Diane Chamberlain - Kiss River

“Hello!” he shouted, just as a wave crashed onto the beach.

The woman didn’t turn her head, and he guessed she could not hear him over the sound of the sea.

He cupped his hands around his mouth. “Yo!” he hollered. “Hello!”

Sasha came running at the sound of his call, and this time the woman peered over the edge of the tower at him. So high above him, she was very small, her features invisible. If she answered him, he didn’t hear her.

“It’s dangerous up there,” he called. “You’d better come down.”

The woman stood up, but Clay instantly changed his mind. It would be too dark inside the tower. “Wait there!” He held up a hand to tell her to stay. “I’ll come up and get you. I have a flashlight.”

He told Sasha to stay on the beach, then waded through the water to climb the concrete steps into the foyer. Turning on the flashlight, he saw the familiar, eerie, nighttime look of the stairs and railing against the curved white brick wall. He was used to the stairs and took them easily, without a hint of breathlessness. He made the climb nearly every day, sometimes more than once. The tower was a wonderful escape.

The salt breeze washed across his face as he stepped above the broad, jagged-edged cylinder of bricks. The woman stood up again, backing away a bit, and he thought she might be afraid of him. Understandable. It was dark; she had nowhere to run.

“You could trip going down the stairs in the dark,” he said quickly, showing her his flashlight.

“Oh. Thanks.” Her dark hair blew across her face, and she brushed it away with her hand.

She was extraordinarily beautiful. Very slender—too slender, perhaps—with long dark hair and large eyes that looked nearly black in the dim light. There was a fragility about her, as if a good gust of wind could easily blow her from the top of the tower.

As though reading his mind, she lurched a bit, grabbing the railing. He knew how she felt. The stairs held you suspended in the air above the tower, and it was easy to experience vertigo. The first few times he came up here with Terri, he’d actually felt sick. The stairs were solid and sturdy, though. It simply took the inner ear a while to get used to that fact.

“Sit down again,” he said. “We’ll wait till you feel steady on your feet before we go down.”

The woman sat down without a word, moving to the edge of the step closest to the railing, which she quickly circled with both her hands. Clay sat one step below her.

“What brings you up here?” He tipped his head back slightly to look at her, hoping he didn’t sound as if he was accusing her of something. Behind her windblown hair, the sky had turned a thick gray-black. There were no stars. No moon.

“Just … I …” Her gaze was somewhere above his head, out toward the dark horizon. “What happened here?” she asked, letting go of the railing with one of her hands, waving it through the air to take in the lighthouse and all of Kiss River. “What happened to the lighthouse?”

“Hurricane,” Clay said. “More than ten years ago.”

“Ten years.” The woman shook her head. She stared out to sea, and Clay thought her eyes were glistening. She didn’t speak.

“I’m Clay O’Neill,” he said.

The woman acknowledged him with a brief smile. “Gina Higgins.” She pointed behind her to the keeper’s house. “Has that become a museum or something?” she asked.

“No.” From where he sat, the house looked like a church, its windows filled with color. “It was abandoned for many years,” he said. “Then a conservation group I’m part of took it over. My sister and I are living in it while it’s being restored. We help with the work and act as general contractors, for the most part.” The restoration was progressing very slowly, and that was fine with him. There was no target date, no reason to rush.

Gina looked over her shoulder at the house. “The stained glass …”

“It’s my sister’s,” he said. “She just hung it in the windows while we’re living here. It’s not part of the restoration.”

“Your sister made it?”

“Yes.”

“What a talent,” Gina said. “It’s beautiful.”

He nodded, glancing at the house again. “She’s pretty good at it.”

“And what are the plans for the house when it’s refurbished?”

“Actually, none, so far,” he said. Holding tight to the railing, he stood up to peer over the edge of the tower, hunting for Sasha. He spotted the dog nosing at a pile of seaweed and took his seat again. “Possibly a little museum,” he said. “Possibly a B and B. Maybe even a private residence. The situation is unusual, since the lighthouse is off limits. They aren’t sure they want to draw people out here. I was surprised to see you here, actually. How did you get in?”

“I walked in from the road, where that chain is. I ignored the No Trespassing sign.” She looked beautifully sheepish. “Sorry,” she said.

“It’s off limits because it’s dangerous out here, as you can probably tell,” he said. “But you haven’t gotten yourself killed, so no big deal. Were you hiking? Exploring? Most people don’t even realize this lighthouse is here anymore.”

“Oh, I’m an amateur lighthouse historian,” Gina said. She touched the camera hanging around her neck. “So I was curious to see the Kiss River light and get some pictures of it. Where is the rest of it? Where is the Fresnel lens?”

She pronounced the word FREZnal instead of FraNELL . Odd for a lighthouse historian. But she’d said she was an amateur; she had probably seen the word in writing but had never heard it spoken before.

“The Fresnel lens is somewhere at the bottom of the ocean,” he said, diplomatically using the correct pronunciation, and even in the darkness, he could see coins of color form on her cheeks.

“Why didn’t they raise it?” she asked. “It’s very valuable, isn’t it?”

He nodded. “Yes, but there was a lot of opposition to raising the lens,” he said. His own father, once an advocate for saving the lighthouse, had led the fight against finding the lens. “The travel bureau and the lighthouse society wanted it raised, but the locals tend to think that things should remain right where nature puts them. And, as you can imagine, they’re also not keen on bringing even more tourists to the area as it is. Besides, who knows? The lens could be in a thousand pieces down there.”

“But it also could be in one piece, or in just a few pieces that could be put back together,” she argued, and he knew she had a feisty side to her. “I think it’s a crime to leave something that’s historically valuable on the bottom of the sea. It should be displayed in a museum somewhere.”

He shrugged. He didn’t really care about the lens. Never thought about it, actually. In the great scheme of things, it did not seem worth getting upset over.

“It was a first-order lens, wasn’t it?” Gina asked.

“Yes. It’s three tons, at least. Whether it’s in one piece or a hundred, it would be a job to bring it out. Once they got the thing up, it would probably have to spend months in an electrolyte bath so the metal parts didn’t disintegrate in the air.”

“No, it wouldn’t,” she said. “The metal parts are brass, aren’t they? Brass wouldn’t need an electrolyte bath.”

She was right, and he was wrong. And also a little impressed.

“And if it’s three tons,” she continued, “it couldn’t have drifted too far from the lighthouse, then, could it?”

He looked out toward the black cavern of the sea. Long ago, he and Terri would drive up here to Kiss River and sit on these stairs at low tide, trying to spot the lens, expecting to see it jutting out of the water. They never were able to spot it. “It was an unbelievable storm,” he said. “And there have been a few just as bad since then. The coastline’s really changed here. Before that storm, the water was never up this high. It’s washed away the beach. By now the lens could be just about any—”