Chapter 20
The notice dinged on his computer. An email.
Marty almost didn't open it. Gerald Pryce, the name in the sender line.
A man he'd gotten a few emails from during the last twelve years.
From his old department. Old life. Gerald had stayed at the university while Marty drove south. Gerald had been a friend. Kind of.
The subject line read, Look familiar?
Marty pushed his glasses up onto his forehead and clicked it open.
A forwarded publicity announcement. A publisher's banner across the top, the kind of breathless copy he'd spent a whole career rolling his eyes at. And under it, Gerald's note. "Wasn't this the sort of writing you used to call beneath us? Turns out it pays better than Faulkner. Ha."
Marty's eyes skipped past it to the announcement itself.
F. L. Maxwell. The reclusive bestseller.
After fifteen novels and twenty years behind the initials, the author was launching a brand-new series.
And stepping into the light at last. A Gulf Coast lighthouse.
A small town like the ones the readers had always loved.
The publisher was thrilled to introduce, for the very first time, the writer behind the byline.
There was a photograph.
He looked at it a long moment without understanding it. The way a man looks at a word he's read a thousand times and suddenly can't spell.
Dark hair. Sharp features. A linen blazer and that steady, measuring look he knew from across a cluttered counter.
Fiona.
"No," he said, to no one. The shop had no answer. It never did. He talked to it anyway, the way he'd talked to it for years.
He read the thing again, slower, like slowing down might change it. It didn't. F. L. Maxwell was a woman. F. L. Maxwell was Fiona Wells. The woman who'd walked into Tides & Tales asking for nothing and walked out with the bottom shelf of his local history under her arm.
And then it all began to rearrange itself.
That first afternoon. She'd called the mystery's promise to the reader a promise. He'd thought, here's a woman who reads more carefully than she lets on, and he'd been charmed by it. He hadn't once asked why a casual reader argued craft like a person who'd bled for it.
Every conversation after that turned over in his hands and showed him its other side.
She'd known too much. Always. Why an ending earned out or didn't. She'd defended Hank Carson harder than Hal ever had, then caught herself and gone quiet. He'd let it pass. He liked the heat in her face when she argued.
He'd liked it. That was the part that stung going down.
The hours in the back room. He'd handed her his rare collection like a man showing off his garden.
The drowned poet. The ship's log. The journal with the Copeland footnote that lit her up like nothing else on the shelf.
He'd thought she was curious. He'd thought they were two careful people circling the same small mysteries for the love of it.
She'd been working. The whole time, she'd been working.
A Gulf Coast lighthouse. A town like the ones the readers had always loved.
She hadn't stumbled onto a story in Starlight Shores.
She'd come and mined one. His collection.
Winnie's lighthouse. The old hurt the whole town stepped so carefully around.
Fiona had walked straight through the middle of it taking notes, and he'd carried the lamp for her the whole way.
He took the glasses off the top of his head and set them on the counter and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes.
And the book. The book.
He'd read it in the dark above the shop, telling himself it was research, telling himself a man ought to know his enemy. Hal's worn paperback, the spine gone soft from other hands. He'd meant to find it thin. He'd wanted to.
It wasn't thin. It was good. Better than good, and he'd known it by the third chapter and hated knowing it. The plotting tight as a drum. The detective lonely in a way that came from someone who understood loneliness from the inside.
He'd told himself it didn't count. A well-built machine. He'd said as much to her face the day they met. And then, weeks later, in the back room, Hal had asked did he read it, and Marty had said yes. Said it was a real book. The detective's lonely in a way the author actually understands.
The author. Standing right there. Holding her coffee. Letting him say it.
She'd let him say it.
He'd thought—or at least he'd been beginning to think—that there was something between them. Small. But there.
Never mind what he'd thought. He was fifty-six years old and he'd let himself think it anyway.
The two coffees every afternoon. The way the shop felt brighter on the days she came.
A foolish thing for a foolish man to let in.
He'd pushed aside the lesson he'd learned when Annette died, and then he'd handed himself over to a stranger who'd been writing him down the whole time, plotting a book. Using the town and the people and him.
The widower in the bookshop, good for a scene. The thought turned his stomach.
He stood there a while in the quiet. A fishing boat worked its slow way across the harbor past the front window, indifferent to all of it. He watched it the way he watched most things lately, from a distance, through glass.
Then he crossed the shop and flipped the sign to CLOSED.
It wasn't even noon. He'd never once shut early in all the years of owning the place. Not for heat, not for rain, not for the slow afternoons when nobody came at all. He turned the deadbolt and stood there with his hand on it, listening to the shop clock tick across the room.
Then he climbed the narrow stairs to the rooms above.
Hal's paperback still sat on the nightstand where he'd left it.
Marty picked it up. He looked at the name on the cover the way he'd looked at the photograph, like it might tell him something new if he stared long enough.
F. L. Maxwell. Black letters on a worn blue spine.
He'd carried that name around in his mind for weeks.
Complaining about it. Defending against it.
And the whole time it had been sitting in his back room, cross-referencing his journals.
He set the book on the dresser and didn't pick it up again. He didn't come back downstairs all afternoon.
He heard the knock the next morning. He knew her knock. Of course he did. Two quick raps and a pause, then one more. The one she used when the shop was closed and she'd come early to see him.
"Marty?" Her voice came muffled through the door and the front glass. "I saw the sign. Are you all right?"
He sat in the chair and he didn't move.
"Marty. I know you're up there."
He looked at the door without getting up.
"Please." A pause. "I think you saw it. I think that's why you're not answering." A longer pause. "I should have told you myself. I know that. I wanted to."
He almost got up. His hand was already on the arm of the chair.
But he thought of the back room and the book she was writing about a small Gulf town. A lighthouse. Using the town.
He stayed in the chair.
After a while the knocking stopped. He heard her go down the steps, heard her footsteps fade, then nothing but the gulls and the water and the ordinary morning going on without him in it.