Lighthouse Bay

by Kimberley Freeman

  When he speaks he is infinitely gentle, despite his size and obvious strength. “Mary, you can stay here tonight. Tomorrow, you can bathe and make yourself presentable. Mrs. Fullbright stands on ceremony and a torn dress and dirty face won’t do. You cannot stay here for longer than a night. It isn’t right.”

  Isabella struggles to comprehend him in her addled state. It finally sinks in that he is trying to preserve her reputation. She no longer cares about her reputation, but she nods because she sees he will be immovable.

  “Thank you. Thank you.”

  She eats, then returns to the rough bed. The mattress sags. The room is unmistakably male: no fancy cushions, no curtains, no tablecloth, no cut-crystal decanters or vases for flowers. It smells of tobacco, papers, oil and dust. Matthew Seaward’s things. And in Matthew Seaward’s bed she sleeps, dreamless.

  Nine

  2011

  Libby devoted a week to getting her life back in order, creating some kind of routine. She felt like an ant whose tracks had been washed away and who had to create a new path through a new place. She shopped at the local greengrocer and got to know the owner’s name as he boxed her vegetables. She had her electricity and phone connected and her windows cleaned. She registered to borrow at the nearest library. She scrubbed her cottage from top to bottom. She avoided her sister: the cool reception had told her that Juliet still harbored nothing but ill will for her. She swam every afternoon in the sea, as the evening closed in and the bright lights of Noosa to the misted south blinked into life. And she sketched, spending long hours in the well-lit art room, curled in a rocking chair with her sketchbook on her knee, with a plan to paint something very soon.

  Between each activity she had to stop, rest and fight the tears. The grief weighed on every thought, every action. She pushed herself to keep going, keep setting up this new life. It was what Mark would have wanted for her.

  A week after she arrived, Libby bought a new SIM card with a local number for her mobile phone and, before inserting it, charged the phone to see if there were any last messages on it. She expected nothing, so she was surprised to hear the familiar voice of Cathy, Mark’s secretary, on her voicemail.

  “Oh, good morning, Libby. It’s Cathy here from Winterbourne Jewelers. I wonder if you might call me back. I have some mail here for you and I need your forwarding address.”

  Libby listened to the message again, confused. It was one in the morning in England now. She would have to endure eight hours of curiosity.

  She glanced up at the view through the sparkling windows: a wide wedge of blue sea, golden sunlight on its white caps. Mark was on her mind again now. Sometimes, she forgot about him for a blissful five or ten minutes. Her body still felt bruised from the inside, but sometimes she forgot just how devastated she was. Then it came tumbling back, and she hated herself for having stopped remembering him, even for a little while.

  She got through the day, absorbed by her drawing and cleaning and swimming in the sea. After her shower, while another dish of frozen lasagna heated in the microwave, she called London.

  As the phone rang at the other end, her heart thumped hard. The last time she had called this number, she had said what she always said: “Hello, Cathy, it’s Libby Slater. May I have a word with Mark, please?” She would have to find a new sentence.

  “Winterbourne Jewelers, Cathy speaking.”

  “Cathy. It’s Libby Slater, returning your call.” There, not so hard after all.

  “Oh, hello, Libby! You’ve left Pierre-Louis. We couldn’t find you.”

  “I’m back in Australia.”

  “That was sudden.” Cathy was the only person whom Libby suspected of knowing about her affair with Mark.

  “I’d been unhappy at PL for a long time. I got your message. Something about mail?” Libby realized she was pacing, so she forced herself to stop and lean against the kitchen bench. The smell of the lasagna began to fill the air.

  “Ah, yes. Bit of a mystery. I’ve been going through the papers in Mark’s office. As you can imagine, it’s terribly sad.”

  “I’m sorry. That must be difficult.” Libby swallowed over the lump in her throat, wishing she could be there in London to go through Mark’s papers; to have any keepsake of him, even a scrawled sample of his handwriting.

  “We all miss him terribly, Libby.”

  “His family . . .”

