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S HEA

I was a child, and she was a child, in this kingdom by the sea...

Annabel Lee

ANNABEL’S LIGHTHOUSE PRESENT DAY

“DON’T GET TOO CLOSE. It may bite you.”

Shea mouthed the lightkeeper’s words to herself as she explored the place that would be her home for the next month. Annabel’s Lighthouse. A two-story building with cramped rooms, a metal spiral staircase that led from the keeper’s bedroom up to the little attic bedrooms and then on to the lighthouse itself.

Curiosity demanded that she ignore the inner rooms and head to the beacon or lamp room. The square iron gallery accommodated a platform and rail, while the decagonal beacon room held an old Fresnel lens and light. Though it was no longer working, no longer warning ships of the rocky shoreline, the light remained intact, like a time capsule that held memories only it could recall. She eyed heavy curtains hanging over several of the panes of glass, wondering at their existence when the purpose of the lighthouse was to shine the light outward, not hold it inside.

Pulling her phone from her pocket, she typed a note into an app to remind herself to research the curious curtains. The room was a tad chilly, the wind clanging against its metal framework.

Annabel’s Lighthouse.

Shea was here for Annabel as much as she was for the inner workings of a lighthouse built in the 1860s. She scanned the horizon. It was said a person could see twelve miles out on a clear day. Twelve miles of blue-green waters, icy cold even on a hot July day. Waters that never gave up their dead but preserved them for years because of the freezing temperatures. Corpses didn’t have the normal “bloat and float,” as Shea liked to call it. They sank along with their ships, which became permanent caskets in a watery grave.

But then there was Annabel.

Not much was known of the woman who had taken over the name of Silvertown Lighthouse and claimed the place as her own. It was said that some nights she could be seen walking the shoreline, barefoot and wearing a white gown. Annabel’s story comprised a marriage and an outside lover, thwarted love, a raging tempest, and a man who had never given up hope of finding her—the young woman lost to the lake’s frigid depths.

The lighthouse had been kept for years, the beacon said to have searched for the lost woman even on calm nights. Its light shone over the waters, a silent cry for Annabel to come home, to rise from the lake and take her place beside the man who’d loved her for decades until his death.

Today, Annabel was a mere ghost story. Her spirit was said to haunt the lighthouse. She was a restless spirit, visiting people when least expected, acting as though she pled for rescue, sometimes heralded as a nurturing specter, other times so haunting she was almost like a siren one wished to follow. Some said her husband killed her. Most believed the man who’d truly loved her—her lover—joined Annabel after he died. An old man curled on his cot in the lightkeeper’s room, alone and decrepit.

Shea didn’t believe in ghosts, but she did believe in lore and in telling the stories of the ones whose lives had been captured in ways that made them ghostly.

Annabel had a story.

Shea planned to unravel it, and then she would write it. And when Shea was done, Annabel would no longer be a ghost, but a human who had lived and died, plagued by the same tempestuous waters of love that Shea herself was attempting to navigate.

As she did on any research trip, Shea took the first day to explore the area and gather information. Following a fifteen-minute drive from the lighthouse, she entered the Porcupine Mountains State Park and its miles of wilderness. Once she’d found a place to park, she set off, hiking along the Escarpment Trail that led to a scenic overlook, where she could look down at the vastness of the region and the famed Lake of the Clouds, which sparkled at the foot of the dramatic cliffs. The old-growth forest below burst into full spring foliage, a deep emerald green and invitingly lush.

While she’d been enticed to hike the trail, she wasn’t prepared for a several-mile-long walk, nor was it the purpose of her day. Turning away from the Lake of the Clouds, she traveled back toward the lighthouse and then beyond it toward Ontonagon. Lunch in a small diner brought her face-to-face with locals, and she spent some time exploring the town, poking her head into a small museum, and afterward walking the pier. She’d gathered a few names of people to reach out to for more information about lore, history, and the like.

The name Edna Carraway had come up a few times, just as Holt had mentioned earlier that morning, and so had the names August Fronell and Captain Gene. Apparently all three were locals, born and raised, with Captain Gene being the one who interested her the most. Maybe it was the Captain ahead of his name, or maybe it was merely because he’d been described as “cranky and crotchety.” And while she might get the most stories out of him concerning Annabel and the lighthouse, she’d be lucky to find the man.

It seemed the captain was as elusive as “Pressie,” the lake’s mysterious serpent that was not unlike the Loch Ness Monster. In fact, they said it was Captain Gene who had been the last known person to spot Pressie in the lake, although that had been back in the 1970s. Regardless, Captain Gene was someone Shea wanted to interview.

With leads noted in her phone app, Shea made her way back to the lighthouse, stopping briefly at the diner once again where the Wi-Fi was reliable. She scanned her inbox, wrote and sent an email to her editor, and thumbed through text messages.

Pete had texted her once: Make it there?

She eyed it for a long moment, debating whether she felt like giving Pete the satisfaction of knowing she’d arrived safely. He could have at least taken the time to call her. Finally, she ignored the sting of her stagnant marriage and sent him a quick response: Yep .

There. If Pete could write in short sentences, so could she.

Back at the lighthouse, Shea heated soup in the kitchen, enjoying the cast-iron pot and the old-fashioned stove that still worked. She’d followed the instructions Holt had left on a laminated card—wood in the firebox to get it started and to keep it warm. Back in the day, they would have followed up the wood with coal for longer and more consistent burning. But tonight, she just needed enough to heat the iron range, which took far longer than Shea anticipated.

