Chapter 3

Morning came too soon for Lane. It had been well after two by the time she’d crawled into bed, and she’d spent another hour tossing, trying to explain away what she’d seen, and failing completely. The fact that the Burtons would be pulling out in less than an hour did little to brighten her mood. In the five years they’d been staying at the Cloister, Dan and Dottie Burton had become like family, sending newsy e-mails along with the latest travel pics, and lately, drawings had begun to arrive in the mail from their granddaughter, Shelly. The most recent, a somewhat abstract rendition of her new puppy, Tango, stared back at her with bright green crayon eyes as she closed the refrigerator door.

Lane couldn’t help smiling. They had been her very first guests, a sweet, comfortable old couple, married so long they’d actually started to resemble each other, and often finished each other’s sentences. She could hear them upstairs now as she pulled out a handful of silverware and prepared to set the table—opening and closing bureau drawers, making a final check for items left behind, followed by the steady bump of suitcases being lugged downstairs. It would certainly be quiet when they were gone.

After filling the cream and sugar, Lane stacked a tray with mugs and carried it to the small sunroom just off the kitchen, where high arched windows usually offered a stunning view of the beach. Today, the view was anything but stunning. The sea was a heaving mass of gray-green swells, and the sun was nowhere to be seen, lost in a sky of scudding pewter clouds. She frowned at the windows, washed the day before yesterday and already hazy with salt spray. After the Burtons were gone she wouldn’t have to wash them until March if she didn’t feel like it.

“Yoo-hoo!”

Dottie Burton’s cheerful greeting brought Lane around with what she hoped was a warm smile. “Morning, Dottie. All packed and ready to hit the road?”

Dottie was a young sixty, plump and pretty in a lived-in sort of way, with a quick smile and the slow, sweet drip of Nashville, Tennessee, in her voice.

“Dan’s putting the bags in the trunk as we speak. I hate that we’re having to desert early. Really, we’d be happy to pay you for the other three days.”

Lane filled a mug with coffee and passed it over. “Don’t be silly. It’s not like I lost a booking. The season’s over.”

“And tomorrow you’ll have this big old place to yourself.” Dottie heaped a third spoonful of sugar into her mug and began to stir. She took it sweet, like her tea. “It must be a relief not to have to cook for anyone but yourself, to just eat a sandwich over the sink if you feel like it. By the way, what smells so amazing?”

Lane lifted her nose and sniffed, then remembered the breakfast casserole she’d stuck in the oven. “Good Lord! It’s the breakfast if I haven’t burned it.”

Dan appeared as Lane pulled the casserole from the oven. He spotted the coffeepot on the table and made a beeline for it. “Pretty nasty out there,” he said into his mug. “Windy as the very devil, and I don’t like the look of that sky. No, sir.”

Lane took another quick peek out the window. “Let’s get you fed and on the road, then.” The casserole was crispy at the edges, but salvageable. She served up two plates and carried them to the table, then topped off their coffee. “I made muffins, too, so you can take some with you. If the weather turns and you have to pull off, at least I know you won’t starve.”

Dottie looked up from her plate. “Do you think it’s going to get that bad?”

Lane bit her lip as she eyed the sky through the kitchen window, but she gave the woman’s plump shoulder a squeeze. “It’s only a tropical storm. Just some wind and rain, maybe a few trees down, but then, I’m no expert. I’ve never been through one of these. They haven’t made us leave, so that’s a good sign, right?”

Dan shot his wife a look that said eat faster.

When the breakfast plates were in the sink, Lane bagged a half dozen still-warm muffins and filled two to-go cups with coffee. They said their good-byes on the front porch—a handshake from Dan, a hug and a kiss on both cheeks from Dottie, along with promises to send pictures of the new grandbaby when he arrived in spring.

“You write lots of pretty articles this winter, honey. I’ll be looking for them. And maybe if you get time you could go see your mama for the holidays. I don’t like to think of you here by yourself on Thanksgiving and Christmas.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lane assured her. “And up to my ears in deadlines by the time the holidays roll around. Please promise you’ll be careful. Pull off if it gets bad, or turn around and come back. Your room will be waiting.”

Lane waved from the porch as the Burtons’ silver Buick backed down the drive. As the car disappeared from sight, her eyes slid across the street to the Rourke House. Suddenly, she felt silly. In the light of day there wasn’t anything remotely sinister about the place. And yet as she stared at its windows, rimed with years of salt and dust, she couldn’t shake the memory of last night. She shivered again as she turned to go inside, reminding herself that the police had promised to keep an eye on the place.

