Reading Up a Storm (2 page)

“Thank you, friends, so much for coming. You have no idea how much this means to me. And thank you most of all to the world's best staff—Ronald, Charlene, and Lucy—for this.”

Everyone cheered. Ronald took a deep bow.

Charles, who hadn't quite forgiven me for spoiling his fun earlier, leaped onto the shelf beside Bertie. She laughed. “And thank you, Charles. That storm's building, and fast. I hate to say it, but let's dig into this cake so we can get all of you safely home.”

*   *   *

When Bertie finished to many cheers, Josie pulled out a knife and began cutting the cake. Bertie got the first piece, and everyone cheered again. I placed slices onto plates and a beaming Bertie handed them around.

While we did that, Butch exchanged a word with Ronald and Charlene, and they nodded. Ronald put the caps back on the wine bottles, and Charlene began tidying up crumpled napkins and dirty paper plates. Connor spoke quietly to Bertie.

Soon, all that remained of the gorgeous cake was the bottom layer. Gradually the library began to empty as everyone gave Josie their compliments and said their good nights. Ronald, Charlene, and I finished tidying up with the help of Aunt Ellen and Josie.

Every time the door opened, rain streamed in and the wind caused the pages of magazines on the rack to shudder. Charles kept himself far away from the door, and I was glad I didn't have to venture out into the wild night. I live here, in the lighthouse, in a delightful, cozy little apartment on the fourth floor. My lighthouse aerie.

Josie packed the last of the cake into small boxes, distributed them among the stragglers, and then she and Aunt Ellen gave me kisses and said good night. Ronald and Charlene, clutching their cake boxes while unfurling umbrellas, escorted Bertie to her car.

At the end of the night, only Butch and Connor remained.

The men eyed each other.

I looked from one to the other.
Oh dear.

“Good night, Mr. Mayor,” Butch said.

“Night, Officer Greenblatt,” Connor said.

Neither of them made a move.

“Guess it's time to be going,” Connor said.

“Yup,” Butch said. “Nice party, Lucy.”

Charles sat on the shelf, his head moving from one man to the other as if he were at a tennis match.

“Do you want . . . ?”

“Can I see you . . . ?”

“Good night, gentlemen,” I said.

They looked at me. Then they looked at each other. Charles watched them both.

“I'll follow you, Connor,” Butch said. “Make sure you get to town safely in that little car of yours. Can't have the mayor going off the road in the dark.”

“No need to do that,” Connor said. “I've been driving these roads as long as you have.”

I crossed the room and opened the door. I peered outside. The night was a wet black void. “Neither of you will get to town if you don't leave now. If anything, that wind is picking up.”

“Once I've seen Connor off, I can come back and . . . uh . . . make sure you stay safe here, if you'd like, Lucy,” Butch said.

“I don't think that's a particularly good idea,” Connor said. “Suppose there's an emergency and you get called to come into work.”

“Out. Both of you,” I said.

They moved at the same time, squeezing through the doorway, apologizing all over themselves, calling good night to me.

I shut the door behind them and gave the lock a satisfying twist.

Charles jumped off the shelf and headed toward the stairs.

Excellent idea,
I thought.

I followed him upstairs with a warm, contented glow.

Rain lashed the walls of the Bodie Island Lighthouse, and the tall old building swayed in the wind. I put on warm fleecy pajamas covered in cartoon characters, plugged the kettle in for a pot of hot tea, and filled Charles's food bowl. We told library visitors not to feed the cat, but we had absolutely no hope of anyone paying any mind. At the party, I'd seen Mrs. Fitzgerald taking a slice of smoked salmon off her plate and surreptitiously slipping it under her chair.

