Page 25 of Light of Day (Sea Smoke Island #1)

“I must really like you, because I wouldn’t reach out to Carson for anyone else,” Luke grumbled as he knocked on the door of his father’s library at the Lightkeeper Inn.

“If I tell you I promise to show my appreciation, will that help?” Heather gave him a hopeful smile that he found both sexy and adorable.

“Specifics, please?”

“I was thinking a double scoop fudge swirl ice cream cone.”

That reminded him… “Izzy. I’m taking her to Sea Scoops later on, no matter what’s happening.”

The door opened and his brother Carson greeted them.

Carson was the oldest, and his father’s go-to errand boy.

Aside from the deep blue Carmichael eyes, he didn’t look much like their father; he had a wiry build and a sulky manner.

For most of their lives, he’d treated Luke, who was six years younger, like an irritating fly in his soup.

“You owe me, dude. This better be important.” He barely spared a glance for Heather before focusing on Luke again.

“It is. It’s part of an official investigation.”

“Into what? Old books?” Carson stepped aside so they could enter.

“I can’t say any more than that.” Luke was hoping no one would press too hard on that point, since there was no more investigation into Gabby’s disappearance.

Making this about Denton would be a stretch, since he still hadn’t gotten word from the coroner.

“We’re just looking for some background information. ”

“And you think we have it in here?”

“Hoping.” As the familiar tang of cigar smoke mixed with leather and book glue enveloped him, Luke gestured to the display cases. “We just want to look more closely at some of those newspaper articles.”

“Why?”

“I’m sorry, I really can’t get into the details.

” Luke held steady under Carson’s suspicious gaze.

If his brother hadn’t been such an ass to him—and Carrie, too—he might have said more.

But Carson was generally just looking for an angle to bolster his own standing in the Carmichael universe at everyone else’s expense. “But Dad knows we’re investigating.”

He hoped that was vague enough to be essentially accurate. After all, Heather had talked to him just yesterday.

“Are you sure about that? The old man’s not what he used to be.”

“Do we have some kind of problem here?”

Carson shoved his dark hair out of his eyes and glared at Luke.

Smartly, Heather stayed out of the infamous Carmichael dynamic. Some things were best left to play out on their own.

“Fine,” Carson finally said. He unlocked the glass display case. “I’m a busy guy, I can’t stay and babysit this project. Make sure you lock the case after you’re done. If we find anything out of place, you’ll get a bill.”

“We’ll be very careful.” Luke refused to rise to the bait. He could dispute his brother’s claim that he was “busy,” but that seemed low. He honestly had no idea how Carson spent his time.

“Thank you, Carson,” Heather said politely.

Carson eyed her, his manner softening. When he wasn’t being a dick, he could be very charming. “You’re the one looking for your friend, right?”

“Yes, but?—”

Luke nudged her with his elbow. There was no reason to tell Carson anything other than what he needed to know.

“How did you know about that?” she finished.

“We’re all worried about her, of course. Have you had any luck with the search?”

“Well, it’s definitely heading in some very unexpected directions,” Heather said mysteriously.

Carson narrowed his eyes at her, but she just smiled sunnily at him. “I’ll let you two get to work,” he finally grumbled.

After he was gone, Luke shook his head at Heather. “Poking the bear.”

“Maybe some bears need to be poked. Why didn’t you tell him that we found Gabby?”

“Maybe I don’t trust the bear.”

They shared a smile of complete mutual understanding, and set to work going through the newspapers in the display case.

Each one had been folded so only the front page headline was shown, but the entire paper was still intact.

A box of Nitrile gloves sat next to the case.

They both gloved up, and quickly discovered why they were needed.

The old newsprint came off so easily, the blue gloves were smudged with black within minutes.

All of the articles focused on the construction and opening of the Lightkeeper Inn.

Ground was broken today on Sea Smoke Island for what is promised to be an extravagant addition to the summer getaway roster for New England’s most elite families.

Construction is expected to take at least a year given the remote location and unpredictable weather conditions.

The call for laborers went out months ago, and supervisors say they are still looking for good hands.

Such is the challenge when building on an uninhabited island.

This feat of engineering will be one for the ages.

Another article went into detail about the process of acquiring lumber from down east, since the island itself would be deforested if they relied exclusively on the local island timber.

How many hotels have their very own sawmills? That’s the situation for overseers of operations at the future Lightkeeper Inn. But with warnings of depletion levels approaching, the sawmill is being put into storage and lumber is now being imported from as far away as Limerick.

“ This is interesting,” said Heather, who was using a magnifying glass to look at the photograph above an article in the Harbortown Press-Gazette .

“The headline is about the beauty of the island, and they included this scenic shot of the eastern point. But look at this. You can see the wharf, or a previous version of it. A boat is tied up there. I can see a red cross, like for medical transports. It looks like they’re loading up a coffin. ”

“A coffin! Did someone die during the construction project?”

“If so, it was more than one person. Look, there’s a stack of them back here.” She pointed to a spot on the photo he could barely see, then handed him the magnifying glass.

Sure enough, about ten plain pine-wood coffins waited their turn to be loaded onto the boat.

“If ten people died while building that hotel, it would have been reported on. They documented every detail of this project. I think they did that on purpose. I remember my father talking about what a great marketing person my great-grandfather was.”

“Maybe he was so great he was able to bury the story?” She winced. “So to speak?”

“Possibly. But look at the date on this article. September fifth, nineteen-eleven. They hadn’t even broken ground at that point.” They compared the two dates, and sure enough, the coffin-loading had come first.

“So who was in those coffins?” she asked with a visible shiver. “This article here says that the island is uninhabited. Didn’t anyone live here before the hotel was built?”

“I don’t know, but plenty of the islands out here are unpopulated. There’s so many of them.” He gestured at the map of Lightkeeper Bay mounted on the wall. It included water depths, reefs, light buoys, everything a sailor would need to navigate the bay. “Casco Bay has even more islands.”

“Yes, but most of them are just rocks with a few trees bent over from the wind. Sea Smoke Island is big, and it has natural springs and an aquifer and plenty of trees for building. Remember all those old stories about bandits smuggling whiskey out here?”

“Oh yes, the shipwreck caused by winter sea smoke. The one that gave our island its name. How could I forget that legend?” Luke shook his head. “More marketing from the mind of John Carmichael the First. No one’s ever found any evidence of a shipwreck.”

Heather tipped her head to acknowledge his point. “True. But what about the Abenaki or other Native tribes? I know they used to come to these islands to fish in the summers. We learned about that in high school.”

“Did the Abenaki bury their dead in pine coffins?”

“I have no idea. And why would they be shipped off the island, no matter who’s in those boxes?” She took the magnifying glass and scrutinized the photo again. “Those coffins are not new. They’ve been in the ground. Look, they’re stained dark from being underground.”

This was just getting stranger. “We could ask my father what he knows about this.”

Heather gave a dubious twist of her mouth; to be honest, he felt the same way.

His phone buzzed. The county coroner’s office was calling. He listened to the message, then met Heather’s gaze. “They’re ruling Denton’s death a homicide. Death by strangulation. Gabby was right.”