In the kitchen, she poured herself a cup of coffee and dished up a serving of the now-cold breakfast casserole, thinking of Dottie as she ate it over the sink. With the Burtons gone the inn felt empty. But then, it always did when the last guest checked out: a peculiar blend of loss and relief as time slowed and she traded her innkeeper persona for pen and paper.

And who knew? Maybe one day she’d actually get around to visiting some of the places she wrote about. For now it was enough to hibernate, to burrow in, away from the world, and put words to paper, even if it was only an article here and there. Her name would appear in print from time to time, and now and then a check would appear in her mailbox, money in exchange for words. For a person of limited talent, it was really all she had a right to expect.

After tidying the kitchen, then stripping and straightening the Burtons’ room, Lane laced up her muck boots, donned a heavy fleece jacket, and slipped a bag of stale bread into her pocket. The wind hit her hard as she stepped out the back door, damp and full of blowing sand. Standing with her feet braced wide apart, she shielded her eyes and scanned the beach, wondering whether she should skip her usual morning walk to the light.

Aside from last year’s weeklong bout with flu, she’d made the mile-and-a-half trek to the light every morning for five years. She found clarity in the daily walks, like a kind of moving meditation that lifted away the fog and set the stage for the rest of the day. She saw no reason to let a little wind—or even a lot of wind—cheat her of that. She was contemplating going back for gloves when an unexpected flash of color caught her eye, a bright bit of purple against the dreary seascape.

But it couldn’t be. Not today, in weather like this.

Standing on tiptoe, Lane peered past the back gate, stunned to see that the ragtag old woman was, in fact, seated in her customary spot on the dunes. She had appeared for the first time only a few weeks ago, a rarity since most beach walkers disappeared the minute the warm weather did. Even die-hard Starry Point natives—Old Pointers, they called themselves—rarely ventured onto the dunes past October, and this was the middle of November. Yet, each morning like clockwork, she continued to appear, clutching her purple bag and staring out to sea, as if watching for something no one else could see.

Today, she sat huddled against the wind in an oversize Windbreaker and a lumpy gray sweater, clutching the ever-present bag as if the wind might take it. They had never spoken, or even made eye contact, though Lane had always been curious about the woman’s story. For the slimmest of moments Lane considered approaching, but something in the rigid set of the old woman’s shoulders seemed to forbid it. Instead, she braced against a fresh blast of wind and zipped her jacket to her throat.

The gate wailed as she dragged it open, then clanged shut noisily when the wind snatched it from her hand. The woman flinched, whipping her head in Lane’s direction. For an instant, eyes of indistinct color met hers, wary or confused, Lane couldn’t say which. Then, as quickly as the gaze had settled on her, it withdrew, lost again out to sea.

Determined to give the old woman a wide berth, Lane lowered her head and set off across the dunes. She wanted to pretend the encounter hadn’t unnerved her, but it had. It seemed everything unnerved her these days: old women, the wind, phantom lights in vacant houses. Maybe it was the weather. She’d heard somewhere that low pressure did strange things to cats and pregnant women. Why not innkeepers with active imaginations?

Whatever it was, she was determined to shake it. She doubled her pace, but it was far from an easy go. The dunes were already taking a beating, and the blowing sand made it hard to see. Overhead, a pack of gulls circled and dipped, screeching for the bread in her pocket.

“You know the drill, boys,” she said to them. “Not till we reach the light, and then you have to share.”

A single gull broke from the pack, wings flashing white as it swooped low, then lifted away with a shrill cry—the equivalent, Lane supposed, of a child stomping from the room. By the time she reached the lighthouse, dozens more would have taken its place.

Ahead, Starry Point Light braced for the coming storm, sturdy and steadfast after a century’s worth of rain and wind and surf. The gulls were gathering in earnest now, circling in noisy anticipation as she turned onto the jetty and covered the last few yards. The rocks were too wet to sit on, but the wind was easier on the leeward side of the light. Dragging the bag from her pocket, she crumpled a slice of bread and tossed it into the air, watching the feeding frenzy as the wind took the crumbs.

The air was a blur of salt and sand as she glanced back down the beach, so hazy she could barely make out the roofline of the inn, tucked back from the dunes. Originally built in 1896 as a convent, the Cloister had weathered its share of storms; it had weathered its share of incarnations, too, serving, after the nuns left, as everything from a boys’ home to a record storage facility and most recently a women’s health clinic, until the pious new mayor had it shut down for permit violations.

