Reading Up a Storm (15 page)

Mike turned to me with a smile. “No need to do that. Looks like the coffee's fresh and someone brought pastries. Marlene, get me a cup, will you?”

I expected her to tell him to get his own darn coffee, but to my surprise she went into the kitchen. Her robe flowed behind her in a movement as graceful as a wave rushing to shore.

“No, thanks,” I said. “I have to get to work.”

Mike took a step toward me. His gray eyes twinkled and the edges of his mouth were turned up in a mischievous grin. “Come on, play hooky for once. You don't want to be stuck in some musty old library all day. It's a gorgeous day. Let's go down to the pool. Marlene'll have a bathing suit you can wear.” He ran his eyes down my body. “You're about the same size. How about it, Marlene?”

She handed him his coffee. “I made the offer yesterday. Stay, Lucy. I've got more Prosecco. I'll make mimosas.”

Weird. I would have expected these two to be throwing pillows at each other and tearing out hair, not inviting a witness to that ugly scene to kick back and sip mimosas in the sun. “Sorry—gotta run. Another time maybe.”

“Whatever,” Marlene said. “Speaking of Prosecco, it's time to open a bottle. I've had enough coffee.”

“I'll see you out,” Mike said to me. “Stop by after work, why don't you, Lucy?”

“I . . . I . . . uh, I'm busy.”

“Bring your friends. We can have a party. Might as well enjoy this house while we've got it.”

“Not today,” I said.

He stopped on the bottom step, turned, and put his hand on my arm. He was below me now, and looked up, deep into my eyes. “I'm saying that I want to see you again, Lucy. You don't have someone special in your life, do you?”

An image of Connor flashed behind my eyes. “No.”

“I'm glad to hear that. I'll call you later, ask you to join me for dinner. I hope you'll say yes.”

I slipped past him and continued down the steps. My face was burning. Mike was a nice-looking man, but I had enough complications in my life right now.

My plan to thank my coworkers for filling in for me by treating them to a selection of Josie's pastries had come to naught. By the time I got back to the library, I didn't have any baked goods left for anyone.

I spent the rest of the day in a confused muddle. Neither Marlene nor Mike were exactly mourning Will, or even pretending to. Mike and his dad hadn't been close, but the man was his father. I'm not close to my father, and never have been. Still, I love my dad very much, and I know he loves me. I'd be devastated if he died.

I'd taken the chance during my afternoon coffee break to call Connor. His voice mail answered and I left a message for him to call me back, but as the clock ticked toward closing time, I hadn't heard from him. Mike had promised to call me, but he hadn't, and for that I was grateful. I didn't want to have dinner with him, and I'm never good at making excuses. Come to think of it, he hadn't asked me for my number. I suppose he could get it from Marlene, if he wanted to, but it
made me think he wasn't all that interested in me anyway. Perhaps the casual flirting was only for show. I wondered if Mike was like his dad. He'd said he was divorced. Might that be because there'd been an equivalent to Pat in his past?

On Fridays, we close late. Darkness had fallen over the ocean to the east, and the clouds in the west were streaked with shades of deep indigo and purple when Connor came into the library. I got up from behind the front desk with a smile. My heart pounded as though it were a canvas sail and the wind had just caught it. “Hi. Did you get my message?” How nice—he'd come to see me in person rather than just call or text.

“Message? Oh, sorry, Lucy. Yes, I got your message. But you said it wasn't important so it slipped my mind.”

That took the wind out of my canvas sails. I'd said it wasn't important, meaning the library wasn't on fire, or my car wasn't heading at full speed for the edge of a cliff. But it was still
important
. I'd thought (hoped?) I was important to him.

“Connor, so nice to see you.” Bertie came out of the back. Her eyes were dancing with delight. Something was up. I looked at her suspiciously.

“You said it was important,” Connor said. “You have an idea about something?”

“Not important, really,” Bertie laughed, “but I knew a hint of mystery would get you down here. It was Charlene's idea. You're going to love it. Lucy, buzz Ronald and Charlene and ask them to come down, please.” She giggled. Oh, yes. Something was definitely up.

Connor looked at me with a question. I shrugged to indicate I was as much in the dark as he was.

Charles wrapped himself around Connor's legs.

Ronald and Charlene clattered down the stairs, Ronald looking as confused as Connor and me, Charlene resembling nothing so much as a six-year-old on Christmas morning.

At that moment the door swung open. Curses, I'd been too slow to lock it. Louise Jane walked in. She was dressed in scruffy track pants, rubber boots, and a heavy rain jacket. She carried a flashlight, her pockets were bulging, and a backpack was slung across her shoulders. “Hi. I noticed the lights are still on and cars are outside. What's up?”

