Page 23 of Beachfront Pages

"It's a consistent kind of slow."

Sally laughed, which let Fiona off the hook, and the talk moved on around them. Melissa was deep into her day now, the light off the water, the way the lower windows didn't sit right.

"Sam keeps saying they were never meant to," Melissa said. "The windows. He's got a whole theory."

The name caught Fiona's ear.

"Sam?" she said.

"Sam Copeland." Melissa turned to her. "He's a historian. Maritime stuff, old coastal buildings. We've been working together a bit now, him on the records and me on the photographs. He's the one who got me looking at the window placements in the first place."

Copeland.

Fiona set her plate down on her knee. "He's here? In town?"

"Has been a while. He knows more about this stretch of coast than people who were born on it." Melissa tipped her head. "Why, you know the name?"

And there was her opening. She glanced at Winnie and hesitated, hearing Marty's warning about how Winnie didn't like being questioned.

"I think I might've read it," Fiona said. "That's the strange part. Marty lent me an old journal from his back room. A linguistics quarterly, of all things, from the fifties. There's an article in it about place-names on the coast, and it mentions the lighthouse. Calls it a 'site of linguistic interest.'" She gave a small shrug. "One of the authors was a Copeland. J. Copeland."

"Huh." Melissa's eyebrows went up, interested. "That's a funny coincidence. Sam'd get a kick out of that. You should ask him, he loves an old paper. He'd probably know if it was family or just a name."

"Maybe I will."

She meant to leave it there. She honestly did. But Winnie was right there in the firelight, the woman who'd kept this lighthouse going for years, and the question came out before Fiona could weigh it.

She turned and said carefully, "Winnie, did the Copelands have some connection to the lighthouse? Way back? The paper made it sound like there was history."

The change in Winnie was subtle but unmistakable. The smile that had sat so easily a moment before went stiff at the corners, held up by effort now instead of nothing. Winnie's shoulders drew up the smallest fraction. Her thumb stopped where it had been running along the rim of the mug.

A person who wasn't looking would have missed all of it. Fiona was looking. She always was. It was the writer in her and it didn't come with an off switch.

And the moment she saw it, she wished she hadn't asked.

"The families knew each other. Years ago." Winnie's voice came out even. Too even. "Long before your time or mine, most of it."

"I didn't mean to pry," Fiona said. "It only caught my eye in the journal."

"You're not prying, dear." Winnie lifted the mug and drank, and the drink bought her a second. "There's just not much to it. People came and went back then. Visitors, summer folk, university people. The lighthouse drew all kinds." She set the mug on her knee and turned it a slow quarter turn. "I wouldn't read much into a footnote. Half of what's written about that place is somebody guessing. The other half is selling postcards."

It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Fiona had thought versions of it herself, about fans who'd decided a throwaway line in book six was a clue to book nine. Don't read too much into it. It was what a person said, or thought, when there was, in fact, a great deal to read into it.

"You're probably right," Fiona said, and let it go, because she didn't have it in her to do anything else. Whatever was back there, it was Winnie's.

She wasn't the only one who'd seen it, either.

Sally had gone still. Her gaze cut to Winnie the instant the name dropped, quick and worried, the look one old friend throws another when a sore subject lands at a party. Then Sally looked at Fiona. Then back to Winnie. A whole silent sentence passed between the two women in under a second, and Fiona couldn't read the words of it, only that it was being said.

Sixty-three years of friendship had its own language. Fiona didn't have the dictionary.

"Well," Sally said, and her voice came up bright and a touch too quick, "I'll tell you what I have been hearing about. Emily's show." She brushed crumbs off her lap and took in the whole circle, gathering them, steering. "Second Friday, at the gallery. Grant's giving her the whole back wall. Eight pieces, is it?"

"Eight. If I finish the last two." Emily made a face. "Maybe seven and a very large frame."

"You'll finish them," Grant said from across the fire.

"I'll bring lemon bars. Maybe six dozen or so," Cassidy said.