  “I haven’t seen either of the girls, though I understand the eldest is pregnant. Emily is doing well, I think. Obviously she’s devastated, but she’s been in at work every day since the funeral, and it looks like she’s going to take over Mark’s job, at least in the short term. But let’s sort out this mystery with the mail. I found six letters, all addressed to you care of Mark’s post office. Mark hasn’t opened any of them, just shoved them in a drawer.”

  Libby was both thrilled and terrified. Why would anyone write to her care of Mark? Was this some secret surprise Mark was keeping from her? Or was it blackmail? “Do they have a return address?”

  “They’re all from the same place. A company called Ashley-Harris Holdings in Australia.”

  A company. So not blackmail, and probably not a secret surprise either. “I have no idea who that is, or why they are writing to me at Mark’s address, Cathy, but can I ask you to pop them in the mail to me?”

  “Of course,” she said.

  Libby gave Cathy her new address, reluctantly realizing that as soon as the phone call ended, her connection to Mark would be severed again.

  But then Cathy said, “There’s one other thing, Libby, and I don’t know what you’ll say, but Emily said I must ask you.”

  Libby’s stomach clenched. Twelve years of keeping their affair secret had taught her to be afraid of Mark’s wife’s name. “What is it?”

  “Pierre-Louis called looking to secure our account again, but when we discovered you were no longer there we didn’t sign for this year. Emily was very keen that we ask if you’d be happy to design our catalog again as a freelancer. Now, I know perhaps you have reasons for not doing design work anymore, but—”

  “Yes!” Libby said. “I would love to.”

  “Splendid! Emily will be so pleased. She’s a great admirer of your work.”

  “She is?” Mark had never mentioned Emily’s name if he could help it. She felt strangely exposed.

  “Twelve years on the same job, Libby. You were highly regarded at Winterbourne Jewelers. Now Mark is gone, we’d like to continue the association.”

  “I’m so flattered. I . . .” Libby remembered she had no computer, no Internet connection, no e-mail address. “Can you give me a week? I’m just setting up my new office over here and . . .”

  “Certainly. Call us when you’re ready and the account is yours.”

  They said their good-byes just as the microwave beeped, but Libby didn’t retrieve her dinner. She stood in the kitchen, staring out the window at the darkening sky, feeling the distance between her old life and her new. Mark was, and would forever remain, a million light-years away. But then she straightened, and told herself to stop being maudlin. What would Mark want for her, if he were here? To make up with her sister? Well, that hadn’t gone well so far, but she had hope. Solve the Winterbourne family mystery? It didn’t seem likely she could do that, and yet he would definitely want to drive up to Winterbourne Beach to see it with his own eyes. Tomorrow, then.

  She left just after eight. Paris traffic had never been like this at rush hour. In fact, there was no rush hour at Lighthouse Bay. A couple of cars queued on the roundabout and a few cyclists on the beachfront road, but nothing else. Libby recalled the packed platforms on the Metro, choking on somebody else’s cigarette smoke or strong perfume, the constant beeping of car horns as mad Parisian drivers tried to make their way around each other on narrow roads. She put her window down and breathed in the sea air and sunshine. The drive north took just under an hour, along a straight highway hemmed by cane fields.

  Winterbourne Beach was smaller than
Lighthouse Bay, a tiny village surrounded by bushland, a vast deserted beach and a general store that doubled as the tourist information center. She stopped to buy a chocolate bar and a juice, and picked up a brochure about activities in the bay.

  Want to find a lost treasure? Dive the Aurora! Libby flipped the brochure over and scanned it. The owner of the dive company lived four houses down, according to the map. Her phone was out of range up here, so she decided to visit him. Libby followed the map in the hot sunshine, and soon stood outside a weatherboard house with a large motorboat on a trailer out the front. If the boat was in, he’d be home.

  She started up the path when a shirtless man with an enormous belly emerged from behind the boat and called out gruffly, “No diving today.”

  Libby smiled. “I don’t want to dive, I just want to ask you a few questions,” she said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

  He rubbed his hands on a greasy cloth. It looked as though he’d been working on the boat’s engine. “What do you want to know?”

