Page 39

39

S HEA

In the sepulcher there by the sea...

Annabel Lee

ANNABEL’S LIGHTHOUSE PRESENT DAY

SHE WAS NEVER MORE GLAD to see lights from a police car than the moment the red-and-blue flashed through the lighthouse kitchen. Marnie stumbled alongside Shea, holding her hand with a heartbreaking sense of need. Shea couldn’t wait to be free of the woman who only moments before had been strangling her and now trailed Shea like a hurting child.

The door slammed open, and the next few moments were a blur. Officers took custody of Marnie. Holt barreled into the room, eyes wild, until they landed on Marnie. “Marnie!” He rushed toward her, but the officer who had Marnie in custody held out his hand. Holt pulled up short as Marnie lifted her head and looked over her shoulder at him, a desperate apology on her face.

“I’m so sorry, Holt. So very sorry.”

Holt stared at his aunt as she was led away.

Another figure pushed through the fray in a calm manner, and Shea’s knees nearly buckled. Instead, she collected herself and pushed past Holt, stopping just short of flinging herself at Pete. His arm was still secure in its sling, yet he was wincing even as a smile touched his lips. Rain was beginning to dot their skin, the wind whipping her hair in all directions.

“Hey.”

“Where on earth were you?” Tears pricked Shea’s eyes. She wasn’t angry now. She wasn’t anything other than relieved and desperate to make it up to Pete. Make everything up to Pete. Everything she had stolen from him, she now wanted to give back.

“I drove Captain Gene’s car back to the Dipstick. Holt and his mom—Penny—had been harboring his grandfather in the basement of the Dipstick. The old man has dementia, but he’s always been a local hero of sorts. They’ve taken care of him while letting everyone believe he’s off on his adventures—like a legend. But he’s just an old man who has been battling age and the loss of his memories,” Pete explained. “Penny said her father asked them to do that. He didn’t want people to remember him as anything but Captain Gene, man of the Porkies.”

It made sense, Captain Gene’s actions earlier. His erratic behavior, the fact that no one knew where he was, that he couldn’t tell anyone what he knew. Captain Gene was no longer with them, and all that was left was the shell of an elderly man lost in a maze of dementia-riddled confusion.

Shea felt her heart break a little—for the man’s pride, for Penny’s silent burden, and for her own impetuous insistence to solve the mystery once and for all.

“Why didn’t Penny tell me Holt was her son? Why didn’t Holt call her ‘mom’ for goodness’ sake?” Shea stared past Pete toward the flashing lights, toward Holt’s silhouette as he stood looking lost, his hands behind his head and elbows sticking out.

Pete shook his head. “All I can say is that it’s a pretty dysfunctional family, and Captain Gene’s current condition hasn’t lent toward making it functional.”

Shea tempered her words so that they didn’t sound accusatory. “Why didn’t you tell me you were going back to the Dipstick tonight with Holt?”

Pete gave her a quizzical look. “I did. I asked you to trust me. Of course, I had no idea Marnie was in the lighthouse, not until Holt mentioned that’s why he was here in the first place. He was starting to put things together after I got hit by the car. He’d always wondered if Marnie was ... well, if she was okay. Her sending you to talk to Edna about all the history, it never added up to Holt because Marnie didn’t like anyone being in the lighthouse. Once he told me his concerns, that’s when we called— I called—the cops.”

Shea wrapped her arms around his left arm and gave it a hug since she couldn’t exactly assault him with affection due to his other arm. “Marnie has been lurking around here since I first came. Since she hasn’t been able to access the lighthouse the way she wanted, when I came, she thought my finding the map Rebecca supposedly stole way back in the 1800s might be her answer. Then Marnie was going to take it. She tried with Jonathan Marks—swore he knew where they were, but then she accidentally shot him.”

“Accidentally?” Pete’s eyebrow raised.

“That’s what she claims.”

They pushed into the lighthouse just as the sky opened up in full torrents. Within a few minutes, Holt burst in and then froze at the sight of them. He hesitated. “Can I ... come in?”

“It’s your lighthouse,” Pete said.

Holt collapsed onto a chair at the table, head in his hands. “I knew it,” he muttered. “I knew it.”

Shea glanced at Pete before easing into a chair across from him. “Holt?”

Holt looked up, eyes red, hair tousled and damp from the rain and the horrific night. “I’m sorry, Shea. I didn’t ... well, I hoped my aunt Marnie wasn’t responsible for all of this. And my mom, Penny—I was trying to protect her—and my grandfather—and—I didn’t know—” Holt was legitimately at a loss, and Shea couldn’t help him.

Holt lifted his eyes to hers. “I messed everything up—from the beginning until now. I wasn’t even honest that Penny was my mother. But it’s just how we function. Our family keeps each other at arm’s length. We care, but we don’t trust—not even each other, really.”

