Lighthouse Bay (25 page)

But instinctively, she also knew that her quiet life was slowly crushing her. Juliet sometimes woke in the middle of the night with a white-hot fear under her ribs:
You haven’t lived.
She usually managed to push the feeling down, make a joke of herself, but Libby’s arrival had made the fear hang around all day. Because it was true: she hadn’t lived. She’d lost Andy and she’d decided just to skim over the top of life.

Juliet dropped her head to her knees. “Libby’s back, Andy,” she said, her voice barely audible over the crash of the waves. “Do you think I can forgive her?”

Andy didn’t answer, but he didn’t need to. He was a thoughtful man, wise beyond his years. She knew he would have said something like,
Just spend a little more time with her and don’t rush anything and don’t expect miracles
. And maybe he also would have said,
You really should have moved on by now.

“Hey, Juliet!”

Juliet lifted her head and opened her eyes. Down on the sand, in his board shorts and a white T-shirt, was Scott Lacey. He made his way up to her.

“Afternoon, Sergeant,” she said with a smile.

He grimaced. “Don’t call me that or I’ll ask you if you’re sitting there waiting for Romeo.” His standard joke, usually delivered in good humor except for the tense weeks after she turned down his offer of love. “I thought I might find you here. Twenty years today, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Twenty years today.”

“And your sister back in town too.” Scott lifted his gingery eyebrows. “That’s got to hurt.”

“I don’t think she realizes. I think she was a lot more able to let go of the past than I’ve ever been.”

“Yeah, well, you and I are like the old-timers around here now. Preserving local memory.” He turned to look at the sea, saying wistfully, “Andy was a great guy.” Then he returned his attention to Juliet. “So, your sister’s a bit jumpy. Called me the other night saying there were footsteps outside her house, a car engine, that kind of thing.”

Juliet was surprised to find she was concerned. “Really? She didn’t mention it. Or perhaps that’s why she asked if anyone used the lighthouse anymore.”

“I’ve been past a few times but haven’t seen anything. I’m hoping she might feel grateful enough to go on a date.” A broad wink.

Juliet had given up trying to be sure when Scott was joking or serious. He had been married three times and didn’t want for female company, so perhaps this was just a joke. She could only imagine how Libby would look down on somebody like Scott, who had spent his whole life in one place. Just as Juliet had.

But perhaps that wasn’t right. Perhaps she was getting the old Libby confused with the new Libby. Her sister still had the glamour that came from aspiration, but she had seemed genuine, even sweet, when she’d come for dinner.

“Do you think she’d say yes?” Scott was saying. The rain intensified, but he didn’t seem to notice.

“I have no idea,” Juliet replied. “She’s become a stranger to me.”

“You ought to do something about that,” Scott said.

“Yes. Perhaps you’re right.”

F
irst thing Monday morning, Libby phoned Ashley-Harris Holdings, gave her name and asked to speak to Tristan. A few moments later a man’s voice was on the line.

“Tristan?”

“No, Elizabeth. I’m Yann Fraser. I’m handling this part of the project now.”

“I understand that, but it’s Tristan particularly I want to speak to.” She and Tristan had connected. She’d felt it, and she knew he did too. She didn’t want to talk to a stranger. She wanted to pose her questions to somebody she trusted.

“Tristan is in Sydney this week. But I’m happy to help.”

Libby paced in frustration. “No, I’ll work it out,” she said. “Good-bye.”

She hung up. Was Tristan just a smooth-talking charmer sent in to soften her up? She certainly felt disinclined to do business with Ashley-Harris now.

But the money.

Libby was about to return to her art room when the phone, still in her hand, rang.

“Hello?” she said, realizing too late that there was still impatience in her voice.

“Libby? It’s Tristan Catherwood.”

Immediately, she softened. “Tristan! I’m so glad you called.”

“Yann just texted me to say you were looking for me. I’m in Sydney for a few days. Look, I need to explain something to you and it’s potentially awkward, so be kind to me.”

Libby frowned and said slowly, “Okay.”

“I know I’ve handed you over to Yann. He’s my equal in the business, and he’s more than qualified to handle any property
agreements we make. But there’s a reason I handed you over.” He fell silent.

