Page 99 of Tempest at Annabel's Lighthouse
Pete slid a tin mug across the table to Shea, who took it and palmed it with her hands. He slipped onto the chair Holt had occupied not long before, and they sat in companionable silence. Shea was sure if she reached out, she could physically feel the unspoken words between them, and knowing Pete, he wouldn’t know how to start. That was the deal with being married to a man of few words, who’d pretty much used up his entire vocabulary in the last few hours.
“Do you think we’ll ever know where Rebecca hid the map?” Shea ventured. It was as good a place to start as any.
“I doubt it.” Pete shook his head.
“Now that we know what happened here with Jonathan Marks and the recent hauntings, it’s kind of—”
“Anticlimactic?” Pete raised his eyes.
Shea gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah. I mean, I shouldn’t say that considering you’re recovering from being hit by a car, but I just ... I felt there might be more to the story.”
“I’m sure there is,” Pete was quick to respond.
Shea shot him a questioning look.
“Well,” Pete went on, “if you were able to go back in history, what do you know?”
Shea contemplated the story she’d been able to unravel. “Annabel drowned in the lake. Hilliard, her husband, watched it happen from the shore. Their daughter, Rebecca, stole the map—out of spite toward her father perhaps? She never revealed where she hid it. Silvertown went belly-up. Captain Gene was in her family tree through a brother she had named Aaron.”
“So why is there a grave?” Pete asked.
Shea stared at him.
“If Annabel died by drowning, did her husband pull her body to shore? Was it really her husband on the shore?”
Shea frowned. “What are you saying, Pete?”
“I’m saying it’s a story. That’s all it is. Records state Annabel drowned in the lake after the craft she was in overturned. That’s all. There are no records of her body being retrieved. There are no grave records either.”
“How do you know this?” Shea was taken aback by Pete’s extra knowledge.
He gave her a pacifying smile. “You’re not the only one who got into figuring out the mystery.”
“So if there are no grave records,” Shea ventured, “then someone had to have created a grave for memorial’s sake. To keep her close to the lighthouse.”
“The lightkeeper,” Pete finished.
Shea stared at him. “That’s right!” She snapped her fingers.“I forgot that part of the legend. Annabel and her lover. Her lover wasn’t her husband. It was the lightkeeper, wasn’t it? The man who spent his life watching over the lake where she died.”
Pete shrugged. “Who knows? It’s a good guess, though. We’ll probably never know.”
Shea considered this, and then the name slipped past her lips. “Edgar.”
“Who?” Pete asked.
Shea didn’t answer. She remembered the extra gravestone. The name etched into its face. Edgar the lightkeeper lost to the annals of time. She dared a glimpse at Pete, who drank his tea quietly, oblivious to any further expansion of the conversation or else deep in thought about it. Maybe she’d made a bad habit of misinterpreting Pete’s silence.
Regardless, the genealogy of Annabel didn’t include a man named Edgar, but the ghostly story claimed the lightkeeper’s undying love for her long after she’d drowned. Shea tapped her finger on her mug, not taking her eyes away from her study of Pete. She wondered what it would be like to love someone so much that you never stopped, long after they were dead and buried. Or ... a darker thought overtook her, so dark that Shea stuffed it away and determined not to revisit it. What would it be like to love someone so completely and obsessively that you never wanted to share them with anyone else?
They had a lot of work to do, this Shea recognized as she packed her belongings in preparation to leave Annabel’s lighthouse. Holt had waived the rental fees as penance for all the drama. Shea had what she needed for a book—more than what she needed—and much of it she would never use.
It seemed when a person dug into a story from the past, so many details revealed themselves. Ones that made the past so much less romantic and haunting and instead darker and morebroken. She still had questions, but Shea had concluded she would never know the answers. She couldn’t time-travel back and read Rebecca Hilliard’s mind when she’d secreted away with her father’s papers and map. Shea also couldn’t reconcile exactly how Edgar fit into the equation—aside from the infamous story of being Annabel’s lover.
Putting the pieces together, it was apparent that Annabel had been married to Hilliard, Silvertown’s founder who’d gone bankrupt and had been imprisoned for fraud and conspiracy to commit manslaughter. Which meant Annabel had not been married to a very nice man—not at all. In Shea’s romantic mind, it all made sense then, that Annabel would fall in love with an older, caring sort. But seeing as Hilliard had raised Annabel’s daughter, Rebecca, it also was apparent Annabel had not left Hilliard except by death—the tragedy of being lost at sea. An escape? Perhaps. But a strange one.
Shea had mulled over the concept of Annabel’s supposed craft sinking and her drowning. But why would a woman take a skiff out on the lake unless the waters had been calm? And if the waters were calm, there was no reason for a skiff to overturn or a woman to drown. Unlike the story of a tempestuous storm or a husband stuck on shore unable to reach her due to the high waves, logic offered a different theory. One that made Shea question if Annabel had, after all, died of drowning by accident...
The thought hung in the air as an arm slid around her waist. Shocked, Shea stiffened and spun within the circle of the arm to stare wide-eyed at Pete.