The Cloister.

Even the name had struck a chord the first time she heard it, conjuring thoughts of peace and quiet, of seclusion—of escape. She had closed in just two weeks, plunking down nearly every cent of the divorce settlement before she had time to change her mind. It felt rash at the time—rash and good—to finally have something that was hers, and hers alone. Her mother had been horrified when she finally broke the news. But then, when had Cynthia Kramer not been horrified by something her oldest daughter had done?

And then there was Bruce, the real reason she’d left Chicago. Their marriage had been doomed from the beginning, despite her husband’s meteoric rise to become head of Chicago General’s cardiac surgical unit and all the trappings that came with such a title—the egos, the parties, the pretty young nurses. It had ended, not with a bang but with a whimper, after she’d miscarried their first child.

Her fault, of course—somehow everything was always her fault—the warm gush of scarlet soaking through her lemon yellow slacks in the middle of lunch, the sudden horror, the moment of knowing. She had come to in the hospital, the child—the little girl who was to have been named Emma—gone. Bruce was there when she opened her eyes, his first words not expressions of care or concern, but of accusation. “What did you do?”

Her marriage had died that day, along with her child, and yet, for nearly a year after, she had worn her good-wife face as it all came unraveled: through his desertion of their bed, the transparent late nights and spur-of-the-moment conference weekends, the hamper of dirty shirts reeking of someone else’s perfume.

Lane shivered involuntarily, though whether the reaction had to do with the memory of those dark days, or with the blast of sea spray that suddenly gusted in off the waves, she couldn’t say. In the time it had taken to reach the jetty, the wind had risen considerably, its constant rush melding now with the hiss and roar of the waves, until one had become indistinguishable from the other. The sea, too, was on the move, the tide pushing in, boiling up onto the rocks in a ceaseless swirl of green and white. If she stayed much longer, she was going to end up soaked.

With the bread gone and the gulls disbanded, Lane shoved the empty sandwich bag into her pocket, tugged her hood up onto her head, and made her way in from the jetty. At least the wind would be with her on the way back.

The rain started around two, just as Lane was returning from a last-minute run for supplies. She darted inside with an armload of bags, trying not to dwell on the sullen clouds shredding overhead. Every radio station up and down the dial seemed to be blasting information: storm coordinates, wind speeds, projected surges on Manteo, Nags Head, Duck, and Starry Point. She had turned it off. No point worrying about the numbers now. She was as ready as she was going to get.

Sam Redman had come by yesterday and taped all the windows with big ugly X’s. Better than nothing, he had grumbled when she told him she’d never gotten around to pricing the storm shutters he recommended four years ago. She had also misjudged when to start thinking about things like water, canned goods, and batteries. Unfortunately, Old Pointers were well acquainted with the ins and outs of storm preparation and hadn’t made the same mistake. By the time she got to town, the Village Mart looked as if it had been set upon by a pack of zombies, plundered of everything but meat and produce.

She’d had no luck with batteries but had at least managed to scare up a few gallons of water and a lone jar of peanut butter. Crunchy wasn’t her favorite, but it would have to do. She had fuel for the Coleman stove, two loaves of fresh-baked bread, and a huge pot of soup cooling on the stove. She might end up sitting in the dark, but she wasn’t likely to starve.

After recording a “closed for the season” message referring callers to the inn’s Web site, she brewed a mug of Earl Grey and carried it upstairs, resigned to nailing herself to the chair in her writing room until she completed a first draft of the vintage soap-making piece that was due next week.

The first day of the off-season was generally one of her most productive, when she was finally free to mold the ideas that had been percolating all summer, to lose all sense of time without a care for anyone else’s needs. No bread to bake, no beds to change, no constantly being available for guests.

But today was different somehow. Even her writing room failed to inspire, despite last night’s careful preparations. Folders filled with research and interview notes were stacked to her right, scraps of ideas captured on pastel-colored sticky notes were arranged to her left, and in the center, her laptop awaited only the touch of a button to bring it to life. All that was missing was inspiration.

As always, when her creativity was playing hide-and-seek, Lane reached into the desk for the old sketchbook, tucked carefully in the center drawer. From the moment one of the contractors had discovered it in a dusty nook beneath the stairs, the book had held a strange fascination for her. She had scoured it for a signature or date, anything that might offer some clue about its origin, but there was nothing. Now, after five years, she knew every scuff and scar on the leather cover, every smooth place worn along its spine, every gorgeous, lushly colored sketch: fairy-tale images of castles and princes and fair-haired damsels, each framed with an intricate vine of white flowers, like something from a child’s storybook, but all done by hand.

