“And the extra work for the curriculum?” Teddy said dryly. “Let me guess—something happened with her and the principal.”
She felt him tense. “I don’t…think so,” he replied. “I wondered…but I don’t think so. Even so, we began growing apart, and—well, she’s six years younger than me, and had just graduated college when we got engaged. She finally told me she wasn’t ready to get married. So…we tried to get through that. And…it just didn’t work out. I was ready to get married and start a family, and she wasn’t.”
“Except…she is now. Barely a year later.” Teddy kept her voice low and empty of the venom she felt on his behalf, but the roughness in Oscar’s voice told her she wasn’t saying anything he hadn’t thought or felt.
“Yeah. So…” He shrugged. “The guy she’s marrying—”
“It’s not the principal is it?” she demanded, unable to contain her outrage.
“No, thank goodness. He—Trevor—is just a guy she met—maybe eight or nine months ago. Father of a student, I think.”
“How do you know all this? You don’t keep in touch with her, do you?” she asked.
“No. Definitely not. But Dina keeps me in the loop. She—”
“All right, wait. Can we stop there for a second?” Teddy said. “How did you get a great name like Oscar London, but your sister ended up with a very boring name about being stuck cooking?”
“Stuck cooking?”
“You know—someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah,” she sang, “someone’s in the kitchen I knooo-ohhh-ohhh-owww—”
“Okay, okay,” he said, cutting her off with a chuckle. “I got it. Her name is actually Engadine.”
Teddy burst out laughing. “Oh my, that is the best! Engadine. Engadine London. I’m totally using that in a book someday. So…Oscar and Engadine.”
“Yes, that’s us.”
“Who were your parents?” she said in the same tone as Sally Albright when she asked Harry Burns about his wife named Helen, who was a lawyer.
“Coming from a woman named Teddy,” he said, his voice shaking with laughter, “I don’t know how you can point fingers.”
“I’m not pointing fingers,” she said. “I’m admiring. I told you, I love good names. But seriously—are your parents British or something?”
“My father is. And my mother was a mechanical engineer from Boston. They met in Germany, both working for an auto supplier based there. I lived my first six years between Germany and the U.K., then we came to the U.S.”
“Ah, that explains a lot.” Teddy’s giggles had calmed, and she closed her eyes. Even with Oscar’s shirt, she was getting chilly. She couldn’t imagine how cold he was getting, bare-chested and all. How chivalrous it had been of him to have offered her his shirt—and a peek of what was beneath it. A little pale, but very solid and taut.
“I’m not going to ask what you mean by that,” Oscar said after a moment of silence. His voice was dry, and he, too, let his head bump gently back against the glass wall.
Then he sighed again.
But this time, it wasn’t a hopeless one.
It was just a sigh.
And she smiled a little.
Oscar blinked drowsily.
What the—?
It took him a moment to realize where he was—still on the top of the damned lighthouse—with Teddy slumped next to him, her head on his shoulder and her warm body tucked next to him. Somehow, his arm had come to slide around her waist and a hand settled at her hip. He jerked it away, but didn’t have the heart to move and awaken her.
Did I really fall asleep?
He must have dozed or something, and his companion as well, for the night was very dark. And still. It had gotten much cooler. Maybe it was the chill that had awakened him.
The sky was as black as it got when there was a swath of stars glittering above. There was a quarter moon, and it hung high and distant in the sky, offering sketchy light that rippled over Lake Michigan below. Based on that, he guessed it was well after midnight, but not yet close to dawn.
He thought about moving, but he was comfortable, and Teddy was warm and soft next to him. Her head with its sagging, soft bundle of hair was just beneath his shoulder, and whatever shampoo she used had been teasing him all night with its smell, mingling with that of female, and now tinged with lake and the chill air.
He smiled in the dark. An interesting woman, to say the least. Practical, unruffled—except when it came to her unfinished book—and amusing, with the way her thoughts and words bounced around. Not to mention soft and pretty.
She hadn’t raged or cried or stomped around when they realized they were stuck up here. No accusations or recriminations. She’d just taken it in stride—maybe even better than he had done, he realized with a grimace.
Of course, he thought as his lips quirked into a smile, she probably didn’t mind, as this was a foolproof excuse for not working on her book. He gave a short laugh, thinking he might tease her about manufacturing the whole thing—at least when it was all over and they were down from here—when suddenly he felt the air change.
All at once, it was icy cold. Not just chilly from the lake wind, but like bloody winter in Vermont—it was a cold like he’d never experienced. A sharp, unnatural cold.
This shocking, startling chill front had come from nowhere. The wind wasn’t blowing…the frigidity was just there. As if a cube of dry ice had been dropped on him.
As he looked around for some sort of explanation, he saw it.
What the hell?
A phosphorous-like substance, with the consistency of smoke or a cloud, hovered there on the gallery to his left, right next to the door from which he and Teddy had come out. It was bluish-green, glowing in the darkness…curling and billowing and moving…
Oscar fought to keep his breathing steady, and his thoughts from scattering. Some sort of alga, he told himself. Or moss. Growing on the side of the lantern—glows in the dark, so we didn’t see it before. Or some sort of plant or moss blown up from the lake or from a tree…like a glow-in-the-dark sagebrush…
He stared at it, his nose feeling as if it were iced over, his fingers like tiny shards of icicles, goosebumps all over his bare torso—and then Teddy bolted awake.