Shea grimaced. She couldn’t really say anything. In a lesser and more familiar way as far as society was concerned, she’d done the same with Pete. Cared, but kept him at arm’s length.

Shea noted Pete at the stove, pushing more firewood into it to generate enough heat to boil water for tea. His back was to her and Holt. He managed as though nothing major had happened. She looked back to Holt. “Your aunt Marnie admitted to the hit-and-run with Pete.”

Holt dipped his head. “I’d hoped that there was a different explanation.” He let out a growl of frustration and guilt.

Shea reached across the table as if to take Holt’s hand, but then she pulled back. “I won’t say it’s okay, Holt, but it’s not your fault. What Marnie did.”

Holt leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest, tipping his head back to stare at the ceiling. “She and my mom have always been on the outs. But I got along with Marnie in our own way. It’s my grandfather, Captain Gene, that’s a tough nut to crack. And now he’s just gone, even though he’s still here.”

“He sounds like he made life rough on Marnie and your mom,” Shea said.

Holt snorted. “Rough? Yeah, I guess that’s true. I’m so deeply entrenched in it, between Marnie and Captain Gene and Penny—my mom—I can’t even see the water for the land at this point.”

Pete gave a short laugh of understanding. “It’s not about any of that, Holt. It’s about wanting to be a part of something. It’s about family. It’s about the ties that bind—or don’t bind.” Pete’s gaze fell on Shea. “The fact is, when you let yourself get in the way, you cheat not only yourself but those around you of the chance to love you.”

Shea’s cheeks warmed, both out of guilt and in realization that Pete was staring deep into her eyes in a way she’d long wished for but had rarely seen, if ever.

He finished, “We get our priorities messed up. We forget that the ones we love are what’s most important, no matter the cost.”

Holt had left to head back to his place. The lighthouse was a quiet refuge from the wind and rain as dawn split the sky. The gray clouds kept the sun at bay, yet the light still stretched over the lake, over the woods, and across the lighthouse.

The tea had finally been made.

Pete slid a tin mug across the table to Shea, who took it and palmed it with her hands. He slipped onto the chair Holt had occupied not long before, and they sat in companionable silence. Shea was sure if she reached out, she could physically feel the unspoken words between them, and knowing Pete, he wouldn’t know how to start. That was the deal with being married to a man of few words, who’d pretty much used up his entire vocabulary in the last few hours.

“Do you think we’ll ever know where Rebecca hid the map?” Shea ventured. It was as good a place to start as any.

“I doubt it.” Pete shook his head.

“Now that we know what happened here with Jonathan Marks and the recent hauntings, it’s kind of—”

“Anticlimactic?” Pete raised his eyes.

Shea gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah. I mean, I shouldn’t say that considering you’re recovering from being hit by a car, but I just ... I felt there might be more to the story.”

“I’m sure there is,” Pete was quick to respond.

Shea shot him a questioning look.

“Well,” Pete went on, “if you were able to go back in history, what do you know?”

Shea contemplated the story she’d been able to unravel. “Annabel drowned in the lake. Hilliard, her husband, watched it happen from the shore. Their daughter, Rebecca, stole the map—out of spite toward her father perhaps? She never revealed where she hid it. Silvertown went belly-up. Captain Gene was in her family tree through a brother she had named Aaron.”

“So why is there a grave?” Pete asked.

Shea stared at him.

“If Annabel died by drowning, did her husband pull her body to shore? Was it really her husband on the shore?”

Shea frowned. “What are you saying, Pete?”

“I’m saying it’s a story. That’s all it is. Records state Annabel drowned in the lake after the craft she was in overturned. That’s all. There are no records of her body being retrieved. There are no grave records either.”

“How do you know this?” Shea was taken aback by Pete’s extra knowledge.

He gave her a pacifying smile. “You’re not the only one who got into figuring out the mystery.”

“So if there are no grave records,” Shea ventured, “then someone had to have created a grave for memorial’s sake. To keep her close to the lighthouse.”

“The lightkeeper,” Pete finished.

Shea stared at him. “That’s right!” She snapped her fingers. “I forgot that part of the legend. Annabel and her lover. Her lover wasn’t her husband. It was the lightkeeper, wasn’t it? The man who spent his life watching over the lake where she died.”

Pete shrugged. “Who knows? It’s a good guess, though. We’ll probably never know.”

Shea considered this, and then the name slipped past her lips. “Edgar.”

“Who?” Pete asked.

Shea didn’t answer. She remembered the extra gravestone. The name etched into its face. Edgar the lightkeeper lost to the annals of time. She dared a glimpse at Pete, who drank his tea quietly, oblivious to any further expansion of the conversation or else deep in thought about it. Maybe she’d made a bad habit of misinterpreting Pete’s silence.