“A staff meeting,” Bertie said.

“Good,” Louise Jane said. “I'm glad you're all still here. Hi, Connor. Don't be alarmed, Lucy, if you see lights out in the marsh at night.”

“Why would I be alarmed?” I said, forgetting that I always did a fine job of stepping straight into Louise Jane's carefully laid traps.

“I spent the day with my great-grandmother,” she said.

“Is she . . . well?” Bertie asked. I swear our library director almost said, “Is she still alive?”

“Very well. The body is failing but the mind is as strong as ever. Almost as sharp as mine.”

“Not good then,” Charlene mumbled.

“What's that, Charlene, sweetie?” Louise Jane asked.

“Nothing.”

“When I told my grandmother about the lights Will and Marlene had seen in the storm on Monday, Grandma said this was too deep for her, we needed Great-grandmama. That's why I haven't been able to come around before now. This is much too important for us to discuss on the
phone so we had to make the trip out to the retirement home to talk in person, but Grandma was attending a bingo tournament in Elizabeth City. You'll be glad we were able to talk, Bertie.”

“I'm sure I will,” Bertie said.

Charles had unwound himself from Connor's legs and was making a careful inspection of Louise Jane's pink-and-purple rubber boots. The boots didn't have a speck of dirt on them, and I guessed they'd been bought specifically for this purpose. Whatever that purpose might be.

“There have been rumors, Great-grandmama said, over the years, about the ghosts of wreckers being active along the coast. But she's heard nothing, she said, for a long time. As the area got more and more developed the atmosphere changed and sometimes the spirit world is unable, or unwilling, to adapt.”

“Imagine that,” Charlene said. “Speaking of spirits, there's a nice cold bottle of chardonnay waiting for me at home. Spit it out, L.J.”

“I understand your skepticism.” Louise Jane sniffed. “It can be difficult for folks without any imagination to comprehend those of us who have the gift of a window to the spirit world. Isn't that right, Lucy?”

“Huh?”

“You've experienced so many things since coming here.”

About all I'd experienced was Louise Jane trying to scare me to death. “I haven't . . .”

“You need to take care of her, Connor,” Louise Jane said. “There are forces in this library that Lucy cannot understand. That even I cannot understand sometimes.
Forces that do not like people to be where they shouldn't be. Particularly at night.”

“Lucy,” Connor said, “is perfectly capable of looking after herself.” He gave me a smile. That slow Southern grin.

“Louise Jane,” Bertie said. “We are having a meeting here. If you have a point, get to it. Otherwise, the library is closed.”

“Great-grandmama said it sounds as though the ghosts of the wreckers are back. If they're lighting lamps along the shore, that's awful dangerous. Why, look at what happened to poor Will and Marlene!”

I groaned. No one believed me about the lights I'd seen, and now Louise Jane was consulting her great-grandmother and interweaving ghost stories into Will and Marlene's experience. Any credibility I might have been hoping for was completely shot.

“You'd better notify the coast guard,” Connor said. He kept his voice was deep and serious. Louise Jane glanced at Bertie and preened, and thus missed the wink Connor gave me.

So uninterested was Ronald in Louise Jane's spirit hunting, he'd gone to the window and pulled out his iPhone to check for messages. In contrast, Charles had jumped onto a shelf, the better to follow the conversation.

“Your open-mindedness does you credit, Dr. McNeil,” Louise Jane said. “You can be sure you have my vote.”

“Speaking of which,” Bertie said. “Our meeting.”

“Anyway, I wanted y'all to know that if you see lights in the marsh at night, it might be me.”

Despite myself I had to ask. “What will you be doing in the marsh?”

“Asking the spirits to leave, of course. My great-grandmother realized it was time to pass some of her most potent spells onto her daughter. And from Grandma to me.” She patted her pockets. “I've brought them tonight.”

“If you're going to be prowling around the marsh, you're several hundred yards short,” I said. “The wreckers worked on the coast.”

“Try to keep up, Lucy dear. Have you learned nothing from all I've attempted to teach you? They can, and do, wander. You think it's a coincidence that poor Will Williamson was killed only two nights after the wreckers' attempt to lure him ashore in the storm?”

“I don't think it's a coincidence at all,” I said firmly.

“Precisely. Foiled in their attempt to trick him, they tried more direct methods next. The spirits, Lucy, do not like to be thwarted. You might try to remember that next time you scorn my attempts to protect you from The Lady.”

The Lady
was the ghostly presence of a nineteenth-century woman who'd been confined to the lighthouse tower after her marriage to a mean old lighthouse keeper. That story may or may not be true, but her spirit existed in nothing more than Louise Jane's imagination, mixed with a healthy dose of spite and an attempt to scare me away.

