The Wishing Tide (2 page)

Lane

O
f all the rooms at the Cloister House, Lane’s favorite was her writing room in the northeast turret. She loved the smoothly curved walls and high, curtainless windows, how the light played over the smoothly worn floorboards and turned the jars of sea glass along the sills into chalices of pastel jewels. But most of all, she loved the view, nothing short of spectacular when the day was clear and bright but even more breathtaking at night, when stars filled the sky and the moon turned the sea to quicksilver.

But tonight, as she peered over the rim of her cold cup of tea and listened to the wind gusting in off the Atlantic, there was nothing to see: no moon, no stars, nothing but the rhythmic sweep of Starry Point Light and her own reflection in the wavy panes.

They didn’t have tropical storms in Chicago. Penny would be her first. There had been scares, of course, close calls that caught the attention of the locals and even sent a few scurrying to prepare, but they’d been incredibly lucky, something to do with El Niño. Now it seemed their luck had run out. Not that she was worried. She’d been through plenty of firsts in her life, plenty of lasts, too, and had managed to survive them all. More than five years had passed since she landed in Starry Point, the last in a sandy string of islands along
North Carolina’s Outer Banks. At the time it seemed an unlikely place for a Chicago girl to end up, a small spit of land tethered to the world by a series of narrow, sand-swept bridges. But something had whispered as she crossed that last bridge, something that said this spit of land, with its charming old lighthouse, pastel-washed bungalows, and sleepy Victorian village, this place at the end of the world, might be the perfect place to begin again. And begin again she had.

Running a bed-and-breakfast had never been her dream. In fact, until she laid eyes on the Cloister, the idea had never crossed her mind. She’d had no idea where to start, but with a failed marriage, a failed pregnancy, and a failed novel to her credit, one more failure wasn’t likely to make much difference one way or another.

She liked to pretend it was the view that captured her heart—powder white dunes and teal blue seas, Starry Point Light standing tall and formidable in the distance—but that wasn’t the absolute truth. Those things kept her guest register full during the season, but for Lane the Cloister’s appeal had to do with its twin Romanesque towers and rough-faced gray stone, wholly unexpected and starkly at odds with Starry Point’s wooden shingles and white picket fences.

I’m all wrong,
it seemed to say
. I don’t belong here.

Yet here it stood, proud, indomitable—a survivor. And now it belonged to her. For the first time in years, perhaps in her life, she was in charge of her own life, with no one peering over her shoulder, ready to pounce on her slightest mistake. And if running it took most of her waking hours, so what? For now, that was enough. And when the season ended—three weeks early this year, thanks to tropical storm Penny—there was time to pursue her freelance work: scribbling articles about things she’d never done and places she’d never been.

Lane’s teacup came down with a clatter as a fresh gust of wind slapped at the windows, rattling the old panes in their frames.
Everyone said that waiting was the worst. Everyone was right. Snapping off the lamp, she rose from her desk and headed downstairs.

In the kitchen she rinsed her cup and saucer, then decided to make one last round to check the locks. She had already checked once, right after the Burtons went up for the night, but these days it didn’t pay to take chances. As if a late-season storm weren’t excitement enough for one small town, a recent rash of break-ins on the normally sleepy island had the good people of Starry Point bolting their doors and demanding answers.

Nine break-ins reported so far: all petty, and all unsolved. But in a town where sand-sculpture contests and chowder cook-offs qualified as excitement, they might as well have been armed home invasions. And now, with her last guests fleeing inland tomorrow morning, she would soon find herself alone for the entire winter.

The thought was vaguely unsettling as she took one final peer through the curtains. Across the street, the Rourke place stood grave and forlorn. The once-fine house was empty now, and had been for years, its rear windows boarded after a fire ravaged the upper floors and took the life of five-year-old Peter Rourke. In the dark the place looked grand enough, when you couldn’t see the overgrown shrubs and shabby lawn, or the faintly scorched brick above the third-story windows. She stifled a shiver, as she always did when her eyes lingered on the Victorian-style greenhouse hunkered against the north side of the house.

She had ventured inside once, not long after moving to Starry Point, had stood in the center of the ruined conservatory, choked with weeds and saplings, more than half its small square panes in shards on the packed earth floor. It had given her the creeps then, and it still did. But it made her a little sad, too.