“Go on,” she prompted.

“I don’t think business and pleasure mix very well,” he said softly.

“What do you mean?” But she suspected she knew what he meant, and flushed warm at the thought.

“I mean,” he said, “that I felt very strongly about you when we met. I was reluctant to see you go. And I can’t ask you out for dinner if we’re in the middle of a property deal.”

Now it was Libby’s turn to fall silent. It had only been two months since Mark’s death. She was in no way ready to date.

“Libby?” he said with a nervous laugh. “I just asked you out for dinner.”

“I’m sorry,” she blurted. “I . . . The man who died. He was . . .”

“Oh, I see. He was your partner?”

No. He was never her partner. He was never her husband. He was her lover. They saw each other one weekend a month and the occasional stolen week away in an exotic location where nobody knew them. They never had dinner with friends or family. She never met his mother. She had loved Mark, but he was not her partner. She took a deep, shaking breath. “I’d love to have dinner with you, Tristan,” she said.

“Really? I mean, I do understand if it’s too soon.”

“I’d love to,” she said again. “When are you back from Sydney?”

“Friday morning. How about I pick you up on Friday night at six?”

“That sounds wonderful.”

She regretted it as soon as she hung up, but it was too late. The future was coming. It had to.

L
ibby forgot that Damien was coming for dinner until half an hour before he was due. She scrambled around in her pantry and refrigerator, and was relieved to turn up enough ingredients for pizza. She set about tidying the house, especially the desk where she had been working feverishly the past twenty-four hours on the catalog, trying to distract herself. Her last bad decision had resulted in twenty years of consequences; who knew how many decades she might feel the reverberations of this one? To take the money and regret it; to refuse the money and regret it.

Libby was in the bathroom, brushing her hair, when Damien knocked at the door. She opened it to find him standing there with a tool kit and a cat.

“This is Bossy,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind, but I don’t understand,” Libby said, as the fine-boned ginger cat slid past her ankles.

“I don’t want to leave her alone at the lighthouse. Too many places for her to get stuck or lost.”

Libby bent to scratch the cat under the chin. “She’s beautiful. Did you just get her?”

“No, I’ve had Bossy for years. It’s complicated and I don’t really want to talk about it, except to say that this week I managed to get my cat, my utility belt, and”—he lifted up his tool kit—“my tools. You said you had some problems with your linen cupboard.”

“You can fix it?”

“Yeah. I’m a carpenter. It’s the least I can do, considering you’re making me dinner.”

“Oh, I thought . . .” She trailed off, realizing it might be an insult if she said, “I thought you didn’t have a job.” Instead she said, “I didn’t know that.”

He was already in the hallway, testing the door on the linen cupboard. She watched him a little while. Where had his cat been? And his car and his tools? He must have gone to get them this week, but why? She was dying to ask, but it was clear he wasn’t going to tell her.

She cooked while he took the doors off, planed them down, then refastened them on their hinges. He was very at ease with her and it made her feel at ease with him, and they chatted about the past and people they’d known. While the pizza was cooking, they sat outside on the mismatched outdoor furniture. She was tempted to tell him about the offer from Ashley-Harris and the potentially disastrous situation with Juliet but decided he wouldn’t be much help. He had no money; he didn’t even have a job. Big property deals were probably beyond his scope.

In any case, he had other things on his mind to talk about. “I kept looking at the 1901 lighthouse journal,” he said, pulling it out of his tool box. “I found something interesting in the final few pages.”

Libby leaned forward. “Go on.”

“At first I thought there was nothing. I thought maybe the keeper—his name was Matthew Seaward—might have been foreign because there were a number of sentences with very odd grammar. Things like,
Brought home some fresh apples for I,
or
I very down today.
But then I realized he’s not saying ‘I’ as in himself. I think it’s somebody’s initial.” He flicked through the pages, looking for an entry.

“Oh? So he means Isaac or Ivan or something like that?”

“No. It’s a woman. Because there was one entry . . . Ah, here it is:
I anxious. Not sure what is wrong with her.
”

“Was he married?”

