Vision of Darkness (15 page)

Her teeth sank into her lower lip, drawing his gaze to her mouth. Such kissable lips. He wondered if her nether lips—and all her soft, pink woman parts—were just as kissable, then immediately cursed himself for the thought. Not the time for a hard-on. Of course, his cock didn’t listen. He shifted away from her body and ignored the strawberry scent of her shampoo as the wind played through her hair. His fingers itched to touch the black silk, wind it around his hand and drag her mouth to his.

Stupid, stupid, stupid to sit down so close to her.

Pru hugged herself, pushing her breasts up with her arms. Under the windbreaker, she wore a V-neck shirt and he caught a glimpse of cleavage as she moved. He almost groaned. If he didn’t know better, he’d think she was torturing him on purpose, but she was so oblivious to her own sexiness, she had no idea how much she tantalized a guy’s fantasies.

“The other night you asked me about murders in the lighthouse,” she said. “Is that because of this feeling you’re having?”

The only feeling he had right now was raging lust.

Hah. She’d slap him if he said that. Alex jerked his gaze from her chest and tried to focus on the question, but it took a moment for the blood to pump back to his brain.

“Maybe,” he hedged. “I don’t really know what prompted me to ask that. At the time, it seemed important.”

“So we should check it out.” She climbed to her feet and dusted off her ass, right at eye level. Alex’s mind went blank and all of his blood rushed back to another, more southern portion of his anatomy. The spit dried in his mouth. Man, those blue jeans were sinful the way they hugged that round bottom like a second layer of skin.

He gave himself a mental kick.
Mind on the task at hand, Al
—though he would very much like to have her ass at hand instead. He shook his head and struggled to pick up the thread of the conversation again.

Murders. Lighthouse.

Right. She wanted to investigate.

“We should?” he asked.

“Well, you don’t know why you came to town, but it felt important so you did. You don’t know why you asked me if there had been any murders, but it felt important too. So we should at least research it. What can it hurt?” She shrugged and held out a hand to help him up. “And I happen to know the perfect person to ask.”

***

Charming in a way Alex couldn’t immediately explain, the one-story cape cod had the look of a pair of timeworn, well-loved boots. Yellow paint peeled off the sunburned siding to show specks of gray underneath. The front yard boasted a wild tumble of flowers and a menagerie of stone animal figurines behind a white fence badly in need of painting. A woman with a long braid tossed over one shoulder sat on the front porch, waving at them with the ear of corn she had been husking when they pulled into the drive.

Alex pressed his lips together. “Lookit, I don’t think this is a good idea. Meeting your grandmother…I mean, you made it perfectly clear last night you wanted to leave things platonic.”

Pru poked him in the ribs. “Hey, you wanted to know about the lighthouse. Grandma Mae knows more about the lighthouse than anyone. Besides, she’s dying to meet you.”

Great. Just…great.

He stared out the windshield of Pru’s Jeep and rubbed his bad right knee. The early-onset arthritis ached today, probably because of the weather. It was a beautiful day with puffy clouds in a vivid blue sky, but a deep chill whispered the promise of winter in the air and cold always aggravated his knee.

Pru gave him an encouraging smile and touched the back of his hand, a fleeting brush of skin not remotely sexual that sent lust pounding through his veins.

“We’ll only stay for a bit,” she said. “Grandma’s already seen us so there’s no turning back now.”

No turning back now. Somehow, those words had a ring of truth to them that had nothing to do with meeting Pru’s grandmother. He couldn’t find his voice and nodded, his gaze dropping to her hand resting on his. She yanked back and whacked her elbow on the steering wheel. Wincing, she shoved open the car door and scrambled out as if escaping the clutches of an evil beast.

You got the devil in you, boyo.
Alex heard his grandfather’s voice in his head and his stomach twisted. Granddad had done a massive mind-fuck on him—he knew it, but it was still hard to shake the ideas Cillian Brennan had pounded into him throughout his adolescence.

He released a shaky breath, fortifying himself, and stepped out of the jeep. Stupid to be terrified of the skinny gray-haired woman bounding off the steps with the sprightliness of a girl, enveloping her granddaughter in a firm hug—yet he was. He approached slowly, but gave serious consideration to a duck-and-run maneuver that had always worked well for evading the enemy in the Middle East.

“There’s my dear!” Pru’s grandma exclaimed. “I was wondering when I’d see you again. I heard about all the nastiness at your place this past week. Poor, poor Wade.”

“I know,” Pru said and to Alex’s horror, both women started crying.

Oh good God in heaven, help me.
He didn’t know what to do when one woman started the waterworks, and now he had two hugging and blubbering all over each other. He decided to let them get it out of their systems and stuffed his hands in his coat pockets.

