Kiss River

  The stairs rose several yards above the opening of the lighthouse, right up into the evening sky. Gina leaned against the brick wall, her heart beating more from fear than from exertion as she contemplated climbing those last few unprotected steps. She could sit on that top step, she thought, and look out at the ocean. Maybe she’d discover the lens was directly below her in the shallow water near the base of the lighthouse.

  She forced herself up another step, then another, holding on to the railing with both hands, and when she reached the top step, she turned and gingerly sat down on it. She was above the world here. The ocean was spread out in front of her like a huge, deep-purple rug fringed with white. The thick wall of the lighthouse looked as if it had been chewed off by some huge monster, leaving the jagged edges of the brick behind.

  What was she going to do now?

  Afraid of losing her balance, she carefully leaned a bit to the left and pulled the small photograph from the rear pocket of her shorts. Pressing it against her knee, she studied the image. A little girl. Much smaller than she should have been for being one year old, her age when the picture was taken. Skin the color of wheat. Very short, jet-black hair. The hugest, darkest eyes. Sad, hopeful eyes.

  Gina shut her own eyes, feeling the sting of tears behind the lids. “I’ll find a way, sweetheart,” she said out loud. “I promise.”

  She sat very still for a long time, watching the last traces of daylight disappear in the sky, her mind only on the child in the picture. She did not think about how she would manage to climb down the spiral staircase in the dusky light, or walk back to her car through those darkening woods, or find a room on a Friday night in a place overrun by tourists.

  She must have moved her head just a fraction of an inch to the left, because something caught her eye and made her turn around. And what she saw then stopped her breath in her throat. Every window of the keeper’s house glowed with stained glass.

  CHAPTER 2

  Clay O’Neill stopped his Jeep directly in front of the chain. Removing the key he kept attached to his visor, he got out of the car, unlocked the padlock, then dragged the chain to one side of the road. He tried to remember if his sister would be home yet. It was Friday, and Lacey usually attended an Al-Anon meeting on Friday evenings. He would leave the chain open, then. Save her the effort of unlocking it.

  Once back in the Jeep, he noticed a car parked on the opposite side of the cul-de-sac. Strange. Someone must have left it there, then hiked through the woods to the beach. He forgot about the car as he turned onto the gravel road, avoiding the familiar ruts and driving very slowly, since he had nearly broken an axle on one of the tree roots a few weeks earlier. He would need to trim some of the branches back one day soon; they scraped the roof of the Jeep as he drove through the tunnel they formed above him.

  Emerging from the woods, he could see the keeper’s house, its windows aglow with stained glass. Seeing the house so alive with color in the gray dusk of evening, he understood why Lacey insisted on setting the lights on a timer. She usually beat him home after work and she’d told him she hated coming home to a dark house, but he knew her real reasoning: she loved to see her handiwork glowing from all the windows. He’d argued that it was a huge waste of electricity, but he didn’t argue hard or long. Lacey had done too much for him. He would let her have her lights. He supposed the stained glass comforted her in a way, and although he would never admit it to her, it comforted him as well. Their mother had also been a stained-glass artist. Coming home to those windows was like hearing an old lullaby.

  He parked in the inch of sand that covered the corner of the parking lot nearest the house, then got out and opened the rear of the Jeep to retrieve the groceries. It had been his turn to do the shopping, and he had bought thick, mauve-colored tuna steaks to grill for a late dinner, along with a week’s worth of milk and cereal and fruit and some cleaning supplies. The grocery bags were heavy, but he managed to carry all four of them as he made his way across the sand to the house.

  Setting the groceries down on the new wooden countertop in the kitchen, he heard Sasha bounding down the stairs. The black Lab ran into the room to greet him, and Clay leaned over to give him a hug.

  “Hi, boy,” he said, scratching the dog’s broad chest. “Bet you’d like to go for a walk, huh?”

  Sasha took two steps toward the door and looked back at his master. Poor neglected dog, Clay thought as he opened the refrigerator door. “Just let me get this stuff put away and I’ll be right with you,” he said.

  The small kitchen was the first room he and Lacey had helped refurbish when they moved into the house six months earlier, right after the first of the year. The room was a small square, with pine cabinets and wood flooring. The original porcelain-topped table sat in the center of the room, surrounded by four oak chairs. The room was inelegant but functional. Elegance was not their goal in this house. Historical accuracy was far more important.

  He had finished putting away the groceries and was nearly to the door with Sasha when he happened to look through the kitchen’s rear window. Beneath the wide panel of stained glass hanging from the sash, he could see the lighthouse. The sun was down, the sky a milky gray, but he could still make out the silhouette of the tower, and he looked hard at it. Something was different. Squinting, he leaned closer to the glass. He knew how the tower should look from here. He knew the ragged shape of the rim and the way the spiral staircase rose above it. The line of that staircase was blurred now, and it took him a moment to realize that someone was sitting up there, on the top step, the place he thought of as his own private roost.