“So cold. It’s so— What is that?”
But Oscar was already on his feet as the cloud—or moss or whatever it was—suddenly darted away, hovering for a moment above them. Then it swept over the railing and disintegrated as it tumbled down into the darkness.
“What was that?” Teddy cried, stumbling as she dragged herself upright. Oscar automatically reached out to grab her so she didn’t accidentally launch herself over the railing. “That—that glowing cloud thing?”
“I don’t know,” he managed to say. He noticed the air temperature had suddenly gone back to normal. “Some sort of—alga or somethin—”
All at once, a horrible, night-shattering cry split the silence. Terrifying and shrill, it was as if someone was in agony.
Her eyes popped wide, Teddy grabbed Oscar’s arm as the scream reverberated in his ears.
Then it was gone, just as quickly as it had come.
Everything was silent except for Teddy’s panting breathing and his own heart pounding in his ears.
“What was that?” she said, grabbing his arm. “What in the hell?”
“I—I don’t know,” he said, mostly managing to keep his voice steady.
But holy hell. It was the same sound he’d heard last night—the same tortured, terrified scream. “I think it must have been an animal in heat or—or something like that,” he said, ignoring the fact that it hadn’t come from down below, but from right up here.
“Whatever it was, it was in pain,” she said, still gripping him tightly. “Good grief. Did I really fall asleep?”
“We both did,” he replied. “I—” He stopped speaking and gently pushed her away as he fairly leaped over to the glass door.
It glowed slightly from the residue of whatever had
been floating there, which was how he could see that the door was ajar.
Wordlessly, he pulled on the handle and the door opened. Teddy gaped at him, her eyes wide and gleaming in the moonlight, but for once, she said nothing.
Instead, she walked through the door, and he followed her.
Neither of them spoke all the way down the one hundred and sixty-eight steps to the bottom.
Five
Teddy woke the next morning with an uneasy feeling in her belly.
It took her a few minutes, lying there in the patchwork-quilt-draped bed, staring up at the plain white ceiling, to realize what it was.
The nauseating feeling was a roiling mixture of nervousness and guilt, mixed with a high level of creep factor related to whatever had happened on top of the lighthouse last night. The nervousness and guilt were, of course, related to the fact that she’d made no progress on her book. But the creep factor—
She put it out of her mind.
“I can’t think about that right now,” she told herself. Because if she did, she’d have a nervous breakdown.
It was after seven thirty—a reasonable time for a writer on deadline to get her butt up and to work (whereas a writer who wasn’t on deadline might sleep until nine, and a writer who’d just finished her book might sleep until noon), so, feeling determined, she rolled out of bed.
Teddy showered in the clean, serviceable, but aged bathroom allotted to her suite, and decided on yoga pants and a tank top with a hoodie over it, as it was a little chilly yet this morning. Very comfortable, very get-down-to-work, she told herself.
She bundled up her damp hair with a bunch of clips and pins at the back of her head, uncaring how it looked and that a few strands straggled over her neck. She brushed her teeth (she couldn’t write unless she’d done so, and couldn’t understand people who claimed they immediately opened their laptop to start work, first thing in the morning, while still in bed), and padded out through the curve-topped door into the shared living space to get a cup of coffee.
Teddy was relieved when she heard the sound of the shower from down the hall where, presumably, Oscar’s room was. She didn’t want to see him this morning.
A different kind of walk of shame, I guess, she thought with a pained grin as she poured coffee into the filter of an ancient coffee maker.
While it hissed and burbled and went about exuding a delicious scent, she looked out the kitchen window. This side of the keeper’s house faced the woods that contained the little hot spring that Dr. London (for some reason, it tickled her to think of him by his title) was using as an escape from his real life. She caught a flash of russet—a deer—as it foraged in the thick greenery, and a red hawk was sitting in a tree, watching for its own opportunity for breakfast.
At last the coffee was done, and Teddy poured a full mug, added a glop of milk (wishing for one of those mini-frothers; she should ask Harriet to send her one) and some stevia, then quickly slipped out of the kitchen and back to her suite. Just as she was closing the door separating the two spaces, she heard the bathroom door open down the hall.
Whew.
When she got back to her room, she found a text from Declan, apologizing that he wasn’t going to be by this morning as planned, because he’d forgotten his sixteen-year-old daughter had a doctor appointment in Grand Rapids.
LMK when is a good time to come by. Don’t want to mess up your work, he added in a closing text.
All right, then. Good. No distractions this morning.
She could get right to work, and work all the way until lunch without having to stop.
Teddy sat down at her laptop, setting the mug of coffee next to it. Then she got up and found a pillow for the chair—it was too low without one. She settled that into place and sat down.
Then she got up and made her bed. Can’t work with a messy bed.
Then she sat back down, opened up the laptop, and was confronted by the same blank white screen she’d faced yesterday.
Six
Teddy poised her fingers over the keyboard and stared at the screen.