Finally, Mae set Pru back at arm’s length. “Are you okay, honey? Let me have a look at you.” She frowned. “You’re too skinny and too pale.”

Pru sniffed and wiped her eyes. “And you’re too old and too cranky.” The smile she gave the old woman was the warmest Alex had ever seen from her and made him forget his unease. His heart swelled, leaving him grinning like an idiot at her side as she again squeezed her grandmother.

“Oh, I’ve missed you, Grandma Mae. How was your vacation?”

“Same old, same old.” She waved a thin hand. “I tell you, you go on one African safari, you’ve been on them all. I’m thinking next year I’ll try backpacking in the Outback. The travel agency’s offering a great deal on a two week Sand-n-Surf trip in Australia….” Trailing off, she looked at Alex as if just noticing him. “Oh, my. Where are my manners!” She wiped her hand on the front of her purple sweater and held it out in greeting. “You must be Alex Locke. I’m Pru’s grandmother, Fiona Mae Pritchard. You can call me Grandma Mae. Everyone else does.”

Her hand felt bony and light, and blue veins crisscrossed the pale skin on the back, but her grip was a firm one and her clear eyes—the same haunting shade of blue as Pru’s—held his gaze as they shook. This woman was all of five feet tall, thin as a wisp of smoke, and larger than life. He had the strangest feeling she could see right through him.

After a second, she smiled and those chilly blue eyes warmed. “Welcome to Three Churches, Alex. Come along inside. I have lunch on the grill. Oh, and could you be a dear and help an old lady carry this heavy basket of corn?”

CHAPTER 14

As Pru and her grandmother disappeared into the kitchen with the directive he make himself at home, Alex wandered around the parlor, taking a moment to soak in the cottage’s unidentifiable charm. A nice, lived-in area. Clean but not the military tidiness of Granddad’s old house that he’d come to associate with the elderly. Not airy and open, no polished metallic fixtures, no perfectly choreographed linens, no matching patent leather furniture like there had been in Granddad’s living room, like there was in Alex’s condo. The air didn’t carry the clean, stringent smells of Clorox, Windex, Pledge, or Pinesol like he was used to, though it wasn’t an altogether unpleasant odor either. Just different—a hybrid of aromas that came from living every day but only cleaning on every other. He spied several cobwebs draped high in the corners of the room and even though there was a pile of coasters on the coffee table, rings from sweating drink cups dotted the scuffed glass surface. Books on everything from soap making to spelunking gathered dust on every available surface that photographs did not take up. On the coffee table sat a cold mug of coffee and an open book. He leaned over the back of the couch and peered at the page.
Surfing for Dummies
.

He smiled. Grandma Mae had to be in her mid-eighties and she was learning to surf? Amazing.

There was love in this house and plenty of it. He could see it in the clutter of new and yellowed photos over the drafty fireplace. He sidled over to get a closer look. Danger Ledge Lighthouse hovered wraith-like in the background of the photos, and he noticed it hadn’t changed at all over the years. The clothes, hairstyles, and cars changed, as did the people, but the lighthouse remained the same, as strong and faithful as the life-saving beacon it sheltered. He picked up one photo—a family portrait of four adults, three young boys, and a baby girl—that looked to have been taken mid-twentieth century, judging by the beautiful 1948 Cadillac Series 61 parked in the far left corner. One of the women in the photo was undoubtedly a much younger Grandma Mae, and the other looked enough like her to be her sister. Mae had a toddler boy on her hip and another small boy tugging at the hem of her dress.

“That one is Pru’s father, Samuel,” Grandma Mae said, pointing to the boy with his pudgy hand knotted in her skirt. “And that little guy standing next to my sister is Cappy.”

Alex gazed up, startled. The woman seemed to walk on air, she moved so soundlessly. He glanced around the living room, but Pru was nowhere to be seen.

Mae smiled. “She’s in the kitchen on the phone with her Uncle Joey. That’s him right there.” She pointed to the toddler on her hip in the photograph, then her expression melted the way only a mother’s could.

“Oh, goodness, I haven’t really looked at these in so long. Look at him,” she cooed and took the frame, lovingly touching the faded print. “My Joey. So chubby and look at that smile! He was always smiling. I swear he came out of me with that grin. Oh, he was such a happy boy until the accident.”

Alex frowned, struck by the sudden note of sorrow in her voice. Another accident? Couldn’t be a coincidence. “What happened?”

Mae sighed. Her hand shook a little as she replaced the photo on the mantel. “He was in a car accident when he was eighteen. It paralyzed him from the waist down. It broke something inside him, something more than his spine. He was never the same afterward.”

