Sinister Sanctuary: A Ghost Story Romance & Mystery (Wicks Hollow Book 4)

by Colleen Gleason

  “It was around midnight, I think.” She gave him a rueful look. “Yes, my cousin Declan dropped me off. I’d gone out to dinner with him and his girlfriend, and I had a few too many samples of the wares of the local craft brewer. By the time I got back, I was more than ready to hit the hay—and a little more than tipsy.”

  Oscar stopped short of asking her if she’d heard anything strange in the night, but he did probe a little further. “So you went right to bed? Didn’t stub your toe or walk into the wall in the dark?”

  Didn’t make any loud, horrifying screams—or hear one?

  To his relief, she didn’t seem to think his question was strange. “Nope. Once I hit my mattress, I was out. Until I heard you banging around in there this morning.”

  “Right.” With that, Oscar decided to escape his chatty companion before he said something he’d regret. He went outside to grill the chicken while she worked in the kitchen and chopped veggies for salad. He was surprised a short time later when, just as he was taking the meat off the grill, she brought the salad and wine outside.

  “We have to eat out here on the porch,” she explained. “I’ve been cooped up all day, and it’s just so beautiful.”

  He couldn’t argue with that. Though it was facing the beach, this side of the covered porch was also partly in shadow from the sprawling forest that filled most of the tiny island. Stony Cape Lighthouse loomed above them, painted white with a jaunty blue band two-thirds up and a matching cap on top, casting a long, broad shadow behind the cottage. The air was lightly humid and filled with the scent of summer flowers—maybe some honeysuckle and wild roses—plus lake. It was warm, but not hot, and the breeze from Lake Michigan was enough to keep the bugs away but not to blow napkins about.

  The shoreline was pale sand, and weedy with tall clumps of prickly, hay-like grass growing beyond the farthest reaches of the lake’s waves. Larger stones, smooth from rushing water, made a natural barrier between sand and grasses. There was a wooden walkway that led from the cottage down to the lake—a distance of less than twenty yards.

  They settled onto two metal chairs, balancing plates on their respective laps. The wine was crisp and light, the chicken (simply marinated in Italian dressing) was grilled till the outside was crispy but the inside still moist and then cut up over the colorful salad, and the view was beautiful. The sun was still several knuckles above the horizon, casting gold and orange rays over the surging waves.

  “Thank you for this,” Teddy said with a sigh as she looked out over the water. “I might have stayed in there all day.”

  “I figured you hadn’t eaten, and you must be hungry,” he said.

  She gave a little laugh—throaty and sexy—and said, “Not that I’m about to waste away anytime soon.” She gestured at her curves with a shrug. “I do love to eat.”

  Oscar ignored the little sizzle of awareness from her laugh and focused on his meal instead of on her curves. As soon as he was finished, he could hightail it back to work. Now that he knew she was alive and fed and no longer so angst-ridden.

  But Teddy Mack had other plans. She started talking.

  “It’s just so peaceful here,” she said, looking out over the vast array of blues shimmering on the Great Lake. “I’m sure it’s different when there’s a storm—I can imagine what it’s like when a nasty one rolls in over the lake. Lightning bolts shooting from a heavy gray sky—slamming into the churning water. Loud rolls of thunder…pounding waves surging onto the shore.

  “There’ve been quite a few shipwrecks in the Great Lakes, and the coastline of Michigan is longer than any other state—hence the reason it has more lighthouses than any other state. Did you know that?”

  “Actually, I did. I think it was mentioned in the rental brochure,” Oscar replied.

  Teddy studied him. He seemed as if he was ready to bolt from his chair at any moment. Probably to return to his lab work, strewn all over the living room. Easy for him to pick up and get back to work at any time—he didn’t have to figure out plots or characters or stop all the time to do research or check obscure facts, to measure his words and tweak them, to think about pacing and foreshadowing and clues and—

  “Too bad they don’t use this lighthouse anymore,” she said, fully aware that she was making conversation in a desperate attempt to keep from being left alone—or to work. Oscar had folded his napkin and laid the flatware over his salad bowl, giving the appearance he was preparing to stand up and go inside. “It would be interesting to see how it works. I wonder why they don’t use it anymore.”

