by Various
“He called me Sophie Smith. And said I looked like Petey.” Her throat caught on something. “Miranda, I mean.” She stopped herself right there. She was not thinking about it for one more second. She pressed a bag of frozen peas to her forehead, the closest thing to an ice pack Francine had. “Never mind. Stupid to even believe him. He wants attention, that’s all.” They’d had locals send them on wild goose chases before.
Lon stopped pacing. “Think there’s any chance it’s true?”
“Lon! Of course not.” She dropped the peas to the floor. She needed something stronger for her headache, something with a label on the bottle and rocks to pour it over. “Don’t you think I’d know something like that?” But she looked at her lap rather than at him. Would she? For sure, one hundred percent certain cross-her-heart-and-hope-to-die? A weird creepy-crawly feeling hadn’t left her skin all afternoon, because the possibility existed Tom Allen might be right. It was tiny. Almost miniscule. But it was there. And it terrified her.
How come you never talk about my dad?
She’d asked the question for the first time in kindergarten, when she looked around and saw the other kids walking in the front door on Open House night with a parent in each hand. A mom. A dad. One of each. She knew she didn’t have that. She knew the facts of her father’s death. She knew her mother had loved him. And lost him, and mourned deeply when she’d buried him. But beyond that, his favorite color or the sound of his voice or where he’d met her mother–she didn’t know anything.
He’s been gone a long time, honey had been her mother’s first answer. You never knew him or it’s hard to remember now became popular alternatives as the years passed. But It’s too hard for me to talk about was the one she’d finally resorted to once Sophie entered middle school and high school and finally stopped asking. Once she became a teenager who had her heart broken more than once, it was easy enough to understand. No point in dwelling on the details. No use missing someone she could never get back.
Her mother had always said it was to protect Sophie. Always said they should focus on moving forward. Now Sophie wondered how much people lost when they didn’t mourn fully, when they buried something inside themselves so completely that it turned around and ate away their souls.
Lon pointed a stubby finger. “You told me yourself you never knew your father.”
“Because he died in a car accident when I was six months old.”
He waved a sheaf of papers at her. “Peterson Smith died in a car accident. Outside of Boston. The year after you were born. Think it’s a coincidence?”
“Yes, I do,” she lied. She rubbed her elbows with her palms. Eighty outside. Seventy-two in here. And still she shivered. “You know how many people die in car accidents each year? Especially outside of major cities? Besides, his name was Paul Smithwaite. Not even close.” But her voice sounded fake even to her own ears. Gooseflesh covered both arms.
His voice softened. “Aren’t you the least bit curious? Good reporter like you? Someone tells you they knew who your father was, and you don’t wonder if there’s a shred of possibility he’s right?”
Her face went hot. “I don’t know.” She cleared her throat. “It’s not like it makes any difference, right? He’s been dead almost thirty years, no matter who he was.” She tried to make the words sound light, but the walls of the room went a little wavy.
Lon spit his gum into a wadded-up tissue and popped a fresh piece out of the pack in his shirt pocket. “Oh hell, I’m sorry. Guess that would be a pretty weird situation, coming out of the blue. Never mind. Your business is your business.”
“Thanks. My thoughts exactly. And now I need a shower.” And a stiff drink, she wanted to add, but the words didn’t make it out, because when she went to stand up, sudden, violent lightheadedness swept over her. Her heart stuttered inside her chest, and sweat broke out on her forehead. She took a step backward and grabbed both arms of the chair.
“Soph? What’s going on?” Lon said from across the room.
His face looked as though she was seeing it down a long, narrow tunnel. Something tickled the back of her throat. Her heart, trying to escape? She coughed, trying to get rid of the feeling. “I’m not– I think I need–” What was wrong with her? “I need some air.” She stumbled toward the door.
“Hang on, sweetheart. Let me get you a glass of water.”