She stared at the photo for a long moment. Alex’s heart twisted with sorrow and maybe a nip of envy. He had never put much stock in the power of the maternal bond. Until now, he hadn’t had much to measure it against. His own mother had all but disowned him the moment he was conceived, though it was no fault of his own that he’d come from an extramarital affair that ended Monica Brennan-Macartan’s marriage to Theo’s father.

Alex studied Grandma Mae, watched the flutter of emotion over her features. Joey Pritchard had to be in his fifties or sixties by now, and she still hurt for what he went through at eighteen. How would it feel to have a mother who cared that deeply for her children?  

Mae gave her head a slight shake. When she smiled, all traces of sadness dissipated. “Did you see how much Pru looks like my mother?”

She picked up another photo half-hidden behind goofy high-school portraits of each of her sons and passed it to him. It was a good two decades older than the others judging by the car the pregnant woman leaned against, and again, the lighthouse stood in the background. The woman, Grandma Mae’s mother and Pru’s great-grandmother, could have been Pru in 1920s costume. Same hair, same eyes, same pear-shaped build and heart-shaped face.

Alex whistled. “They could be identical twins.”

“Creepy, huh?”

“Yeah. Wow,” he said and set the picture down. “So the lighthouse has been in your family a long time?”

She nodded. “Since my uncle bought it.”

“Who did he buy it from?”

“Nobody ever talked about the previous owners. Not in polite society anyhow.”

“Lovie True?” Alex guessed.

Mae grinned. When she was younger, her smile had probably knocked more than one man for a loop. As it was, he felt himself falling a little bit in love with her.

“Have you seen The Green Lady?” she asked.

Alex snorted. “Ghosts don’t exist.”

“Uh-huh,” she said.

“But I’d like to know more about the lighthouse,” he added, “if you wouldn’t mind answering a couple questions for me.” He hesitated. She looked so frail he wasn’t sure how to proceed. “Uh, some might be disturbing.”

She patted his cheek. “Honey, I’m nearly eighty-nine years old. There’s not much that disturbs me anymore. Ask away.”

“All right.” He wasn’t sure what to do with his hands, so he stuck them in his pockets and studied the line of photographs again. “Uh, where to start?”

Mae sat on the couch and folded her hands across her stomach in a gesture that reminded Alex of Pru. “I’ve found the beginning always works best.”

He nodded. The beginning was as good a place as any, and it would ease the way for the tough questions. She may not find much disturbing, but the thought of talking murder with a nearly eighty-nine year old woman disturbed him, which was why he’d never gone into homicide investigation.

“Okay,” he said. “The beginning. When was the lighthouse built?”

“Ah. Let me make sure I have the story straight.” Her eyes rolled toward the ceiling as she thought about it. “A ship wrecked right below Danger Ledge in 1845, killing quite a few people, including women and children. You could say that was the final straw, the last of a long line of shipwrecks, and the government commissioned the lighthouse that year. I believe they completed construction in…oh, goodness. 1847? Somewhere around there.”

Mae grinned at him again. “You say ghosts don’t exist, but for over one hundred and sixty years, people have claimed to see that ship still riding out the waves at the base of the cliff. Cappy, my nephew, believed it existed right up until the end.” She tsked. “That poor boy. What happened to him…and then Wade…it’s just awful.”

Okay, so much for easing into the hard stuff, Alex thought. She’d gone right to the heart of the matter.

“You sound like you don’t think Cappy killed himself,” he said.

“I don’t.” Mae sat up and picked a napkin from the pile she’d brought in with the cider. She dabbed at her eyes. “And I said so for months afterward, but who’s going to believe me? I’m a silly old woman.”

“Then what do you think happened to him?”

“Now that’s the mystery, isn’t it? Cappy was ill. There’s no denying that. He loved telling stories, but it got to the point he wasn’t able to distinguish story from reality. The day before he died, he kept talking about the ghost ship, came to me in a panic, saying the crew wanted to kill him. I’ve often wondered if maybe he’d seen a real ship and confused it with the ghost story.” She let her voice trail away and shrugged. Speculation hung thick in the air.

“A real ship?” Alex asked, remembering the boat he’d seen below the lighthouse his first night in Three Churches. Even though it had seemed to disappear into thin air, that boat hadn’t been a ghost ship. He refused to believe that. Besides, it certainly hadn’t been from the 1800’s. Modern. Sleek. Was that the same boat Cappy had seen? Did it have anything to do with how he ended up hanging from the lighthouse tower?