I dithered over the music selection on my iPad. I like a pounding rock anthem as much as the next person, but tonight I was in the mood for something soft and quiet, so I could enjoy the sounds of the storm and get lost in the world of my book. I eventually settled on a playlist of piano concertos. Ronald and I had used Charlene as a distraction to keep Bertie in her office while party preparations were under way. Ronald had decided on a jazz selection for the night's music, and brought some CDs from home. While Charlene had been busy
keeping Bertie occupied, he'd taken the opportunity to hide Charlene's collection of CDs. Our academic librarian's passion in life was rap and hip-hop, and she was convinced that with sufficient exposure to it, all the rest of the world would join her in her love. That we hadn't told her to go away and take her passion with her was testament to how much everyone liked her. I'll never forget the look on Eunice Fitzgerald's face the time Charlene cornered our library board chair and stuffed EarPods into her ears and told her to listen to Jay-Z's newest recording.

With a chuckle at the memory, I found my book and settled into the deep comfortable window alcove to read. I'd been busy taking care of our guests so I hadn't had anything to eat, and I enjoyed my cake now with a cup of steaming black tea. The cake was as delicious as it was beautiful. Josie was truly a wonder in more ways than one. My cousin was beautiful, talented, hard-working, and just plain all-around nice. Charles, also beautiful and talented but definitely not hard-working, finished his own dinner and jumped onto my bed.

The warm glow from the success of the party, not to mention the attentions of two highly desirable men, lingered, and I let out a contented sigh, happy with my world and my new life on the Outer Banks. The heavy draperies were pulled back and the deep black of the night was broken only when the great first-order Fresnel lens high above me burst on in the two point five seconds on, two point five seconds off, two point five seconds on, and twenty-two point five seconds off pattern it would maintain throughout the night.

On nights like this, I truly came to understand the
power and importance of a lighthouse. It must be bad enough to be out at sea on a dark and stormy night with modern satellite guidance systems and the entire Eastern seaboard lit up, but in the days when the only glow from shore might be the dim and dirty light of a tallow candle or the dying flames from a damp cooking fire?

I shivered in delight and turned back to my book. Charles had moved off the bed and was now purring softly on my lap in the comfy, pillow-covered window alcove tucked into the four-foot-thick stone walls. I was reading
Kidnapped
by Robert Louis Stevenson in preparation for the next meeting of my classic-novel reading group. By coincidence I was at the part where the brig
Covenant
, bearing the kidnapped young David Balfour and the rescued Jacobite hero Alan Breck Stewart, is about to be destroyed on the storm-tossed rocks off the western isles of Scotland.

I stroked Charles's fur and he rolled over with a contented stretch.

Poor David had been tossed into the cold sea and had barely managed to stagger onto the deserted shore, more dead than alive, when I again looked out the window. To the north the lights of Nags Head were a yellow smudge on the horizon, but where this stretch of the coast ran along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore, all was as dark as could be. No car lights lit up the strip of highway, and nothing moved out at sea. Ships had headed for safer waters long ago. I had candles and matches and bottles of water at hand in case the electricity went out. My cell phone was fully charged, although getting a signal inside these stone walls was a matter of luck at the best of times. To conduct a proper conversation, I had to open the
window and lean as far out as I could reach, protected (hopefully) by a grate of iron bars.

Knowing I wouldn't get a chance to head outside this evening, I'd taken a late lunch break and gone to Coquina Beach to enjoy a short walk. I'm from Boston, and thus no stranger to the sea, but I love this stretch of the coast more than any place in the world. A storm warning had been issued; the wind had been strong, the waves high, and the sky to the south a mass of boiling black and gray clouds, so I hadn't walked for long. The beach had been almost deserted. No family groups remained, but a handful of storm lovers had been out. A young woman had stood on the edge of the water, her feet in the pounding surf, her head back and eyes closed, arms held out almost in benediction. The wind had whipped her long, loose dress around her legs. Close by, a man had been surveying the shoreline with binoculars. He'd worn a Red Sox ball cap low over his eyes and Bermuda shorts over thin and very hairy legs with prominent knees. He'd glanced at me as I passed, and I had felt the binoculars following me down the shore. I didn't walk for much longer after that, but went back to work to carry on with the party preparations.

