But to the west, toward the ocean, there was a broad clearing along the top of the ridge. There were small saplings, the size to be planted in a Chicago suburban front yard to make it look finished. Here they were tiny things that looked as if they needed to be either mowed down or pulled up like weeds from among the tall grass.
At the far end of the clearing, a towering lighthouse utterly commanded the point. It was a classic: circular, white, and several stories tall with a glass housing at the top. Inside, he could see a big glasswork lens spinning. Each time it swung by, there was a bright flash of the light.
“Why is it flashing? It’s still daylight.”
“It’s a navigation beacon, so it’s always flashing. At night I like to watch it as it sweeps across the trees then out over the water. When there is a light sea mist, it’s an amazing sight, like the beams of light could go on forever.” Tiffany’s eyes had gone soft and wondering. Again, that simple child inside what he was coming to understand was not a simple woman. She noticed his scrutiny and continued flatly. “White, green, and red every ten seconds. They’re all automated now so the keepers don’t live by the lights anymore.”
Sure enough. He watched the lighthouse through a full minute, two flashes of each color. It was mesmerizing. The light itself didn’t move or blink as he’d always assumed. Instead, a stepped lens bigger than his torso spun about it, six of them actually, forcing the light into beams. It was the glass itself that was colored.
Then he refocused in the foreground. To the north side of the clearing, providing it with a nice southern exposure, stood the lighthouse keeper’s cottage. It was right out of some storybook: two stories tall, a big box with six well-spaced windows wide, all painted in glaring white with a red shingle roof. If ever there was a blank template, this was definitely it. He would need to keep the feel or it would lose its lighthouse charm. But he needed to do something serious, because other than its lighthouse heritage, it was one of the least charming buildings he’d ever seen.
“What do you know about—” Devin turned, but he was alone. There was no sign that only moments ago Tiffany had stood here beside him. He saw no hint in the trees, no flash of color from her dark blue harp carrying case. He scanned again, but he was definitely alone. He couldn’t even see any sign of a trail leading away other than the one back to the B&B. A vague hint of what must once have been a logging road switchbacked to the north. Yet she’d waved southeast toward her farm and in that direction there was nothing but a solid wall of forest and dense undergrowth.
Still no sign. He pulled the key out of his pocket and headed over for a closer inspection of the cottage.
Devin just hoped that he hadn’t imagined her. He was less concerned for his mental state of possibly hallucinating and much more concerned with hoping she was real so that he could meet her again.
Tiffany stood fifty feet into the trees to the east of the lighthouse clearing and watched Devin Robison.
She knew that her abrupt departure was rude, but she hadn’t been able to stop herself. She had spoken more and to more people today than she typically did in a month. But what had finally driven her to escape was how much she’d enjoyed speaking with Devin. Despite his obvious pain over something in his recent past, there was an easiness to being around him. She’d always suspected that her own pain pushed others away and isolated her. Perhaps it was sharing a common theme of broken pasts which had made him so easy to be with.
It was the very easiness that she found so disconcerting.
Tiffany almost called out to him as he kept turning again and again to look for her. It was touching really. When at long last he went into the keeper’s cottage, she picked up the compound bow and quiver of arrows—that she carried for protection but never took into town—from where she kept them stashed before turning for home. She brought it with her ever since a black bear had almost caught her. She’d escaped only by shedding her pack of fresh supplies and bolting for the farm. Coming back with the bow had filled her larder with bear meat to make up for the loss of her slashed and chewed supplies, but her pack had never been the same no matter how she patched it.
Keeping to the narrow path she’d forged, little wider than a deer trail and mostly over rock outcroppings, she left little trace of her passage. That had been her goal, her guiding principle since her arrival in Oregon, long before she came to Eagle Cove. She wanted no one to know where she had passed, or how.
At first she had appreciated the privacy. She had attended no functions in town. Spoke with no one and slowly learned to enjoy the peace. Even now, the birdsong soothed her far more than any people. Gray squirrels, little Douglas browns with the tufted ears, and striped chipmunks scattered up trees, saw it was her, and came back down hoping for a treat.
“No treats today, girls. Tuesday, I promise.” When she went to town, she normally slipped an extra scone or a few cookies into her pocket, especially the ones with nuts and raisins, but she’d forgotten them in all of the day’s flurry. A few of the braver ones followed her the distance of two or three trees before moving away to more fruitful pastures.
Going to town. She’d thought of it as if doing so was a normal thing. When had that happened?
Three years ago her ancestor’s journal had led her to Eagle Cove and it had taken Tiffany months to work up the nerve to enter the town. She hadn’t wanted to even then, but her assistant had finished his job and left. Everyone had assumed he was her boyfriend and that he’d jilted her and stolen her truck, leaving her abandoned and penniless. Actually, she’d bought him the truck as part of his pay. In exchange, he’d spent three months helping her with the heavy work of getting the farm started—a back-breaking summer before he’d returned to college.
She felt bad about leaving the false assumptions from the rumor in place. But Tiffany had learned the hard way, the true danger of anyone knowing she was descended from the highest tier of the San Francisco financial monarchy. Any misdirection was welcome.
