owned the place. I think it can survive a field trip to Sea Glass Cottage."

She held it against her chest, oddly reluctant to put it in her bag, as if it might disappear if she stopped touching it. "I'll take care of it."

"I don't doubt it." He walked her back through the front room, and at the register he paused. "For what it's worth. If you're chasing the lighthouse, Winnie's the one who'd know. Lockharts have kept that light four generations. There's nothing about that place she hasn't heard."

"Winnie." She thought of the woman's steady eyes, the way she watched a person like she was reading the parts they didn't say out loud. "Maybe."

"She's prickly about it sometimes. The history." He scratched his jaw. "I asked her once about something I'd found, a reference to the lighthouse during the war. She changed the subject so fast I got whiplash. So go easy."

"Noted." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Thank you. For the back room. And the dust."

"Come back and insult my taste anytime."

"I might."