Page 49 of Beachfront Pages

"They have a coffee bar," she said. "And recliners."

"Traitor's amenities."

"I'm only here for your back room. Don't flatter yourself."

But she was smiling, and so was he, and neither of them seemed in any hurry to pretend otherwise.

She set the two coffees on the counter, both black, the way they'd fallen into taking them. Jan had handed them over with a look that Fiona had decided to ignore. She'd been ignoring a lot of looks lately. Sally's. Winnie's. Her own, in the mirror.

"You're early," Marty said, lifting his cup.

"I had a thought overnight. About the journal."

"Did you?" He came around the counter, and she caught the worn softness of his shirt, sleeves already rolled. "You realize most people, when they have a thought overnight, go back to sleep."

"Most people aren't onto something."

He gave her a look she was getting to know, the one that pretended to be long-suffering and wasn't. "Back room," he said. "Bring your evidence, Detective."

They headed to the back room of Tides & Tales. Well, honestly, it was barely a room. More of a generous closet that someone had lined with shelves, then kept lining until the shelves outnumbered the air. A single bulb hung from the ceiling. There was one chair, a wooden stool, and a narrow table. Marty had cleared the table off the first time she'd come back here. He'd swept a stack of auction catalogs onto the floor like a man making room for work that mattered.

Fiona opened her notebook on the table. She'd filled four pages since the last visit, her handwriting getting smaller and more urgent the way it always did when a story started pulling at her.

"Okay," she said. "The journal. The linguistics one. It calls the lighthouse a site of interest, J. Copeland co-authoring. We knew that."

"We did."

"But there's a footnote in the back. I almost missed it." She tapped the page. "It cites an earlier piece. Something about coastal installations and, I'm quoting, unusual technical arrangements. I want to find it."

"Maybe in the regional stuff?" He ran a finger along a shelf above his head. "Or the periodicals box. I never catalogued half of what came with the shop."

"You bought a building full of books and never read them all?"

"I've read most of them." He pulled down a clothbound volume, frowned at it, and slid it back. "The local material's the orphan shelf. Nobody wants it. I keep it because somebody should."

She liked that. She wrote it down without meaning to, then crossed it out, because she wasn't writing him, she was writing the lighthouse.

"You know your trouble," she said, watching him reshelve. "You hoard the books nobody reads and you sneer at the ones everybody does."

"I don't sneer."

"You sneered at my mysteries the first day I walked in. Comfort food, you said. Well-built machines."

"That was before I knew you'd argue with me about it for a month." He found another volume, checked the spine, kept it. "A man can revise his position."

"Can he?" She filed that away. Marty Fuller, revising.

For a while they worked without talking. He pulled volumes and handed them down. She cross-referenced, running her finger down indexes, calling out dates. The bulb buzzed faintly overhead. Outside, muffled, a gull was having an argument with another gull.

"Anything with Lockhart in the index, set it aside," she said.

"You're very bossy for someone using my collection for free."

"You love it."

He didn't answer that. She glanced up and he was already looking at her, and she went back to her index very quickly.

They both reached for the same shelf at the same moment, the low one near the corner. Her shoulder pressed into his and stayed there a beat longer than the room required. Neither of them moved. She was aware of the warmth of him, the ink-and-paper smell that was just Marty by now, and her pulse doing the flutter thing again.