Page 26 of Beachfront Pages

"Or that." He gave her a sidelong look. "You'd have made a fair historian, Winnie Lockhart."

"I've had practice. Living on top of the evidence."

For a while neither of them said anything.

The lighthouse threw its beam out over the water, swung it back, gave them a moment of light and a moment of dark, over and again, the way it had her whole life.

"My father used to sit right here," she said. "He'd watch that beam like it owed him an answer."

"Mine watched it too." Sam laced his fingers over one knee. "Differently. He'd have had a notebook open. Numbers running down both margins." A short breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "I found stacks of them after he passed. Formulas I still can't read, half of them. Some of them about this place, I think, though he never once wrote the name."

They were careful. Both of them. She heard it in him, and she was certain he heard it in her.

"I had a question put to me yesterday," she said.

"Did you?"

"One of my tenants. Fiona, in Sea Glass." She made herself keep her voice level, a woman passing along a bit of gossip. "She found an old paper. Some journal from the fifties, about coastal place-names. Dry reading. It called the lighthouse a site of interest. Linguistic interest, if you can believe it."

Sam went still in a way she felt more than saw.

"It listed an author," she said. "J. Copeland."

The beam swung over them and away.

"My father," Sam said quietly.

"I know."

He was quiet a moment. "He wasn't a linguist, Winnie. He was a mathematician, same as I was before the history bug got me. Why he'd put his name on a paper about words, I couldn't tell you. I've wondered about that journal since I cleared out my father's study."

"You knew about it?"

"I knew it existed. I never could lay hands on a copy." He turned his head and looked at her. Really looked, in the failing light, the way he used to when she was a girl. "And now it turns up in your tenant's lap. Funny how this town keeps the past in a drawer and forgets to lock it."

She almost smiled. She'd missed that, the dry way he had of saying the truth sideways.

"She doesn't know it's you," Winnie said. "The Copeland in town. She thinks it's a coincidence of names."

"Is that what we're calling it?"

"For now." She pressed her thumb harder against the stone. "Sam, I shut her down. Right there in front of Sally and the others. I went cold as a flounder and she saw it. She reads people for her living, that one. I might as well have drawn her a map."

"So she'll ask me instead."

Winnie nodded. "I assume so."

"And what's she like, this tenant of yours?"

"Sharp. Lonely, though she'd sooner eat the bench than admit it." Winnie thought of the drawn curtains, the half-truths, the ring of pale skin on a finger that had worn a band too long. "She came here running from something. They mostly do. I put her in Sea Glass and I've been feeding her and waiting on her to remember she's allowed to want things. And now she's gone and pulled the loose thread on the one story I'd hoped to keep wound up a while longer."

"You sound fond of her."

"I'm fond of all of them. It's a weakness." She huffed. "But yes. Her especially. She reminds me of someone."

"Who?"

"Never you mind."