Chapter 7
The bell over the door of Tides & Tales gave its same tired jingle, and Fiona told herself she was only here for the rare collection.
She'd just go in, ask about the old volumes, and leave. Easy.
Marty looked up from the counter, glasses shoved into his hair where he'd clearly forgotten them. "You came back."
"You sound surprised."
"I insulted your entire genre last time. Most people don't return for seconds."
"Maybe I'm not most people." She set her bag down by the register. "Or maybe your coffee's better than the place down the street."
"I don't sell coffee."
"That's the trouble with this town. No one will let a person starve, but you can't get a decent cup unless you walk three blocks."
He came around the counter, and his boat shoes made that soft scuff against the old plank floor. "Harbor Brew's two blocks. And they'd give you the cup for free if you let Jan ask you enough questions."
"I've met Jan."
"Then you understand the price."
She laughed. It came out easy, which bothered her more than it should have. People who laughed like that had let their guard down, and she didn't do that. Not anymore.
"You said something about a back room," she said. "Last time. The rare collection."
"I did." He studied her for a beat, head tipped, the way he had of looking at a person like they were a sentence he was deciding whether to trust. "You sure? Most of it's local history and a lot of dust. Not a beach read in sight."
"I'll risk it."
"Your funeral." He waved her toward the rear of the shop. "Watch the third shelf. It's held together with spite and an old shipping strap."
The back room was smaller than she'd pictured, and warmer, the air thick with the smell of old paper and binding glue.
Books crowded floor to ceiling on shelves that didn't match.
A reading chair sat in one corner under a lamp with a crooked shade.
One narrow, salt-fogged window let in a slice of harbor where a single masthead rocked.
"This is the part of the shop I actually like," Marty said. "Don't tell the front room."
"Your secret's safe." She turned a slow circle. "Why hide it back here? You could sell half of this to the right people."
"That's exactly why it's back here." He pulled his glasses down, settled them on his nose, and ran a finger along a spine. "The right people would buy it. Then it'd be gone, and I'd have the money instead of the book. Bad trade."
"You'd rather keep books you can't sell than make rent."
"Now you're starting to understand the business model." He tugged a slim clothbound volume free and held it out. "Here. First edition. Local poet, drowned in 1952, never published again because he was already dead. Three copies known to exist. I have one."
She took it carefully. The cover had faded to the color of weak tea, the title stamped in flaking gold. "And you won't sell it."
"To the wrong person? Never." He shrugged. "To the right one, maybe. I haven't met them yet."
"How do you know which is which?"
"They ask the right questions." He said it lightly, but his eyes stayed on her a second too long, and she made a show of opening the poetry book so she wouldn't have to answer that.
He showed her others. A water-stained ship's log from a schooner that had run aground off the point in the 1890s, the ink gone brown, the last entry breaking off mid-word.
A hand-bound book of recipes someone's grandmother had kept, the margins crowded with notes in three different hands.
A pamphlet on hurricane lore that he called nonsense and clearly treasured.
"You light up doing this," she said. "You know that?"
"Do I." He slid the log back into its slot, careful as a man returning a sleeping baby to a crib. "Annette used to say I only ever sounded happy when I was talking about a book nobody else had read."
He said the name plainly, no weight on it, but she caught the small hitch under the words. A wife, then. Past tense, by the way he handled it. She didn't ask. She knew better than anyone what it cost to be asked.
"Smart woman," was all she said.
"She was." He cleared his throat and nodded at the shelves. "Keep looking. You're not done."
For the better part of an hour she lost herself in his shelves, and Marty let her.
That was the thing she hadn't expected. He didn't hover.
He didn't narrate. He pointed her at a row, told her one good fact about it, then drifted off to do something with a box of inventory and left her to it.
Drake had never once let her browse in silence.
He'd stood at her shoulder in every shop they ever entered, asking if she'd found anything yet, checking his watch, making her feel like a meter running down.