But she didn’t even slow down. She was dying in here, suffocating minute by minute, and the only means of survival was through that front door decked out in chintz. She made her way across the floor and reached for the knob as the tickle cut off her last breath. Ridiculous, the irony of it. Sophie Smithwaite had jumped out of planes, climbed mountains, eaten foods in foreign countries that would have turned most people’s stomachs inside out. She’d lived in four major cities before the age of eighteen and backpacked around Europe for her twenty-first birthday. Alone. Now a single ridiculous comment with no possible basis in truth was going to be the reason she passed out for the first time in her life?
“Sophie!”
She made it down the front steps barefoot, and when her toes hit the grassy sand at the edge of the driveway, she tried for one last, long breath. This time, her lungs worked. Her heart slowed its frantic pace. She dropped to her knees, pressed both palms to her forehead and stared at the sky. Breathe. God. Oxygen. Please. Yes. Another breath. A little more clarity. A third, and the dizziness started to go away. After another minute she dared to look up, and the sky stayed in place. The sound of ocean waves replaced her pulse hammering inside her ears.
“Sweetheart.” Lon laid a hand on her back. “You’re shaking.”
“No, I’m all right.” She was, now. Or she would be. Little by little, the night came into view. Her pulse calmed down. “But that was weird.” Panic attack? She’d never had one before, though she’d read about them. Even did an episode last year on the mayor of a small town who never left her house for fear of having one in public.
Now she could understand why.
Lon wrapped an arm around her shoulders and pulled her to her feet. “You need sleep, honey. You’ve had a long day.”
“I know.” That was it, lack of sleep. And maybe a vitamin deficiency. She’d go see her doctor for a checkup as soon as she got back to the city. Sophie rolled her neck from side to side. She didn’t feel like going back inside, now that she’d gotten a few good breaths of ocean air. “God, it’s beautiful here, isn’t it?”
A million stars poked holes in the sky. The lighthouse stood a few hundred yards away, a tall, slim silhouette in the darkness.
“You sure you’re feeling better?”
“Yeah.” Her heart had settled down, and the goose bumps were pretty much gone. An Advil PM would do the rest of the trick nicely.
“Let me walk you back inside and stay for a while.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t have to.” He rubbed the top of her head like she was a little girl. “I’ll sit down here in the parlor and go over some things. Too early for me to go to bed, anyway.”
She squeezed his arm as they walked up the front steps. “Promise me that ‘going over some things’ isn’t going to involve a cigarette or two.”
“You know how hard it is to quit?”
“No. But that’s because I never started.”
“Smart girl.”
Inside, Francine was nowhere to be found, but Sophie got the impression her hostess retired soon after the sun did. Seemed as though it would be a lot of work, running a bed and breakfast, even if Sophie was the only guest here this week. “Where are we meeting tomorrow morning?”
“Terrence thinks a few shots inside the lighthouse, maybe go up top for a distance view, then shoot the rest outside on the beach. It’s supposed to be a clear day, so we should have good light for most of it.”
“All right.” She kissed Lon on the cheek. “You don’t have to stay here. Go back to the hotel. Hang out with Terrence, have your bedtime scotch and I�
�ll see you tomorrow.”
“Sophie.” He took her elbow before she could escape up the stairs. “I want you to look into it.”
“Into what?”
“What that man said.”
She froze. “Lon, stop it. It’s ridiculous. There’s no way I’m related to Petey and Miranda Smith. He’s making up a story to get attention. Or maybe money. I don’t know. But it isn’t true.”
He pressed his lips together. “It could be. Not the craziest thing in the world.”
Of course it was.
“I’m not talking about for the show,” he went on. “Although it would be a hell of a twist, our own host being the long-lost granddaughter of–”
“Lon. Stop.”
He held out both palms in surrender. “Forget it. I won’t mention it again. But I do think you should find out. For your own peace of mind.”
“‘Peace of mind’? That’s a lousy cliche. You’re usually better than that.”
He swatted her on the arm. “Sometimes cliches have a basis in truth.”
“I’ll think about it,” she lied. “Now go.” She pushed him toward the door. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“G’night, Soph.”