Her four-times-great-grandmother had made a fortune in big lumber in the late 1800s. The guardian of her three-times-great-grandmother had owned the first lumber ship to arrive after the 1906 quake and fire and had quickly chartered two more. Three more generations of women had safeguarded that fortune assiduously. But for her mother’s ability to marry well, much of it would have slipped away in the last generation prior to Tiffany’s own. But she did marry well, and it had continued to grow. And Tiffany had wanted no part of it.
Her entrance into Eagle Cove society had been tentative. By the first time she came down from the woods to buy some essentials at the Warbler Market, she’d had “eccentric” down (though she wished it felt more like an act than a reality) and had been reluctant to break it.
One day she’d been slipping along the verge of the Lamont B&B’s property, she’d stopped to look at it. This was the house that Lillian Lamont had built for her first daughter, Pearl, so that she would be close beside her mother. Lillian had lived in the house next door, now owned by Judge Slater. There was so much history and so many memories here. It was like a lens into the past.
January 1, 1900
New Year’s Day
We held the housewarming at Pearl’s upon the first day of the new century. Together we have designed and had built a Victorian house close beside our family home so that we may never live far apart.
Each visitor brought a log and we toured through the new house until each fireplace had been filled and lit. The warmth of the air felt almost as great as the warmth of spirit shared by those within these new walls.
My daughter is situated now, though her hopes for Thomas Harrow to join her were so recently cut short by the loss of his fishing craft. Yet we Lamont women put on our cheerful faces and welcomed all who came to wish her well. She is only nineteen, but in the morning she sails to San Francisco. There she shall briefly reside with my aging mother. I have entrusted Pearl with renewing our lucrative timber and fish sale contracts.
It is my hope th
at she will find a better man than poor Thomas while she is about her duties.
And Tiffany had seen the two layers, both past and present, intertwine that day three years ago as she walked by the B&B. She had been pulled toward the grand Victorian, fascinated by the vision of men and women once so attractively dressed in their Sunday finery, visiting good wishes upon the town’s founders. She edged forward, imagining that she could catch a glimpse of Lillian and Pearl Lamont at their very best.
Then Tiffany had stumbled against the first step up to the verandah. The image faded, she was once again in the present, and she stood mere feet from a circle of women knitters, sitting out on the porch in the spring sunshine. The bright clicking of aluminum needles manipulating colorful and patterned yarns was so startling that she couldn’t move.
Her hesitation lasted too long and Mrs. Winslow had spotted her. She’d waved Tiffany to sit in a seat beside her in such a peremptory fashion that Tiffany had been unable to refuse. But once there, they had allowed her to simply sit with her hands clenched around a glass of ice tea. The others might have looked at her oddly; she didn’t know because she hadn’t looked up. They let her just listen, and hear the warm friendship that flowed back and forth between them all.
Weeks later, working up her nerve, she’d come to town on a Tuesday afternoon with her own knitting tucked in her pack. Daring greatly, she’d walked up onto the porch, sat down next to Maggie Winslow, and pulled out her own project. The conversation had died at first, but once it restarted, Maggie Winslow had leaned over and whispered in her gruff way, “Good girl.” That had made her Tiffany’s first friend in town…her first in years. Though it was weeks before she could find her voice to answer back, she’d never forget that day or that kindness.
Tiffany stopped high on the trail leading to her farm and looked back to the north. The trail crested here on a ridge. It was one of the best views there was of the town founded by her forebears. Two miles to the north lay Eagle Bay, where the Eagle River pooled and slowed before finally reaching the sea. Beyond it lay only state forestland, patchworked with recent loggings and more mature growths.
The town stretched for two miles southward along the beach from the docks. The core of town lay nestled close by Eagle Bay. Residential areas stretched a half mile inland then were backed by a few small farms and the gravel-runway airport. The houses continued close above the beach to the south, finally petering out in the last long stretch of LBB Lane, slipping between the ocean and the forest to reach the Lamont B&B.
Her perch was at twice the height of Orca Head here and she could look down on the lighthouse and the cottage. Devin stepped out of the door as she watched and she could imagine him looking for her one more time as he twisted and turned—though he didn’t look high enough to see her perch above the ridge—before he hurried down the trail, racing back down toward the civilization of the B&B. Evening was fast approaching and clearly the forest unnerved him. Yet another reason to feel bad about abandoning him.
“Sorry, Devin.” It was the first time she’d said his name aloud and she liked the sound of it. Then she felt utterly ridiculous. She’d met many men with wonderful voices and learned that it didn’t mean a thing about who they were. Devin’s voice was nice—not deep, but nice. Kind with a bit of funny built in.
He disappeared out of sight down the trail after one last look behind.
“Devin.”
Perhaps it was ridiculously schoolgirl, but she still liked the sound of his name.
She turned south, crossing over the ridge and out of sight of Eagle Cove. More importantly, out of sight of the lighthouse as well. Tiffany began to trot along the trail despite how it made the harp thump against her back. The farm might not be her own country…yet, but it felt as if it was. Her step always lightened as it came into view.
“Returning to her remote kingdom,” she announced to the forest. After all, no one said her new country had to be a democracy.
