Chapter 8
The fire pit was already lit when Fiona came across the courtyard, and she told herself she wasn't nervous.
She'd been to a few of these now with the same loose ring of chairs around the flames, the same easy noise of people who enjoyed each other's company.
She promised herself she wouldn't count off five minutes and bolt tonight.
The journal had been on her mind all day, though. That single strange line, a notable site of linguistic interest, and the name under it. She'd come out here half meaning to ask about it and half hoping she'd talk herself out of it.
"There she is." Sally Morris patted the chair beside her, the one with the cushion that had gone flat years ago. "Sit. I saved you the good seat."
"This is the good seat?"
"It's next to me. That's what makes it good." Sally pressed a plate into her hands before she'd even sat down. "Winnie's been baking. Eat before the men find it."
Across the pit, Bryan looked up from the fire he was poking. "I heard that."
"You were meant to."
Fiona sat. The chair creaked as she eased down. They kept the fire small, since the warmth still hung in the air. Late August did that here. The sun went down and the heat only changed shape.
"You look better than when you got here," Sally said. "Few weeks ago you had a look like you might bolt for the door if anybody breathed wrong."
"I did not."
"You did. We all clocked it. Winnie told me to feed you and not crowd you."
"That explains the biscuits you insisted I take when I walked by your store."
"That explains the biscuits." Sally grinned and bit into one of Winnie's sugar cookies.
Winnie sat on the far side, a mug cradled in both hands.
She was listening to Melissa, who was telling Emily about some long day of photographing the lighthouse from a boat.
Clint sat close beside Melissa with his arm along the back of her chair, putting in the occasional dry word that made her swat at him.
It was a good circle to sit in. Fiona still felt like a guest in it, but a guest who'd been told to make herself at home, and she was starting to believe the invitation.
"How's the writing?" Sally asked.
"Slow."
"That's what you said last week."
"It's a consistent kind of slow."
Sally laughed, which let Fiona off the hook, and the talk moved on around them. Melissa was deep into her day now, the light off the water, the way the lower windows didn't sit right.
"Sam keeps saying they were never meant to," Melissa said. "The windows. He's got a whole theory."
The name caught Fiona's ear.
"Sam?" she said.
"Sam Copeland." Melissa turned to her. "He's a historian. Maritime stuff, old coastal buildings. We've been working together a bit now, him on the records and me on the photographs. He's the one who got me looking at the window placements in the first place."
Copeland.
Fiona set her plate down on her knee. "He's here? In town?"
"Has been a while. He knows more about this stretch of coast than people who were born on it." Melissa tipped her head. "Why, you know the name?"
And there was her opening. She glanced at Winnie and hesitated, hearing Marty's warning about how Winnie didn't like being questioned.
"I think I might've read it," Fiona said.
"That's the strange part. Marty lent me an old journal from his back room.
A linguistics quarterly, of all things, from the fifties.
There's an article in it about place-names on the coast, and it mentions the lighthouse.
Calls it a 'site of linguistic interest.'" She gave a small shrug.
"One of the authors was a Copeland. J. Copeland. "
"Huh." Melissa's eyebrows went up, interested. "That's a funny coincidence. Sam'd get a kick out of that. You should ask him, he loves an old paper. He'd probably know if it was family or just a name."
"Maybe I will."
She meant to leave it there. She honestly did. But Winnie was right there in the firelight, the woman who'd kept this lighthouse going for years, and the question came out before Fiona could weigh it.
She turned and said carefully, "Winnie, did the Copelands have some connection to the lighthouse? Way back? The paper made it sound like there was history."
The change in Winnie was subtle but unmistakable. The smile that had sat so easily a moment before went stiff at the corners, held up by effort now instead of nothing. Winnie's shoulders drew up the smallest fraction. Her thumb stopped where it had been running along the rim of the mug.
A person who wasn't looking would have missed all of it. Fiona was looking. She always was. It was the writer in her and it didn't come with an off switch.
And the moment she saw it, she wished she hadn't asked.
"The families knew each other. Years ago." Winnie's voice came out even. Too even. "Long before your time or mine, most of it."
"I didn't mean to pry," Fiona said. "It only caught my eye in the journal."
"You're not prying, dear." Winnie lifted the mug and drank, and the drink bought her a second.
"There's just not much to it. People came and went back then.
Visitors, summer folk, university people.
The lighthouse drew all kinds." She set the mug on her knee and turned it a slow quarter turn.
"I wouldn't read much into a footnote. Half of what's written about that place is somebody guessing. The other half is selling postcards."
It was a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Fiona had thought versions of it herself, about fans who'd decided a throwaway line in book six was a clue to book nine. Don't read too much into it. It was what a person said, or thought, when there was, in fact, a great deal to read into it.
"You're probably right," Fiona said, and let it go, because she didn't have it in her to do anything else. Whatever was back there, it was Winnie's.
She wasn't the only one who'd seen it, either.