“The records say no. And I looked back through his journals
from when he started in 1895, and there is no mention of another person, no mention of ‘I’ until after the diary entry I read you. About the strange woman.”

“And is she there with him until he finishes?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t found all of his journals yet. This one ends in July 1901.”

Libby turned this over in her mind. “Just because a strange woman turns up—one he sends to town to find a more appropriate place to stay, remember—that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily the same woman that he starts talking about later in the journal, does it?”

“Well, no. We’re working with possibility rather than probability. But it’s fun to imagine, isn’t it? She gets shipwrecked, he takes her in, they fall in love. It doesn’t matter if it didn’t happen; it’s all in the past now.”

Libby let this idea sink in. Yes, eventually it all becomes the past. Like her love affair with Mark. Time erases everything. Did Mark know that? Is that why he always urged her to live in the moment? She tried to feel the moment now. The soft breeze, the beat of the ocean. Happiness was almost there. But there was still too much sadness lying on her heart. If she could, she would wish Damien away and put Mark in his place. She could have had that. She could have sat here with Mark with the breeze and the ocean, but she had been too stubborn and now it was too late. Time had passed.

But it also meant that her decision about selling the cottage would disappear into the past one day too. Did that mean it didn’t really matter what she did? She furrowed her brow, trying to make it not matter.

“Are you okay?” Damien said.

She glanced up, tried a smile. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine. Do you think I could hang on to this journal? I’d like to read it for myself.”

“Sure.” He laid it on the side table. “Shall we check on the pizza?”

Damien wanted to eat inside, on the couch. He said he hadn’t sat on a couch for a long time and Libby found this both funny and puzzling. But neither of them probed each other’s secrets. It was much more comfortable to eat pizza, talk about the locals and construct an elaborate story behind their lighthouse mystery.

“I’ll come back during the week and check your other cabinets, if you like. Anything else you need done?”

“It wouldn’t be right. I’m not really in a position to pay you and—”

“I have an ulterior motive.”

For a second her heart fluttered: he wasn’t going to make a move on her, was he? He wasn’t her type and she was a lot older than he was. But then he said, “Is there any chance I could leave Bossy here with you?”

The idea delighted Libby. “Of course.”

“And if you can make me a meal once in a while, I’ll pay you back in odd jobs. There are . . . problems with my bank accounts. I can’t even get hold of the bits of paperwork that would make it easy for me to get a job. I need cash jobs and in-kind trades. If you know of anything . . .”

“Damien, why—”

“It’s too raw. I can’t talk about it.”

She nodded. “You should go and see Juliet. She says she needs some work done in the kitchen of the tea room.”

“Really? Perhaps I will, then. Could you let her know I’ll drop in?”

Libby’s mind whirled. No, she wasn’t going to speak to Juliet again until she’d made up her mind. If she told Damien she was considering abandoning any chance of a relationship with her sister
for two and a half million dollars, he would judge her. Everybody thought that family relationships were priceless.

“Sure, I’ll let her know,” Libby said. The lie was harmless. “She’ll be glad to see you.”

Later, after Damien had gone home, Bossy was waiting on the end of the bed when Libby came out of the shower.

“Hello, puss,” she said, switching on the lamp and climbing into bed with the lighthouse keeper’s journal. Bossy stretched and came to lie at her side, purring softly.

At first, Libby found it difficult to decipher Matthew Seaward’s writing, but then she got the hang of it and flicked through, looking for mentions of “I.” Damien was right that most of them were in the last few pages of the journal, recording events in late June. Mostly very mundane things. But then she flicked backwards and found an interesting entry from April.
I returned to telegraph sister.
I returned. Was he speaking of himself, or of the mysterious woman whose name began with “I”? Curious now, she began to read more closely, as a storm moved in off the sea and made the eaves shake. A list of telegraphs received. At the end, squashed against the bottom margin:
Still no reply from I’s sister.

It sounded as though Matthew Seaward had become invested in the mysterious woman and her sister. A little further in, a longer entry caught Libby’s eye.
I has not heard from sister. Best for I if we find her soon. She needs family of her own to love and guide her.