  Was it Lacey? But no, her car was not in the parking lot. It was a stranger, then. It was so rare to see anyone out here. Tourists had long ago forgotten Kiss River, and the road had been chained off ever since the storm destroyed the lighthouse ten years ago. It was possible to get to the lighthouse by the beach, but difficult, since the water had eroded so much of the sand. By boat, perhaps? His eyes scanned the area in front of the lighthouse for a boat. He didn’t see one, but it was too dark to be sure. Then he remembered the car parked in the cul-de-sac.

  “Come on, boy,” he said, opening the door and stepping onto the porch. He kicked off his sandals, picked up the flashlight from the seat of one of the Adirondack chairs and headed toward the tower. Sasha ran full speed toward the trees at the side of the yard, where he liked to do his business.

  It was a woman sitting on the lighthouse stairs, that much he knew for certain. Her long hair rose and fell with the breeze, and she was facing the sea. And looking to break her neck, he thought. Those stairs could be treacherous in the dark if you weren’t used to them. The waves swirling around the base of the lighthouse shone white with froth, and Clay stepped into the chill water, keeping enough distance between himself and the tower that he could still see the woman when he craned his neck to look up.

  “Hello!” he shouted, just as a wave crashed onto the beach.

  The woman didn’t turn her head, and he guessed she could not hear him over the sound of the sea.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Yo!” he hollered. “Hello!”

  Sasha came running at the sound of his call, and this time the woman peered over the edge of the tower at him. So high above him, she was very small, her features invisible. If she answered him, he didn’t hear her.

  “It’s dangerous up there,” he called. “You’d better come down.”

  The woman stood up, but Clay instantly changed his mind. It would be too dark inside the tower. “Wait there!” He held up a hand to tell her to stay. “I’ll come up and get you. I have a flashlight.”

  He told Sasha to stay on the beach, then waded through the water to climb the concrete steps into the foyer. Turning on the flashlight, he saw the familiar, eerie, nighttime look of the stairs and railing against the curved white brick wall. He was used to the stairs and took them easily, without a hint of breathlessness. He made the climb nearly every day, sometimes more than onc
e. The tower was a wonderful escape.

  The salt breeze washed across his face as he stepped above the broad, jagged-edged cylinder of bricks. The woman stood up again, backing away a bit, and he thought she might be afraid of him. Understandable. It was dark; she had nowhere to run.

  “You could trip going down the stairs in the dark,” he said quickly, showing her his flashlight.

  “Oh. Thanks.” Her dark hair blew across her face, and she brushed it away with her hand.

  She was extraordinarily beautiful. Very slender—too slender, perhaps—with long dark hair and large eyes that looked nearly black in the dim light. There was a fragility about her, as if a good gust of wind could easily blow her from the top of the tower.

  As though reading his mind, she lurched a bit, grabbing the railing. He knew how she felt. The stairs held you suspended in the air above the tower, and it was easy to experience vertigo. The first few times he came up here with Terri, he’d actually felt sick. The stairs were solid and sturdy, though. It simply took the inner ear a while to get used to that fact.

  “Sit down again,” he said. “We’ll wait till you feel steady on your feet before we go down.”

  The woman sat down without a word, moving to the edge of the step closest to the railing, which she quickly circled with both her hands. Clay sat one step below her.

  “What brings you up here?” He tipped his head back slightly to look at her, hoping he didn’t sound as if he was accusing her of something. Behind her windblown hair, the sky had turned a thick gray-black. There were no stars. No moon.

  “Just…I…” Her gaze was somewhere above his head, out toward the dark horizon. “What happened here?” she asked, letting go of the railing with one of her hands, waving it through the air to take in the lighthouse and all of Kiss River. “What happened to the lighthouse?”

  “Hurricane,” Clay said, “More than ten years ago.”

  “Ten years.” The woman shook her head. She stared out to sea, and Clay thought her eyes were glistening. She didn’t speak.

  “I’m Clay O’Neill,” he said.

  The woman acknowledged him with a brief smile. “Gina Higgins.” She pointed behind her to the keeper’s house. “Has that become a museum or something?” she asked.

  “No.” From where he sat, the house looked like a church, its windows filled with color. “It was abandoned for many years,” he said. “Then a conservation group I’m part of took it over. My sister and I are living in it while it’s being restored. We help with the work and act as general contractors, for the most part.” The restoration was progressing very slowly, and that was fine with him. There was no target date, no reason to rush.

  Gina looked over her shoulder at the house. “The stained glass…”

  “It’s my sister’s,” he said. “She just hung it in the windows while we’re living here. It’s not part of the restoration.”

  “Your sister made it?”

  “Yes.”

  “What a talent,” Gina said. “It’s beautiful.”

  He nodded, glancing at the house again. “She’s pretty good at it.”

  “And what are the plans for the house when it’s refurbished?”

  “Actually, none, so far,” he said. Holding tight to the railing, he stood up to peer over the edge of the tower, hunting for Sasha. He spotted the dog nosing at a pile of seaweed and took his seat again. “Possibly a little museum,” he said. “Possibly a B and B. Maybe even a private residence. The situation is unusual, since the lighthouse is off limits. They aren’t sure they want to draw people out here. I was surprised to see you here, actually. How did you get in?”