It was a shame that a home that once belonged to one of Starry Point’s most beloved mayors had been allowed to go to ruin. For years, the Preservation Society had been vowing to restore the place
and open it to the public, but as far as she could tell, little progress had been made in that direction. In the meantime, years of neglect had taken their toll, until all that remained was the hollow echo of the home’s former grandeur. And yet it remained a favorite on Starry Point’s seasonal walking tours—mostly because locals insisted the place was haunted. Lane didn’t believe it, of course, but it had become clear that owning a bed-and-breakfast across from the local haunted house wasn’t exactly bad for business.

She was surprised when the banjo clock in the hall sounded a single, throaty peal. How was it already one a.m.? The Burtons would be up in five hours, ready for breakfast and anxious to stay ahead of the weather. She didn’t blame them. According to the news, Highway 12 was bumper-to-bumper all the way to the mainland. She only had one more window to check.

Lane went still when she saw the light, a wide, milky beam floating past the first-floor windows of the Rourke House. She’d heard people use the expression
frozen to the spot
but had never experienced it firsthand—until now. Her heart thumped heavily in her ears as she squinted through the curtains, following the beam’s steady progress and trying to make sense of what she was seeing. Then, as suddenly as it had appeared, the light was gone.

The police cruiser pulled up along the curb and cut its lights. Lane watched from the window as the officers emerged from the car, relieved that Donny Breester hadn’t decided to answer the call. But then, Starry Point’s chief of police wasn’t one to put himself out when there was nothing to be gained, and after five years of trying—and failing—maybe he’d finally grasped that when it came to Lane Kramer, there was
absolutely
nothing to be gained.

She watched as the pair split up, then melted into the shadows at the back of the abandoned house. When they reappeared an impossibly short time later, she hurried out to meet them. The night air was thick and hazy with salt and chillier than she’d expected. She
shivered as she made her way to the street, wishing she’d put more on her feet than a pair of flip-flops. Rick Warren and Gary Mickles were waiting for her at the base of the drive. Rick holstered his flashlight and tipped his hat. Gary spat, hooked his thumb between his paunch and his duty belt, and said nothing. Neither looked especially happy that they’d been called.

“Did you find anything?” Lane aimed the question at Rick, the less annoyed-looking of the two. “The light disappeared, but I never saw anyone moving away from the house. I’ve been watching since I hung up with dispatch.”

Rick was scribbling in a small notebook. “No sign of anyone around back,” he muttered without looking up. “No signs of forced entry. All the windows are still boarded. So unless somebody had a key—”

“There was a light,” Lane said again, shivering now, and painfully aware that she was standing outside in a bathrobe. “It moved past the front windows, right to left, then back again.”

Gary craned his neck in the direction of Starry Point Light and waited for the beam to sweep back around. “There’s your intruder right there,” he snorted.

Lane stared at him, incredulous. “You think I saw the beam from the lighthouse?”

Mickles spat again and hitched up his drooping belt. “Moves past those windows just like you said. Mystery solved.”

Lane bit back the remark on the tip of her tongue and turned to Rick. “The light I saw moved slowly. And it moved from right to left, not left to right. It wasn’t the lighthouse. It was . . . something else.”

Rick jotted a final note in his book, then flipped the cover closed before stuffing it back into his pocket. “Light can do tricky things, Mrs. Kramer, especially late at night.”

Especially late at night?
What was that supposed to mean? Were there special laws of physics that kicked in after dark?

“Rick, I’ve lived here for five years now, and I can promise you that if the beam from Starry Point Light came anywhere near those windows I would have seen it before tonight. If you don’t believe me, stand here and watch it for yourself. The beam’s too high, and it moves in the wrong direction.”

Mickles snorted again, clearly impatient. “Maybe the light looks different from over at your place. I read somewhere that light can bend.”

Even Rick thought it was a stupid answer. He shot Mickles a look that told him to be quiet. “I don’t know what you saw, Mrs. Kramer, but I can tell you there’s nothing there now. We’ve checked the place out top to bottom and there’s no way anyone was in that house tonight.”

“So you’re saying I imagined it?”

Mickles let his breath out through his teeth, heavily scented with the onions he’d obviously had for dinner. “Don’t feel bad. Every time the wind blows these days, some woman’s picking up the phone and dialing 911. You haven’t got anything to worry about over here, though. So far all the incidents have been on the sound side. Hey, maybe you saw one of them ghosts that’s supposed to live there—the boy, or the old man.”

