Table of Contents
A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart
About A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart
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Quick-Start Contents
The Garrison Gage Mysteries
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
About the Author
Books by Scott William Carter
About Ghost Detective
Ghost Detective
Ghost Detective - Copyright
Chapter 1
A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart
A Garrison Gage Mystery
Scott William Carter
About A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart
They find his body at the bottom of Heceta Head Lighthouse—Ed Boone, a longtime volunteer who commits suicide rather than see his grim diagnosis to its bitter end. The strangeness of the old man's death makes the local news, but Garrison Gage thinks little of it until the famous Nora West sneaks into town with an unsettling letter in hand.
Professing he wants to go to his grave with a clear conscience, Ed claims to be Nora's biological father. But the revelation stirs up all kinds of complicated emotions for the talented but troubled musician, who hires Gage to find out the truth.
Yet the truth may be a lot more disturbing — and dangerous — than either of them expect.
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Quick-Start Contents
Begin Reading
About the Author
Other Books
Preview of Ghost Detective
The Garrison Gage Mysteries
The Gray and Guilty Sea
A Desperate Place for Dying
The Lovely Wicked Rain
A Shroud of Tattered Sails
A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart
A LIGHTHOUSE FOR THE LONELY HEART. Electronic edition published by Flying Raven Press, May 2017. Copyright © 2017 by Scott William Carter.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
For more about Flying Raven Press, please visit our web site at http://www.flyingravenpress.com.
For R.B.
Among giants, you were always
one of the tallest.
Chapter 1
The ocean churned, wild and unforgiving, buffeting the boat from all sides. It wasn't much of a boat, a pathetic fourteen-foot aluminum rust bucket with a pitiful ten-horsepower outboard motor that threatened to fly apart as it rattled violently in its casing, but Gage didn't care. He kept the throttle cranked to the max, his fingers on the handle already so numb he barely felt them. The roaring wind in his ears, the cold rain in his eyes—he might as well have been blind and deaf for all the good his senses did him.
Yet still he strained, squinting into the murk of night, searching for the yacht he knew had to be out there.
His bruised and beaten face, his left eye almost completely swollen closed, made it even harder to see anything. For now, he saw only the next ocean swell, white-capped and ferocious, sweep toward him out of the swirls of blues and blacks. The boat crested the wave, catching air, and slammed down hard in a spray of salty mist. Gage knew he risked capsizing, pushing the little boat with such abandon, but what other choice did he have?
If he hurried, he might still save them.
The storm had come on suddenly, following one of the most beautiful September days they'd had in years. Sunny and still, high sixties, with an extended forecast of many more days like it to come—and then, out of nowhere, this. A raging monster that surged out of the west with all the suddenness of a heart attack.
Nothing. He saw nothing. He blinked away the stinging salt water, hoping, praying for some sign. Was he even heading west? Dizzy, disoriented, his head still ringing from all the punches he'd taken to the face, he was no longer sure. He could have been heading up or down, his sense of direction was so out of whack. He glanced over his shoulder, trying to reaffirm his course, and was reassured when he saw the telltale glow high up on Heceta Head.
The lighthouse.
It was still there. Of course it was still there. It was hardly more than a yellow smear, but when the rest of the world was black and full of hidden dangers, a yellow smear could provide all the hope a person needed. The source of so much strife, the focal point of so much of his effort the past few weeks—and yet there it was, still persisting, still true to its singular mission regardless of all the chaos. Show us the way. Save us from the rocks. Bring us home. He hoped it would do the same for him. Once he found the yacht. Once he saved them.
"Garrison."
His first name, a whisper in all that howling wind, should not have been something he could hear. Yet he had. He'd heard it as clearly as he'd heard it spoken so many hundreds, thousands of times before. He would have known that voice if it had been seven years or seven hundred.
He turned, with all the slowness and apprehension of a man who feared that any sudden movement would prove this all to be a dream, and saw her perched at the front of the boat. A dark, pleasing shape. Long black hair whipped around her face. Her eyes flashed momentarily white as the boat lurched over the next ocean swell. Like her voice, he should not have been able to identify her from these sparse details, but he could. This was no dream. How could it be a dream? The way she gripped the metal bow with both hands, the way she arched her back and leaned into the storm—it was all too real, all too particular, all too her for this to be a dream.
"Janet?"
"It's me, sweetie."
"What are you doing here?"
