Chapter 9
The names had gone soft under Winnie's thumb. William. Henry. Robert. Three Lockhart men, their names cut into the stone back of the memorial bench. She'd touched them so many evenings the letters had worn smooth.
She sat with her hand resting over her father's name.
The garden had finally let go of the day's heat.
Late August on the Gulf held its warmth like it had something to prove.
Evenings were kinder. A breeze came up off the water, smelling of salt and the green of the courtyard plantings.
Past the cottages a screen door banged. One of the girls, in for the night.
"You could have told me more," she said to the carved name. "You could have warned me better than you did."
Her father said nothing back. He never did anymore.
Fiona had asked her a simple thing. Whether the Copelands had any connection to the lighthouse.
That was all. A reasonable question from a curious woman who read too much and noticed everything.
Winnie should have laughed it off. Should have said the families had known each other ages ago and let it lie flat and harmless on the grass between them.
Instead she'd gone stiff as a fence post. She'd felt it happen. Her shoulders climbing. Her thumb stopping on the bracelet. The smile freezing onto her face. A woman like Fiona didn't miss that sort of thing. Winnie had handed her a clue without saying a single word.
"I held my tongue," she told the stone. "For all the good it did."
Fifty years she'd carried this. She'd dodged questions. She'd given vague answers. Then one name out of a stranger's mouth had undone her in her own courtyard.
J. Copeland.
She wrapped her arms around herself though the evening wasn't cold.
Some chills didn't come from the weather.
Her father would have known what to do with a woman like Fiona.
He'd had a whole life of practice at saying nothing in a way that sounded like saying plenty.
Winnie had only ever managed the saying nothing.
Gravel shifted on the path. The particular unhurried crunch of a man in no rush to be anywhere.
She didn't have to turn. She'd have known that walk in the dark.
"They told me you'd be out here," Sam said.
"Did they." She kept her eyes on the lighthouse. "And here I thought I'd found the one bench in Starlight Shores nobody could track me to."
"Melissa pointed. I just followed orders." He stopped beside the bench, a camera bag slung across his chest, his gray hair mussed from the wind off the gallery deck. "We lost the light a while back. She wanted the north door before the shadows went long."
"Did you get it?"
"We got something. Whether it's the picture I wanted, I won't know till I'm home and it's bigger than a viewfinder." He nodded at the open stretch of bench. "This seat taken?"
"By three dead men and me." She slid over anyway, making room. "Sit down, before your knees give out and I have to explain to Melissa how I broke her historian."
He sat next to her. He smelled of salt air and the faint chemical tang of whatever he carried in that bag. Under it was the warm ordinary smell of the man himself, and she remembered it without wanting to.
"The north door," she said. "What is it you think you'll find in a door?"
"Honest answer? I don't know yet." He patted the camera bag.
"It's older than the rest of the build. The hinges sit wrong, the framing doesn't match.
A door like that was put in for a reason, and nobody puts a door in a lighthouse to admire it.
Somebody wanted to come and go without being seen from the courtyard. "
"Or wanted to bring something in."
"Or that." He gave her a sidelong look. "You'd have made a fair historian, Winnie Lockhart."
"I've had practice. Living on top of the evidence."
For a while neither of them said anything.
The lighthouse threw its beam out over the water, swung it back, gave them a moment of light and a moment of dark, over and again, the way it had her whole life.
"My father used to sit right here," she said. "He'd watch that beam like it owed him an answer."
"Mine watched it too." Sam laced his fingers over one knee.
"Differently. He'd have had a notebook open.
Numbers running down both margins." A short breath that wasn't quite a laugh.
"I found stacks of them after he passed.
Formulas I still can't read, half of them.
Some of them about this place, I think, though he never once wrote the name. "
They were careful. Both of them. She heard it in him, and she was certain he heard it in her.
"I had a question put to me yesterday," she said.
"Did you?"
"One of my tenants. Fiona, in Sea Glass.
" She made herself keep her voice level, a woman passing along a bit of gossip.
"She found an old paper. Some journal from the fifties, about coastal place-names.
Dry reading. It called the lighthouse a site of interest. Linguistic interest, if you can believe it. "
Sam went still in a way she felt more than saw.
"It listed an author," she said. "J. Copeland."
The beam swung over them and away.
"My father," Sam said quietly.
"I know."
He was quiet a moment. "He wasn't a linguist, Winnie. He was a mathematician, same as I was before the history bug got me. Why he'd put his name on a paper about words, I couldn't tell you. I've wondered about that journal since I cleared out my father's study."
"You knew about it?"
"I knew it existed. I never could lay hands on a copy." He turned his head and looked at her. Really looked, in the failing light, the way he used to when she was a girl. "And now it turns up in your tenant's lap. Funny how this town keeps the past in a drawer and forgets to lock it."
She almost smiled. She'd missed that, the dry way he had of saying the truth sideways.
"She doesn't know it's you," Winnie said. "The Copeland in town. She thinks it's a coincidence of names."
"Is that what we're calling it?"
"For now." She pressed her thumb harder against the stone. "Sam, I shut her down. Right there in front of Sally and the others. I went cold as a flounder and she saw it. She reads people for her living, that one. I might as well have drawn her a map."
"So she'll ask me instead."
