A Lighthouse for the Lonely Heart: An Oregon Coast Mystery (Garrison Gage Series Book 5)

by Scott William Carter

  Gage's heart began to pound, a steady drumming in his ears. Still, the stranger didn't move. An eerie stillness enveloped them. Gage started to doubt himself, wondering if hallucinations, strange imaginings, and, yes, maybe even invisible friends would soon become part of his everyday life. Why wouldn't his invisible friend be an ominous shadow in the dark? It fit him, didn't it?

  Then, just as the gentlest of breezes whispered along the tops of the firs, just when Gage was about to give up this silly game and go searching for a better one, like how fast he could find the bottom of a bottle of bourbon, the stranger moved.

  He simply turned and stepped deeper into the shadows, not running, certainly not fleeing, but not walking away with obliviousness or indifference either. He left like a man who wanted Gage to know he was leaving.

  And yet the stranger's departure only lasted a second before he vanished completely into the shadows.

  * * *

  The next morning, after a night spending more time reassuring himself his Beretta was within reach on his nightstand than actually sleeping, he ventured into the forest behind his house for some sign of the stranger. The fog that wreathed the trees, thick and wet on his face, did not make his job any easier. There were no obvious footprints or broken branches. Somehow he almost expected something blatant and sinister, like the words I'm watching you carved into tree. He searched until his fingers and toes were numb from the cold, growing increasingly frustrated, and thinking about those years after Janet's death where she sometimes appeared to him.

  She'd seemed so real, as real as a person could be.

  Knowing little good would come from continuing to dwell on it, he pushed the whole thing from his mind and left for the grocery store. The empty aisles at Jaybee's, and the lonely highway, should have been some clue to him how early it was, but it wasn't until Nora opened her motel door, rubbing her eyes and squinting up at him, that he realized he'd never checked the time.

  She wore a baggy white T-shirt and gray sweatpants with holes in the knees, the kind of thing that millions of women wore to bed but that he somehow found surprising on the great Nora West. He didn't know what he expected—a black silk gown with a ruby-studded collar? It wasn't the sort of ensemble that was designed to show off her figure, that was sure, but there was still something tantalizing about how her body filled out the clothes in certain places, tight here, loose there, a curve of a hip, a slope of a breast, as if he was glimpsing her naked body through shifting vapors of smoke. Gage always found it more provocative when a woman wasn't trying to beautiful.

  "Are you always such an early riser?" she asked.

  "Almost never," he said. He shifted the two bags of groceries in his arms. "Do you always answer your door without asking who it is?"

  "I looked through the peephole," she said.

  "Not for very long. You should be more careful."

  "Okay … Is there a specific reason I need to be more careful?"

  "No. Can I put these on your kitchen counter?"

  "Oh, yeah, sorry. Come on in."

  She took one of bags from him and led the way. He would have protested, but the truth was that without his cane, his situation was too precarious to pass up the offer. As it was, he was glad she was in front of him, because she didn't have to watch him limp into the room. He was also afforded a very nice view of the sway of her bottom inside sweatpants that didn't seem at all baggy from the backside.

  He realized he was staring, and caught himself. Hadn't he learned anything from the previous night? The last thing he wanted was start the next day on another awkward misunderstanding. Don't go there, Gage.

  Pale gray light rimmed the closed curtains, the surf crashing on the beach loud enough that she must have had the screen door cracked open. He hoped she hadn't slept with it open. She put the bag on the tiny kitchen counter and started to unload it, but then must have read his concern on his face, because she stopped and looked at him.

  "Okay, what is it?"

  Gage put his bag on the counter next to hers. "Nothing."

  "It's obviously not nothing. What happened?"

  "Nothing happened. I just …" He thought about telling her about the man he'd seen in trees, but if he was going crazy, he'd prefer to keep that fact to himself a bit longer. "Look, this whole thing is just strange, that's all. The letter. His suicide. I've just learned to be careful when all the pieces don't seem to add up. Can you just, you know, take extra precautions?"

