Chapter 16
Fiona opened the door to Tides & Tales, and her heart did a small, ridiculous flutter.
She stopped on the mat and frowned at herself. A flutter. Like a teenager. She was too old for that. She'd walked into this shop a dozen times now, and somewhere along the way her body had started doing things without asking permission.
It was just the books. She liked the smell of the place, old paper and dust and the faint salt that got into everything in this town. That was all.
It was not just the books.
Marty looked up from the counter, reading glasses shoved up into his hair where he'd forget about them soon enough. "There she is," he said. "I was starting to think you'd defected to the chain store up the highway."
"They have a coffee bar," she said. "And recliners."
"Traitor's amenities."
"I'm only here for your back room. Don't flatter yourself."
But she was smiling, and so was he, and neither of them seemed in any hurry to pretend otherwise.
She set the two coffees on the counter, both black, the way they'd fallen into taking them. Jan had handed them over with a look that Fiona had decided to ignore. She'd been ignoring a lot of looks lately. Sally's. Winnie's. Her own, in the mirror.
"You're early," Marty said, lifting his cup.
"I had a thought overnight. About the journal."
"Did you?" He came around the counter, and she caught the worn softness of his shirt, sleeves already rolled. "You realize most people, when they have a thought overnight, go back to sleep."
"Most people aren't onto something."
He gave her a look she was getting to know, the one that pretended to be long-suffering and wasn't. "Back room," he said. "Bring your evidence, Detective."
They headed to the back room of Tides & Tales.
Well, honestly, it was barely a room. More of a generous closet that someone had lined with shelves, then kept lining until the shelves outnumbered the air.
A single bulb hung from the ceiling. There was one chair, a wooden stool, and a narrow table.
Marty had cleared the table off the first time she'd come back here.
He'd swept a stack of auction catalogs onto the floor like a man making room for work that mattered.
Fiona opened her notebook on the table. She'd filled four pages since the last visit, her handwriting getting smaller and more urgent the way it always did when a story started pulling at her.
"Okay," she said. "The journal. The linguistics one. It calls the lighthouse a site of interest, J. Copeland co-authoring. We knew that."
"We did."
"But there's a footnote in the back. I almost missed it." She tapped the page. "It cites an earlier piece. Something about coastal installations and, I'm quoting, unusual technical arrangements. I want to find it."
"Maybe in the regional stuff?" He ran a finger along a shelf above his head. "Or the periodicals box. I never catalogued half of what came with the shop."
"You bought a building full of books and never read them all?"
"I've read most of them." He pulled down a clothbound volume, frowned at it, and slid it back. "The local material's the orphan shelf. Nobody wants it. I keep it because somebody should."
She liked that. She wrote it down without meaning to, then crossed it out, because she wasn't writing him, she was writing the lighthouse.
"You know your trouble," she said, watching him reshelve. "You hoard the books nobody reads and you sneer at the ones everybody does."
"I don't sneer."
"You sneered at my mysteries the first day I walked in. Comfort food, you said. Well-built machines."
"That was before I knew you'd argue with me about it for a month." He found another volume, checked the spine, kept it. "A man can revise his position."
"Can he?" She filed that away. Marty Fuller, revising.
For a while they worked without talking. He pulled volumes and handed them down. She cross-referenced, running her finger down indexes, calling out dates. The bulb buzzed faintly overhead. Outside, muffled, a gull was having an argument with another gull.
"Anything with Lockhart in the index, set it aside," she said.
"You're very bossy for someone using my collection for free."
"You love it."
He didn't answer that. She glanced up and he was already looking at her, and she went back to her index very quickly.
They both reached for the same shelf at the same moment, the low one near the corner.
Her shoulder pressed into his and stayed there a beat longer than the room required.
Neither of them moved. She was aware of the warmth of him, the ink-and-paper smell that was just Marty by now, and her pulse doing the flutter thing again.
"Sorry," he said, not sounding sorry.
"You're in my way," she said, not moving.
"It's my shop."
"Details."
He laughed and reached past her. His arm brushed hers. She pulled down the box of loose periodicals, then set it on the table with more force than it needed.
The earlier piece wasn't in the box. But a different one was.
A thin pamphlet, one corner water-stained, the kind of self-published local thing that turned up at historical-society bake sales. Notes Toward a History of the Gulf Keepers. No author name. Printed who knows when.
"Marty. Look."
He leaned over her shoulder. She felt him there, the bend of him toward the page.
She read aloud, low. "During the war years the Lockhart light hosted a number of visitors not connected with the Lighthouse Service. Academics, by their dress and manner. It was said that equipment was brought in by boat after dark."
"Huh," Marty said.
"Wonder what type of equipment? They already had the light."
"I have no idea." Marty shrugged.
"Why academics? Why bring in equipment after dark?" She flipped the pamphlet over, hunting for more, and found it on the last page, in a footnote so small she had to tilt it under the bulb. Her finger stopped.
"There," she said. "Among the visitors recorded in the keeper's private accounts. Copeland."
"The same Copeland?" Marty asked.
"It has to be. J. Copeland on the linguistics paper.
Copeland in the keeper's accounts." She pressed the heel of her hand to the table.
"But it's still not enough. It's a name in two places.
Equipment brought in after dark. Academics nobody can account for.
I'm building a picture and half of it's fog. "
"That's research," he said. "You're describing research."