“Good night.”
She yawned and waved, waiting as he drove his rental car out of the driveway. Long day. Hell, long year. She couldn’t wait to hit the sheets. But sleep didn’t come as easily as she’d thought it might, even though her body ached with exhaustion. Instead, with her teeth brushed and her face washed and two lovely sleeping pills settled in her stomach, Sophie powered up her iPad and opened the file Terrence had sent her a few days ago. Just a quick look. Just to know there’s no possible way the story could have anything to do with me.
She scanned the opening lines of the article, biting her bottom lip as the words blurred in and out of focus. Welcome home, Sophie. She shook the memory away. It’s a local story, she told herself. A story that has nothing to do with me. Except she couldn’t really dismiss the facts, could she? She couldn’t pretend a man hadn’t killed his wife out of jealousy, that he hadn’t jumped to his own death on the rocks below or left a crying, terrified two-year old son wandering alone on the beach.
A son who’d been raised by local relatives until he left Lindsey Point at sixteen and moved to Boston. A son who might or might not be Sophie’s own father.
Impossible.
But it wasn’t. When she did the math in her head, the dates matched up. So did the location–she’d spent the first ten years of her life less than a hundred miles from this town. And the circumstances of his death in a car accident. Sophie kneaded the bedspread between her fingers. If–and she couldn’t believe she was actually thinking this, but–if Peterson Smith was truly her father, why the hell hadn’t her mother told her?
Sophie flopped back against the pillows and tried to call up something, anything at all, her mother might have said that might tie him to Lindsey Point and the lighthouse. But Margot Smithwaite (or Smith? How would she ever know?) had never shared much about her deceased husband, even before the Alzheimer’s started snipping away at her memory. She’d never kept any picture in the house of him save one. Move forward, think about the future, don’t look back. That was what she’d always repeated to her daughter. It was almost as if talking about the memory would shatter it or cheapen it.
Or maybe reveal the truth about who he really was.
Chapter 8
Lucas steadied the camera on Sophie’s face and slowly widened the view to take in the lighthouse behind her, the beach, and finally the ocean.
“Here in Lindsey Point, Connecticut,” she began, “this lighthouse has a story to tell.” Pause. He narrowed the view slightly, so Sophie and the lighthouse shared the frame. “A story that, according to locals, began over fifty years ago, when...”
Fifty years. Shit. Had it really been that long? He’d grown up with the rumors; everyone had. Tourists drove into town asking directions, you gave them. Old-timers wanted to retell stories at the local bar, you let them. And on foggy nights when everyone over the age of sixty stared at the ocean, you joined in and speculated with them. Who’d seen what. Who’d heard what. Who believed some kind of secret treasure had been the downfall of Petey and Miranda Smith, and who swore someone else had been in the house that night.
Ghost story, some called it. Or tragic love story. Legend, if you were feeling particularly generous.
Lucas dragged his attention back to the camera and the face it framed. The breeze caught a lock of her hair and blew it into the corner of her mouth. For one, two, three seconds it remained, until she reached up to pull it away with a fingertip. He felt a quick pull of desire, a wake-up-and-look from a part of him that hadn’t done much looking in a while. With a tug at his shirttails, he forced his thoughts off Sophie’s mouth, smile, cleavage–you name it, he suddenly found himself looking at it–and back to the job.
“...some locals say Petey came home early one night and found his wife in the arms of another man.” She looked back over her shoulder at the keeper’s house. She waited a beat, a dramatic pause in which the waves rolled against the shore and filled in her silence. After a few seconds, she continued. “Others believe it was an intruder, someone seeking a so-called treasure Petey had long talked about. ‘Worth millions,’ he told friends and neighbors.” She squared her face back on the camera, and Lucas came in close. “But were those millions the Achilles’ heel for this young couple? Was a treasure the reason Miranda Smith ended up strangled, Petey Smith leaped to his death, and their young son was left crawling helpless on the beach?”