Lane stifled a groan. It was clear that nothing she said was going to make these two take her seriously.

Warren must have sensed her frustration. “How about I arrange for a car to drive by from time to time and keep an eye out? I’d be happy to do that if it’ll make you feel better, but in all honesty, I can’t imagine anyone wanting to get inside that old house. Everyone knows it’s been empty for years. I’ll send that cruiser around, though.” He tipped his hat. “You have yourself a good rest of the night.”

Lane fumed as she watched the cruiser’s taillights disappear down Old Point Road. They thought she was a hysterical female, a woman living alone, given to bouts of paranoia. But they had agreed to send
a patrol around. That was something, at least. She turned to look again at the Rourke House—not a sign of life or light now—and wondered if Mickles might not be right. Maybe her imagination
had
been working overtime, conjuring things that weren’t there. But no, in her mind she could still see the light. Someone had been in that house.

M
orning came too soon for Lane. It had been well after two by the time she’d crawled into bed, and she’d spent another hour tossing, trying to explain away what she’d seen, and failing completely. The fact that the Burtons would be pulling out in less than an hour did little to brighten her mood. In the five years they’d been staying at the Cloister, Dan and Dottie Burton had become like family, sending newsy e-mails along with the latest travel pics, and lately, drawings had begun to arrive in the mail from their granddaughter, Shelly. The most recent, a somewhat abstract rendition of her new puppy, Tango, stared back at her with bright green crayon eyes as she closed the refrigerator door.

Lane couldn’t help smiling. They had been her very first guests, a sweet, comfortable old couple, married so long they’d actually started to resemble each other, and often finished each other’s sentences. She could hear them upstairs now as she pulled out a handful of silverware and prepared to set the table—opening and closing bureau drawers, making a final check for items left behind, followed by the steady bump of suitcases being lugged downstairs. It would certainly be quiet when they were gone.

After filling the cream and sugar, Lane stacked a tray with mugs
and carried it to the small sunroom just off the kitchen, where high arched windows usually offered a stunning view of the beach. Today, the view was anything but stunning. The sea was a heaving mass of gray-green swells, and the sun was nowhere to be seen, lost in a sky of scudding pewter clouds. She frowned at the windows, washed the day before yesterday and already hazy with salt spray. After the Burtons were gone she wouldn’t have to wash them until March if she didn’t feel like it.

“Yoo-hoo!”

Dottie Burton’s cheerful greeting brought Lane around with what she hoped was a warm smile. “Morning, Dottie. All packed and ready to hit the road?”

Dottie was a young sixty, plump and pretty in a lived-in sort of way, with a quick smile and the slow, sweet drip of Nashville, Tennessee, in her voice.

“Dan’s putting the bags in the trunk as we speak. I hate that we’re having to desert early. Really, we’d be happy to pay you for the other three days.”

Lane filled a mug with coffee and passed it over. “Don’t be silly. It’s not like I lost a booking. The season’s over.”

“And tomorrow you’ll have this big old place to yourself.” Dottie heaped a third spoonful of sugar into her mug and began to stir. She took it sweet, like her tea. “It must be a relief not to have to cook for anyone but yourself, to just eat a sandwich over the sink if you feel like it. By the way, what smells so amazing?”

Lane lifted her nose and sniffed, then remembered the breakfast casserole she’d stuck in the oven. “Good Lord! It’s the breakfast if I haven’t burned it.”

Dan appeared as Lane pulled the casserole from the oven. He spotted the coffeepot on the table and made a beeline for it. “Pretty nasty out there,” he said into his mug. “Windy as the very devil, and I don’t like the look of that sky. No, sir.”

Lane took another quick peek out the window. “Let’s get you fed and on the road, then.” The casserole was crispy at the edges, but salvageable. She served up two plates and carried them to the table, then topped off their coffee. “I made muffins, too, so you can take some with you. If the weather turns and you have to pull off, at least I know you won’t starve.”

Dottie looked up from her plate. “Do you think it’s going to get that bad?”

Lane bit her lip as she eyed the sky through the kitchen window, but she gave the woman’s plump shoulder a squeeze. “It’s only a tropical storm. Just some wind and rain, maybe a few trees down, but then, I’m no expert. I’ve never been through one of these. They haven’t made us leave, so that’s a good sign, right?”