She pulled the thought up short. Drake didn't get to come in here too. He took up enough rooms already.
"Find anything?" Marty asked from the doorway.
"A lot of things. None of them what I came for."
"What'd you come for?"
She didn't have an answer that wouldn't give her away, so she gave him a different one. "The lighthouse. Sentinels had a chapter on it. Made me curious."
"Ah." He came in and leaned against the shelf, arms crossed. "Everybody gets curious about the lighthouse eventually. It's the town's favorite ghost."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning it's been here longer than any of us, and people like to fill the gaps with stories.
" He nodded at the far corner. "Bottom shelf, left.
Anything local I've got is shoved down there.
Town histories, a few society pamphlets, some academic things nobody's opened since the Eisenhower administration. "
She crouched. The bottom shelf was a graveyard of the unloved, fat church directories and thin stapled committee reports and one cracked leather album with no title at all.
She worked through them with her thumb, the way she went through anything, half her brain reading and half of it already asking what doesn't belong.
"You catalog any of this?" she asked.
"Define catalog."
"That's a no."
"That's a someday." He crouched beside her, knees cracking, and made a face about it. "I keep meaning to. Then a customer comes in wanting the new whatever, and someday gets later."
Her fingers stopped on a journal near the back. It was the wrong size for everything around it, taller and thinner, bound in faded gray board with a number stamped on the spine. Coastal Linguistics Quarterly. The date on the cover read 1954.
"What's this one?"
He took it, tilted it toward the lamp, pushed his glasses up to read without them, then gave up and pulled them back down.
"Academic journal. Linguistics, looks like.
Universities used to send these to anyone who'd take them.
I think this came with a lot I bought from an estate. Honestly never read it."
"Linguistics." She took it back. "About what?"
"Regional speech, probably. Dialect studies. The way people on the coast talk versus inland." He shrugged. "Dry as a cracker. Why?"
"No reason." But she was already turning pages.
The journal was exactly as dull as he'd promised, for eleven pages.
Fiona skimmed an article on vowel shifts in fishing communities, another on loanwords from Spanish and French along the Gulf, a third so dense with phonetic symbols it might as well have been a code.
Her eyes glazed. She kept turning anyway, because that was the other half of how she read, the part that didn't trust a quiet room to stay quiet.
"Told you," Marty said from the doorway, a box of inventory braced on his hip. "Dry as a cracker."
"It's not dry. It's hostile."
"That's academic writing. Hostility you have to subscribe to." He set the box down. "Want me to put it back?"
"Not yet." She waved him off without looking up. "Give me a minute."
"Take ten. I've got a shipment to lie to myself about."
She turned another page, and the next, half-listening to him scuff around the front room. Then a name in a footnote stopped her cold.
Lockhart.
She went back a paragraph and read it slow.
The article was about coastal place-names and the people who studied them, and there, tucked into the middle of a sentence about field research sites, was the Lockhart Lighthouse.
Described, in that flat scholarly way, as "a notable site of linguistic interest." No more than that.
One clause, dropped and abandoned, the writer already moving on to a tide chart in the next line.
A notable site of linguistic interest.
She read it again. What did that even mean?
A lighthouse wasn't a site of linguistic interest. A lighthouse was bricks and a lamp and a family that kept it lit.
People didn't travel to a lighthouse to study how anybody talked.
They studied a town for that, a wharf, a church, a school.
Not a tower on a spit of sand with one family living in it.
Her thumb found the byline at the top of the article. Two authors. The first name meant nothing to her, some professor at a college she'd never heard of.
The second name was J. Copeland.
She sat back on her heels.
"Marty."
"Mm."
"Who's J. Copeland?"
He looked up from his box. "Who?"
"There's an article in here." She held the journal open across her knees, finger on the line. "About place-names on the coast. It mentions the lighthouse. Calls it a 'site of linguistic interest,' whatever that's supposed to mean. One of the writers is a J. Copeland."