She said nothing. He felt a terrible quench of loneliness, the worst he'd felt in all the years since she'd died. His wife. His true love. The woman who'd meant everything to him, and the woman he'd failed not once, but many times, and in the end, too. In the end, he'd failed her in the worst possible way. Someone had come to kill him and ended up killing her instead. He could move three thousand miles away to try to forget his failure, and in an instant, with nothing more than his name, all that time and distance was gone and it was as if his failure was yesterday.
"Don't give up hope," she said.
He blinked and she was gone. He blinked a few more times, hopin
g to bring her back, but he saw nothing but the raging storm ahead.
"Janet?" he said.
The word had barely fallen from his lips when a fiery explosion—an outline of a yacht briefly visible within the most intense oranges and yellows he'd ever seen—lit up the western sky.
Chapter 2
One week earlier, as the sun slipped behind an indigo ocean as smooth and shiny as a taut ribbon, Gage crammed the last of the plastic totes into the white Corolla and shut the trunk. A bit too forcefully. A slam, really.
Even reflected in the rear window, the ocean and the sky, glimpsed through the fir trees and over the tops of the houses down the hill, were full of the kind of vibrant colors usually only seen in the many artist galleries that populated the Oregon coast: a mix of warm crimsons, pulsating yellows, and a wide spectrum of blues that ranged from the most somber shade to the lightest and cheeriest.
It had been a particularly stunning sunset, the latest in a long stretch of stunning sunsets, but Gage was in no mood to enjoy it.
"I just don't know why you have to take the cat," he said.
Zoe's answer, if she'd even heard him, was the distinctive clink of a seatbelt. He took a step around the car and saw her leaning over the cat carrier, a massive orange crate she'd bought on Amazon when he'd refused to give her the older, smaller, and, honestly, infinitely inferior cat carrier they'd had ever since he'd inherited the cat and all its paraphernalia from his deceased house cleaner—and Zoe's grandmother—three years earlier. Through the gaps in the carrier, he saw the cat peering out at him with its large yellow eyes, seemingly happy to the point of smugness. The color of the carrier matched the color of the tabby's thick orange fur, which, knowing Zoe, was probably deliberate.
A breeze ruffled the arbor vitae that separated his house from his closest neighbors. Down below, on Highway 101, a truck downshifted as it prepared to haul its load up the many hills of Barnacle Bluffs. Gage took another couple steps toward Zoe just as she turned, and, because the gravel driveway was loose and uneven—another sore point because he'd refused to pave it even though he had the money—his right foot came down in a divot. This created an awkward twist that predictably sent a painful shiver into his worthless right knee.
Seeing his grimace, Zoe shook her head and crossed her arms, looking so much older than her nineteen years. Of course, she'd always been older than her years, even when he first met her and she was still in her Goth stage: black, baggy clothes, black hair, and so many earrings, nose rings, and other jewelry affixed to her face that she set off metal detectors at the courthouse when they went to her adoption hearing. Now all that remained of that rebellious time was a single diamond stud so tiny some people had mistakenly pointed out to her that she had a bit of glitter stuck to the side of her nose.
As for the rest of her? Gone was the near-religious commitment to the color black. Her hair, a luxurious auburn highlighted by just a few threads of blond—a look that some women spent a small fortune to achieve in a salon and yet was entirely natural, flowed in gentle, billowing curls to her shoulders. The hip-hugging jeans, the V-neck gray cardigan over the powder-blue T-shirt, and the leather mesh sandals—all of it could have come straight from a J.Crew catalog. Even her toenails had been painted the same blue as her shirt.
Yet it would have been a mistake to think that the young woman before him was a carbon copy of some preppy who frequented Martha's Vineyard, or that she'd suppressed her fierce intelligence behind a conformist facade. A while back, he'd made the mistake of asking if she was making a deliberate choice to blend in with people better, which prompted her to unleash a blistering two-hour tirade about the real definition of feminism in the modern era.
"Acting up again?" she said, nodding toward his knee.
He shrugged.
"You know—" she began.
"Don't," he said.
"I was only going to say—"
"I know exactly what you were going to say. You were going to remind me, as you and others have done many times before, about the wonders of modern medicine. Let's just pretend we had the conversation this time, shall we? I want to stay focused on why you're stealing my cat."
Zoe rolled her eyes. "The reason everybody keeps bringing up knee surgery is because you're so damn stubborn about it. You were never supposed to have just that one surgery, but you refuse to go back. Cobalt-chromium and titanium plating, wear-resistant plastic molded just for your knee—"
"Boy, you've done a lot of research."
"It'll change your life!"