Dan shot his wife a look that said
eat faster
.

When the breakfast plates were in the sink, Lane bagged a half dozen still-warm muffins and filled two to-go cups with coffee. They said their good-byes on the front porch—a handshake from Dan, a hug and a kiss on both cheeks from Dottie, along with promises to send pictures of the new grandbaby when he arrived in spring.

“You write lots of pretty articles this winter, honey. I’ll be looking for them. And maybe if you get time you could go see your mama for the holidays. I don’t like to think of you here by yourself on Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lane assured her. “And up to my ears in deadlines by the time the holidays roll around. Please promise you’ll be careful. Pull off if it gets bad, or turn around and come back. Your room will be waiting.”

Lane waved from the porch as the Burtons’ silver Buick backed down the drive. As the car disappeared from sight, her eyes slid across the street to the Rourke House. Suddenly, she felt silly. In the light of day there wasn’t anything remotely sinister about the place. And yet as she stared at its windows, rimed with years of salt and dust, she
couldn’t shake the memory of last night. She shivered again as she turned to go inside, reminding herself that the police had promised to keep an eye on the place.

In the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of coffee and dished up a serving of the now-cold breakfast casserole, thinking of Dottie as she ate it over the sink. With the Burtons gone the inn felt empty. But then, it always did when the last guest checked out: a peculiar blend of loss and relief as time slowed and she traded her innkeeper persona for pen and paper.

And who knew? Maybe one day she’d actually get around to visiting some of the places she wrote about. For now it was enough to hibernate, to burrow in, away from the world, and put words to paper, even if it was only an article here and there. Her name would appear in print from time to time, and now and then a check would appear in her mailbox, money in exchange for words. For a person of limited talent, it was really all she had a right to expect.

After tidying the kitchen, then stripping and straightening the Burtons’ room, Lane laced up her muck boots, donned a heavy fleece jacket, and slipped a bag of stale bread into her pocket. The wind hit her hard as she stepped out the back door, damp and full of blowing sand. Standing with her feet braced wide apart, she shielded her eyes and scanned the beach, wondering whether she should skip her usual morning walk to the light.

Aside from last year’s weeklong bout with flu, she’d made the mile-and-a-half trek to the light every morning for five years. She found clarity in the daily walks, like a kind of moving meditation that lifted away the fog and set the stage for the rest of the day. She saw no reason to let a little wind—or even a lot of wind—cheat her of that. She was contemplating going back for gloves when an unexpected flash of color caught her eye, a bright bit of purple against the dreary seascape.

But it couldn’t be. Not today, in weather like this.

Standing on tiptoe, Lane peered past the back gate, stunned to see
that the ragtag old woman was, in fact, seated in her customary spot on the dunes. She had appeared for the first time only a few weeks ago, a rarity since most beach walkers disappeared the minute the warm weather did. Even die-hard Starry Point natives—Old Pointers, they called themselves—rarely ventured onto the dunes past October, and this was the middle of November. Yet, each morning like clockwork, she continued to appear, clutching her purple bag and staring out to sea, as if watching for something no one else could see.

Today, she sat huddled against the wind in an oversize Windbreaker and a lumpy gray sweater, clutching the ever-present bag as if the wind might take it. They had never spoken, or even made eye contact, though Lane had always been curious about the woman’s story. For the slimmest of moments Lane considered approaching, but something in the rigid set of the old woman’s shoulders seemed to forbid it. Instead, she braced against a fresh blast of wind and zipped her jacket to her throat.

The gate wailed as she dragged it open, then clanged shut noisily when the wind snatched it from her hand. The woman flinched, whipping her head in Lane’s direction. For an instant, eyes of indistinct color met hers, wary or confused, Lane couldn’t say which. Then, as quickly as the gaze had settled on her, it withdrew, lost again out to sea.

Determined to give the old woman a wide berth, Lane lowered her head and set off across the dunes. She wanted to pretend the encounter hadn’t unnerved her, but it had. It seemed everything unnerved her these days: old women, the wind, phantom lights in vacant houses. Maybe it was the weather. She’d heard somewhere that low pressure did strange things to cats and pregnant women. Why not innkeepers with active imaginations?

