Page 38 of Beachfront Pages

Sea Glass Cottage had its light on.

He could see it from the path, a warm square of yellow with the shape of her bookshelves behind the glass. He stopped without planning to. She was in there. Probably reading. Probably not writing, from the little she'd said about whatever she was supposed to be working on and wasn't.

He stood at the top of the path and looked at her lit window like a boy outside a dance.

"Go home, Marty," he said.

He made himself turn around.

Whatever this was, a man didn't go knocking on a woman's door after dark because he'd gotten sentimental over the water. He had her in his shop most afternoons. That was enough. That was, in fact, already more than he'd meant to allow. He set off back toward town with the light behind him. He didn't look over his shoulder to see if her window was still lit. He wanted to, though, and the wanting told him plenty.

The apartment over the shop was as warm as he'd known it would be. He cracked the windows and ran the tap till it went cool. He drank a glass of water standing at the sink, which was a thing Winnie would have scolded him for. He thought about the Hungarian novelist on the nightstand. He'd been meaning to start it for a week.

He got into bed with it and read the first page three times and couldn't have told a soul what it said.

His mind kept wandering off down the waterfront to a yellow window. He set the Hungarian down on his chest and stared at the ceiling and called himself several unkind names, none of which helped. He sighed and went down into the shop and grabbed the book Hal had left for him. He went back upstairs and climbed into bed.

"All right," he said to the empty room. "All right, Hal."

He picked it up. He'd read it for ammunition. He'd find the cheap tricks and the lazy sentences. The next time Fiona defended the genre, he'd have chapter and verse. That was a perfectly good reason to open a book he'd sworn for years he'd never bother with.

He opened it to the first page.

A man named Hank Carson stood in the rain over a body nobody in town would admit to knowing. The voice came up off the page plain and dry and certain. The rain was wet. The dead man wore the wrong shoes for the part of town he'd died in, and Hank noticed that before anything else.

Marty read the first chapter telling himself he wasn't impressed.

He read the second one without telling himself anything at all.

The writer knew how to do it. That was the trouble. The thing moved. Every scene paid for the next one. There wasn't a wasted line. Once or twice there was a line so good he stopped and read it again out of professional jealousy. The detective was lonely in a way the book never once announced. He just was, in the gaps between what he said. Marty knew that loneliness from the inside. He resented being made to feel it by a paperback Hal had pushed across his counter.

He looked at the author's name on the spine. F. L. Maxwell. Fifteen of these. Sixteen, soon, when the man got around to it.

"Well," he said.

He turned the page.

The window beside the bed went from blue to black. A boat came in somewhere out on the water, its engine a low murmur and then nothing. Marty read on, the harbor quiet below him, Hal's soft old book held up to the lamp, Hank Carson three steps ahead of him in the rain and pulling farther away.

When he finally looked at the clock, it was far later than a working man had any business staying up to.

He read one more chapter anyway.

Chapter 13

The phone lit up on the third ring. Rachel.

Fiona stared at the screen. She could let it go. She'd gotten good at letting it go. Four voicemails good, a whole month good. But the phone kept buzzing, insistent, like Rachel had decided to sit on redial until somebody picked up.

She picked up.

"Don't hang up," Rachel said.

"I wasn't going to hang up."

"You were thinking about it. I could hear you thinking about it." A breath. "Hi. Hello. You're alive."

"I'm alive."