  He shrugged. “Who knows.”

  “It could have something to do with the guy who jumped off—or fell—a few years back. Probably why no one wanted to stay here for so long.”

  “A guy jumped off the top of the lighthouse?” Oscar squinted up at the tall column.

  “Or was pushed.”

  “Or was pushed? What makes you think that?” He frowned at her.

  Teddy laughed. “Only my writer’s imagination. The official word is that the guy jumped, but I’m a suspicious sort—and I write action and crime novels—so, I’m going to suspect the worst. Murder and mayhem whenever possible—that’s my motto.”

  He mumbled something unintelligible. Teddy suspected she didn’t want to know what it was, for he was looking at her with a wary expression. “I’m sure there was a complete investigation by the authorities,” he said mildly. But he adjusted his gaze to look up at the top of the lighthouse.

  “Let’s go up there and see what it’s like,” Teddy said, standing up quickly.

  “To jump off?”

  He caught her by surprise, and she gave a hearty laugh. “You know what I meant.”

  He dragged himself to his feet much more slowly than she did. “All right.”

  His easy agreement, though not particularly enthusiastic, surprised her. She thought she’d have to wheedle him into coming with her. Sure, she could have gone alone, but it was more fun with someone else. Besides, if she was alone, she’d probably start to think about how she should be working instead of exploring.

  “So have you really been working on Chapter fracking Ten for two months?” he asked as they brought their dishes into the kitchen. Without discussion, they each tackled different tasks for the cleanup.

  “At least,” Teddy replied, surprised that he’d asked. A twinge of guilt and nervousness pinged in her belly, but she pushed it away. After all, she had worked all day.

  Except when she was pacing around her room, napping, or swearing at the white screen of the laptop. Or napping. Or typing this sucks this sucks this sucks just to make sure her keyboard still worked.

  “How long does it usually take to write a chapter?”

  “It depends on the chapter. The first nine chapters went pretty well. But this one…” She sighed. Being a scientist was so much easier than being a creative person. Everything was so cut and dried, so objective, so organized. You drew the sample, you put in on a slide, you looked at it under a microscope, you made notes, and voila! the project was done.

  “Where—uh—is it in the book?” he asked, handing her a dripping plate to dry. “The end?”

  “Oh, I wish,” she said, giving a pained laugh. “The ending chapters are usually the easiest. This one’s about halfway through—what we writers call the sagging middle.” She’d noticed that for being a nerdy scientist, Oscar had nothing even remotely like a sagging middle. In fact, his button-down shirt (why was he wearing something so formal, anyway?) seemed to fit loosely around his midriff—in other words, no bulge—but was snug over square shoulders and rounded biceps.

  “How many chapters are there usually in a book?” he asked.

  “It depends on the book.”

  “Right. Can’t you just—I don’t know—skip to Chapter Eleven?”

  Teddy gave a sad laugh as she slid the last plate into its slot in the cabinet. “I wish. Unfortunately, that’s not how I work. I’m a linear writer, meaning I write from beginning to end, pre
tty much, since I am not a plotter—that’s plot-ter with a T, not a D—although there are times when I feel like a plod-der as well, so skipping ahead doesn’t help me because I don’t know what comes next or where I’m going until I write it.”

  “That sounds horrible,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Teddy sighed again as she folded up the dishtowel. “Let’s go check out the lighthouse—the top of it is called the lantern room.”

  “And there’s a Fresnel lens up there, too, I believe,” he said. “Beehive shape with bull’s-eye prisms.”

  She gave him a quick, appreciative smile. “You’ve been doing your research.”

  His skin was pretty fair, and it turned a little ruddy in the cheeks as he gave a wry smile. “Well, yes. I mean, I was going to stay in a lighthouse—I figured I should know about it. Even if it isn’t operational.”

