Diane Chamberlain - Kiss River

“Are you Dr. O’Neill?” she asked. She was wearing dark-blue shorts and a light-blue shirt, open, over a white top of some sort.

“Yes,” he said.

“I’m Gina Higgins, a friend of your son and daughter’s.”

With his mind already on Jack and Maggie, his heart did a nervous little dance in his chest until he realized she was probably not talking about his two youngest children. “Oh,” he said. “Do you mean Clay and Lacey?”

She nodded. “That’s right,” she said with a smile. “I should have made that clear. I forgot you have younger children.”

He felt awkward, if not downright rude, standing in the doorway without inviting her in, but this did not appear to be an emergency, and he was anxious to get back to Olivia. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I was wondering … May I come in for a moment?” She looked past him into the living room. “Is this a good time?”

“Actually, it’s not,” Alec said, but Olivia walked into the room in her khaki shorts and white shirt, and he figured there was nothing to get back to, at least not at that moment. He opened the door wider. “It’s fine,” he relented, stepping back to let her walk past him into the living room. She was wearing a green backpack. “Olivia,” he said, “this is Gina Higgins. Right?” He looked at Gina to check his memory.

“Right.” She held out her hand to Olivia, who shook it, smiling her usual gracious smile.

“Gina’s a friend of Lacey and Clay’s,” Alec explained.

“It feels so good in here,” Gina said, taking in a deep breath and smoothing her dark hair back from her damp forehead. “The air conditioner’s broken in my car.”

“Have a seat, Gina.” Olivia motioned toward the sofa. “Can I get you something to drink?”

Gina sat down, slipping her backpack from her shoulders to her lap. “No, thank you. I don’t want to take that much of your time.” She looked up at Alec, who was still standing in the middle of the room. “Lacey and Clay suggested I talk to you,” she said. “I’m a lighthouse historian in the Pacific Northwest. I came to the Outer Banks to do some exploration of the Kiss River light. I hadn’t realized that it had been demolished.”

Alec felt his smile freeze at the mention of the lighthouse. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Olivia lower herself to the other side of the sofa, and he knew she was watching him, waiting for his reaction to this news. He rarely thought about the lighthouse anymore. His long-ago fight to save it had been misguided and had sapped far too much of his time and energy. It had been part of his crazy grieving process after Annie died. “All grieving seems crazy,” Olivia had comforted him, but he knew he’d gone a bit over the edge.

He sat down on the arm of the upholstered chair near the door and studied their guest. It seemed odd that a lighthouse historian would not have known that the Kiss River light was no longer standing. “I’m surprised you didn’t know it had been damaged,” he said.

“Well—” Gina smiled “—my focus has been on the West Coast. And I’m just an amateur at this. I’m really a schoolteacher, and I only get to pursue my lighthouse passion in the summer. I admit I didn’t do my research very well, did I?” She was clearly nervous. Her hands clutched the backpack in her lap as she leaned forward on the sofa, and her smile had a shiver to it. He felt some sympathy for her. “I was using an older lighthouse guide because it’s a favorite of mine,” she continued, “and I popped out here, expecting the light to be just as it was described in the book.”

“That must have been upsetting,” Olivia said.

“There are several other lighthouses here for you to explore,” Alec suggested.

She shook her head quickly. “I’m into preservation,” she said. “And I was very upset to realize that not only had the lighthouse been destroyed, but that no one has ever tried to retrieve the Fresnel lens from the ocean.”

“That’s an issue that was put to rest a long time ago,” Alec said, wishing he could put it to rest in this room as well.

“I know.” She rubbed her palms over her backpack. “I wanted to see if I might be able to do something about that.”

“About raising the lens?” Olivia asked.

Gina nodded. “Yes. I’d like to see it on display somewhere.”

Alec did not understand why someone from the Pacific Northwest would give a hoot about the Kiss River light, and her intrusion into something that really did not concern her annoyed him. As a lighthouse historian, though, amateur or not, she had to know that the lens was very rare. Only two of them still existed in North Carolina, and they were valued at over a million dollars apiece. He was suddenly suspicious of her motives.

He folded his arms across his chest. “The first thing for you to realize is that it’s unlikely the lens is still in one piece.”

“I know that,” she said.

“And second, the lens would be government property, no matter who salvaged it. You wouldn’t get any money out of raising it.”

She looked stricken, and he knew he had offended her.

“I’m not after money,” she said. “I just want to see it displayed appropriately for the public to enjoy. I was hoping you might be able to help me make that happen.”

“I’m not the right person to help you with this, Gina,” he said, shaking his head. Again, he was aware of his wife’s eyes on him. She was a quiet, but hardly disinterested, observer.

“Lacey and Clay said you used to be the head of the Save the Lighthouse committee,” she said.

“That’s true, but that was a long time ago and I’ve since changed my allegiance. Now I just want to let things stay the way they are.” The eldest of their three cats, a Persian named Sylvie, stole into the room and hopped up on Olivia’s lap. Gina reached over to scratch the cat’s head.

“Are there other people who were on the committee with you who might still want to see the lens salvaged?” she asked, her eyes on Sylvie.

Alec sighed. He wanted her to go. Wanted to get back to bed with his wife. But there were other people who might be willing to help her, and in the interest of fair play, he thought she should have those names. He could see the determination in her eyes and knew she would dig them up anyway, with or without his help. “There’s Nola Dillard,” he said.

“Oh. The real estate agent, right?” Gina pulled a pad and pen from her backpack and wrote down the name.

“Yes.”

“Where can I find her?”

“She has her own company now,” Olivia said. “It’s on Croatan Highway in Kitty Hawk around milepost four.”

“What’s the name of the highway again?” Gina asked.

Olivia spelled the word for her. Croatan was the common name for Highway 12, the main road through the Outer Banks. Gina was showing her outsider status in more ways than one.

“And who else?” She looked across the room at him.

“Walter Liscott and Brian Cass are the other two,” he said. “They’re getting up there in years, though, and spend their days playing chess at Shorty’s Grill and not doing much else.”

“That’s on the beach road in Kitty Hawk,” Olivia volunteered.

“They’re not going to be up for much of a fight these days,” Alec said, although he knew both men would probably love to raise that lens as their final tribute to the Kiss River light.

“Well, I can talk to them about it,” Gina said, writing on her notepad.

“The only other person on the committee was another woman, Sondra Clarke,” Alec said, “but she got married and moved away a few years ago.” There had been one other person on the committee—Olivia’s first husband, Paul—but his work for the committee had not been born of a sincere effort to save the lighthouse. Besides, he lived in Maryland.