"I'm describing being one good document short of the whole picture.
" She straightened and looked at the shelves like they were withholding evidence on purpose.
"There's a piece missing. The thing that ties the man to the equipment to the lighthouse.
It's out there. Probably in a box like this in somebody's garage. "
"Or," Marty said, "it never existed. People didn't write down the interesting things. They wrote down the harvest, the weather, and who got married. The good stuff lived and died in conversation."
He had a point, which annoyed her. "Then I'll find the conversation. Somebody's grandmother told them something they remember. Somebody always remembers something."
Marty sat down on the stool, which put his face level with hers where she stood, and he looked at her differently than he had ten minutes ago. Not warmer, exactly. Closer. Like a man recalibrating.
"You know what this is, don't you?" he asked.
"A pamphlet from an old box?"
"This is real scholarship." He said it plainly.
"I spent eighteen years around people who called what they did important.
Half of them were filing the same idea four different ways for the tenure committee.
Then you walk in here with a footnote, a hunch, and you're doing the actual research.
Following a real question because you can't stand not knowing the answer. "
Heat climbed her neck. "It's procrastination with extra steps."
"It's not." He set down his coffee. "I'd forgotten what it looked like. Somebody caring about getting it right."
The room felt smaller. The bulb buzzed. She was very aware of the inch of table between his knee and her leg. His eyes had gone from the page to her mouth and back. Her own breath had gone shallow and quiet.
"Marty," she said, and didn't know what she meant to say after it.
He leaned in. Just slightly. Just enough that the question was on the table with everything else, plain as the pamphlet. Her whole foolish fluttering body leaned the half inch back toward him, and—
"Marty? You here?" A voice called out.
They both went still. Marty closed his eyes for a second, like a man counting to ten.
"You back there?" A man's voice, cheerful, getting closer. "Door was open."
"Hal," Marty said, under his breath, and stood. "We're in the back."
Fiona stepped away from the table and busied her hands with her notebook.
Her face was warm. Her pulse was a mess.
She had absolutely been about to let the man kiss her in a closet full of old books and papers, and a small, traitorous part of her wanted to lock the front door and pretend the shop was closed.
Hal came through the curtain, a big sunburned man in a fishing shirt, and stopped when he saw her. "Oh. Didn't know you had company."
"Hal, this is Fiona," Marty said. "She's renting out at the lighthouse. Fiona, Hal. He keeps me honest about what people actually want to read."
"Somebody's got to." Hal stuck out a hand and she shook it. "You the writer? Sally mentioned. Says you keep to yourself."
"Sally mentions a lot of things," Fiona said.
"That she does." Hal turned to Marty, clearly here on a mission.
"Listen. I'm out. I finished the Maxwells.
All of them, the last one too, took me three days.
So now I got nothing and Donna says I'm unbearable when I got nothing to read.
What's next? Give me a whole series. Something I can sink into for a month. "
"I can do that." Marty crossed to the front, already thinking, already in his element. "Depends what you're in the mood for. Do you want another detective, or do you want to try something different?"
"Detective. Don't get fancy on me." Hal followed him out through the curtain, then stuck his head back through. "Hey, did you ever read the one I left you? The first Maxwell. Or's it still holding up your coffee mug?"
Fiona's hand stopped on her notebook.
"I read it," Marty said, from the front of the shop.
"And?"
There was a pause. Fiona found herself standing very still in the back room, the pamphlet forgotten in her hand, waiting on an answer like it was a verdict.
"It was good," Marty said. "Genuinely. I expected to hate it and I didn't. The plotting's tight. And the detective's lonely in a way the author actually understands. It's a real book."
Hal said something pleased and triumphant that Fiona didn't catch, because her ears were ringing a little.
She came out of the back room slowly. Marty was at the shelf, sliding out a fat paperback for Hal. He glanced over at her like nothing had happened. Like he hadn't just said the kindest thing anyone had said about her work in years, with no idea he'd said it to her face.
"You read a Maxwell book," she said.
He shrugged, faintly sheepish. "Don't tell anyone. I've got a reputation to protect."
A real book. The detective's lonely in a way the author understands.
She had written that loneliness at her own kitchen table in the dead middle of the night, married and aching and unable to say it out loud.
She'd poured it into Hank because Hank was the only one she could tell.
And Marty Fuller, who'd called her detective functional and forgettable the day they met, had read it. He'd felt it and called it real.
She didn't know what to do with that. She honestly didn't. She stood there holding a water-stained pamphlet about a lighthouse and honestly didn't know what to think.
The door opened again. A young couple in matching sunglasses came in, the man holding a phone up the way tourists did, the woman already drifting toward the postcards by the window.
"Excuse me," the woman called. "Do you have, like, a local map? A cute one?"
Marty caught Fiona's eye over Hal's shoulder, an apology and a question in it both. Stay, the look said. Don't go.
But she couldn't stay. Her face was still warm. She needed air, a long walk, and to be anywhere that wasn't a small room with Marty Fuller until she'd figured out what her own heart was doing.
"I should get back," she said. "The lighthouse won't research itself."
"Fiona—"
"Tomorrow," she said. It was the word she'd been saying to everyone for months, Rachel and herself and the empty page. But this time she found she meant it. "I'll come tomorrow."
She tucked the pamphlet into her bag and slipped past the tourists.