  “You probably even know what year the Fresnel lens—a breakthrough in lighthouse lantern design—was invented,” she teased as they walked through the arched doorway into the base of the lighthouse. Not that she hadn’t done her own research—when she was supposed to be working on her book. For, like Oscar said, if she was going to stay in a lighthouse, she should know about the structure and history.

  Besides, Teddy never knew when a bit of trivia or seemingly unrelated information could help her with a story.

  “Eighteen twenty-two,” he replied. “The reason the Fresnel lens became so popular was because it used prisms—called bull’s-eyes for obvious reasons—which collected the light from the flame or bulb and reflected it more strongly. That meant that eighty percent of the light given off by the lantern was directed and reflected out, rather than the less than twenty percent before the Fresnel lens.”

  She’d opened the door to the tall spiral staircase that wound around the inside of the lighthouse column. It was metal, and their shoes made dull clangs as they climbed.

  “And,” he said, “when they began to use revolving lanterns—which meant the light went around in a circle, moving from prism to prism—it gave off the appearance of a flashing light. Between that and the colors of the lantern shield—which could be red or blue or yellow or whatever—the beams from each lighthouse could be made to look unique so as to allow them to be distinguished from one another by the navigators…”

  His voice trailed off, and Teddy knew it wasn’t because he was out of breath from the climb.

  She, on the other hand, was a bit out of breath from the climb. And they were only about halfway up. Argh. She really should start walking regularly again.

  Once she finished the damned book.

  “Sorry,” Oscar said. “Sometimes I get into lecture mode and forget I’m not in class, giving off information people actually need.”

  “Nevertheless, I found your—uh—lecture very interesting and quite thorough.” Teddy grinned at him from two steps up. Since she’d turned, she took the opportunity to pause and look out one of the small, lakeside-facing windows. “Wow. What a view. We should have brought a pair of binoculars.”

  “Agreed. Next time.” Oscar moved in behind her, close enough that she felt his warmth and caught a hint of his scent—shampoo, soap, hair products; whatever it was, it was nice. Masculine without being obnoxious. His foot bumped hers as he adjusted to see out the window. “Oh, sorry,” he said, and stepped back as if he’d been burned. “Let’s keep going.”

  This time, Teddy followed him so she could go a little slower, and without feeling self-conscious about the size of her butt—which sat in a desk chair far too often. She also had the benefit of seeing the way the shorts fit to his rear end, and noticed the tight, lean muscles of his calves. They were tanned several shades darker than his face—he must wear a hat outside—and sprinkled with blond hair instead of the rosy-gold color on his head.

  Teddy was pleased that she was lagging only a turn of the spiral away when Oscar stepped off the top stair onto a small landing with a door that must lead to the gallery. “The door’s locked,” he called down to her. “Don’t suppose you have a key?”

  “There are a bunch on the ring I have. I hope one of them works.” Because it would be a real drag to have climbed up a hundred and sixty-eight (yes, she’d counted) stairs and not be able to get to the good part.

  She handed him the keychain and paused to catch her breath while he studied the keys on it. Teddy smothered a smile. If she’d been doing it, she’d have just started sticking each key in, one at a time, until she found one that fit. Oscar, on the other hand, examined the lock, looked at the keys one by one, then picked one out, stuck it into the keyhole, and turned.

  “Success,” he pronounced, then handed the keychain back to her. “Ladies first—especially since it was your idea.” He opened the door, and she stepped in.

  As she came through, some great, dark entity came to life in a flutter of wings and rush of movement.

  “Eeek!” She ducked and automatically covered her head, but the flock of bats—of course it was bats—knew their way out of the encasement in which they’d been making their home for some years.

  She reared back, flailing a little, and bumped into Oscar, who caught her before they both went tumbling onto the small landing—and potentially down the spiral stairway.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, pulling away—totally mortified and feeling ridiculous. “I’m not usually that—uh—squeamish. But they caught me by surprise, and there were so many of them. Sorry for screaming in your ear.”