  She studied his face for a long time, the sleepiness in her eyes already completely gone. In the end, though she didn't appear satisfied with his explanation, she nodded and emptied the bags. He helped her. She offered to pay and he told her he'd put it on her bill, knowing full well he'd never put it on the bill because there would never be a bill. She asked him if he wanted some coffee, and he said yes. While she was making it, he opened the curtains.

  The fog still lay thick over the western horizon, only a small strip of beach and flat gray ocean visible before everything blurred into white. The grass on the narrow strip between her concrete patio and the white picket fence glistened with moisture. A lone seagull stood on the fence, staring at him petulantly, like an impatient diner glaring at a waiter, but otherwise Gage saw no one. When he turned around, he saw Nora wincing and shielding her eyes.

  "Ouch," she said.

  "You want me to close them?"

  "No, no, it's good. You weren't lying. It's really close. It's just, I'm not much of a morning person, you know?"

  "Sorry again."

  "No, it's fine, really. I'm here for a reason. I can't expect you to adjust to my schedule."

  With the room now full of light, he saw what he had not seen before: her acoustic guitar perched on the couch, and an open spiral notebook on the bamboo coffee table near it. In the lined pages of the notebook, he saw a mixture of handwritten words and musical notes written in blue ink, lots of scratched-out passages. He realized he was staring, looked up and met her gaze, then felt guilty, as if she'd caught him snooping in her underwear drawer.

  "Yeah," she said, "I wrote a little last night."

  "New song?"

  She shrugged, turning her attention to getting down some mugs. He didn't press, though he was dying to know what she wrote. Her cell phone, plugged into a socket at the edge of the counter, vibrated. She glanced at it and wrinkled her nose.

  "It's been going crazy this morning," she said. "Everybody's pretty upset that I took off."

  "Everybody?"

  She shrugged. "My personal assistant, Jewel, mostly. But she called my manger, Harry, and he got everybody else worked up into a tizzy. Some of the guys in the band even called. You know, it's mostly my fault. I just left a message for her yesterday telling her I was taking off for a few days and I'd be in touch. Then, because I'm a pretty horrible liar, I didn't answer her calls or texts."

  "Do they know where you are now?"

  "No. Not yet. I did text them telling them I'm fine, so they'd lay off, but I just don't want to deal with that right now. And honestly, if I tell them I'm in Oregon, I know it's going to leak to the press. But I don't know how long I can hold them off before they send out a search party for me." She laughed, though it came out a bit hollow. "I'm only joking a little."

  "Well," Gage said, "I guess the upside is it's nice to have people who care about you so much."

  She didn't say anything, though he sensed it was uncomfortable terrain for her. She poured their coffee and put his cup on the counter, along with the creamer he'd bought. Even with a healthy dollop of half-and-half, the coffee tasted strong and bitter. He put in more creamer, which made the taste at least tolerable. She drank hers black. They stood like that, sipping their coffee in silence, the gray faux-marble counter between them like a fence between two pens. He felt like he was in a different world from her.

  "So," she said, "what's your plan?"

  "Well, I'm not sure yet. It depends on how fast things have been moving with your f—with Ed Boone's persona
l affairs. Has his next of kin been notified? I'd like to see his apartment. It'd be a good place to start, and there's got to be a lot of clues in there, maybe even some things about you. There's the will, of course. We want to get that into the right hands. His neighbors. The library. Heceta Head. Anyplace he's spent some time. I usually just start asking questions and see where it leads."

  "Hmm. Doesn't seem all that complicated."

  "What, did you expect Sherlock Holmes?"

  "No. No, I just … I don't know."

  "Most of the time it's not complicated at all. Usually this kind of work is just brute effort when it comes down to it. Being relentless, following one lead to another. There's a lot of dead ends, a lot of conversations that lead nowhere, a lot of hours spent following people or on stakeouts that don't amount to anything. Most PIs are bad not because they lack brilliant deductive reasoning but because most PIs are lazy."

