Page 16

16

S HEA

So that her highborn kinsman came and bore her away from me...

Annabel Lee

ANNABEL’S LIGHTHOUSE PRESENT DAY

PETE WAS STILL THERE. Shea grimaced as the lighthouse came into view. Holt must have caught her look because he bid her goodbye rather quickly and veered off toward his place. Shea noticed two legs sticking out from underneath Pete’s truck that he’d driven to the lighthouse the day before. She stopped and gathered her wits. A glance over shoulder told her Holt was out of sight and a guilty sensation washed over her. But it shouldn’t, she argued within herself. She had come here to the lighthouse for her and her career, and once again, Pete was inserting himself.

“What are you doing?” She didn’t mean her voice to sound as sharp as it did.

Pete’s voice was muffled. “Checking the exhaust. I thought it sounded a bit loud on the way here.” He maneuvered his way out from under the truck and pushed himself off the ground, brushing his hands together to wipe off any debris. “It’s getting rusty, but I don’t see anything serious.”

“How long are you staying?” Shea didn’t like herself in that moment. She heard the edge to her words. She sounded bitter. And she didn’t want to turn into a bitter wife. But it was hard not to. It was hard to look at her husband after just spending lunch with Holt and comparing the two. Holt was interested in what she was doing. He gave her eye contact. He shared in the conversation and even bought her lunch. Pete was just—busy. Fixing things.

“I don’t know.” Pete was also oblivious to her tone and was horrible at reading her emotions. He looked over his shoulder at the lake. “This place is nice.”

Nice? How about beautiful, or gorgeous, or entrancing? But no. Pete could barely make his way through the basic thesaurus of synonyms.

“Yes. That’s one reason I came here.” Shea bit her tongue before she added, “Because you never brought me.”

Pete redirected his gaze back to hers, and she saw a flicker of something. Hurt? Or maybe irritation. Frankly, she couldn’t read him anymore like she used to.

He proceeded to answer and disregard her not-so-veiled complaint. “I’d like to stay until your windshield is repaired. I’ll check on the battery, probably replace it to be safe. I’d like to check the fluids too since I’m here. After your drive from home, it wouldn’t hurt to check.”

“I’m sure they’re fine.” Her car was newer than anything Pete drove.

“Probably.” He offered a nonchalant smile and lifted his brows. “You want to get lunch?”

Well, there was Murphy’s Law in action. Her cheeks warmed. “I’m not really hungry.”

“Okay.” Pete didn’t seem to care. He patted the side of his truck like it was an old friend. “I saw there is a bar down the road a couple of miles. I was thinking of getting a burger.”

Fabulous. Just what Shea needed. Penny to meet Shea’s husband after she just had a mini lunch date with her bachelor landlord.

“Why don’t I make you a grilled ham and cheese?” she offered quickly.

Pete’s surprise was evident. He rubbed the back of his neck for a moment. Shea noticed his dark hair had gotten longer, and he needed a haircut. “Yeah, I guess.”

“Okay.” Shea took his acquiescence and ran with it. She started for the lighthouse. “I’ll just get it started then.”

“I’ll follow,” Pete stated.

Great. That wasn’t her intention, but follow he did.

“If you were going to shoot yourself, would you shoot yourself in the head?”

Pete choked on a bite of his sandwich. “Do you want me to shoot myself?” he countered.

“No!” And Shea was stupidly relieved to realize she really, truly didn’t. “No. I was thinking about a man named Jonathan Marks. He used to live in the lighthouse about fifteen years ago, and they found him dead with a gunshot wound to the head.”

Pete considered for a moment. “It’d be a quick way to go.” He took another bite of his sandwich.

“But is that how you would do it?” Shea pressed.

“I’ve never actually considered how I’d kill myself.” He gave her a sideways glance and a raised eyebrow.

Shea knew she was being gruesome, but at least with Pete, she didn’t have to pull any punches. One plus of being married to a man who had no emotional reaction to anything. Ever.

They sat outside at a picnic table in the yard that overlooked the lake while Pete ate his lunch. The sun was warm, the breeze remarkably light considering they were lakeside. At least it was a pleasant backdrop to the darkness of her train of thought. Shea couldn’t let it drop. She peppered Pete with another question—he might as well earn his stay.

“And the gunshot wound was to his right temple. He was left-handed. Can you shoot yourself easily with your less dominant hand?”