No words came.
Then she closed her eyes, imagining the scene, and settled her fingers on the keys.
No words came.
She opened her eyes and sighed, took a drink of coffee, then set the mug down and closed her eyes again.
It’ll come.
She opened her eyes and stared at the blank white screen.
Oscar was absolutely not going to think about what happened on the top of the lighthouse last night.
He took a shower—steaming hot—and carefully kept his mind blank during the whole thing by picturing the table of elements and reciting each one, in order, with its chemical symbol.
As he toweled off and dressed, he hoped he wouldn’t run into Teddy in the kitchen. She hadn’t said anything last night once they left the top of the lighthouse, but knowing her, that meant she’d saved up every thought, comment, exclamation, and question overnight and would soon be bludgeoning him with them.
All he wanted to do was bury himself in his work, and now he had two things from which he needed to distract himself: Marcie’s wedding and that—whatever it had been—on the top of the lighthouse.
The word “ghost” teased the back of his mind, but he thrust it away with the same alacrity he’d have done to the lethal Zaire ebolavirus.
Though when he came out to the living room he smelled fresh coffee, Teddy wasn’t there. Evidence indicated she’d made the brew (enough for both of them, it appeared) but retreated to her wing of the cottage.
Good. That meant he could work in peace.
And he did. After plugging in his earbuds and today queueing up Coldplay and Kings of Leon, he set to work preparing a few slides of samples from the hot spring.
Once he had a plate ready, he placed it on the microscope dash. He turned on the lamps, made a few adjustments—magnification, light—and took a look.
Normal water molecular structure. Tardigrades, ostracods, phages, and a variety of other, harmless microbial specimens. Wait.
“Hm.” Oscar frowned, squinting a little more. What the hell was that? He dialed back on the magnification to see the full image. A little jump of interest spiked inside him. Never seen anything like that before. He adjusted the magnification and looked closer.
Instead of the soft, organic shapes he was used to seeing, Oscar was examining something that appeared crystalline and spiky. Shiny and silvery, even under the microscope. That little jump of interest turned into something more like a leap, and he moved the slide around to see if there were other examples of this unfamiliar microbe. There were…randomly, but more than one example. He quickly pulled out samples from a different Cubitainer—maybe that first one had somehow been contaminated.
But no. There they were, the unrecognizable crystals, noticeable only at one hundred magnification. His spike of interest had blown into full-fledged curiosity.
Was it possible? Was there something unique enough about the hot spring to make this trip actually worth something? Oscar had never seen anything like that spiky crystal organism before. It didn’t look like anything else.
Impossible. But…
“I should go get another sample,” he said. Just to make sure what he was looking at was uncontaminated.
He’d get it himself this time. He’d climb into the pool, gather three samples himself, making sure it was done correctly…and then he’d take another look.
“Another sample of what?”
He turned, jolted out of his music and thoughts.
Teddy was there. She must have walked into the kitchen without him even noticing. She looked determined, for her hair was pulled back into a messy knot at the back of her head and she carried a slim silver laptop that looked as if it weighed hardly more than a magazine. In the other hand was a steaming mug of coffee.
Oscar pulled out his earbud, leaving Chris Martin to mutedly sing into the room. “How’s your writing going?” he asked.
; She made a face. “I don’t want to talk about it. What are you getting another sample of?”
“The hot springs. There’s a unique crystal sort of microbe—”
“Great. I’ll come with you.” She put down the laptop as if it were a hot potato. “Wait till I change.”
Teddy knew she should stay at the cottage, sit her butt in a chair, and focus on the laptop.
What better time to work than when her housemate was away from the place, and no longer sucking up all her air?
But here she was, traipsing through the woods with Oscar—who was making no effort to hide his grumpiness. Not that he had any real right to be grumpy. He was the one who’d taken over her place and was distracting her.
People didn’t understand how writers (or any artist, she supposed) could be distracted simply by another person’s presence. Even if they weren’t interacting with them. The truth was that they sucked up all the air just being there.
Teddy sighed. If only there was a quick fix for her writer’s block. If only she could take something, or make a wish or something—
“Here we are,” Oscar said unnecessarily. He set down his heavy pack and began to take off his hiking boots.
She sat on a large boulder and began to pull off her walking shoes. They weren’t as heavy-duty as his boots, but they protected her feet. “Too bad that’s not a fountain of youth or wishing well,” she said, looking at the coiling steam rising from the softly bubbling pool. “Something that granted your heart’s desire when you threw in a coin, or jumped in or drank it or something.”
Oscar looked at her as if she’d sprouted a third ear. “What?”
“I’m just saying…don’t you think that maybe the Native Americans—I think they were Chippewas around here—might have considered a place like this special, or even sacred and holy, with it being the only hot spring in the whole region? Probably the only one they’d ever seen. I mean, think about it—in the dead of winter, they’re trudging through here, crossing the huge Lake Michigan on all that ice—they’d have had no idea how big the lake was to begin with—and suddenly they see steam rising from the middle of a snowbank. And there’s this pool of hot water—in the middle of winter! Don’t you think that’d give them something to wonder about? Like, there was some sort of mysterious or supernatural element to it?”
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