Storm Surge. Celia Ashley

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      “I don’t know what I believe.” He stood. “But this is what I do. I write travelogues, and I gather and research local stories about ghosts and other mysterious happenings and compile them into books. Sometimes I combine the two, writing travelogues featuring ghost stories of the area along with the scenic spots. I can’t explain everything I’ve found out or everything people believe they’ve seen.”

      He paused in his pacing in front of her. The heat off his body was palpable in the evening’s dropping temperature. She lifted her head to look him in the eye. “Okay. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

      “You didn’t upset me. The subject just makes me a little nuts at times.” He laughed. “What about you? What do you do when you’re not here?”

      Paige sidled away from him. His proximity made her twitchy. She reclaimed the Adirondack chair since he obviously wasn’t using it. He returned to his earlier roost on the railing.

      “I teach eighth grade English,” she said.

      “A bunch of hormonal thirteen- and fourteen-year-old boys? They must adore you.”

      “What?”

      “You have to be aware you’re a good-looking woman, Paige.”

      Paige waved a hand, heat flaring in her cheeks. “I don’t have to be aware of any such thing. And we’ve gotten off topic. I want to go back to you. How long have you been making a living at writing?”

      Liam folded his arms across his chest. Evening’s last light flashed off the water behind him. “Making a living? Not long. And not hand-over-fist, either. But I like it. I’ve been writing most of my life. But a sedentary occupation was never the destiny of a Gray. Nope. I was out on the sea at sixteen and owned and operated my own trawler by nineteen. Fished the ocean for more than fourteen years.”

      Performing some quick math even after only half a beer proved difficult, but Paige figured she had an approximate idea of his age. Curiosity satisfied, Paige smiled. “So you gave that up? Commercial fishing?”

      “About eight months ago,” he said with a small affirmative motion of his head. “Sold the boat and equipment shortly after I bought this place.”

      “To pursue your writing? Bold move.”

      “Yeah, something like that.”

      Paige leaned forward, elbows on her knees in an awkward position on the sloped seat. “Not satisfied writing about ghosts?”

      “That’s not what I meant. But I don’t plan to talk about it, if you don’t mind.”

      He held her gaze as though daring her to question him. She shook her head. Another thing he didn’t want to talk about, like his scar. And he didn’t have to. Who was she to him, after all? A stranger who’d shown up practically on his doorstep in the wee hours, claiming an association to the house he owned. No reason for confidences exchanged. No cause for anything beyond a neighborly chat. “It’s your business, not mine, Liam. We both have our secrets, I guess.”

      “Yes,” he said quietly, “I think we do.”

      * * * *

      Soon after the exchange, Paige thanked Liam for the beer she hadn’t finished and left. Instead of returning to the cottage, she went to her car and removed a small flashlight from the glove compartment. Slipping it into her pocket, she headed down to the waterline. Despite her dismissal of Liam’s ghost story, she found herself motivated to prove a flesh and blood man had been walking on the beach and not some specter of seafaring lore. Though she appreciated Liam’s pursuit of a writing career, she wondered if he couldn’t have chosen a more worthy topic than tales of phantoms and things that went bump in the night.

      Stopping above the surf, Paige flicked on the light, casting its blue-white glow over the sand. Apparently high tide had come in while she’d been talking with Liam. A narrow scrim of tumbled shell and stone showed where the water had begun its slow withdrawal. Any footprints lay beneath the water, scrubbed away. Nevertheless, Paige continued toward the jetty, flicking the light on and off to make sporadic checks of the ground. Once there, she scuttled up onto the rocks to sit a few moments. She figured it was safe to do so. She might have been in a dangerous position if the tide were still coming in.

      Paige shoved the flashlight back into her pocket and drew her knees up, wrapping her arms around her legs. She could see the lights of town against a lowering cloud cover. Sitting on a porch that had once been her own hadn’t felt as much like home as this did. Jammed between the huge boulders beneath the night sky, staring toward town while the ocean rushed in and out at her back was far more nostalgic. She’d often come here to sit alone long after her parents had thought her asleep. Why? She hadn’t been meeting anyone. The number of friends she’d had was fairly limited. For one thing, she’d been uncomfortable inviting anyone over. Looking back, though, she couldn’t place her finger on a particular reason for that avoidance. Not her parents’ fighting. She’d witnessed spats between other kids’ parents and none of them cared. They all brushed it off as a normal course of events. She supposed it was, indeed, daily life, relationships. But as far as she knew, none of their mothers had been the victim of a brutal attack by her spouse.

      Secrets. Her early life had been full of secrets.

      Paige bit her lip and lowered her forehead onto her knees. The pounding surf reverberated from her heels on stone up through the hard mass of knee and skull. She squeezed her eyes shut against the discomfort, refusing to move.

      A male voice spoke nearby in a series of unintelligible words. Sucking in a breath, Paige lifted her head, scanning the shadowed beach. Seeing nothing, she considered using the flashlight, but decided not to draw attention to herself. Not Liam, so whoever it was, she’d rather they passed on by.

      A light flared. Paige narrowed her eyes, peering between her lashes. A man stood with a lantern in his hands at a distance of about twenty yards. She could see him clearly, bearded and wearing an ill-fitting coat despite a comfortable night. If he saw her, he gave no indication, but began walking away with the same slow, ambling stride she’d seen earlier.

      Watching him move back along the beach, she tried to decide if she should speak to him, get his name, so she could tell Liam she had met his mirage, his ghost, in the flesh. In the lamp’s golden glow, she could distinguish his coat’s dusty folds, the coarse knit of his cap, his curly beard and hair, but below the coat’s hem his legs were invisible, hidden in shadow. She stood up. “Hello?”

      Paige scrambled down from the rocks, eyes on her descent to avoid breaking her neck. When her feet touched sand, she looked up again. The man was gone. “Hello?” She whipped the flashlight from her pocket and passed the beam in a huge sweep across the rocky beach. Still finding nothing, she hurried to the place she’d seen him last.

      Suddenly dizzy, she stopped, her gaze glued to an indistinct mound on the sand in front of her. It looked like a body. Oh, God, had the old man fallen? She staggered over. Before she reached him, recall slammed like ice into her skull, a silver flash, swiftly to the mark—

      Mom, what is that?

      Come away, Paige. Now.

      —and then nothing.

      What lay on the beach before her was no more than rock and seaweed. The man with the lantern was nowhere, and her mind was trying to make mincemeat of her resolve. She backed away in haste СКАЧАТЬ