Chapter 5
The phone buzzed against the kitchen counter at nine in the morning, and Fiona knew without looking that it was Rachel.
It was always Rachel at nine. Rachel believed in the morning.
Rachel believed a person could accomplish anything before noon if they simply decided to, and she'd built a whole career on the strength of that belief, and most days Fiona loved her for it.
Today she let it ring.
She watched the screen light up and go dark on the counter, the way she might watch a wasp she didn't want to get close to. Four rings. Five. Then the little red dot, and the voicemail, and the small accusing number beside the icon that now read three.
Three voicemails she hadn't answered.
She made her coffee first. That felt important, somehow, to make the coffee before she listened, as if she could meet whatever Rachel had to say on a full cup instead of an empty one. She poured it black, carried it to the table, and sat down across from the laptop, which was closed.
Then she pressed play and put it on speaker, because she was a coward but not enough of one to hold the thing against her ear.
"Fiona, it's me." Rachel's voice filled the quiet cottage, warm and faintly out of breath, the way it always was, as though she'd taken the call while walking somewhere more important.
"I know, I know, you're writing, you're in the cave, I'm not supposed to exist when you're in the cave.
But sweetheart, I need ten minutes. The publisher called again.
They're getting—" A pause, and Fiona could picture her choosing the word, smoothing it the way she smoothed everything.
"—they're getting eager. About the manuscript.
And there's something else. Something good.
The kind of good we don't say no to. I don't want to do this over voicemail. Call me. Please? Just call me back."
A beat of silence. Then, softer, the part she probably hadn't planned to say.
"You okay out there? You sound far away lately. Even on email."
The message ended.
Fiona sat with her coffee and didn't move.
Something good. The kind of good we don't say no to.
She knew what that meant. A new contract.
The multi-book deal Rachel had been circling for weeks, the one with the number in it that would make a sane woman weep with gratitude.
A career-defining yes, sitting in her inbox, her voicemail, and the back of her own throat, waiting.
And she couldn't reach it. That was the thing she couldn't explain to Rachel, who'd worked twenty years to put exactly this in front of her.
She couldn't make herself reach out and take the good thing, because taking it meant promising books she didn't know how to write, in a voice she wasn't sure she still had, as a person who'd been telling everyone she was fine for months.
She'd have to sign her real name to it. Fiona Wells. And Fiona Wells was a woman whose husband had decided she wasn't enough, and a woman who hadn't told her own agent her marriage was over.
How did you say yes to your whole future when you couldn't say one true sentence about your present?
She picked up the phone. She held her thumb over Rachel's name.
She thought about how it would go—Rachel, hi, sorry, I've been heads-down—and how easy the lie would be, how it would slide out smooth as the husband-is-traveling lie had slid out at the fire pit, and how she was getting frighteningly good at this.
She deleted the voicemail instead.
The little red number dropped to two. It didn't feel like relief. It felt like kicking a thing under the bed.
"I'll call her tomorrow," she said, out loud, to the empty kitchen. Then, because she was a writer and writers heard their own dialogue, she noticed how it sounded. The same thing she'd said yesterday. And the day before.
Not that anyone was counting.
She opened the laptop.
And Hank Carson was still in the alley.
Of course he was. Fiona had left him there, mid-crouch over the dead man with the rain coming down, and the alley hadn't moved an inch, because alleys in unwritten scenes didn't move.
They just waited. They waited the way the cursor waited, blinking at the end of the last sentence she'd managed to write months ago.
So many months she'd practically quit counting.
Hank knelt beside the body and saw the thing that changed everything.
That was the sentence. That was where it stopped.
Because Fiona didn't know what the thing was.
She'd written fifteen books on the faith that the thing always came, and that if she put the detective in front of the body the answer would rise up to meet her the way it always had.
Hank would see the scuffed heel, the wrong watch, the matchbook from a bar across town, and Fiona would know, and the chapter would unspool from there.
She put her fingers on the keys.
She waited.
Nothing came. Not the scuffed heel, not the wrong watch.
Just the rain she'd already described and a detective she'd stranded and a writer who couldn't remember why any of it had ever felt like magic.
She typed a sentence. She read it back. It was flat.
Dead on the page, deader than the man in the alley, who at least had the decency to be interesting. She deleted it.
She typed another. Deleted that one too.
This was the part nobody warned you about.
Not the blank page. Everybody talked about the blank page like it was the enemy, but the blank page was honest, at least. The blank page didn't pretend.
The real enemy was the page that filled up with words that meant nothing, that did the shape of writing without the soul of it, and a writer sat there producing them like a factory that had forgotten what it made.
She'd been good at this once. Hadn't she?
She had. She knew she had. There were fifteen books on shelves to prove it, and a man in a bookshop calling her detective functional, and a whole reading public who thought F. L. Maxwell was a man and had never once been disappointed by him.
So where had it gone? Had it left when Drake did? Had he taken it with him, the way he'd taken the good knives and the painting from the front hall, and some essential thing she hadn't thought to ask for in the settlement because she hadn't known it was hers to lose?
That was a maudlin thought. She closed the thought the way she'd closed the voicemail.
She closed the laptop too and wandered over to the reading chair.
The lighthouse book was still open to where she'd left it the night before, facedown and splayed in a way that would have made Marty Fuller wince.