Alex filed those questions away for later consideration. He moved across the room and took the empty seat beside Grandma Mae on the couch. “As far as you know, has there ever been a murder at the lighthouse? Particularly a stabbing.”

“A murder? Well.” The wrinkles around her mouth deepened as she considered it. “Not that I’m aware of, but I don’t know the lighthouse’s entire history.”

“What about a fire?” Alex asked.

Mae started to shake her head but stopped. Her eyes widened. “There was! Lordy, I—I completely forgot about it, but my mother mentioned a fire once when I was very young. I had burned my hand playing with the stove and when Mama told my daddy about it, she had such a sad look on her face. She said, ‘Abe,’—that was my father’s name, Abraham. She said, ‘Fiona Mae nearly burned down the kitchen again’. Daddy yelled at me and my mama started crying. She never cried. I remember it so clearly now. I was shocked that Mama thought I’d tried to burn the kitchen down once before.”   

“You hadn’t had any other close calls with fire?” Alex asked.

“No. That was the first, and the only reason I turned the stove on was because I had this silly idea I could make cookies for Daddy. I was six.”

“So you think your mother was referring to another fire, one that happened before you were born?”

“She must’ve been. I can’t think of any other reason she’d say what she did.” Mae brightened and many of her wrinkles vanished, making her look decades younger. “If there was a fire, there would be records in the archives of Town Hall.”

Alex grimaced. Sheriff Forbes’s office was in Town Hall. No way he’d be able to get in there and research a fire that may or may not have happened eighty plus years ago. Stupid to try. Dead end.

“Do you think a fire has something to do with what happened to Cappy?”

Alex laughed at her girlish excitement. “Honestly, I have no clue where I’m going with these questions.”

“Oh, I think you do. You’re a smart man.” She patted his bad knee as Pru entered from the kitchen carrying a platter of cheese, crackers, and dip. “If anyone can figure out the lighthouse’s curse, it’s you.”

“Now, Grandma,” Pru sighed. “Don’t start that again.”

“What?” Mae’s chin hitched up in the same defiant way her granddaughter’s did. “The boy asked me some questions, and I was giving him my answers.”

Pru rolled her eyes, set the platter on the coffee table and dropped a kiss on her grandmother’s brow before heading back to the kitchen. “There is no curse on the lighthouse, Grandma Mae.”

“That’s what your daddy thought too,” she shot back. “And look where it got him.” To Alex, she added, “Sam, her daddy, fell off the tower last year while he was painting it.”

“Dad lost his footing,” Pru said. “Simple as that.”

“So did your grandfather when he fell down the stairs and your great aunt Sarah when her horse spooked in the yard. And what about poor, sweet Wade? Next you’ll be telling me Cappy fell too.”

“Cappy killed himself.” Pru shook her head and mouthed
sorry
at Alex from the kitchen doorway, then added aloud, “How about a subject change? Tell Alex about your safari. I’m sure he’d like to hear about it.”

“My ass,” Mae muttered and crossed her arms over her thin chest. The gesture was also so similar to Pru that Alex had to hide a chuckle behind a cough.

“She’s a sweetheart,” Mae confided, “but she’s so innocent. She’s not like me or you. Her daddy loved her very much and his intentions were always good, but he did her no great service by keeping her in a bubble her whole life. I had hoped she would grow up when she moved away from here, but that ex-husband of hers stepped in and took over right where my Samuel left off.”

“I can understand why,” Alex said. Putting Pru in a bubble where nothing or no one could hurt her seemed like a good idea to him. His gaze strayed to the mantel, settled on a photo of Pru as a child in pigtails on a banana-seat bike. Yes, as a matter of fact, the bubble was an excellent idea.

Mae gave a knowing smile. “Mm. I can see that. You’ve only known her for a short time and you want to protect her as well.” She folded both of her tiny hands around his. “You go ahead and keep her in that bubble a little longer, Alex. Okay? Protect her for me. All these recent accidents have me worried sick.”

The so-called “accidents” happening around Pru didn’t sit well with him either, but he couldn’t let that on. He cleared his throat. “Ma’am, if you’re really worried about her you should ask the sheriff to keep an eye on her. I just install alarm systems for a living.”

Without a word, Mae spread his right hand open, palm-out, and traced the callus on his trigger finger.

“We both know you’re not a ‘security consultant’,” she murmured. “Just as we both know Sheriff Forbes cannot be trusted to look after our Pru. He’d put Rhett Swithin on the job and that good for nothing—” She snorted delicately. “He wants her for one reason and one reason only. But you…Oh, my dear boy. You care about her in ways that you won’t understand until you look at her fifty years down the road and still see what you see in her today.”