"It's an unnecessary expense."
"God, you're impossible. That's not why you don't get it done, and you know it. You don't get it fixed because you want to suffer."
"Now you sound like Tatyana—right before she left me, too."
This gave her pause. He knew it would. Zoe, with everything she'd been through, had one of the hardest shells to crack. She didn't break easy. She didn't break at all, really. But for her to even get misty-eyed, that was a rare event. He definitely saw a bit of glistening there, maybe even a tear if pushed to the brink. It wasn't really fighting fair, bringing up Tatyana, but he didn't feel like fighting fair.
Truthfully, Tatyana hadn't left him—they'd left each other, or he'd left her and she'd let him do it, but in the end it was all a muddle, as the ends of relationships often were. His lovely girlfriend of nearly six months, a doctor who'd emigrated from Ukraine when she was a young woman in search of a better life, had finally decided that all the troubles in her homeland demanded some personal sacrifice, whatever that meant, so she'd announced one morning over pancakes and scrambled eggs that she was going back. A month, a year, she didn't know for how long. Did this mean they were through? She said she preferred to think of it as taking a break. He said he preferred something a little more definitive.
There'd been shouting. Scrambled eggs thrown against the wall. That whole business about his knee had been brought up out of the blue, along with lots of other long-simmering minor feuds all folded into the bigger one. Deep down, though he hadn't said it aloud, he'd actually preferred to wait for her, call it a break, a reset, a long-distance relationship, whatever. He'd wanted to hold on to whatever she would give him, but he didn't think that was fair to her. She was going home to finally deal with the guilt because of her choices, the people she'd left behind, the people she'd hurt. He didn't want to give her any more reason to feel guilty.
If anyone was well acquainted with all the dangers of piling on the guilt, it was Gage.
But damn it, he had to draw the line somewhere.
"Let's get back to the cat," he said.
Zoe groaned. "You're just deflecting."
"And you're stealing my pet."
"It's not stealing if you own it! Grandma actually got Carrot for me, after I came to live with her. That's his name, you know. Carrot. Not 'the cat,' as you so lovingly refer to him. If you can't even use his name, why in the world do you think he belongs with you?"
"I use his name. I use it all the time."
"Uh huh."
"Carrot. See, not so hard. Carrot, would you like Zoe to steal you away from me? If you don't answer, I'll assume you're blissfully happy in this life. See, no answer. I knew it. He's silently outraged at this injustice you're foisting upon him. Upon Carrot. Because that's his name."
"Congratulations, you passed the first test in pet ownership. Now, when's the last time you fed him?"
"Well …"
"Changed his litter box? Took him to the vet?"
"He goes to the vet?"
"When's the last time you even petted him, for God's sake?"
"Last week, when I sat down near him, he started purring. Does that count? At least, I think that sound was him. It might have been the furnace acting up again."
He smiled. She didn't. He tried a wink. She ignored it. It was becoming abundantly clear that he'd taken his concern for the cat—for Carrot—as far as he possibly could. He knew what this little song and dance was about.
She did too. What was that line? Something about partings and sweet sorrow? He thought about saying as such, to see if he could get her into another bantering contest to determine who could remember the most lines from Shakespeare, a common game of theirs, but he knew she'd see right through that ploy just like she was seeing through this one.
"Term doesn't even start for another week," he said.
"I need time to settle in," she said.
"What about Todd? How's he handling this, you moving away?"
"First of all, his name is Zachary. And second of all, when did you suddenly become concerned about what he thinks?"
"I know he cares about you a lot. I just don't like to think of him heartbroken."
"Uh huh. You told me if I ever married a cop, you wouldn't attend the wedding."
"I never said that."
"Yeah, well, he's got his job here, and we're trying the long-distance thing for a while and seeing how it goes."
"This was his idea or yours?"
"What difference does it make?"
"Ah! It was yours."
"Will you stop? This isn't about Carrot, Zachary, or any of that stuff. You're just cranky because I'm leaving."
"Portland's a big city. I worry about you there."
"Dad, you lived in New York for years. Portland is tiny compared to it. You know I'll be fine. Mostly I'll be sticking to the campus, anyway. My apartment is a block from PSU. Between that, the college library, and maybe Powell's bookstore now and then, I really don't need much else. I'm going to bury myself in books and learning. It's going to be wonderful! I know you never really wanted me to go to the community college, you wanted me to go straight to a four-year school, and now here I'm going and you're not happy about it. You should be excited for me."
A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 5) Page 1