  “I walked in from the road, where that chain is. I ignored the No Trespassing sign.” She looked beautifully sheepish. “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s off limits because it’s dangerous out here, as you can probably tell,” he said. “But you haven’t gotten yourself killed, so no big deal. Were you hiking? Exploring? Most people don’t even realize this lighthouse is here anymore.”

  “Oh, I’m an amateur lighthouse historian,” Gina said. She touched the camera hanging around her neck. “So I was curious to see the Kiss River light and get some pictures of it. Where is the rest of it? Where is the Fresnel lens?”

  She pronounced the word FREZnal instead of FraNELL. Odd for a lighthouse historian. But she’d said she was an amateur; she had probably seen the word in writing but had never heard it spoken before.

  “The Fresnel lens is somewhere at the bottom of the ocean,” he said, diplomatically using the correct pronunciation, and even in the darkness, he could see coins of color form on her cheeks.

  “Why didn’t they raise it?” she asked. “It’s very valuable, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Yes, but there was a lot of opposition to raising the lens,” he said. His own father, once an advocate for saving the lighthouse, had led the fight against finding the lens. “The travel bureau and the lighthouse society wanted it raised, but the locals tend to think that things should remain right where nature puts them. And, as you can imagine, they’re also not keen on bringing even more tourists to the area as it is. Besides, who knows? The lens could be in a thousand pieces down there.”

  “But it also could be in one piece, or in just a few pieces that could be put back together,” she argued, and he knew she had a feisty side to her. “I think it’s a crime to leave something that’s historically valuable on the bottom of the sea. It should be displayed in a museum somewhere.”

  He shrugged. He didn’t really care about the lens. Never thought about it, actually. In the great scheme of things, it did not seem worth getting upset over.

  “It was a first-order lens, wasn’t it?” Gina asked.

  “Yes. It’s three tons, at least. Whether it’s in one piece or a hundred, it would be a job to bring it out. Once they got the thing up, it would probably have to spend months in an electrolyte bath so the metal parts didn’t disintegrate in the air.”

  “No, it wouldn’t,” she said. “The metal parts are brass, aren’t they? Brass wouldn’t need an electrolyte bath.”

  She was right, and he was wrong. And also a little impressed.

  “And if it’s three tons,” she continued, “it couldn’t have drifted too far from the lighthouse, then, could it?”

  He looked out toward the black cavern of the sea. Long ago, he and Terri would drive up here to Kiss River and sit on these stairs at low tide, trying to spot the lens, expecting to see it jutting out of the water. They never were able to spot it. “It was an unbelievable storm,” he said. “And there have been a few just as bad since then. The coastline’s really changed here. Before that storm, the water was never up this high. It’s washed away the beach. By now the lens could be just about any—”

  “Hey!”

  The shout came from the beach, slipping past Clay’s ears on the breeze. Leaning over, he saw a flashlight far below them.

  “Hey, Lace!” he called back. “We’ll be down in a sec.”

  Turning to Gina, he stood up. “That’s my sister,” he said. “Are you ready to go down?”

  She nodded. He held his hand out to her as she stood up, but she didn’t take it. Leading the way down the staircase, he kept his flashlight turned backward a bit to light the stairs for her. “Watch your step,” he warned. “It’s not as easy in the dark.”

  He moved slowly, aware that Gina had a death grip on the railing behind him, and it was a while before they exited through the tiled foyer. The waves washed over their feet and legs once they’d descended the three concrete steps into the water. Sasha bounded toward them, splashing their arms and faces as they waded to the dry sand where Lacey stood.

  Gina nearly ignored Lacey as she squatted low to the ground to pet Sasha, and Clay’s opinion of the woman instantly rose a few notches. Sasha rolled in the sand, exposing his stomach to the stranger, and Gina obliged by rubbing his belly.

  “That’s Sasha,” Clay said. “And this is my sister, Lacey. L
acey, this is Gina…?” He couldn’t recall her last name.

  “Higgins.” Gina stood up, wiping her sandy hand on her shorts before extending it to Lacey.

  “Are you a friend of Clay’s?” Lacey asked as she shook Gina’s hand, and Clay heard the hope in her voice. His sister would love nothing better than for him to have a new woman in his life.

  Gina smiled at her. “No,” she said with a slight laugh. “I’m a trespasser, actually. I was up on the lighthouse when it got dark and your brother rescued me. That’s all.”

  “Really?” Lacey raised her eyebrows at him.

  “She came in from the road,” he explained.

  “I walked around the chain,” Gina said. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to see—”

  “No big deal,” Lacey said, waving her unlit flashlight through the air. Her long red hair was tied back against the breeze, and her fair skin glowed white in the darkness. “We don’t own this place.” She glanced from Gina to Clay and back again, and he could almost see what she was thinking. Right age, very attractive, perfect for Clay. “Are you here on vacation with your family?” she asked. “Or with a bunch of girlfriends?” Clay nearly groaned at her transparent probing. Why didn’t she just come right out and ask the woman if she was available to be fixed up with her pathetic brother?

  “I’m alone,” Gina said. “Just here for a few days.”

  “She’s a lighthouse historian,” Clay said.

  “Amateur,” Gina added, glancing away from him. She was probably still embarrassed over her pronunciation of Fresnel.