That was the allure of Annabel’s Lighthouse, and she knew when she’d reserved the place that she’d be stepping back in time. A microwave oven was available as another option for heating up the soup, but the call of the prior century had wrapped itself around Shea as darkness set in. She could hear the ebb and flow of the waves on the shoreline. The strength in the waves filled the lighthouse with a consistent, rhythmic song.

The lights in the kitchen were kept purposefully dim. Shea could see why Holt had attempted to recreate an early twentieth century appeal. The simplicity of life was emphasized by the solitude of the lighthouse, a cozy environment that belied the dangers of the lake and wilderness just outside the door.

With a bowl of hot soup in hand, Shea moved to the sitting room, settling on a green couch long out of style. It sagged in the middle but was remarkably comfortable when Shea sank onto it. She propped her feet on a faded blue-velvet ottoman and, with a sigh of relief for the familiar, retrieved the remote control for the small TV mounted on the wall above a table that held coasters, a few locally written books on the area, and a guest book for visitors to sign.

She wasn’t sure what she’d find for channels, and it was obvious to her the moment she turned on the TV that her choices were limited. But there was a true-crime documentary on, and now that it was dark outside and the 60-watt lightbulb in the lone lamp created shadows around the room, it only seemed appropriate to watch something creepy.

Maybe Annabel would pay a visit too...

Shea smiled to herself, pleased with the solitude, the silence, and the overwhelming feeling that she was alone. Truly alone. A wild country, a temperamental lake, a legendary ghost, and just herself. It was almost delightful, if she could set aside the realities of life.

The documentary proved to be one she’d seen before, but Shea found a few DVDs on the table next to the books. She set her soup bowl aside and looked through them, her attention perking up when she noted one of them was about the Silvertown Lighthouse.

Within a few minutes, Shea had popped the DVD into the player and located its remote. She hit play, retrieved her soup, and settled in for what she hoped would be helpful research.

“In 1968, the keeper of the lighthouse in Silvertown, Michigan, finally allowed the lamp to go out for the last time...”

Shea leaned forward, her spoonful of soup hoisted partway to her mouth. Her eyes were glued to the documentary. The camera lens panned the lighthouse, undoubtedly filmed with the use of a drone, and then swept over the roof of Annabel’s Lighthouse, along the shoreline, then back to glide past the gallery.

Shea let the spoon fall into the soup bowl.

“...but this wasn’t the last that would be heard of the Silvertown Lighthouse.” An edge of suspense tinged the male narrator’s voice. “Ghost stories aside, the lighthouse would once again make the news in 2010 when the body of Jonathan Marks was found in the living area of the lighthouse.”

Enthralled, Shea set down the bowl.

“At the time, the lighthouse was owned by Marks. The coroner confirmed he’d been dead for at least seventy-two hours before his body was found. An investigation into the death of Mr. Marks was launched, and living up to the lighthouse’s mysterious and secretive reputation, Mr. Marks’s death, while being ruled a suicide, has long since been debated.”

The couch she sat on changed from cozy to downright creepy.

The narrator droned on. “Reports claim that Mr. Marks’s body on discovery had the telltale signs of a gunshot wound to his right temple. People who knew Mr. Marks claimed this simply didn’t add up. Jonathan Marks was not only left-handed, but he was known in the U.P. for his unpopular stance against firearms as a whole. A conservationist, Marks was an outspoken critic of the hunting of wildlife and a proponent for nationwide gun-control laws.”

Shea sank into the couch cushions, unable to peel her eyes away from the TV. A suspicious death? Here at the lighthouse? This she had not heard of prior to coming, nor in her first day of research in the nearby town. And how could that be? She’d think a more current lighthouse death would even trump the old ghost story of Annabel for telling rights.

“With a lack of resources to fund an investigation that had already been determined to be a suicide, the case of Jonathan Marks and what may have been his potential murder was closed. To this day, many locals believe that fifteen years is far too long for this murder to go unsolved. But if Marks was indeed murdered, his body found on the floor beneath a painting of the elusive Annabel from a century prior, was it really a man who took his life, or was it, as some have claimed, Annabel who exacted revenge for the tragic circumstances surrounding her death back in 1852?”

Shea sprang up from the couch, sweeping her eyes around the cramped room and alighting on a painting that hung on the wall to her left. She’d noticed it before, but only as a beautiful landscape of the Lake Superior shoreline. Now, on closer inspection, Shea noted that just off to the right of the shore, what appeared to be filmy white foam from the waves was actually the obscure form of a woman. Annabel.

Shea’s gaze dropped to the wood floor beneath it. Jonathan Marks had died right there. Right where her bare feet were planted. She scrambled backward.

No one had mentioned to her the murder of Jonathan Marks fifteen years ago. Or was it really a death by suicide? Everyone spoke of Annabel. Annabel’s Lighthouse. The dead woman of 1852, back when Silvertown didn’t even have a name yet, when the wilderness was truly wild and the indigenous people still traded and interacted with the trappers and miners moving into the area.

In 1852, the lighthouse hadn’t been built yet, and Annabel’s spirit hadn’t begun to haunt the place.

But possible murder?

Shea grabbed her soup bowl and retreated into the kitchen, where somehow she felt more in control. Heat still emanated from the stove. She set the bowl on the table.

This changed things. The lighthouse’s cozy sense of peace had morphed into an eeriness reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe. Actually, this brought the lighthouse well into the twenty-first century. It brought death directly into its inner sanctum.

The lightbulb in the fixture suspended over the kitchen table flickered. Shea froze, eyeing it. It buzzed, flickered again, and then, like an exclamation point marking the moment, it popped, swallowing both the kitchen and Shea in complete, terrifying darkness.