Winnie nodded. "I assume so."
"And what's she like, this tenant of yours?"
"Sharp. Lonely, though she'd sooner eat the bench than admit it.
" Winnie thought of the drawn curtains, the half-truths, the ring of pale skin on a finger that had worn a band too long.
"She came here running from something. They mostly do.
I put her in Sea Glass and I've been feeding her and waiting on her to remember she's allowed to want things.
And now she's gone and pulled the loose thread on the one story I'd hoped to keep wound up a while longer. "
"You sound fond of her."
"I'm fond of all of them. It's a weakness." She huffed. "But yes. Her especially. She reminds me of someone."
"Who?"
"Never you mind."
He nodded slowly, then looked at her closely again. "And what would you have me tell her?"
There it was. The question under all the other questions.
She could have answered it. The truth sat right there, fifty years of it.
Her father's face the afternoon he'd told her, how frightened he'd looked.
Promises matter more than happiness, Winifred.
The Copelands can't be trusted. We have to protect what your grandfather built.
She'd been twenty-five and so in love with the man on this bench that she'd thought her heart would split clean down the center.
She'd done what her father asked. She'd split it herself instead, and saved everyone the trouble.
"Tell her about lighthouses," she said. "Tell her about brick and how they kept the lamps lit. Tell her the long romantic history a person comes to a town like this hoping to hear." She drew a breath. "Not the rest. Not yet. I can't, Sam. Not while there's so much I still don't have answers for."
"I'm not trying to corner you."
"I know you're not. You never did." That was the worst of it, in a way.
He'd only ever been gentle with her, even the day she'd been cruel to him on purpose.
"It's only that the minute it comes out, it's out for good.
My grandfather, your father, whatever it was the two of them and mine were doing up in that lantern room.
I've kept it secret for so long, which is strange, because I'm still not certain what it is. "
"You don't owe the world the whole story tonight."
"No." She looked at the lighthouse. "Just you, maybe. Eventually. If I can ever sort out what's mine to tell."
He was quiet a moment, then a low sound came out of him that was almost a laugh.
"You remember the night we rowed out past the second buoy," he said. "To see if the light reached that far."
"I remember you swore it would and it didn't."
"It reached. You weren't patient enough to wait for the sweep."
"I was twenty-three and freezing, Sam. And you'd promised me a romantic evening, not a science experiment in a leaky skiff."
"And yet you came." His mouth tipped up. "Every time I had some fool idea, you came."
"Somebody had to bail the boat." She let herself smile at the dark water.
They'd argued the whole way out and the whole way back, and she'd thought, even then, that she'd never been so happy arguing with anyone in her life.
"We caught the sweep eventually. You were so pleased with yourself I thought you'd tip us both in. "
"I wanted to show you… everything. Share it with you." He shook his head slowly.
She didn't answer. She didn't trust her voice for a moment.
The breeze moved the sea oats by the gazebo. Somewhere a gull complained at the dark.
The silence between them was a careful one.
"Winnie," he finally said. "Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
The oldest lie in her repertoire. She'd told it to doctors, developers, and every well-meaning soul who'd found her out here alone with the beam going round. Two words, smooth as a stone off the beach.
He didn't say anything. He just kept looking at her. She understood he didn't believe her. Worse than that, she didn't believe herself. The not-believing sat between them like a third person on the bench.
"You always could spot it," she said. "When I was lying."
"Not always." His voice had gone rough at the edge. "Took me forty-five years to be sure about the biggest one."
She had no answer for that. There wasn't one. The lie she'd told him at twenty-five, the one she'd long since called the worst she ever told. He set it on the bench between them as easy as setting down a hat.
"I told myself it was kindness," she said. "Letting you go. You had a whole life waiting for you, and none of it was here."
"It wasn't kindness."
"No." She looked at her hands. "I know what it was."
He reached over and put his hand over hers. Over her father's name and her own cold fingers both.
His palm was warm, and heavier than she remembered. A man's hand now, spotted and creased, the knuckles thick. She looked at it lying there on top of hers and didn't pull away.
Just for a moment. She let herself have the one moment.
The sea glass at her wrist caught what light was left. She'd worn it forty-five years. Through every season since she'd sent him off.
His thumb moved once across her knuckles.
She could stay. That was the thing she told herself she couldn't afford to think, and thought anyway.
She could sit on this bench in the dark with this man and let the years be the years and let her father's promises keep themselves.
The lamp would still turn. The town would still stand.
Nobody would die of Winnie Lockhart resting her hand under Sam Copeland's for an hour, would they?
She stood.
The loss of his hand was its own small cold, and she made herself pay it no mind.
"I've got a pot on," she said. "It'll scorch if I leave it much longer, and then I'll have wasted good soup over an old paper that's likely nothing at all."
"Winnie."
"Stay for supper if you want it. There's plenty, there always is." She was already moving, already a woman with somewhere to be, because that was easier than being a woman on a bench with her whole heart showing in the bad light. "Or don't. Suit yourself, you always did."
"I'll think about it," he said behind her, and she heard the smile in it.
The breeze met her halfway across the courtyard. The sea glass at her wrist caught the last of the sun off the water and threw it back. Behind her she heard Sam's footsteps following her to the cottage.