Читать книгу Storm Surge - Celia Ashley - Страница 11

Paige gripped the beer she’d been babying. She wasn’t going to finish it. She knew that. Yet she derived some comfort from the feel of the bottle, solid and heavy in her hand.

Liam had taken a long time getting himself another beer. Paige glanced at the darkened window over her shoulder before returning her gaze to the ocean. In the setting sun, the waves battering the rocky shoreline had gone blue-black, each rolling crest tipped in a wash of gold and red. Gulls soared on the sea breeze in the darkening sky with wings outspread. And there, way out on the water, another freighter winked its tiny lights. The scene tugged at her insides, pulling at old memories, causing conflicting and harrowing emotions to rise to the surface. Teeth in her lip, Paige blinked back tears.

“Enough.” She struggled up from the deep, angled seat. When she stood, she caught sight of the man she had seen the night before down by the water’s edge, his bobbing lantern bright against the dark sea beyond. She rushed to the porch railing, leaning forward to study the man’s locomotion, spotting something not quite right in the way he moved. The screen door rasped open behind her.

“Do you know that man?” she asked Liam. He didn’t answer. She turned.

No one was there.

“Liam?”

Paige twisted back toward the ocean and hastened out onto the weathered steps. The man had vanished, lantern and all. Perhaps he had already clambered over the jetty of rock, but he had been moving with profound sluggishness, as if age or infirmity weighed him down.

The screen door opened and closed again. Liam appeared at her side on the step. “Were you calling me?”

She frowned at him. “Did you forget something?”

“I thought you didn’t want another beer?”

“No, no, I don’t. Thank you. I mean, you started to come out a second ago. I heard the door. But you weren’t there when I turned around.”

Liam’s left eyebrow shot up. “That happens sometimes.”

“Absentmindedness?”

“No, the door opening and closing with no one there.”

She frowned at him before breaking into laughter. “Ooh, creepy. Got it. But you forget, I used to live here. The door doesn’t open and shut on its own.”

“Maybe it didn’t, but it does now.”

“Tighten the screws on the hinges or something. I was calling you because there was a man on the beach. I wanted to know if you knew him. He’s gone now.”

Liam gave the beach the onceover. “No one there.”

“He vanished.”

“Like smoke?”

“No,” Paige said in sharp impatience, “not like smoke. I didn’t see what happened to him. One second he was there, and the next he wasn’t. And believe me, he was moving none too quickly. But he wasn’t a ghost. Oh!” She skipped down two steps. “Do you think he might have slipped into the water?”

Unconcerned, Liam went back up onto the porch. “There’s nothing splashing about down there. Probably a mirage.”

Paige followed. “A mirage? Like you see in the desert?”

“It happens. If the conditions are right, objects miles out to sea will appear as if they’re right in front of you. That man might have been walking on the deck of a ship that’s no more than a speck on the water.” He resumed his seat on the crate. Paige noticed his hands were empty. He folded them together between his knees. Instead of taking the chair, Paige remained standing.

“That would mean the conditions were right two days in a row. I saw him last night, too.”

“What did he look like?”

“I don’t know. It was hard to see. Curly hair and beard. He wore a hat and coat, now that you mention it. Odd time of year for that.”

“Hmm. Perhaps a ghost, then?” His eyes cut in her direction as if to gauge her reaction.

Paige didn’t hold back. She snorted. “A ghost? Come on. This isn’t some television show.”

“No,” he agreed, “it isn’t. It’s a very real town with three hundred years of history behind it. Before I moved here, I’d heard the town referred to as Haunted Alcina Cove.”

“Haunted?” Paige tried not to laugh again and was not entirely successful. “Although its residents might not always be the friendliest, and some might be downright peculiar, it’s a quaint, picturesque location. Certainly not the stuff of nightmares.”

“Neither are ghosts. Not usually, anyway.”

“You sound like you believe—”

“I don’t know what I believe.” He stood. “But this is what I do. I write travelogues, and I gather and research local stories about ghosts and other mysterious happenings and compile them into books. Sometimes I combine the two, writing travelogues featuring ghost stories of the area along with the scenic spots. I can’t explain everything I’ve found out or everything people believe they’ve seen.”