  "Well," she said, "it's a good thing you're not lazy."

  "Oh, no, I'm lazy too. Just not when I'm working."

  "Somehow I have a hard time believing that."

  "Do you want to know how many hours I've spent just sitting in my armchair doing crossword puzzles? Civilizations have risen and fallen, I assure you, while I was filling my days putting tiny letters in tiny boxes."

  "Hmm."

  "Anyway," he said, "I'll know more when I start asking questions. In the meantime, sit tight. Write some songs. I'll swing by at least once a day, if not more."

  "Okay," she said. "One request?"

  "Sure."

  She smiled. "Can you not make it so early next time?"

  Chapter 6

  Feeling better about how he parted from Nora this time—there was still an awkwardness there, a residual tension from their spat last night, but no rancor—Gage headed into town in the van. His first instinct was to check out Ed Boone's apartment, but it was still too early for that. Besides, he needed some breakfast, and he knew the perfect place to do it.

  The fog pressing down on the ocean was already lifting, the ocean extending farther to the horizon, more blue than gray. He had the highway mostly to himself, the road slick and black, the headlamps of the occasional passing car a soft and gauzy yellow. The cast iron clock mounted on the sidewalk outside the U.S. Bank, at the edge of the most touristy part of town, read a quarter past seven, and all the little shops were still dark. Kites, surfboards, T-shirts, saltwater taffy, knickknacks of every size and shape—the windows were filled with all the kitschy stuff that was common in a beach town but would have been out of place just about anywhere else in Oregon. Gage, usually indifferent to this sort of thing, felt strangely morose at the sight of all those empty sidewalks.

  A couple blocks after the clock, he turned east and parked on the street. Unlike the highway, cars were parked on both sides, as well as in the little parking lot right behind McAllister's Family Diner. This was its official name, of course, the latest in a long series of names over the past few decades, but almost everybody just called it "the diner." Or Ed's Diner, if they were real old-timers and remembered its original name. Unfortunately, there weren't many of those folks around anymore, since most of them had been old-timers even back then, and the thing about old-timers was that their time eventually did run out.

  Gage hoped to find at least a few of them.

  He donned his fedora and walked with his cane to the front door. The humidity from yesterday still lingered, and his jacket would have been unnecessary if not for the moisture in the air. Water beaded on the leather. It was quiet enough on the highway that he heard the ocean over the tops of the stores on the other side of the road. The diner was in a low, squat building, a laundromat on one side, a tax preparer on the other, moss growing in the crumbling sidewalk along the front. Through the big front windows, he saw two old guys at separate booths and his heart cheered a little. Maybe luck was on his side.

  Most of the booths and tables were taken, so Gage took a seat at the counter, leaning his cane underneath. That was the thing about the cane. He always had to find a place to put it. The hubbub of conversation was loud enough that he could only barely make out Otis Redding's "(Sittin' On) The Dock of the Bay" playing from the jukebox. The diner might have seemed surprisingly busy for a Monday in September, especially for a town that lived and died by the tourist trade, but it was no surprise to anyone who actually lived in Barnacle Bluffs. The peeling black-and-white checkered tile floor, the yellow stuffing spilling out from all the rips in the vinyl booths, the grease stains that dotted the plain white walls—these may have been off-putting details to some of the ritzier tourists from the valley, but they were signs of familiarity and comfort to the locals who actually kept the place in business.

  A few people glanced at him, but mostly he was ignored. It was why Gage liked the place. Though gossip certainly traveled fast when there was something worth talking about, like any small town, for the most part the locals didn't bother you unless you wanted to be bothered. Be friendly, you usually got friendly back. Keep to yourself, and they'd do the same, no hard feelings. Gage, of course, almost always opted for the second.

  Today, however, he needed to dig deep for his best social self. He drummed his fingers on the counter in time to Redding, and when Judy, the waitress, asked him if he wanted coffee, he actually smiled at her.