She'd fallen asleep in the armchair reading it and woken at two with a crick in her neck and her hand still marking the page.
She picked it up now and meant only to find her place and set it aside. She had work to do. She had a detective in an alley, an agent on the phone, and a deadline rolling in like a hurricane.
But the page she'd fallen asleep on had a photograph.
Black and white, grainy, the caption set in that small serious type old local presses used.
The Lockhart family on the gallery deck, circa 1911.
A cluster of people in high collars and long skirts, squinting into a sun that had set a hundred years ago.
A bearded man with his hand on the rail like he owned the whole Gulf.
A woman beside him, unsmiling, holding a child who'd moved during the long exposure and come out as a blur of white.
And behind them the tower itself, younger, its paint not yet weathered, rising up out of a coast that had been nothing then but scrub and water and one stubborn family who'd decided to put a light on it.
Fiona looked at the blurred child for a long time.
Then she started reading from the top of the chapter, the way she should have the night before, and the cottage went quiet around her, the coffee went cold, and she didn't notice either thing.
The lighthouse had been lit for the first time in 1885.
She hadn't known that. She'd assumed—the way you assumed about things that had simply always been there—that it had appeared more or less whole, the way it stood now.
But it had taken three years to build, hauled up stone by stone by men who'd died before they saw it finished, and Winnie's great-grandfather had been the one to climb up and light the first lamp, a young man then, the first keeper of a light that barely had a town to guide anything into.
After him, his son. After the son, his son again.
Generations of them, the light handed down the way other families handed down a name.
A whole family organized around the single proposition that the light would not go out, not on their watch, not while there was a Lockhart left to climb the stairs.
And then the government had stopped paying for keepers.
Automation, the book said, in the flat way the book said everything.
The Coast Guard had wanted to decommission it, and there'd been some wrangling Fiona didn't fully follow, and at the end of it the Lockharts ended up owning it rather than let it go dark or fall into the sea.
And they'd kept it private ever since, and they were keeping it still, in the person of a silver-haired woman who brought soup to strangers.
Fiona sat back.
Her pulse had picked up. She noticed it the way she noticed things in other people, from a slight distance, with interest. My pulse is racing. Why's my pulse racing?
Because this was a story. Not a fact, not a pamphlet, not a Wikipedia stub.
A story, with a shape to it, with that particular charge a story had when it was true and nobody had bothered to tell it right.
A family who'd given a century to a light.
A child who'd moved in a hundred-year-old photograph and would never be named now.
There was a novel in this. There were three novels in this.
She could feel it the way she used to feel the books coming, that low hum behind her breastbone, the one that had gone silent months ago and that she'd assumed was gone for good.
It wasn't gone for good.
It had just been waiting for something worth the trouble.
She opened the laptop again. Not for Hank. Hank could keep waiting in his alley. Hank had been waiting for months. Another hour would not hurt him.
She opened a browser instead and typed Lockhart Lighthouse Starlight Shores history and hit return, and the afternoon disappeared.
The internet, it turned out, knew very little, which was its own kind of fascinating.
A historical-register listing with a paragraph of dry facts.
A maritime-society page that hadn't been updated since 2009.
A handful of tourist photos. A genealogy forum where someone calling themselves GulfCoastGran had been trying for years to trace the keepers and people involved with the lighthouse and kept hitting a wall, where the records got thin in a way the poster found "frustrating" and Fiona found, professionally, electric.
Records didn't go thin by accident. Records went thin because somebody made them thin.
Now where had that thought come from?
She was being a mystery writer. She knew she was being a mystery writer.
Forty years of training your brain to find the hidden body and you couldn't walk past a thin patch in the historical record without wanting to dig.
It probably meant nothing. A small-town lighthouse with a paperwork gap was not a conspiracy. It was just a paperwork gap.
But she opened a new document anyway. A blank one. The same blank that had mocked her all morning over Hank's body, except this time the blank didn't mock. This time her hands knew what to do.
LIGHTHOUSE — notes, she typed at the top, and then she started.
Built 1885. First keeper, Lockhart—find the first name.
How the Lockharts ended up owning the lighthouse.
The records thinning. Winnie's great-grandfather as a young man with the first match.
The blurred child in the 1911 photograph, the one who'd moved, the one nobody would ever know now had been laughing or crying or simply unable to hold still.
She wrote a paragraph about the child. It had nothing to do with research. It was just good. She kept it.
The notes got longer.
She told herself it was procrastination, and it was, obviously it was, she had a contracted manuscript and an agent with good news she couldn't bear and a detective stuck in the rain.
This was the worst possible use of an afternoon she'd already half-wasted.
A grown woman with a deadline did not spend her afternoon chasing a dead lighthouse keeper through a genealogy forum because the blurred white child in a hundred-year-old photograph had ignited something inside her.
She typed another line.
She told herself she'd stop after this one. She didn't.
Outside the window the light was going gold over the water.
Somewhere across the courtyard Winnie was probably baking something, and Hank Carson stood patiently in his alley in a city that didn't exist. Fiona Wells sat in the writer's nook of Sea Glass Cottage with cold coffee at her elbow and wrote three pages of notes about a story she had no business starting and absolutely no intention of writing.
The phone buzzed once more, late in the afternoon. She didn't look up to see who it was.