He paused in his pacing in front of her. The heat off his body was palpable in the evening’s dropping temperature. She lifted her head to look him in the eye. “Okay. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You didn’t upset me. The subject just makes me a little nuts at times.” He laughed. “What about you? What do you do when you’re not here?”

Paige sidled away from him. His proximity made her twitchy. She reclaimed the Adirondack chair since he obviously wasn’t using it. He returned to his earlier roost on the railing.

“I teach eighth grade English,” she said.

“A bunch of hormonal thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys? They must adore you.”

“What?”

“You have to be aware you’re a good-looking woman, Paige.”

Paige waved a hand, heat flaring in her cheeks. “I don’t have to be aware of any such thing. And we’ve gotten off topic. I want to go back to you. How long have you been making a living at writing?”

Liam folded his arms across his chest. Evening’s last light flashed off the water behind him. “Making a living? Not long. And not hand-over-fist, either. But I like it. I’ve been writing most of my life. But a sedentary occupation was never the destiny of a Gray. Nope. I was out on the sea at sixteen and owned and operated my own trawler by nineteen. Fished the ocean for more than fourteen years.”

Performing some quick math even after only half a beer proved difficult, but Paige figured she had an approximate idea of his age. Curiosity satisfied, Paige smiled. “So you gave that up? Commercial fishing?”

“About eight months ago,” he said with a small affirmative motion of his head. “Sold the boat and equipment shortly after I bought this place.”

“To pursue your writing? Bold move.”

“Yeah, something like that.”

Paige leaned forward, elbows on her knees in an awkward position on the sloped seat. “Not satisfied writing about ghosts?”

“That’s not what I meant. But I don’t plan to talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

He held her gaze as though daring her to question him. She shook her head. Another thing he didn’t want to talk about, like his scar. And he didn’t have to. Who was she to him, after all? A stranger who’d shown up practically on his doorstep in the wee hours, claiming an association to the house he owned. No reason for confidences exchanged. No cause for anything beyond a neighborly chat. “It’s your business, not mine, Liam. We both have our secrets, I guess.”

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I think we do.”

* * * *

Soon after the exchange, Paige thanked Liam for the beer she hadn’t finished and left. Instead of returning to the cottage, she went to her car and removed a small flashlight from the glove compartment. Slipping it into her pocket, she headed down to the waterline. Despite her dismissal of Liam’s ghost story, she found herself motivated to prove a flesh and blood man had been walking on the beach and not some specter of seafaring lore. Though she appreciated Liam’s pursuit of a writing career, she wondered if he couldn’t have chosen a more worthy topic than tales of phantoms and things that went bump in the night.

Stopping above the surf, Paige flicked on the light, casting its blue-white glow over the sand. Apparently high tide had come in while she’d been talking with Liam. A narrow scrim of tumbled shell and stone showed where the water had begun its slow withdrawal. Any footprints lay beneath the water, scrubbed away. Nevertheless, Paige continued toward the jetty, flicking the light on and off to make sporadic checks of the ground. Once there, she scuttled up onto the rocks to sit a few moments. She figured it was safe to do so. She might have been in a dangerous position if the tide were still coming in.

Paige shoved the flashlight back into her pocket and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around her legs. She could see the lights of town against a lowering cloud cover. Sitting on a porch that had once been her own hadn’t felt as much like home as this did. Jammed between the huge boulders beneath the night sky, staring toward town while the ocean rushed in and out at her back was far more nostalgic. She’d often come here to sit alone long after her parents had thought her asleep. Why? She hadn’t been meeting anyone. The number of friends she’d had was fairly limited. For one thing, she’d been uncomfortable inviting anyone over. Looking back, though, she couldn’t place her finger on a particular reason for that avoidance. Not her parents’ fighting. She’d witnessed spats between other kids’ parents and none of them cared. They all brushed it off as a normal course of events. She supposed it was, indeed, daily life, relationships. But as far as she knew, none of their mothers had been the victim of a brutal attack by her spouse.

Secrets. Her early life had been full of secrets.

Paige bit her lip and lowered her forehead onto her knees. The pounding surf reverberated from her heels on stone up through the hard mass of knee and skull. She squeezed her eyes shut against the discomfort, refusing to move.

