Chapter 18 #3
I looked around, taking in for the first time how dark and quiet it was here.
The moon, almost full, hung low over the inlet, its reflection shimmering on the water before breaking up on the small waves where the Pacific met the shore.
Off in the distance, through the trees, I could see the occasional pinprick of light moving along the highway, and closer in, the inn glowed tiny and snug on the edge of the bluff across the water.
And if I strained my eyes and caught the timing just right, I realized, I could make out one more source of light, a tiny white circle on the beach below the inn, bobbing and flickering like a drunken firefly.
I pointed it out to Ricky. “What is that?”
He leaned forward on his crutches, squinting. “I think it’s a flashlight? Someone’s walking on the beach below the inn with a flashlight.”
“Huh,” I said. “Maybe Mary Alice is finishing her date with a moonlit stroll on the beach.”
“Going up and down that trail with a flashlight? That sounds more treacherous than romantic.”
I threw my hands up. “I’m never going to know what’s romantic or not, am I?”
Ricky’s teeth flashed white in the moonlight as he grinned at me. “Of course you will. I’ll see to that. Anyway, come on. We’ve got our own moonlit stroll to finish.”
We started back up the gravel-lined hill, hugging the edge of the bluff around a couple more turns before the lighthouse burst back into view, suddenly only a few hundred yards away.
Moonlight glittered off the glass at the top of the tower, but a soft, flickering light emanated from within the small attached keeper’s cottage on the ground floor.
“Shh!” Ricky stopped short, putting a hand to my chest to stop me, too.
We hung there for a moment watching. A low murmur of voices drifted out to us.
“I have to try to make these things as quiet as I can,” Ricky whispered, wincing as started toward the lighthouse again, shifting some weight onto his injured left leg to help quiet his heavy, metallic crutch-assisted footfalls. I crept silently by his side.
The voices within the building rose and fell.
We inched closer and closer, moving painfully slowly to minimize noise.
Finally, when we were within about a hundred feet, one of the voices rose high enough in pitch to become familiar.
It was Tawny, speaking loud and high and fast, and then, not speaking at all.
The lights in the keeper’s cottage flickered out at the same moment that a shriek, Tawny’s, tore through the darkness.
We broke into our best approximation of a run, closing the last short gap toward the building, Ricky yelping every few steps.
The main entry door to the lighthouse stood ominously open, the interior inky black and frighteningly silent.
The doorway to the keeper’s cottage, immediately to the right upon entering the building, was open, too, and I rushed in to see if there was any sign of Tawny or where she might have gone, Ricky tumbling in shortly behind me.
The lone, small room of the cottage was cold and quiet and dark, with a strange, close, stale smell.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I did a quick scan of the space, my body still tensed.
“Nothing,” I said, wondering with growing dread what had become of the people who had just been in here, but as I turned to muscle past Ricky out the door, it slammed in my face with the metallic clank of a bolt being locked.
“Wha—” I sputtered, jiggling the handle in vain. “We’re locked in!”
Ricky hobbled to the lone window that looked out toward the front of the building. “I don’t see anyone—wait, no, there they go!” I rushed to join him, catching a fleeting glimpse of a dark figure running around the curve and down the hill, hugging the tree line to minimize their exposure.
“I think they ducked down under the window so we wouldn’t see them until they were clear of the building,” Ricky said. He gripped the latch on the side of the window frame, caked over with a hundred years’ worth of paint, trying fruitlessly to turn it. It wouldn’t budge.
“Getting that open wouldn’t help us much anyway,” I said, pointing to the metal bars on the outside of the window.
“We’re stuck in here.” I pulled out my phone.
“I’m calling 911. There was more than one person here, but only one person left.
We’re trapped, and who knows what trouble the other person is in, right?
” I punched in the numbers, putting the phone to my ear.
“What’s that smell?” Ricky wondered, poking around in the dark for a moment before pulling out his own phone and turning on the flashlight.
My phone gave no indication that my call was going through. I looked at the screen. Calling … I had no bars, no Wi-Fi signal.
“Here it is.” Ricky bent down and came back up with something pinched between his thumb and forefinger. A smoldering cigarette butt. “Someone was smoking in here.”
“Ricky,” I said, “I don’t think this is going through. I don’t have any service here. Do you?”
He consulted the screen of his phone. “No, but I’ll give it a try. This thing is out, right?” He passed the butt to me.
I looked at it, but I didn’t know what to look for. “I think so. It’s not still smoking.”
“So why does it seem like the smell is getting stronger?”
I looked around in the dark, sniffing the air. It had been stale before, but now it was bordering on stifling, something that curled up into your nose and set up camp there and you couldn’t quite get it back out. It wasn’t cigarette smoke, though, it was … what?
Ricky’s flashlight was still on, and as he tried to call emergency services, its beam hit the door of our prison, catching a shimmery tendril snaking in through the crack at the bottom.
It wasn’t cigarette smoke. It was smoke smoke.