The light above me went into its twenty-two-point-five-second dormancy, and I was about to turn my attention back to the book when a white flash caught my eye. I grabbed my binoculars. I love to sit here watching the activity out at sea. Gray battleships, huge tankers, mammoth cruise ships, luxury yachts, commercial and sport fishing boats, and sailboats of varying sizes all pass by my lighthouse aerie. Tonight, however, I wouldn't have expected
any activity, certainly not close to shore. I adjusted the glasses and scanned the black void that I knew was the sea. There it was again: a light rolled and jerked, as if being tossed by the waves. I estimated that it couldn't have been more than twenty or thirty yards offshore.

From this distance, it was impossible to tell if the light was attached to a boat. It might have been on a dinghy that had come loose from its moorings and drifted away. As I began to lower the binoculars, again intending to return to my book, another light caught my attention. This one, I estimated, was on shore. It was followed by a second light and then two more until there were four lights, maybe twenty feet apart. They bobbed up and down, but I was pretty sure they were on the beach, not in the water. At first I thought of campers and bonfires. But the rain was relentless; no open fire would last long. And no sensible person would want to be sitting around it in any event. It couldn't be a camper because that beach was for day-use only.

I wasn't sure what I was seeing. My eyes were having trouble focusing through the binoculars, alternating between the pitch-dark of the storm and the sudden flash of light from the thousand-watt bulb above me.

As I watched, the light on the water began to approach the lights on the shore. It had to be a boat; it was moving against the force of the wind.

I leaped to my feet and grabbed a flashlight. I ran out the door and dashed up the twisting iron stairs. Two flights up, another window faced out to sea. I was higher, but the view wasn't better. A narrow walkway wound around the top of the building, making a complete circle
of the lighthouse tower at its narrowest point. On a bright sunny day, the view from up there is one of the best along the coast.

I'm not afraid of heights, but not entirely comfortable with them either. When I'd gone out on the exposed walkway to take in the scenery, I'd kept my back flat against the solid stone walls. The door to the viewing platform was kept locked at night, the key somewhere downstairs in the library director's office.

I pressed against the window, binoculars in place. I hadn't shut my apartment door behind me, and Charles leaped onto the window ledge. He stood on his back legs and pawed at the glass.

“I can't see anything,” I said to him. Opaque sheets of rain blew across my line of sight. As I tried to peer around the raindrops, a calm spot blew in and I could see. The light was dipping and weaving, there one second, gone the next, as waves tossed it about. It had almost reached the shore and was heading straight for the four bobbing lights. Those lights looked exactly like boats resting comfortably in harbor. But no harbor was there.

Ghost ships?
The thought flashed unbidden into my mind. Louise Jane McKaughnan, the self-appointed source of all knowledge on the paranormal legends of the Outer Banks, had plenty of stories about ancient shipwrecks and long-dead sailors still struggling to save themselves.

Whether the lights were from a supernatural presence or not, there was a vessel out to sea and it was in distress.

I ran downstairs to my apartment. I grabbed the landline phone off the kitchen counter and was pleased to hear a steady dial tone. The lines were still up.

I dialed 911. “This is Lucy Richardson at the Bodie Island Lighthouse Library. There's a boat in trouble just south of Coquina Beach.”

“Can you see it?” replied a calm, steady voice.

“I'm not entirely sure what I'm seeing. It's too dark to be sure that it's a boat, but there definitely is a light. And it's heading for shore, tacking against the wind.”

“I'll report it to the coast guard,” the operator said. “Thank you for your call, Ms. Richardson.”

“Good night,” I said. I hung up, feeling totally useless.

This was a dangerous stretch of coast, so dangerous that it was sometimes called the Graveyard of the Atlantic. Thousands of ships have been wrecked along the Outer Banks. The boat I saw, if it was a boat and not just an abandoned dinghy, was not far from the wreck of the
Laura Barnes
. The wooden schooner had come ashore in heavy fog in 1921, and its rotting remains were now, of all things, a tourist attraction.

I went back to the window, and resumed my post. The rain had lessened fractionally but I didn't see either the bobbing light or any of the four on land again.

It was a long time later when I switched off my own lamp, drew the curtains, and crawled into bed. Charles settled beside me and began to purr. Before falling asleep, I gave a thought to the men and women who go down to the sea in
ships.