Chapter 24
The fire was already going when Fiona came down the path, and she didn't have a single excuse ready to leave early.
That was the new part. For weeks she'd shown up to these gatherings with one foot already pointed back toward her cottage.
A headache invented and waiting in her pocket like loose change.
Tonight she carried a bottle of wine instead.
A good one. She set it on the table between Cassidy's cookies and a platter of cut limes, and she didn't reach for a reason to go.
"There she is." Sally looked at her and smiled. "You look like a woman who slept."
"I did, actually."
"Don't sound so shocked about it."
"It's been a while, Sally. I'd forgotten what it does for a person."
"Eight hours and a clear conscience. Cheapest face cream there is." Sally looked her over once more, satisfied. "Wine's a nice touch, too."
Fiona crossed to the far side of the fire and settled on a bench near Emily and Winnie. The heat came at her in a soft wall there, and the smoke leaned the other way. Winnie reached over, squeezed her knee once, then went back to her own glass like she'd done nothing at all.
The whole courtyard was in motion the way it got at this hour. Off to the side Bryan stood over the grill, turning fish with a long spatula, frowning like it might lie to him. Clint hovered at his elbow with a plate, getting in the way and being tolerated.
"Lower the lid, you'll dry it out," Clint said.
"You cook the grouper at the Sandpiper for one week. Then you can talk to me about the lid."
"I'm just saying."
"I know what you're just saying."
Across the fire, Grant had a paper napkin spread on his knee and a pencil out, sketching with quick small strokes, his head tipped to one side. Melissa sat by Sam, scrolling through photos on her phone and holding it up for him every few seconds.
"No. This one." She turned the screen toward Sam. "Look at the window line. See how the third one sits lower than the rest? That's not the building settling. Somebody built it that way."
"I've been telling you that for a month." Sam's blue eyes crinkled. He sat close to Winnie, near enough that his knee nearly touched hers, and he hadn't drifted off the way he might have a few weeks back. "The cover should be the lighthouse. You keep fighting me on it."
"The cannery's stronger and you know it."
"The cannery's falling into the sea, Melissa."
"That's what makes it stronger."
"You two are going to fight about this cover until the book's out of print," Clint said.
"Probably," Melissa said, cheerful about it.
Winnie watched the two of them go back and forth, her sea glass bracelet glinting at her wrist, the corner of her mouth turned up. She caught Fiona watching her watch them and didn't bother to hide it.
"They've been at this for months," Winnie said, low. "I gave up refereeing weeks ago."
"You like it."
"I like the noise." Winnie turned her glass slowly in her fingers. "The house was too quiet for too many years. I'll take the noise now."
Cassidy had the bench across the way, and she was three sentences into a story with both hands going.
"So Bryan tells the health inspector the freezer's always made that sound.
Always. Like it's a feature of the freezer.
" She was already laughing at her own setup.
"And the man crouches down to get a look at it, real serious, clipboard out.
And the freezer picks that exact second to give up the ghost. Just dies. Loud. Right in his face."
"It was timing," Bryan called from the grill. "Pure bad timing."
"It was a haunted freezer, is what it was. You'd already gone and named it."
"His name was Larry. He'd earned a name by then."
The whole circle turned toward Bryan. Even Marty, who'd come down the path quietly a minute before and sat on the bench beside Fiona without making a thing of it. He had a beer he wasn't drinking. His shoulder settled warm against hers.
"You named the freezer Larry," Marty said.
"Everybody names the freezer," Bryan said. "You don't name your shelves?"
"I alphabetize my shelves. I don't name them."
"That's sadder. I want it on the record that's sadder."
Fiona laughed into her wine. It came out of her easily with no edge to it. Just natural, enjoying an evening with friends. No part of her standing off to one side keeping watch, taking down everyone's tells for some future book.
"What's the verdict?" she asked Marty, under the noise.
"On the freezer?"
"On all of it. You've avoided these for years. Winnie's been trying to drag you down here since before I showed up."
He considered the fire. "It's loud," he said.
"Sally cornered me about a book I don't want to stock on the walk in.
Clint's wrong about the grill." He turned his head.
The firelight caught the hazel of his eyes and the silver running through his hair.
"I'm staying anyway. Don't make me say more than that. I'm out of practice."
"You don't have to say more than that."
"Good."
But his hand found hers on the bench between them, his fingers folding around her own. That said the rest of it.
Emily had been listening with the open delight she never bothered to hide. "Okay. You two are sappy-sweet. I love it. Don't change a thing." She nudged Fiona's arm. "How's the writing? Last time anyone asked, you looked like you wanted to throw your laptop in the Gulf."
"That was last time."
"And now?"
Fiona set her wine down on the stones. The fire popped. For a moment the old reflex rose in her, the one that softened anything she said about her work into a shrug, a nothing. She let it go by.