A male voice spoke nearby in a series of unintelligible words. Sucking in a breath, Paige lifted her head, scanning the shadowed beach. Seeing nothing, she considered using the flashlight, but decided not to draw attention to herself. Not Liam, so whoever it was, she’d rather they passed on by.

A light flared. Paige narrowed her eyes, peering between her lashes. A man stood with a lantern in his hands at a distance of about twenty yards. She could see him clearly, bearded and wearing an ill-fitting coat despite a comfortable night. If he saw her, he gave no indication, but began walking away with the same slow, ambling stride she’d seen earlier.

Watching him move back along the beach, she tried to decide if she should speak to him, get his name, so she could tell Liam she had met his mirage, his ghost, in the flesh. In the lamp’s golden glow, she could distinguish his coat’s dusty folds, the coarse knit of his cap, his curly beard and hair, but below the coat’s hem his legs were invisible, hidden in shadow. She stood up. “Hello?”

Paige scrambled down from the rocks, eyes on her descent to avoid breaking her neck. When her feet touched sand, she looked up again. The man was gone. “Hello?” She whipped the flashlight from her pocket and passed the beam in a huge sweep across the rocky beach. Still finding nothing, she hurried to the place she’d seen him last.

Suddenly dizzy, she stopped, her gaze glued to an indistinct mound on the sand in front of her. It looked like a body. Oh, God, had the old man fallen? She staggered over. Before she reached him, recall slammed like ice into her skull, a silver flash, swiftly to the mark—

Mom, what is that?

Come away, Paige. Now.

—and then nothing.

What lay on the beach before her was no more than rock and seaweed. The man with the lantern was nowhere, and her mind was trying to make mincemeat of her resolve. She backed away in haste and fell over a piece of driftwood. The flashlight flew from her grasp. With a strangled cry, she crab-walked in search of it and located the instrument by the beam half-buried in the sand. Snatching it out, she jumped to her feet. Something huge and dark and solid blocked her way. With a scream, she launched the light at it, which hit with a noise like rock on stone.

“Shit, Paige, what the hell are you doing?”

Paige reeled in shock relief. “Who is that?”

“Dan. It’s Dan Stauffer.”

Paige brushed sand from her pants and arms, retrieving her flashlight once more from the ground. “Sorry,” she said. “I hope that didn’t hurt too much.”

“I’d be charging you with assault if it wasn’t so damned funny.”

Mouth twisting, she shone the light on his face, checking for bleeding. “Could be a bruise cropping up. What are you doing here?”

“I saw a light and came to investigate.”

“So you saw him, too? Good. I need to—”

“Him? I saw you. Was there somebody else here?”

His gaze darted back to her from the direction of the jetty as he held up a hand to block the light.

“Yeah,” Paige said. “There was a guy with a lantern. You didn’t see him?”

Dan’s hand dropped. A fleeting confusion passed across his features. “I didn’t see anyone but you, staggering like a drunk. Have you been drinking?”

Lowering the flashlight to her side, Paige raised her other hand to her hip. “I had half a beer. Not even. I lost my balance for a second, but I’m fine. Just where were you that you ‘saw’ me?”

He jerked his thumb toward the ridge. “Up there by the cottage. I came to talk to you—”

“I didn’t give you the address.”

“I’m a cop, remember?”

For the first time she noticed he wore street clothes, his size diminished by the missing bulletproof vest beneath his dark T-shirt. She needed no reminder of his occupation, but she found the fact that he’d been able to locate her unsettling. “How’d you do it? Find me, I mean?”

“I’ll be honest. It wasn’t such a feat. The woman who rented you the place happened to mention it to me in passing about a half an hour ago. And I figured I’d stop by for a chat.”

Paige shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “It’s after nine o’clock at night, Dan. Bit late for a chat.”

“Your lights were on, so—”

“No, they weren’t.”

He stepped aside, affording her a full view of the rental cottage. Sure enough, every window in the bungalow glowed with the distinct cast of incandescent lighting. The door stood wide, illumination seeping into the night like yellow dye.

“Did you go in?” Paige asked.

“I did not.”

Paige lurched into a run up the hill.