The Lighthouse

Reese kept smiling, but it was a smile that meant nothing-a mere reflexive stretching of mouth and facial skin. “Now, Mrs. Ryerson, like I said, I was just being neighborly-”

“Is that what you call it?”

“Sure thing. It’s just that out there at the light, you’re pretty isolated. Things can happen to people who live in lonely places like that.”

She could feel her rage rekindling. “Things such as somebody shooting at our car in the middle of the night?”

Reese’s eyebrows rose, meeting the wispy fringe of hair that escaped from his red headband. “Well, now, why would anybody want to do a thing like that?”

“You tell me.”

“Can’t say. Seems a waste of good ammunition to me.”

Alix tried to step around him again. And again he moved into her path. “’Course, that’s nothing,” he said, “now there’s been a murder practically in your front yard. Found that dead girl’s body no more’n a couple of miles from the light, wasn’t it?”

She said nothing, just glared at him.

“Not that that means you folks know anything about it. Or had anything to do with it. Sure is funny, though. I mean, you folks move in out there at the light, my friend Mitch’s poor old dog gets run down, and next thing there’s this poor young girl found strangled in a ditch-”

“Get out of my way, damn you!” She pushed around him and yanked at the door handle.

“Hey,” Reese’s amused voice said behind her, “don’t go away mad.”

She got into the car, ground the starter, finally got the engine going and the transmission into reverse. Once on the road she slammed the gearshift into drive and accelerated with such force that the tires threw up a spray of gravel. When she looked into the rearview mirror, Adam Reese was still standing there, hands on hips, the grin splitting his face like a wound.

It wasn’t until she turned off onto the cape road that she slowed down, and when she pressed on the brake pedal, her leg began to shake. She pulled onto the verge, switched off the ignition, and leaned forward against the steering wheel, spent by her rage.

God, how I hate those people! she thought. Small-minded, insular, suspicious of anyone who’s not like them. As if anyone would want to be like them.

She sat there for what seemed a long time, forehead against her folded arms. After a while, when the last of her anger was gone, a new feeling rose, one of unease.

Why was she letting them get to her this way? She’d lost control in the general store, and she would have struck that handyman if he hadn’t let her past him. And over what? Nasty innuendo that she should have laughed off as small-town rumor-mongering.

Still… when a person allowed gossip to upset her like this, it was usually because she felt there might be some truth in it. Underneath was she afraid that Jan might be a murderer?

Instantly she rejected the notion. It was ridiculous. Jan was her husband, the man she had lived with every day of the past eleven years. She might suspect him of minor faults but never of a crime, much less one as monstrous as cold-blooded murder.

She raised her head and looked out at the flat gray joining of the bay and sea that lay beyond the barren reach of the headland. In spite of herself, her thoughts went back to that night in Boston, the one and only time Jan had spoken of the murder of the girt in Madison. Had he been unduly traumatized by finding the body of someone he’d known only a few hours? Horrible as the experience had been, had his reaction and subsequent de-pmssioo indicated a deeper involvement in the crime? No, she refused to believe that. The real trauma came later, from the way he and his friends had treated Ed Finlayson and the inevitable disintegration of the group.

Then her thoughts shifted back to the present… to Mitch Novotny’s dog. It had been an accident; Jan hadn’t even known he’d hit the dog because he’d been having one of his headaches… just as he’d had one of his headaches the night the hitchhiker was murdered and her body left on the cape. The hit-and-run killing of a dog, the strangulation murder of a young woman. Hardly equivalent, and yet..

Those headaches and his sudden mood changes over the past year-it was almost as if he had undergone a personality change. And the way he seemed to be keeping something from her. At times it was like living with a stranger, someone she really didn’t know or understand. And all because of those headaches.

He’d minimized them upon his return from Portland, had claimed the doctor there had found no organic cause. But now she began to wonder if he might have been lying to her. No, not lying… trying to protect her from some kind of disturbing knowledge. She had to find out more about those headaches, for her own peace of mind. But their own doctor-and close friend-had refused to discuss them with her; and if Dave Sanderson wouldn’t reveal the nature of the problem, surely the Portland specialist would be even more reluctant to do so. Perhaps if she called Dave, explained the urgency of the situation…