Regardless, the genealogy of Annabel didn’t include a man named Edgar, but the ghostly story claimed the lightkeeper’s undying love for her long after she’d drowned. Shea tapped her finger on her mug, not taking her eyes away from her study of Pete. She wondered what it would be like to love someone so much that you never stopped, long after they were dead and buried. Or ... a darker thought overtook her, so dark that Shea stuffed it away and determined not to revisit it. What would it be like to love someone so completely and obsessively that you never wanted to share them with anyone else?

They had a lot of work to do, this Shea recognized as she packed her belongings in preparation to leave Annabel’s lighthouse. Holt had waived the rental fees as penance for all the drama. Shea had what she needed for a book—more than what she needed—and much of it she would never use.

It seemed when a person dug into a story from the past, so many details revealed themselves. Ones that made the past so much less romantic and haunting and instead darker and more broken. She still had questions, but Shea had concluded she would never know the answers. She couldn’t time-travel back and read Rebecca Hilliard’s mind when she’d secreted away with her father’s papers and map. Shea also couldn’t reconcile exactly how Edgar fit into the equation—aside from the infamous story of being Annabel’s lover.

Putting the pieces together, it was apparent that Annabel had been married to Hilliard, Silvertown’s founder who’d gone bankrupt and had been imprisoned for fraud and conspiracy to commit manslaughter. Which meant Annabel had not been married to a very nice man—not at all. In Shea’s romantic mind, it all made sense then, that Annabel would fall in love with an older, caring sort. But seeing as Hilliard had raised Annabel’s daughter, Rebecca, it also was apparent Annabel had not left Hilliard except by death—the tragedy of being lost at sea. An escape? Perhaps. But a strange one.

Shea had mulled over the concept of Annabel’s supposed craft sinking and her drowning. But why would a woman take a skiff out on the lake unless the waters had been calm? And if the waters were calm, there was no reason for a skiff to overturn or a woman to drown. Unlike the story of a tempestuous storm or a husband stuck on shore unable to reach her due to the high waves, logic offered a different theory. One that made Shea question if Annabel had, after all, died of drowning by accident...

The thought hung in the air as an arm slid around her waist. Shocked, Shea stiffened and spun within the circle of the arm to stare wide-eyed at Pete.

“What are you doing?” She drew back, questioning.

He tightened his hold. “Hi.”

“Oh, hi...” The butterflies that rose in her were unusual and rare. It’d been years since Pete had been the cause of them.

His ice-blue eyes were like melting bergs, and Shea had the sudden thought that she was okay with drowning in those eyes.

“I’m sorry.” Pete’s words both stunned and confused her.

“For what?” Shea asked.

“For not listening to you. For working on my cars all the time. For being so busy taking care of things for you, that I forgot to take care of you.”

“Oh.” Shea’s voice was small even to her own ears.

Pete’s fingers grazed the side of her face. “I don’t want to love you for me, Shea. I want to love you for you.”

His words stung and healed simultaneously. Shea sucked in a steadying breath, bracing her balance by taking hold of his waist. “I haven’t been exactly fair to you, Pete.”

He waited.

She tried to gather her thoughts. “I came here to find myself, and I’ve realized that ... well, with everything that’s happened, with Annabel’s story and her family’s legacy, I see now that pursuing taking care of myself first isn’t necessarily balanced. I need to take care of you too. Of us.” Shea pressed forward. “Not that I don’t need to take care of myself. I mean, my health, my emotions, yeah sure, but what I mean is ... it’s not just me. I didn’t fall in love with you for me either, but that’s sort of what it’s become.”

Pete nodded. He leaned forward, and Shea’s breath caught. His lips touched her jaw. “It’s become that for both of us, I think. In our own ways.” He pulled back. “Should we have a do-over?”

Shea gave a little laugh. Gosh, if he kept acting like this, she’d fall in love with him all over again. But, she reminded herself, this time she’d do it with the intent of making him her teammate, her love, and someone she would serve. Love—true love—required humility and sacrifice. That was the long and short of it. Romance ebbed and flowed like the waves outside the lighthouse, and yet love for another carried through the storm. It shone like a light across the tempest, and it beckoned the loved one home to safety.

Love wasn’t about her. It was about them.

As Shea leaned into Pete and tasted the first real kiss in a long time, she wondered briefly if there had ever been true love in this lighthouse. Or if it had always been thwarted by heartache and haunted by the ghost of a woman who had never really known what it meant to be truly, wholly, and completely cherished.

Either way, Shea decided as she laid her head on Pete’s shoulder, breathing in the essence of him, she would start again. She would examine her intentions. She would rethink her motivations. She would consider Pete in all her decisions. Most of all, she would love as if their lives depended on it ... because they did. And that was good and pure and everything that was right.