  “History of the shipwreck?”

  He nodded. “Look, love, my boat’s been out of operation for a week. I’ve lost a lot of money. You pay me fifty bucks and I’ll make you a cup of coffee and tell you everything I know. Fee for service.”

  Libby spread her hands. “Of course. But it had better be good coffee.”

  The man grinned and held out a meaty hand for Libby to shake. “I’m Graeme Beers.”

  “Libby Slater. A pleasure to meet you.”

  He took her upstairs and through a bright, airy living room, then sat her at an outdoor table on a wide verandah that looked over the scrub to the ocean. The sun was on Libby’s shoulders, and she cursed herself for not putting on a layer of sunscreen. She backed her chair as far as she could against the wall, flinching out of the sunshine.

  Libby couldn’t imagine enjoying morning coffee in the damp heat with the sandflies everywhere, but when it arrived it was superb. Exactly the right strength, served in a large white cup with creamy milk, with mango-flavored shortbread on the side. Every now and again a stiff breeze rose off the ocean, cooling her skin and lifting her hair. It was vastly different from coffee with Mark in Paris, but it was pleasant in its difference.

  Graeme had put on a blue cotton checked shirt. He slapped a plastic folder on the table and sat with her.

  “So, you’re new to town?”

  “Not really. I grew up at Lighthouse Bay. So I’ve heard of the Winterbourne treasure. But I was never much interested in the shipwreck when I lived here.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “I worked with the Winterbourne company for a number of years.” A twinge. Why couldn’t she just say it out loud? Mark Winterbourne and I were in love. Still a secret. Always a secret.

  Graeme nodded, looking suitably impressed. “Right, then, the wreck of the Aurora. It was April 1901. There was no township here then. Miles of empty coastland, a few Aborigines and plenty of wildlife. Aurora was a three-masted iron barque . . .” Here he flipped to the first plastic sleeve in the folder, which held a blurry photograph of a magnificent sailing ship. “. . . a cargo ship built in Glasgow but privately owned by Captain Francis Whiteaway of Bristol. He was never off the water; back and forth between here and England, making a killing. Brought tiles and curtains and fancy nonsense from England to all the rich people living here, took back wool for all the cold people living there. He was forty-three at the time of the wreck.” He stopped to slurp his coffee noisily, then resumed.

  “This time he had precious cargo aboard. Queen Victoria had commissioned a parliamentary mace as a gift for the Australian government for federation.” He turned to another picture, this time a watercolor, perhaps a copy of the mace designer’s sketch. “The mace was made of gold, and set with four emeralds, eight rubies, four sapphires and a single diamond at its tip. Arthur Winterbourne, eldest son of the Winterbourne jeweling family, designed it and oversaw its production. Then he wanted to take it to Australia himself. Winterbourne and Whiteaway had gone to school together, so Whiteaway was happy to have him on board.” Another slurp of coffee, another plastic sleeve, this time with a meteorological photograph of a cyclone.

  His voice grew dark; he was no doubt used to milking the drama out of the story for his clients. “They were due to leave cargo in Brisbane before sailing to Sydney, but they hit cyclonic conditions as they approached the southeast coast. Cape Franklin lighthouse reported seeing them on the evening of April the seventh, but Lighthouse Bay lighthouse, the next one along the coast, never saw them. God only knows what they were trying to do coming into the beach here: maybe they were taking on water and thought they could beach the ship. In any case, they struck a submerged reef.” He gestured directly out to sea. “The conditions were horrific, it was late at night, the ship was broken to pieces. Nobody survived. When the ship didn’t reach Brisbane, the local police sent out a search party. Debris washed up just here on the beach alerted them to the ship nearby. Over the next few weeks they recovered a lot of the cargo and a few bodies. The younger brother, Percy Winterbourne, came to see it with his own eyes. Wandered around between here and other places on the east coast, sure somebody would know something. He searched, but never found anything. Died suddenly in a hotel room in Tewantin one evening.”

  Percy was Mark’s great-grandfather. “Died suddenly? Suspiciously?”