“What have you been watching?”

“Just go with me here.” Shea brushed him off. “If I were to shoot myself, I would hold the gun to my temple like this.” She demonstrated with her finger pointing at her right temple, her hand in the shape of a gun. “The left side would feel super weird, and I don’t think I’d want to risk messing up my shot by using my less dominant hand.”

“I’m not sure it makes much difference,” Pete replied. “Unless you’re really bad at holding a gun to your head, left or right, dominant or not, the bullet goes into your brain.”

“But why use your less dominant hand? Why not do what’s easiest?”

“So people like you would still be talking about it fifteen years later,” Pete teased.

“Funny.” Shea twisted in her seat on the top of the picnic table next to Pete. Both of them rested their feet on the bench, where most people usually would have sat. “The police ruled Jonathan’s death a suicide. Some of the locals say he had a severe personality change prior to his death.”

“Consistent with suicide then,” Pete observed, then took another bite of his grilled ham and cheese.

“I suppose.” Pete had a point, and Shea didn’t like it. She liked the theory of murder—if for no other reason than it added intensity to the retelling of the ghost of Annabel’s Lighthouse. A man murdered after going crazy digging into a century-old legend? Her editor would eat it up. But a death by suicide? It totally killed that angle, and she was back to writing about a ghost legend like other ghost legends—more of a historical recounting with spooky elements but less of an exposé. Which, she supposed, is what she’d originally set out to do.

“What would be the motive to murder this guy?” Pete asked.

Shea glanced at him. “He was getting too close to the actual truth about Annabel’s ghost?”

“Who’s Annabel?”

Shea gave him a cursory rundown. It wasn’t lost on her, all her internal whining about Pete never sharing her interests, and now here they were, perched in front of a scenic view and discussing the topic of her next book.

“A dead man and a ghost.” Pete played devil’s advocate better than Shea expected. “Well, a ghost story isn’t a typical motive for murder, especially one over a hundred and fifty years old.”

“Unless Jonathan uncovered something.”

“Buried treasure?” Pete suggested.

“Sure!” Shea perked up, a little surprised Pete was still engaging in their conversation. “Or some elusive truth someone wanted kept buried. Apparently, he was researching another bit of history surrounding the lighthouse. A woman named Rebecca who showed up here in the late 1870s, and she didn’t know who she was. It sounds like she had amnesia or something.”

“I’d start there then.” Pete sniffed, balling up the paper towel his sandwich had been wrapped in.

“And look for what?” Shea knew Pete wouldn’t have a clue, but she asked rhetorically, more to herself than to him.

“I don’t know.” Pete surprised her with an answer as he pushed himself off the table. “But the bigger question, if you opt for the murder theory, is why Jonathan Marks digging into all of this would have any effect on someone wanting to kill him?” Pete shoved the wadded paper towel into the pocket of his jeans. “I’m going to go patch up that woodpecker hole in the trim over the back door.”

The swift change of subject whiplashed Shea from her investigative thoughts, and she frowned. “Holt will do that. This is his property.”

Pete shrugged. “I don’t mind helping. Gives me something to do. I’ll give him a call and make sure he’s okay with it.”

“Ope!” Shea’s voice squeaked.

Pete shot her a quick look. “Is that all right?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s fine.” She answered too quickly, and she knew it. Pete’s eyes narrowed, and then his expression normalized.

“Great.”

“Have fun.” She was still too cheery.

Pete lifted his hand in a backward wave as he hiked back toward the lighthouse.

Shea spun around to face Lake Superior again, noting how it blended with the sky at the horizon. She had to pull herself together. She hadn’t done anything wrong by sharing a pastie—which had been better than she’d expected—with Holt. It hardly equated to an affair.

She hated to admit it, but Pete was right. What had Jonathan Marks stumbled upon that would be worth someone killing him over? Or had he truly just lost himself in it all—Annabel’s ghost notwithstanding—and was driven to end his life? Pete had made sense. If she found nothing, then it made the argument that there might be a hidden motive for murder a moot point—at least in relation to Annabel’s Lighthouse. But in the process, she might find something intriguing to add to her book. And if digging into this bit of the lighthouse’s history really had driven Jonathan Marks crazy, then—well, that added some spice to the story as well.

Shea shoved off the picnic table. Best get to it, she determined, before Annabel decided to break another window—or worse.