Even now, Lane’s fingers moved with a kind of awe as she turned to her favorite illustration at the back of the book, faded with who knew how many years, but still enchanting. It was a two-masted schooner in the throes of a storm, its sails in shreds, its keel shattered on a jagged rise of rock, and on the shoals, a bare-breasted woman with a shimmering tail and creamy white shells woven into her flame-kissed hair.

The drawing had disturbed her the first time she ran across it, its doomed ship and storm-tossed sea too real, too much like life with its storms and its choices. Be brave or yield. Lane knew about yielding, about slowly letting yourself go hollow, until one day you looked in the mirror and no longer recognized the woman staring back, and wondering where you’d gone—or if you’d ever really been there at all.

Maybe that was the real reason the image fascinated her, why little by little a kind of fable had rooted itself in her thoughts: a cautionary tale about a woman too weak to fight the tide, who chose to end her days in a great stone tower overlooking the sea. Purely fictional, of course, but sometimes—like now—her fingers itched to write that story. But she wouldn’t. Not this year. Not ever. Because doing so would mean having to confront her own long list of shipwrecks, and when all was said and done, she simply hadn’t the courage. Safer to stick to her articles and play with words she knew wouldn’t burn.

Sighing, she closed the book of illustrations and slid it back into the drawer, feeling the old familiar ache. It came less often now, but today it had come with a vengeance. Not sadness exactly, but the numbing awareness that this was all there would ever be. Once upon a time, she’d dreamed of so much more, of love and marriage and children, of somehow leaving her mark on the world. Now, as she stared out past the dunes, she saw that even the footprints she’d left in the sand a few hours ago were already gone, blown over—as if she’d never been there at all.

She sipped her tea, too sweet since it had gone cold. She hated herself when she was like this, pouty and discontent, wallowing in the past. If she wasn’t careful she’d soon find herself in the clutches of a full-blown sulk. Hardly the way she’d envisioned her first day of creative freedom.

Shake it off, Kramer. This is ridiculous. Not to mention exactly what Bruce would want.

The thought of Bruce reveling in her self-pity was enough to light a fire. Powering up the laptop, she reached for a folder with WILD AND SWEET VINTAGE SOAPS printed neatly on the tab. Before she could open it, a bit of movement caught her eye, a quick blur of purple. Surely it wasn’t. Pushing up out of her chair, she peered down at the beach. The old woman had been gone when she returned from the lighthouse, removed, Lane assumed, to safer and drier ground. Now here she was again, hunched on the dunes in a blowing gray rain. Clearly, the poor thing wasn’t well.

By the time Lane dragged on a pair of shoes and scrambled down two flights of stairs and out the back door, the woman was already on the move, crabbing her way up the dune and past the back gate. If she noticed Lane at the open door, she gave no sign, her drenched white head hunched into her collar as she skirted the boardwalk and cut across the vacant lot that bordered the inn.

With no thought for a jacket, Lane slipped out into the rain and through the gate to follow. She had no idea why, or what she might say if she were discovered creeping up behind her. She only knew the woman had no business being out in this weather. Moving furtively, she held back a few steps in hopes of avoiding discovery, but it was no good. As she turned the corner of the yard, the woman suddenly rounded on her.

For the second time that day, Lane found herself caught in that strange gaze, a mingling of panic and challenge. But this time it lingered, questioning. Friend or foe? it seemed to ask. The moment stretched, an uncomfortable eternity as they stood eying each other, soaked through and buffeted by the wind. Lane felt a prickle along the back of her neck, as if words had somehow passed between them, though the old woman stood as still and mute as stone. She should speak, she knew, say something, but her lips felt suddenly numb, useless.

It might have been a minute or an hour, but finally the old woman turned away, scuttling with startling speed across the grassy lot, vanishing behind a tall thicket of red cedars out along the road. Moments later, she reemerged on a bike, an ancient, rusty contraption with an enormous basket in front and a jaunty pink DayGlo flag in back.

Lane stood shivering at the edge of Old Point Road, arms wrapped close to her body, blinking fat drops from her lashes as she watched the bright plastic flag gradually fade from sight, praying the poor woman had a safe place to ride out the storm.