The Lighthouse Keeps Its Secrets

Some doors only open from the inside. This one was bolted when they broke it down.Sable Cove in March is rain sideways off the water and shopfronts dark at four. It is also the month Nora Ashby’s great-aunt died, which Nora has been carefully not thinking about, and which is the honest reason she took a job she should have refused.The Heritage Trust is trying the lighthouse again. Last time the restoration money went into somebody’s pocket a raffle ticket at a time, and the town has spent the years since being quietly ashamed of how easy it was. Now there is a grant, a specialist who grew up here and came home to lead the work, and one last obligation before the money can be drawn: a full fabric survey of the old light station, signed off on site. Nora is there to catalog the contents. She is the town’s object woman now, to her own continuing surprise.The nor’easter arrives eight hours early and a good deal meaner than forecast. The surge holds the neck of the causeway under, the launch cannot run in that sea, and the mast on the point goes down before anyone thinks to make a call. Nine people are on the headland when the weather closes it, and one of them is Detective Sam Reyes, who drove out to order everybody off before the road went and arrived, to his lasting disgust, ten minutes late.By first light the architect is dead in the strongroom, and no living person could have reached her. Sam breaks the door himself and sees the bolt still thrown. There is one door and one window and nothing else, and there are eight people on a rock in a storm, and one of them has done a thing that cannot be done.The architect’s ghost is standing in the corner when Nora comes in. She never saw who did it and she is not going to be much help about that. But she can swear to the one fact that matters, because she sat against that door all night with a flashlight, frightened and listening, and it never moved.What she heard was in the wall.Nora has never worked a case alone. A hundred years of Augustus Thorne is bound to a shop on Harbor Street, standing with his palms flat on the inside of the glass, hollering up a cove he cannot walk. The dead of Sable Cove pass what they see hand to hand the way the living pass gossip over a fence, and the line runs out where the water starts. What reaches the point comes late, in pieces, carried by whoever will stand out in it. Some of it does not come at all.What Nora has instead is the point’s own dead. The last keeper of Sable Light has been out there a century with nobody to talk to, and in all that time not one living or dead soul has asked him a single question.She asks him several.Fair-play mystery, no gore, and a hundred-year-old man who has been waiting a very long time to be useful. Third in The Sable Cove Mysteries, and a complete case in itself.