  Graeme shook his head. “Not according to local knowledge. Just dropped dead.”

  Libby thought about Mark’s aneurysm.

  Graeme was still talking. “Upshot is, nobody’s ever found the mace. So, people still like to look for it. Which is why I have a business.” He flipped to another photograph in his book: a half a ship, lying on its side underwater, encrusted with barnacles.

  “Do you think the mace is still out there?” Libby asked.

  “Don’t know. It’s a mystery. That wreck has been combed over by many hands, and nobody’s ever turned it up. People still like to dive it—who can resist a treasure hunt?—but I think most of them realize they’re not going to find anything. You should come out one time, have a look for yourself.”

  “I don’t know that diving is something I’d be terribly good at,” Libby said. The thought of being so far underwater made her nervous.

  “If you can swim, you can dive. It’s easy.”

  Mark would do it. He would tell Libby to do it.

  “I’ll give you a mate’s rate,” Graeme continued, seeing her wavering. “You really should take a look.”

  She shook her head. “Sorry. Why don’t you show me some more pictures?”

  He flicked the pages of his folder, showing more images of recovered cargo, talking about the centenary celebrations of the wreck and offering titbits of local knowledge. But he didn’t mention the Winterbourne family again, and Libby found herself sipping coffee and gazing at the horizon, wishing Mark were here to take her hand and lead her under the water, and bring her back safely.

  Libby turned on the fan over her bed when she got home and lay down to rest, only to wake hours later disorientated with a pounding headache, her cotton dress damp with perspiration. It was late afternoon and her stomach growled with hunger. She microwaved some fried rice and went to her art room. The photograph Graeme had shown her of the Aurora had intrigued her. She was an artist who loved depth and detail, and those old ships were crisscrossed with ropes and rigging. She flicked through her Turner book and found one of his ship paintings, then sat with a sketchbook on her lap copying a detail of the rigging. Hours passed, dusk came.

  She put aside the drawing and decided to go to the library the next day and borrow some books about ships. Eventually, she wanted to paint the Aurora, as a way of remembering Mark. But she’d have to work carefully first, relearning the skills she’d left behind at art college.

  She pulled on her flip-flops and let herself out of the house, then took the path down to the beach, where she realized the night had fallen quickly. One sand crab running over her to
es was enough. She headed back up the path.

  That’s when she saw the figure of a man, near the door to the lighthouse. He had fair hair and broad shoulders, but she couldn’t make out any other features. She shrank back around the side of the cottage. He was fiddling with the lock, then he opened the door. He looked around furtively, then went in and closed the door behind him.

  So, somebody was at the lighthouse, and he knew he shouldn’t be there. Libby went inside her cottage and locked the door carefully. She felt a long way from civilization.

  Libby woke some time in the night, from under deep layers, and lay for a moment wondering why she was awake.

  A sound.

  Her senses were suddenly on high alert, her ears prickling.

  Heat flashed across her heart. Somebody was lurking around outside her window.

  She couldn’t move, she was so afraid. She wanted to be asleep and oblivious again. Then she heard footsteps, moving off, around the side of the cottage. Libby thought of the man she’d seen at the lighthouse. She pulled back the covers slowly and slunk out of bed, half-crouched, and hurried through to the kitchen to find her phone.

  She had put it down somewhere—she fumbled across the benchtops—but it was small and it eluded her. Should she turn the light on to find it? Would that scare the intruder off, or encourage them to burst in and . . . what? What did they intend?

  Libby stifled a groan of fear. She was so far from town, tucked up here at the end of the road. Her hand hit a teaspoon she had left out after making coffee, and it clattered to the floor. She froze, holding her breath. She heard nothing outside but the wind and the sea.

  She decided to brazen it out, and switched on the kitchen light.

  She heard the footsteps speed into a run. A car engine burst into life, and she realized that there was a car parked in her driveway. She went to the front door and threw it open in time to see bright headlights flash on, blinding her. A dark figure—too big and square to be a woman—got into the passenger’s seat, and the car roared away, leaving Libby with the ghost of the headlights in her eyes. The car backfired once in the distance.