He set the box down and came over, took the journal, and read where she pointed. His lips moved a little, the old professor in him surfacing. "Copeland." He turned the name over. "Huh."
"You know it?"
"I know the journal. Or I know the type. There were a dozen of these little regional quarterlies back then, every state university ran one." He turned the cover over, checked the date, turned back. "Don't know the name, though. Why? It mean something to you?"
"No." She said it too fast. "I just… a lighthouse. Why would a linguist care about a lighthouse?"
"Could be nothing." He handed the journal back. "Could be the keeper let them use it as a base. Researchers do that, set up somewhere with a roof and a desk and work out from there. Maybe somebody studied the fishermen and slept at the lighthouse because it was cheap."
"Maybe." She didn't believe it, and she couldn't have said why. "But then they'd call the town the site of interest. Not the lighthouse."
Marty looked at her, and that careful, deciding look came back into his face. "You read footnotes like other people read the last page first."
"Occupational habit."
"What's the occupation?"
She'd walked right into it. "I read a lot," she said. It was the same dodge she'd used last time, and they both heard it.
He let it go. That was the thing about Marty, she was learning. He noticed everything and pressed almost none of it, and that was somehow worse, because it made her want to tell him things.
"You can borrow it," he said, when she finally stood and brushed off her knees. "The journal. Not the poet. The journal nobody wants."
"You're sure?"
"It's been on that shelf since before I owned the place. I think it can survive a field trip to Sea Glass Cottage."
She held it against her chest, oddly reluctant to put it in her bag, as if it might disappear if she stopped touching it. "I'll take care of it."
"I don't doubt it." He walked her back through the front room, and at the register he paused. "For what it's worth. If you're chasing the lighthouse, Winnie's the one who'd know. Lockharts have kept that light four generations. There's nothing about that place she hasn't heard."
"Winnie." She thought of the woman's steady eyes, the way she watched a person like she was reading the parts they didn't say out loud. "Maybe."
"She's prickly about it sometimes. The history." He scratched his jaw. "I asked her once about something I'd found, a reference to the lighthouse during the war. She changed the subject so fast I got whiplash. So go easy."
"Noted." She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "Thank you. For the back room. And the dust."
"Come back and insult my taste anytime."
"I might."
The bell jingled again on her way out, and the heat of the afternoon settled over her like a hand. She walked the harbor road slow, the journal a small weight in her bag, knocking against her hip with every step.
A notable site of linguistic interest. J. Copeland.
She should have been thinking about Hank Carson, still stranded over the rain-soaked body in an alley that had gone six months without a single new sentence.
She should have been thinking about Rachel, and the deal, and the call she kept not returning.
She should have been thinking about the manuscript with her real career inside it.
Instead she was thinking about a one-line footnote in a journal nobody had opened in seventy years.
By the time she let herself into the cottage she'd half-decided it was nothing. A coincidence. A bored academic padding his sources. She set the journal on the writing desk, made tea, sat down with the firm intention of opening her manuscript file and finally, finally moving Hank out of that alley.
"Work," she told the empty room. "You're here to work."
The empty room didn't argue. It also didn't help. She opened the journal instead.
"That's not work," she said. "That's the opposite of work."
She read it anyway, start to finish, then the one before it, then the one after, looking for the name again. Copeland. It didn't come back. One mention, one clause, one initial. A door cracked open exactly far enough to show there was a room behind it, and not one inch more.
Who studied a lighthouse for the way people talked? And what had Winnie heard in four generations of keeping that light that made her change the subject so fast a man got whiplash?
Fiona pulled a clean notebook from the desk drawer, uncapped a pen, and wrote J.
Copeland at the top of a blank page. Under it, linguistic interest, meaning what?
Under that, ask W, but careful. The tea went cold at her elbow while she filled half the page in her small, fast hand, the way she used to fill pages when a story still had its hooks in her and wouldn't let go.