Page 70 of Beachfront Pages

"You helped by being honest. Turns out that's what I needed."

Sally had stayed quiet exactly as long as she was able. She set down her glass. "I don't know who this Hank is, but I'm glad he's out of the alley. Sounds like a dreadful spot to leave a man."

"It was raining the whole time, too," Fiona said.

"Now that's just cruel."

"I'm a mystery writer, Sally. Cruel is the job."

"Put me in one," Cassidy said. "I want to be in a Hank book. I want to be the one who did it."

"You want to be the murderer?"

"Obviously I want to be the murderer. Who wants to be the body?"

"I'll be the body," Grant said, not looking up from his napkin. "Less dialogue."

"You'd be a wonderful body," Fiona told him.

"He really would," Emily said. "He goes so still when he's drawing. I've checked his pulse before."

"I'm not putting any of you in a book." Fiona held up a hand against the protest already starting. "The new one doesn't touch this place. That was the promise I made, and I'm keeping it. The town in the book won't have a thing to do with this one. Except the way the light comes around. I couldn't give that up."

"So we get the light and Cassidy doesn't get to murder anyone," Bryan said.

"Tragic," Cassidy said. "I'd have been so good at it."

"You'd have confessed in chapter two," Clint said.

"I'd have confessed in chapter one. I can't keep a thing to myself, ask anybody."

Winnie smiled. "We know, dear."

Bryan came around with the first plate of fish, and the gathering folded toward food the way it always did. Clint passed plates. Cassidy told everyone to save room for the peach pie she'd made that Bryan's mom had taught her to bake, and it was good, if she said so herself. Grant turned his napkin around to show Melissa whatever he'd drawn. She laughed, reached for it, and he held it out of range.

"What is it?" Fiona asked.

"Bryan, fighting the freezer." Grant tilted it her way. He'd drawn the grill man in full hero pose, spatula raised like a sword, a boxy freezer labeled LARRY looming behind. "I'm calling it the founding myth of the Sandpiper."

"Frame it," Cassidy said. "I mean it. Frame it for the register."

Fiona ate grouper with her bare feet in the cooled sand and Marty's shoulder against hers. She'd written a hundred scenes reaching for exactly this and never once made it as perfect as this moment. The warmth of a group she belonged in.

The talk wandered on. Emily's next show. A storm sitting out in the Gulf that might come in by the end of the weekend. The Beacon's latest column, which Marty had written and Sally had opinions about.

The lighthouse beam swept out over the water above all of it. It came around slowly, pale gold against the deep dark, and crossed the courtyard. It passed over each of their faces in turn. Emily mid-sentence. Bryan and Clint still bickering at the grill. Winnie with her head tipped toward Sam. Then it moved on out to sea and let the firelight have them back.

Beside her, Marty looked over. He didn't say anything. He just squeezed her hand once, a small pressure worth more than a sentence.

Fiona squeezed back.

She looked at the couples who'd found each other at the lighthouse. Emily and Grant. Cassidy and Bryan. Melissa and Clint. And now the mystery writer who'd shown up to hide and the bookseller who'd stopped reading anything that might make him feel. The two of them sitting side by side on a bench by the fire with nowhere either one of them wanted to be except right here.

"You've gone quiet," Marty said.

"I'm working."

"On the book?"