A Fine Cast of Characters - J. Dane Tyler [48]
I nodded and kissed the pads of her fingers as they rested on my lips. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Will you?”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’ll wait for you.”
“What’s your name? I don’t even know your name.”
“Does it matter?”
“What do you mean? Of course it matters. I ... how will I know what to call you?”
“If you never leave me, you won’t need to call me.”
I chuckled. “You won’t tell me your name?”
“There’s time for that later. For now, hurry back. I’ll miss you.”
“I’ll miss you too.”
She got up and made her way to the bed, her body swayed like the dance she’d done the night before. She was weary and her walk was heavier, as if she’d collapse under a stiff breeze. She stretched out and moaned, and it was the sigh of a storm coming in from the sea.
I waited until her breathing became rhythmic and steady before I gathered the rest of my clothes and dressed. I slipped quietly from the tiny room, our little love nest, and realized I’d have to get off the lighthouse grounds without being seen.
It was easier than I thought. There was no one around. The lighthouse keeper’s residence was quiet, shut up, like it was abandoned. I made my way down the rocks and across the beach. I passed through a shady stand of trees where the forest stretched a finger around the cove, and over the pine-needle bed to the road winding past. I traversed the short distance to town lost in thought.
The image of her as a corpse stayed with me. I don’t know why. I tried to force it from my mind, push it from memory by recalling the incredible passion, the raw physicality of our lovemaking. When I came back to the present, I stood outside a tiny Chinese take-out store front. I lazed in and placed an order for two.
The petite Asian lady behind the counter told me in broken English it would be twenty minutes, and I should come back. I thanked her and went out to the busy little main drag, the day’s brightness warming my skin. I looked up the street and a swinging sign beneath the eaves of one of the ancient buildings caught my attention.
It read, USED BOOKS.
It was all the invitation I needed to kill twenty minutes.
The paned glass wooden door swung easily aside and rang a bell on a curled wrought iron hanger above it. I noted the books, propped and displayed in neat stacks on tables near the entrance. Old biographies, worn and cracked leather editions of classics, tattered and ragged paperbacks packed shelves that lined the rest of the store.
Nautical-themed signs designed to look like nameplates from old ships designated the store sections: Fiction, History, Reference, Non-Fiction. I wandered among the aged, dark wood shelf rows and let my fingers brush the weathered spines.
I don’t know where I drifted to—History? Non-Fiction?—but one of the books caught my eye. My finger lighted on it instinctively, and tapped it.
It was a coffee table book, large and square, and stuck proud of the other books on the shelf. I took it down, hefted its weight in my palm. The white-lettered title on the cover broke a lead-gray sky background, a lighthouse silhouette perched on a craggy outcropping stark against it.
LIGHTHOUSE MYSTERIES AND LEGENDS.
I flipped the pages, thumbed through them, and found stories of lighthouse keepers disappearing, storms sweeping ghost ships in from the sea, widows watching in rain from the tops of those beacons waiting for husbands that never returned. In those tales and legends, one caught my attention. The story of a lighthouse couple and their only daughter, a tragic love affair and her disappearance. I only glanced through it, scanning, not reading. I checked my watch. Time to pick up the Chinese. The minutes flew away from me. But there was something about that story, that legend. I couldn’t put the book down. I paid for it and a mousy woman with half-glasses roosted at the end of her narrow nose rang it up. The ruffles on her jabot waggled when she told me to have a nice day. I said I would, and went out with the book tucked in a plastic