"Hank's out of the alley," she said.
Emily blinked. "Is that good? It sounds good."
"It's very good. My detective's been standing over a dead body in a rain-soaked alley since February.
I left him there. Couldn't write him one step in any direction for six months.
" She shrugged. "This week he stood up. Walked to the corner to think.
He's after the killer now. He's actually moving. "
"Fiona." Winnie said it like a small toast.
"It's the most I've written since I got here. Maybe the most in a year." She turned to Marty. "And it's his fault."
Marty raised an eyebrow. "I didn't write a word for you."
"No. You did better." She angled toward him so the others could hear it, because she wanted them to. "I asked him on the beach how he'd end the book. Where Hank goes from the alley. And this one looks me dead in the eye and says, I have no idea, I'm a critic, not a writer."
"I stand by that."
"It broke the whole thing loose." She shook her head, still half amazed at it.
"I'd been waiting for somebody to hand me the answer.
Rachel, the publisher, Drake. I wanted permission from someone who wasn't coming.
Marty just told me flat out nobody was bringing it.
So I went and found it myself. Hank started walking the next morning. "
"So I helped by being useless," Marty said.
"You helped by being honest. Turns out that's what I needed."
Sally had stayed quiet exactly as long as she was able. She set down her glass. "I don't know who this Hank is, but I'm glad he's out of the alley. Sounds like a dreadful spot to leave a man."
"It was raining the whole time, too," Fiona said.
"Now that's just cruel."
"I'm a mystery writer, Sally. Cruel is the job."
"Put me in one," Cassidy said. "I want to be in a Hank book. I want to be the one who did it."
"You want to be the murderer?"
"Obviously I want to be the murderer. Who wants to be the body?"
"I'll be the body," Grant said, not looking up from his napkin. "Less dialogue."
"You'd be a wonderful body," Fiona told him.
"He really would," Emily said. "He goes so still when he's drawing. I've checked his pulse before."
"I'm not putting any of you in a book." Fiona held up a hand against the protest already starting.
"The new one doesn't touch this place. That was the promise I made, and I'm keeping it.
The town in the book won't have a thing to do with this one.
Except the way the light comes around. I couldn't give that up. "
"So we get the light and Cassidy doesn't get to murder anyone," Bryan said.
"Tragic," Cassidy said. "I'd have been so good at it."
"You'd have confessed in chapter two," Clint said.
"I'd have confessed in chapter one. I can't keep a thing to myself, ask anybody."
Winnie smiled. "We know, dear."
Bryan came around with the first plate of fish, and the gathering folded toward food the way it always did.
Clint passed plates. Cassidy told everyone to save room for the peach pie she'd made that Bryan's mom had taught her to bake, and it was good, if she said so herself.
Grant turned his napkin around to show Melissa whatever he'd drawn.
She laughed, reached for it, and he held it out of range.
"What is it?" Fiona asked.
"Bryan, fighting the freezer." Grant tilted it her way. He'd drawn the grill man in full hero pose, spatula raised like a sword, a boxy freezer labeled LARRY looming behind. "I'm calling it the founding myth of the Sandpiper."
"Frame it," Cassidy said. "I mean it. Frame it for the register."
Fiona ate grouper with her bare feet in the cooled sand and Marty's shoulder against hers. She'd written a hundred scenes reaching for exactly this and never once made it as perfect as this moment. The warmth of a group she belonged in.
The talk wandered on. Emily's next show. A storm sitting out in the Gulf that might come in by the end of the weekend. The Beacon's latest column, which Marty had written and Sally had opinions about.
The lighthouse beam swept out over the water above all of it.
It came around slowly, pale gold against the deep dark, and crossed the courtyard.
It passed over each of their faces in turn.
Emily mid-sentence. Bryan and Clint still bickering at the grill.
Winnie with her head tipped toward Sam. Then it moved on out to sea and let the firelight have them back.
Beside her, Marty looked over. He didn't say anything. He just squeezed her hand once, a small pressure worth more than a sentence.
Fiona squeezed back.
She looked at the couples who'd found each other at the lighthouse.
Emily and Grant. Cassidy and Bryan. Melissa and Clint.
And now the mystery writer who'd shown up to hide and the bookseller who'd stopped reading anything that might make him feel.
The two of them sitting side by side on a bench by the fire with nowhere either one of them wanted to be except right here.
"You've gone quiet," Marty said.
"I'm working."
"On the book?"
"On remembering this." She leaned her head against his shoulder. "So I can put it down right, someday. Not the real you. Some version. A man who names his shelves."
"I don't name my shelves."
"You will by the time I'm done with you."
Out past the cottages the beam came around again. Past her cottage that waited with the lamp on, and Hank Carson stopped mid-stride on his way to the corner, ready for her in the morning. Morning could keep. This moment was perfect. And Cassidy was already starting another story.