“By unanimous accolade,” she told a pair of seagulls riding high on the updrafts, “she is acclaimed the ruler. Long live Queen Tiffany Mills.”
Giggling to herself, she went to feed the cat. Fitz always pouted if she wasn’t greeted immediately upon Tiffany’s return…or much more importantly, fed precisely on time.
Devin tried to relax, but he felt twitchy and couldn’t seem to pull it off. He kept turning to look over his shoulder as if Tiffany would suddenly reappear out of thin air, just as she’d disappeared into it. It wasn’t doing him any good because he sat on the small bench on the B&B’s verandah where he’d first met her. And that meant that the only thing over his shoulder was the outside wall of the Lamont B&B. In front of him, the evening had swallowed the front lawn and chased the last of the wedding guests inside.
Light came from the windows behind him and the multicolored twinkle lights wrapped about an old cherry tree that commanded the center of the yard. Lurking in the shadows, great trunks of trees soared upward into the darkness. He’d have to ask what they were…he didn’t think redwoods grew here, but what did he know.
Somewhere beyond that was the steady roar of the freeway.
Except there was no freeway, but there was definitely a steady roar. Not a train; the rhythm was wrong. Besides, he’d seen no tracks as he came into town. He twisted and turned before he identified the source.
The ocean! It was a long, steady thunder in the darkness. Yet another strangeness of this odd place he’d landed in. A moment later his ears again told him that they were listening to the Kennedy Expressway as if I-90 was running close by. He wondered when his ears would catch up to the Oregon Coast like the rest of him.
“You’re sitting in her favorite spot, you know,” Becky dropped down on the bench beside him.
“Whose?” Apparently his brain was still somewhere in Chicago along with his hearing. He could see why Tiffany liked it. It offered a wide view, but it placed his back to a wall, with another to his right because of a jog in the architecture. It was partially protected from the wind…and from people approaching an obviously shy woman from too many directions at once.
“I do so love a wedding,” Becky ignored his question and bubbled on. “I never thought I would, you know. But once you have one of your own, it just makes the world seem so much brighter.”
Or darker. But Devin had learned to keep such thoughts to himself.
“And a double wedding…” Becky sighed happily.
“Are you close?”
“With Natalya? We go back almost to the hospital room. All three of us;. Jessica and Natalya are cousins, which I always envied, and tall, which I really envied. And now we’re all married. I don’t think I could stand it if I was and they weren’t. It’s so amazing to be back together again.”
“Jessica was in Chicago?” Devin had been so pleased to find someone who knew his hometown. And at the same time, it had thrown him badly to be reminded of the places and flavors. In all likelihood he’d be back there in the fall. This was just a summer job after all, but he had no idea how he’d ever face that, especially not in four short months.
“She went and stayed ten years, the dizzy girl. She was following in the footsteps of Mrs. Winslow, who was a journalist there, back when she was young…if you can imagine Maggie Winslow ever being young,” she confided the last in a whisper and then giggled like a little girl rather than a married woman in her early thirties. “I mean she was probably only my age or a little more when I had her in second grade. And that is a totally weird thought. But to a seven year old girl, all adults are ancient.”
“I’m out here shopping for a retirement home myself,” Devin tried to crack his voice with age. Though it was hard to imagine anyone thinking of Becky as ancient. She bubbled with enthusiasm, more than most kids he’d met.
“Eagle Cove is the best place there is. I never left, not like Natya and Jess.”
“Why?” That came out harsher than he intended. “Aren’t you curious what’s out there?” He waved a hand, but not t
oward distant Chicago. Not that he’d traveled or explored either, but Chicago was much closer to the center of the universe than Eagle Cove.
“Sure. But I have a life here, friends, and my brewery, even before I made an honest man of Harry. I’m sure I’ll travel someday. I would love to taste the German and British brews in their own locales, but this is home. Why would I look any further?”
Devin didn’t have a good answer to that one, because Chicago certainly didn’t feel like home anymore.
Behind him, the party continued. The cracked-open windows allowed the sound of conversation and laughter to filter out and join the ocean’s roar—his ears must have finally caught up with him. He was just wondering why Becky was out here with him rather than inside with the others when a tall man with blond hair stepped out onto the porch.
“There you are.”
“I’ve been waiting for you,” Becky made a sudden show of rubbing at her arms and shivering as if she was suddenly in a chill Arctic winter rather than a warm spring evening. “I can’t believe it took you almost five minutes to notice I was gone.” Then she stopped shivering and winked at Devin as if he’d been party all along to her little tease.
“It took me less than a minute, but then I had to find your jacket, and after that I had to convince Jessica that I was indeed going to find you if she’d just stop delaying me. Now I want my dance with you.”
Becky took the jacket and set it on the bench between her and Devin.
“See why I love the man,” Becky told him, then offered another of her happy sighs as she took her husband’s hand and bounced to her feet. “If you’ll excuse us, we have a tradition of dancing in the dark after weddings. Call Marty if we fall off the cliff edge.”
“Marty?”
“He’s the town policeman,” Harry answered. “I think he’s in the kitchen with his wife and Jessica’s parents.”
Keepsake for Eagle Cove Page 4