Lucas’s shoulders hunched up to his ears. He knew the story inside and out, but her husky voice retelling it gave him the chills.
“Maybe no one will ever know the truth about what happened that night,” she went on.
He panned across the beach as directed, a long shot ending on a thicket of pines framing the far end of the beach.
“But what Lindsey Point does know is on certain nights, when the moon is full and the air is still, you might catch a glimpse of Miranda’s spirit still wandering the sand, or hear Petey’s voice bemoaning the death of his love.”
Silence. A shot of the thicket, the lighthouse once more, and finally the ocean with Sophie’s silhouette in the edge of the frame.
“And cut.” The show’s producer, an overweight guy who needed a shave, trotted over. “You get it?” he asked Lucas. “Lighting okay?”
Lucas nodded and lowered the camera from his shoulder. It had taken less than an hour for him to feel comfortable in this position again. Less than an hour to almost miss those early mornings of shooting with the team from Cable News Five. He supposed he couldn’t blame them for taking off when they got a better offer in Bluffet Edge. No one could. Just one more thing that left their town. The lighthouse, the cable show, even the department store that had swept into town fifteen or so years ago, promising hundreds of jobs and tax breaks.
For outsiders, apparently, Lindsey Point wasn’t a place to stick around if they didn’t have to.
“Let’s break for lunch,” Lon said. He stuck an unlit cigarette into his mouth and rummaged through his pockets. Before he could find anything to light it with, though, Sophie walked over and took it from his lips. She broke it in half and dropped it into the pocket of her dress–a cute dress, black and white and landing an inch or two above her knees. Today her hair was pushed back off her forehead, held in place by some sort of headband that matched her dress. It curled and blew in the breeze, and Lucas wondered for a moment whether she’d taken his advice at the diner about leaving it natural. Then he decided there was no way Sophie Smithwaite took advice from anyone.
“Hey!” Lon grabbed for his cigarette, but Sophie laughed. “You’re gonna owe me. Not a cheap habit, you know.”
“Exactly why you should give it up.” She winked at Lucas as she spoke, as if including him in their private conversation. “Hey, you want some coffee?” she asked. “Terrence alwa
ys keeps a fresh pot brewing in the trailer.” In wedge sandals with ribbons that wrapped around her ankles, she gained about two or three inches, but that still brought her only to his chin. Maybe. Didn’t matter. Every one of her curves was within easy reach.
He shook his head and stuffed both hands into his pockets. “Had a couple-a cups earlier. But thanks.”
“I’m not much of a caffeine addict myself. But the guys like it.” She ran her fingers over the headband. “So what do you think? My hair still look like a helmet?”
Lucas felt himself turn a couple of shades of red. “I don’t know. It’s fine. I didn’t really look at it.”
She gave a small smile. “Sure you didn’t.” She turned to look at the small stone structure behind the lighthouse itself. “Did you hear? Lon got permission to film inside the keeper’s house.”
“Heard him mention it.”
She studied him, resting one hand on a slim hip. “Not much of a conversationalist, are you?”
“Didn’t know that was a requirement for the job.”
She shrugged. “It isn’t. You want to check it out with me?”
Hell, yeah were the first words that came to mind. “Uh, sure,” were the ones he managed to get out.
“Cool.” She turned and headed toward the house, and after Lucas set his camera on one of the flatbed trailers parked on the sand, he went after her.
She had a few paces on him, but in her fancy shoes she wobbled and sank every few steps, so he caught up to her almost at once.
“Hey.” She reached for his arm as he approached. “Can you give a girl a hand?” Her fingers landed somewhere around his elbow, and instinctively he crooked it so she could hold on. “Thanks.”
“No problem.” A jolt of something good, definitely hot, more than a little suggestive, zoomed from his elbow straight to his groin. He thought about putting his other hand over hers for extra support and balance, but after a second or two he wasn’t sure he’d be able to stop it from moving elsewhere–say, up her arm to her bare shoulder or her neck, her earlobe or maybe the dark waves of hair brushing her shoulders.