Paula Graves - Secret Assignment

There was little left of whatever had been inside the service room when the place was a working lighthouse. A rickety table, missing one leg and lying in a lopsided heap against one wall, took up half the space. Fortunately, it didn’t block the door that led out to the narrow catwalk circling the lighthouse. Light seeped in through a cracked and dirty window. From elsewhere—either the broken window or the narrow space beneath the door—a draft blew in, cool and fragrant with the sea.

Heart racing, Shannon opened the door and crept out onto the metal catwalk. With the Gulf of Mexico spreading around the island as far as the eye could see, she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t standing on a rusted metal platform thirty feet in the air. She’d never considered herself afraid of heights, but that perception was about to be tested.

The foghorns were a pair of long metal horns that jutted out from a flat platform about ten feet to Shannon’s left. Walking closer to the horns, she saw that whatever mechanism created their sound was back in the service room after all. She started to head back inside but paused, reorienting herself until she faced east, toward the wooded part of the island where Gideon had disappeared.

Suddenly, the air split with the booming moan of the foghorn, the sound rattling the catwalk beneath her feet. Shannon stumbled to her hands and knees, the penlight bouncing off the metal slats of the catwalk and tumbling over the side. The whole lighthouse seemed to vibrate with the horn’s basso profundo, as if the structure was about to collapse in on itself and sink into the sandy earth below.

Shannon crawled to the door of the service room, dizzy from the loud vibrations of the horn. It took a second, therefore, to realize what she was seeing in front of her.

The door to the service room, which she had most certainly left open when she went out onto the catwalk, was now closed.

* * *

T HE FOGHORN ’ S PLAINTIVE moan finally filled the air, sending birds rising from their treetop perches and soaring into the air in a cloud of dark silhouettes against the moonlit sky.

Ahead of Gideon, the three men froze only a hundred yards from Stafford House. Gideon crouched low, keeping an eye on them from behind the cover of a palmetto bush. He squeezed himself into a tighter ball as the men started moving quickly toward him, away from the house.

“I thought you said it was handled,” the leader spat at Midwest.

“It was!”

“If that horn doesn’t stop in five minutes, there’ll be a rescue crew from the mainland,” the big man growled. “I talked to a guy at the marina this afternoon when we regrouped.”

“We can’t get back there and stop it in five minutes,” Midwest complained.

“Then we need to abort,” the leader said firmly. “Again.”

They passed Gideon’s hiding place, moving at a fast march through the woods. A fourth dark shape glided out of the woods to join them on the fast trek back to the shoreline. They weren’t even trying for stealth now.

As they moved farther away from Gideon’s hiding place, he was torn between following and heading back to Stafford House to make sure Shannon and Mrs. Ross were okay.

He couldn’t be sure there were only four men on the island. There could be a whole other intruder force holding Lydia and Shannon captive at this very moment.

He watched only long enough to see the four men pile into the Zodiac. The engine started with a low roar and then they were dark shapes moving across the moonlit Gulf.

With his heart in his throat, he started running toward the house.

* * *

G ROPING TO HER feet, Shannon pressed herself flat against the stone wall of the lighthouse, covering her ears and squeezing her eyes shut against another rush of dizziness. She tried the handle of the service room door and discovered, to her profound relief, that it was unlocked.

She pushed it open and stumbled inside. The sound of the horns was still loud, but the stone walls muted it enough that her ears stopped ringing and her head quit spinning. She dropped her hands away from her ears and peered into the gloom of the service room, wishing she had the penlight back.

There was enough light from the moon outside, pouring through the service room door, to see the path to the spiral stairway. From there, she could hold on to the rail and feel her way down to the bottom.

She paused at the top of the staircase, looking back into the murky bowels of the small room. She had a strange sense, all of a sudden, that she wasn’t alone.

“Hello?” she whispered. She couldn’t hear herself over the low keening of the foghorn.

Her eyes strained to see into the deepest shadows of the small room, and for a second, she fancied she saw a hint of movement. Fight-or-flight instincts kicking in, she started down the spiral staircase with more speed than was probably wise. Nevertheless, she made it down to the bottom with only one terrifying stumble and burst out of the lighthouse at a fast clip.

Lydia was waiting for her, her hands over her ears. “You did it,” she said, her voice barely audible over the sound of the horn.

“I didn’t touch the horns,” Shannon replied as they hurried back through the sea grass to the caretaker’s house. “They just came on while I was on the catwalk—literally knocked me to my knees.”

“Let’s go inside.” Lydia grabbed her hand and pulled her to the stairs leading up to a wooden deck at the back of the caretaker’s house. The door was unlocked, offering no barrier to their entry.

“Better!” Lydia said with a sigh of relief, shutting the door, and much of the noise, behind them. “I wonder how the horn fixed itself?”

“Perhaps the connector up in the service room is loose, and wind blowing through the cracked window knocked it back into place?”

“Perhaps.” Lydia shrugged, leading Shannon through the darkened house as if she had the entire layout memorized. Perhaps she did. The house had been in her family for years, no matter who lived in it now.

It was hard to make out much in the gloom. Shannon got the impression of large furniture in sparing doses, which seemed to fit what she knew of Gideon Stone. He needed big things because he was a big man, but he probably didn’t care much for clutter taking up the remaining space.

“This house used to be my son’s. He would live here on the rare occasions he was home on leave.”

The son who had died saving Gideon Stone’s life, Shannon thought, wondering how Gideon felt, living here in a place that had once belonged to his friend. “You must miss him terribly.”

“We all do.” Lydia’s hand caught hers briefly. “We knew it was a possibility—a soldier’s family doesn’t send their loved one to war without knowing the potential costs. But we never really believed it would happen to us. We couldn’t let ourselves think about it, or we’d go insane.”

Shannon had seen two brothers go off to war. Several of her cousins had served their country as well. She’d been fortunate not to lose any of them, although she’d mourned with her sister Megan after the death of Megan’s husband, Vince, in what they’d thought at the time was a combat death.

Thoughts of Vince’s death led her mind straight to Gideon, who was still out there in the woods somewhere, surrounded by at least three men whose motives for being on this island were suspect in the extreme. “Do you think we should go back to the house?” she asked Lydia. “If Gideon doesn’t find us there, what will he think?”

“Nothing good,” Lydia admitted. For the first time since the ordeal began, Lydia sounded like a woman in her late sixties. “I am almost afraid to hope he’s survived unscathed,” she said in a weak voice. “I’m afraid I have become more accustomed to loss these days than not.”