Chapter Two
Rick
The car’s headlights cut through the trees and the dark. There’s no one up here on the cliffs but me, there’s no reason for anyone to be up here but me, and I know when anyone tries to visit, cajole me into talking. The beams aren’t the same color as the headlights of Pete’s old truck. No, these are weaker, lower to the ground.
How can I tell? You can see everything from two hundred feet up in the air.
I could stay here, wait for whoever it is to leave, but curiosity gets the better of me. Besides my business partner, I haven’t spoken to a single soul in six days.
I need longer than I should to reach the bottom of the concrete staircase. I’m thirty-nine years old, yet I feel like I’m a hundred. The colder months are the worst, my body stiffening up as the temperatures drop below what any normal human being would consider habitable. But I have a fire, I have books, and I have as much whiskey and coffee as I need. I made it through last winter. I’ll survive this one, and the one after that, and the one after that.
The snow isn’t thick enough to deter anyone from parking up close and personal, and so does the driver of this car, right next to the lighthouse’s back, and only, doorway.
The driver’s a woman, and the dim light of her headlights bounce against the white paint of the lighthouse and back into the car’s interior. Her hair is a honey blonde, wavy, and she’s resting her forehead against the steering wheel.
I pull the hood of my parka up and slightly turn my head, hiding the right side of my face behind the thick fabric. I want her to leave, not give her a heart attack. I step from the doorway and stand in the pathetic glare, my hands shoved into my jacket’s pockets, my shoulders stiff, my feet spread apart. She can feel me and lifts her head. Our eyes meet through her windshield dotted with snowflakes, and she swallows, opens the door, a loud squeal echoing over the sounds of the water beating against the shore. A storm’s coming. She better get her ass out of here, or she’ll be stuck in Old Harbor for the next little while.
“Mr. Mercer?” she asks, her mittened hand outstretched.
“Who wants to know?”
“My name is Devyn Scott. I’m a reporter for the—”
Her voice is thick and rich, like melting caramel, but raspy too, like someone threw a sprinkle of salt into it.
“I don’t talk to reporters. You need to go.”
The callers and the trespassers have tapered off since the accident, but I still get a few. Over the summer, when the second anniversary of the accident came and went, requests for interviews spiked, but I spent a lot of time on the boat without my cell and managed to avoid most of it. Not that anyonereallycared what I had to say. They wrote their articles, regurgitated the ugly facts without my help.
She tries to smile, but it doesn’t reach her tired eyes. It barely reaches her mouth. “I thought you’d say that, but if I could just have a few minutes—”
“I said no. Storm’s coming. You need to get out of here while the weather’s clear. You got about an hour, two if you drive fast.”
I turn to head into the lighthouse, but I pause. There’s something about her...I brush it off. It’s all an act, a way to trick me into opening my mouth. I know very well what a few minutes of my time will pay her and what it will cost me.
I look over my shoulder, expecting her to be scrambling into her car, but she’s standing there, covering her mouth, her eyes wide.
Fuck.
When I twisted, I turned the wrong way and gave her a full shot of the right side of my face. If that won’t scoot her cute little ass out of here, nothing will.
I point toward where she came from. “Go.”
I don’t wait to watch her drive away. Instead, I slam into the lighthouse, pull off my boots and jacket. I drop another log into the fire and pour a cup of coffee, add a generous splash of whiskey.
When I bought the Old Harbor Lighthouse, I spent close to a million dollars renovating it into comfortable living space. When it had been built, they’d hooked up water and electricity, which was a boon for me. I have running water, electricity, shaky internet.
There were a few stipulations before the population of Old Harbor allowed the sale to go through, all of them fine with me. I can’t ever tear it down, but I would never want to do that. The light is functional, and still to this day, captains depend on it to keep from drifting too close to shore. The Old Harbor Historical Society approved the changes I wanted, and I need their permission to do anything more. In addition, they consider me the lightkeeper, and when I purchased the lighthouse, I adopted the cost and responsibility of keeping the light in working order. That too, is something I don’t mind doing, and the people of Old Harbor, the Historical Society, and I found a solid truce.
I’ve been happy here.
They leave me alone, and I leave them alone.
I finish my coffee, the whiskey chasing away some of the stiffness. My doc cautioned me from using alcohol for medicinal purposes, thinking, perhaps, I wasn’t too far off from becoming an alcoholic. Better Glenlivet than hydrocodone, I’d said, and he didn’t argue.
I’m low on firewood, and after rinsing out my coffee mug, I pull on my jacket. The first two floors of the lighthouse are heated, but a fire is comforting, and sometimes, when the storms are bad, the electricity goes out. I have a generator, but I like a fire burning, too. It took me all summer to chop wood on my good days. It kept my strength up and gave me something to do.
One of the worst things about moving to Old Harbor is the free time I suddenly had. I’d been married, running a billion-dollar development company with my business partner, and all of it disappeared in the blink of an eye. I hadn’t known what free time was, or how punishing it could be to have time to think.