Whatever it was, she was determined to shake it. She doubled her pace, but it was far from an easy go. The dunes were already taking a beating, and the blowing sand made it hard to see. Overhead, a pack of gulls circled and dipped, screeching for the bread in her pocket.

“You know the drill, boys,” she said to them. “Not till we reach the light, and then you have to share.”

A single gull broke from the pack, wings flashing white as it swooped low, then lifted away with a shrill cry—the equivalent, Lane supposed, of a child stomping from the room. By the time she reached the lighthouse, dozens more would have taken its place.

Ahead, Starry Point Light braced for the coming storm, sturdy and steadfast after a century’s worth of rain and wind and surf. The gulls were gathering in earnest now, circling in noisy anticipation as she turned onto the jetty and covered the last few yards. The rocks were too wet to sit on, but the wind was easier on the leeward side of the light. Dragging the bag from her pocket, she crumpled a slice of bread and tossed it into the air, watching the feeding frenzy as the wind took the crumbs.

The air was a blur of salt and sand as she glanced back down the beach, so hazy she could barely make out the roofline of the inn, tucked back from the dunes. Originally built in 1896 as a convent, the Cloister had weathered its share of storms; it had weathered its share of incarnations, too, serving, after the nuns left, as everything from a boys’ home to a record storage facility and most recently a women’s health clinic, until the pious new mayor had it shut down for permit violations.

The Cloister.

Even the name had struck a chord the first time she heard it, conjuring thoughts of peace and quiet, of seclusion—of escape. She had closed in just two weeks, plunking down nearly every cent of the divorce settlement before she had time to change her mind. It felt rash at the time—rash and good—to finally have something that was hers, and hers alone. Her mother had been horrified when she finally broke the news. But then, when had Cynthia Kramer
not
been horrified by something her oldest daughter had done?

And then there was Bruce, the real reason she’d left Chicago.
Their marriage had been doomed from the beginning, despite her husband’s meteoric rise to become head of Chicago General’s cardiac surgical unit and all the trappings that came with such a title—the egos, the parties, the pretty young nurses. It had ended, not with a bang but with a whimper, after she’d miscarried their first child.

Her fault, of course—somehow everything was always her fault—the warm gush of scarlet soaking through her lemon yellow slacks in the middle of lunch, the sudden horror, the moment of knowing. She had come to in the hospital, the child—the little girl who was to have been named Emma—gone. Bruce was there when she opened her eyes, his first words not expressions of care or concern, but of accusation.
“What did you do?”

Her marriage had died that day, along with her child, and yet, for nearly a year after, she had worn her good-wife face as it all came unraveled: through his desertion of their bed, the transparent late nights and spur-of-the-moment conference weekends, the hamper of dirty shirts reeking of someone else’s perfume.

Lane shivered involuntarily, though whether the reaction had to do with the memory of those dark days, or with the blast of sea spray that suddenly gusted in off the waves, she couldn’t say. In the time it had taken to reach the jetty, the wind had risen considerably, its constant rush melding now with the hiss and roar of the waves, until one had become indistinguishable from the other. The sea, too, was on the move, the tide pushing in, boiling up onto the rocks in a ceaseless swirl of green and white. If she stayed much longer, she was going to end up soaked.

With the bread gone and the gulls disbanded, Lane shoved the empty sandwich bag into her pocket, tugged her hood up onto her head, and made her way in from the jetty. At least the wind would be with her on the way back.

The rain started around two, just as Lane was returning from a last-minute run for supplies. She darted inside with an armload of bags, trying not to dwell on the sullen clouds shredding overhead. Every radio station up and down the dial seemed to be blasting information: storm coordinates, wind speeds, projected surges on Manteo, Nags Head, Duck, and Starry Point. She had turned it off. No point worrying about the numbers now. She was as ready as she was going to get.

Sam Redman had come by yesterday and taped all the windows with big ugly X’s. Better than nothing, he had grumbled when she told him she’d never gotten around to pricing the storm shutters he recommended four years ago. She had also misjudged when to start thinking about things like water, canned goods, and batteries. Unfortunately, Old Pointers were well acquainted with the ins and outs of storm preparation and hadn’t made the same mistake. By the time she got to town, the Village Mart looked as if it had been set upon by a pack of zombies, plundered of everything but meat and produce.