  “No problem. And you didn’t scream.” His hands were still hovering near her hips, as if to catch her if she bolted back again.

  “I didn’t?” she said. “Well, thank goodness for that. In my head, I screamed.”

  He chuckled, and as she happened to have turned to face him, she saw how his green-brown eyes lit up and the way handsome laugh lines crinkled at their corners. “You exclaimed, but you didn’t scream,” he said. “Big difference—as you, a wordsmith, would know.”

  “I think so, but for some people, such subtlety might be lost on them.” She smiled, suddenly realizing she liked this guy—her unexpected and unwanted housemate.

  He was nice. And funny. And pretty laid-back, all things considered.

  And he’d come to her suite to make sure she ate.

  “Well, I feel a little bad about disturbing the poor things,” she said, stepping through a little more gingerly this time. “It’s a little early for them to be out and about—still light out for another hour or so.” She squinted in the unrelieved sunlight blasting through the glass walls, looking up into the lantern room’s cap. “They must have gone out through some hole in the top.”

  To her relief, nothing else moved in the small space. She stepped aside to make room for Oscar to join her on the narrow walkway around the giant glass lenses that did, in fact, form the shape of a beehive.

  The glass-walled lantern room was approximately twenty-five feet in diameter, with the massive set of lenses taking up the center of the space. Each lens was shaped like the interior of a cathedral: straight sides arching to a point at the top. There were six lenses—or sides—each about eight feet tall, attached to each other in the hive shape. Every side was an intricate study in glass: rippling and wavy in texture at the top and bottom, but circular in the center where the bull’s-eye was located.

  There was just enough room for two people to walk side by side around the lenses between its glass enclosure and the glass hive itself. There were three different windows that opened like doors onto the exterior walkway around the outside of the lantern room. Open to the elements and lake breeze, that walkway had only a slender metal railing around it.

  Still inside the protective glass enclosure, Teddy walked around the massive set of lenses. Because of the texture on the glass, it was difficult to clearly see the lighting element inside, but it looked like a very large electric piece. They’d passed by the entrance to the small room beneath the lantern where the lighting element could be accessed for repair, and when she looked
down, she could see the opening that led to the space—and the evidence of the bat congregation down in its depths.

  “Look what I found,” he said, holding up a pair of binoculars. “They were hanging right here.”

  He offered them to Teddy, and she took them with a smile. “Thanks.”

  By the time she’d made her way completely around the lens, looking both inward and outside, with and without the field glasses, Oscar had opened one of the glass doors and gone out to the exterior walkway. She hesitated, but the lantern windows hadn’t been cleaned for years, and the view was distorted by dirt and bird droppings. She could see, but not as well as she’d like.

  So Teddy carefully stepped out the door and paused, standing in the opening well away from the edge as a strong breeze buffeted her. “Wow.”

  Lake Michigan stretched as far as the eye could see—and from thirty feet up, that was far. From this height, she looked down on the texture of varied treetops: pines, oaks, maples, birches, cottonwoods, and many others she couldn’t name. The mainland shore was behind her and curved southward along the left, a broad stripe of pale sand bordered by shrubby grasses, then forestation. Further away, small, rolling hills were turning dark with shadows as twilight approached.

  In the west, the sun had moved swiftly toward the horizon over the last thirty minutes, and its bottom was just touching the lake. Fiery pinks, reds, oranges, and golds splashed over the sky like a spilled tray of watercolors onto a blue canvas, then dripped in ripples on the moving waters of the Great Lake.

  Seagulls, calling with their annoying shrieks, dove and soared above, and Teddy saw a blue heron take flight from some patch of tall grass near the shore on the mainland. The bats she’d disturbed were nowhere in sight. Two fishing boats were zipping along far from shore, likely heading back to their marinas before dark, and in the distance, Teddy saw the outline of a freighter scooting along the horizon. It looked as if it were heading southwest, toward Chicago. She lifted the binoculars and watched the vessel gliding along the seam between water and sky.