  It seemed to catch her off guard, as if she'd just witnessed a rare phenomenon she'd never expected to see. She smiled back, furtively, and when she went to pour his coffee, she splashed a little on the counter. She apologized and dabbed at it with a washcloth from her apron. He hadn't talked to her much over the years, but he'd never seen her spill coffee. He hadn't known it was possible.

  "Good morning, Judy," he said.

  "Good morning, good morning," she said.

  "Got quite a crowd today."

  "We do."

  She stood there with her coffee pot in one hand, the soiled rag in the other, looking at Gage as if not sure what to do next. It was as if she'd forgotten that she was a waitress. He knew she knew who he was, about his past. She'd said some kind words to him during a few of his cases before, so they weren't exactly strangers. A stout woman with stout red hair, not exactly a natural color, but certainly one that matched her bright red lipstick. On someone else, seen someplace else, her appearance might have seemed anachronistic, straight out of the seventies, but since the diner was also straight out of the seventies, it fit. It fit so well, in fact, that he couldn't imagine her outside of it. Maybe she didn't exist outside of it, like a character in a Twilight Zone episode. He thought of mentioning this, as a sort of joke, but couldn't think how to say it without it coming out more like an insult, so he went with the basics instead.

  "I'll have the ham and eggs number two," he said.

  "Oh, right," she said.

  When she started to turn away, he said, "Judy?"

  "Yes?"

  "Have you worked here a long time?"

  "Um, I suppose. Why do you ask?"

  "How long?"

  "Oh gosh, sweetie," she said, "I don't know. Let me see. I moved to Barnacle Bluffs after my divorce, and it was the following winter … Yes, a little over twenty years."

  "So you didn't know the original owner?"

  "Ed Boone? No. I mean, not directly. I think Bart Jellstone had owned it a good five years by that point, and of course the Wellseys after that. I've seen a lot of owners come and go. But I did hear stories about the old days when Ed owned it. Why? What's this about, Garrison?"

  Gage knew he should have anticipated this question, since it was obvious he was going to have to answer it and he couldn't very well tell people the truth, but he hadn't put any thought into a cover story. It may not have been public knowledge that Ed Boone had been the name of the volunteer at Heceta Head who'd committed suicide, but it would be soon enough, so he couldn't very well pretend this was about something else. It had to be something that involved his death that made sense.

  "I'm writing a book," he said.
>
  "A what?"

  "A book. You know, with words and everything."

  "You're writing a book?"

  "Yes."

  "What about? Your cases?"

  "No. Not exactly."

  Gage wished he'd thought of something better, but it was too late now, so he had to go with it. Bill Withers launched into "Lean on Me," and the conversation had lulled just enough that he could actually make out some of the words. It also meant a few of his neighbors might hear his answer, so he wanted it to be a decent one. Fortunately, Judy gave him a bit more time.

  "Hold on, sweetie," she said, "let me get your order in first, and put down this coffee pot. I want to hear everything about this, though! Be back in a jiffy."

  She sounded sincere, and probably was. The advantage someone like Judy had was that she probably didn't have to fake sincerity when it came to small talk. She actually wanted to hear what people had to say, and it made him feel bad lying to her. He watched her clip his order to the cord that ran along the window to the kitchen, his mind skipping past a dozen different book possibilities. By the time she returned to him, he thought he had something at least somewhat plausible.

  "It's called Barnacle Bluffs Blues: The Secret Stories of a Small Coastal Town," he explained.

  "Oh!" Judy said.

  "History, humor, anecdote. You know, a little bit of everything. I've learned a lot about this place from all the work I've done, and I thought it might be fun to put it into a book."

  "Certainly. I mean, I can think of lots of stories for your book. I hear all kinds of things working here."

  "I'm sure you do. That's what I'm hoping."

  "Like the Johnson twins," Judy said, leaning in. "You hear about them? This was, oh, maybe seven, eight years ago. The little one, she—"