“Seems to me,” Charlene said, “that the big question is what brought Will out at night, placed him in that boat, and brought him into the marsh. Even if your spirits”—she coughed—“are active in the marsh, I
doubt they phoned him up and persuaded him to go for a boat ride.”

“Thank you for your opinion, Charlene. You can discuss that with the police and others with limited imagination. The whys of this affair are not my concern. Only the hows.

“Lucy, I want you to be on your guard these nights, being alone in the lighthouse. I'll try to follow my great-grandmother's instructions to the letter, but sometimes . . . well, we don't entirely know how the spirits might react when they're disturbed.”

Despite myself, I peered into the shadows beneath the twisting iron stairs leading up into darkness.

Charles let out a huge yawn and the tension in the room broke. If Charles didn't think anything supernatural lived in the lighthouse, then nothing did.

“Have fun,” Bertie said. “Now, if you'll excuse us, Louise Jane, we have library business to conduct.”

“Pay me no mind. I'm going to sit over here and check my supplies. It's going to be a long night.” She dumped the contents of her backpack onto the circulation desk. Among the granola bars, sandwiches, bags of nuts, and diet-soda cans, she had baggies full of dried herbs and something resembling twigs and bark. Despite my earnest effort to pay no attention, I snuck a peek. She caught me watching and grinned. I often thought of Louise Jane's smile as that of a shark or a barracuda. But, I now realized, it was more like a spider. Innocently spinning its web while I ventured closer and closer.

Bertie cleared her throat and Ronald put away his phone and joined us. “Now, where were we? Oh yes, Charlene's been in meetings with the people at the
Manteo library. With the local elections just over a month away, they want to do something to raise interest. As we all know, participation in municipal elections is nothing short of pathetic.”

“Not just municipal,” Ronald said. “People everywhere are forgetting the value of their vote.”

“And,” I said, “they're forgetting how hard the struggle for voting rights has been. For women and minorities in particular.”

“That's exactly why the Manteo people want to run a series of special displays and features about the history of voting,” Charlene said. “I've been helping them dig up local material. Old election posters, ballots, newspaper headlines, that sort of thing.”

“I get it,” I said. “You want us to do the same. Sure. I'd be happy to help.”

“Oh, no,” Charlene said with a laugh. “We're not going to do
the same
. We're going to decorate the outside of the lighthouse.”

Ronald, Connor, and I exchanged glances. Louise Jane muttered as she sorted herbs. I sometimes wondered if Louise Jane did more with her spells than lay them down. Maybe there was something in those herbs that didn't repel spirits, but attracted them. To the consumer of the magic herbs anyway. I'd love to take one of those baggies to Butch and ask for a forensic analysis.

“I'm listening,” Ronald said to Charlene.

“We're going to advertise the election by wrapping the entire lighthouse in red, white, and blue bunting,” she said.

Connor roared with laughter. “That is the most outrageous thing I've ever heard. I love it.”

“Is that even possible?” I said.

“Sure it is. We'll have people standing at all the windows to secure it. The fire department will provide a truck and a ladder. I've already asked them. It doesn't have to say anything, but will be a reminder to people that they need to vote. Not just another TV ad or their father nagging them to get out, but something really fun that will start a conversation.”

“It'll be memorable,” Connor said.

“When are we going to do this?” Ronald asked.

“Next Sunday,” Charlene said. “When the library's closed. I've checked the weather report and it's supposed to be a nice day. No rain or high winds.”

“Sunday!” Louise Jane shrieked. “You can't. What about my Halloween display? The board has approved my haunted Outer Banks idea. I was going to start putting it up next week. Has the board approved
this
?”

“Mrs. Fitzgerald thinks it's a delightful idea,” Bertie said. “As the only expenditure we have is for the bunting itself, it doesn't have to be approved by the board.”

“Red, white, and blue tape around the lighthouse!” Louise Jane wailed. “There's nothing haunted about that.”

“No, but your exhibit will be inside.”

“I'm going to decorate the outside.”

“No,” Bertie said, “you are not.”

“The entrance at least,” Louise Jane mumbled.

“That can still be done.”

“I'll be on the phone tomorrow,” Charlene said, “rounding up people to help. You don't have to come if you've got plans for your day off, Ronald and Lucy.”

“I wouldn't miss it,” I said.

“Count me in,” Ronald said. “Nan too.”

“And me,” Connor said. “Charlene, you are a genius.”

Charlene beamed and Charles meowed.

“I think that's been seconded,” Connor said, giving the big cat a rub on the head.

Louise Jane wasn't finished yet. “Can't you leave it until November first?”