Sally had gone still. Her gaze cut to Winnie the instant the name dropped, quick and worried, the look one old friend throws another when a sore subject lands at a party.
Then Sally looked at Fiona. Then back to Winnie.
A whole silent sentence passed between the two women in under a second, and Fiona couldn't read the words of it, only that it was being said.
Sixty-three years of friendship had its own language. Fiona didn't have the dictionary.
"Well," Sally said, and her voice came up bright and a touch too quick, "I'll tell you what I have been hearing about.
Emily's show." She brushed crumbs off her lap and took in the whole circle, gathering them, steering.
"Second Friday, at the gallery. Grant's giving her the whole back wall. Eight pieces, is it?"
"Eight. If I finish the last two." Emily made a face. "Maybe seven and a very large frame."
"You'll finish them," Grant said from across the fire.
"I'll bring lemon bars. Maybe six dozen or so," Cassidy said.
"Nobody needs six dozen lemon bars," Bryan said.
"Nobody needs them. That's not the point of a lemon bar."
"It's an art opening, Cass. Not a bake sale," Grant said.
"Every opening's better with a lemon bar. Ask anybody."
"It still means tables," Grant said. "A spread always means I'm carrying tables."
"You love carrying tables."
"I tolerate carrying tables. There's a difference."
And just like that the fire pit turned. The show took it over, easy as breathing, and most of the circle went with it because it was nothing to them. A clean save. The kind a hostess makes look like an accident.
Fiona watched the stiffness slowly go out of Winnie's shoulders as she let the talk wash over her, said nothing into it, and after a minute her thumb went back to the rim of the mug.
Then she was Winnie again. Gracious and unbothered.
Whatever had reached up and grabbed her, she'd put it away again.
"You're quiet again," Sally said, low, just for her.
"Still the thinking kind."
"Mm." Sally patted her knee and let her be.
Fiona understood she'd just been steered, gently, the same way Winnie had. Sally Morris missed nothing. She only chose what to do about it. What she'd chosen was a change of subject, and Fiona was grateful for it. She'd have given a lot to take the question back.
She stayed another half hour. Leaving right away would have said something, and she didn't want the something it said.
When she finally rose to go, Sally got up with her. They walked together to the edge of the courtyard, past the gazebo, to where the firelight gave out and the dark took over.
"You don't have to walk me," Fiona said. "It's forty feet."
"I'm stretching my legs. A woman my age sits too long, she fuses to the chair." Sally tucked her hands in her pockets. They went a few steps in the quiet. Then, easy as anything, "Don't beat yourself up over it. The Copeland thing."
"I shouldn't have asked."
"You didn't know. How could you?" Sally stopped at the edge of the pavers.
"Winnie's carried the Lockhart family her whole life.
Four generations of keeping that light, and not one of them ever once got to set it down.
There's old hurt tied up in it. Some of it she doesn't even understand herself, I don't think. "
"Is it Sam? The man Melissa works with?"
Sally was quiet a beat too long. "Sam's a good man," she said, which wasn't an answer, and she clearly knew it wasn't. "If you want lighthouse history, you ask him. He'll talk. Leave Winnie out of the old part. She's earned that much."
"I will." Fiona meant it. "I like her, Sally. I wouldn't hurt her."
"I know you wouldn't. That's why I'm telling you, not warning you." Sally patted her arm, then turned back toward the fire. "And eat a real supper. You're getting thin, and it worries Winnie, which means it worries me."
"Good night, Sally."
"Good night, hon."
She watched Sally head back to the fire and continued down the path to Sea Glass Cottage.
"That went well," Fiona told the dark. Talking to herself was a habit she'd given up trying to break. "Made the kindest woman in town go quiet at her own fire. Nicely done."
A night bird answered from the sea oats, which was about the level of conversation she could handle.
She stopped at her door and looked back across the courtyard at the keeper's quarters tucked against the side of the lighthouse.
Light spilled out from a window. She wasn't going to keep asking Winnie questions.
That much she'd decided somewhere between the gazebo and the garden.
But the thing the name had touched was real, old, and not going anywhere.
And there happened to be a man in this very town whose whole life was old coastal history. A man whose name was Copeland.
"Talk to Sam," she said, trying the shape of it. "Leave Winnie be."
She let herself in. She didn't reach for the lamp. She crossed to the writing desk and put her hand on the cover of the journal, just to feel the small hard fact of it under her palm.
Two authors. One named Copeland. A historian in town who answered to the same name. And a lighthouse no linguist had any business writing up.
"Hank's still in the alley," she reminded herself.
"Hank can wait," she answered, and pulled out the chair.
She switched on the desk lamp. The beam from the lighthouse slid once across the far wall and was gone. Under J. Copeland and linguistic interest, meaning what? and ask W, but careful, she drew a line through the last note. Then, in her small, fast hand, she wrote something new.
Leave W out of it. Talk to Sam Copeland, historian, here, working w/ Melissa. Same name. Coincidence?