Page 37 of Beachfront Pages

"What do you make of her?" Sally said it light, but her eyes were doing the opposite of light. "You've spent more hours with that woman than anybody in this town. Jan says she carries two coffees over from the Brew most afternoons—one for her, one for you. A person talks, over that much coffee. So. What's her story?"

"She reads." Marty shrugged. "It's a bookshop. Readers come to bookshops. That's the entire business model."

"That's not what I asked and you know it."

"She likes to argue about books. I happen to have a lot of books to argue about." He shrugged, and didn't much care for the little kick his pulse gave at more hours with that woman than anybody. "It's good for trade. She's the only person all week who'll fight me on Faulkner."

"I'm not asking what she reads, Marty. I'm asking who she is." Sally shifted the bag, though it wasn't really about the bag. "Where she came from. Why a woman like that turns up alone at the end of the road in the off-season and won't give a straight answer about her own life. She tell you any of that?"

He went to answer and found he hadn't much to answer with. He thought for a moment, and the more he thought about it, the stranger it got. Georgetown, once. A career she circled and never quite explained. Not one thing past that.

"She doesn't talk about herself," he said finally. "She'll go ten rounds on a book and not tell you a single thing about her own life. I hadn't noticed until you asked."

"Mm." He could see her file it away. "Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

"People are entitled to their privacy. I'm the last man alive who'd begrudge anybody that."

"Privacy's one thing." Sally wasn't quite smiling now. "A woman who answers every question with another question is something else. I've fed about every stray that ever washed up at those cottages, and the ones who won't say where they've been are usually running from it." She studied him a moment. "I just like to know who I'm feeding."

"Then ask her."

"I'm asking the man she brings the coffee to."

"Jan pours the second cup before Fiona can stop her." Which was true, and beside the point, and he knew it even as he said it. "There's nothing to know, Sally. She's a customer who likes a good argument."

"Uh-huh." Sally let it sit, the way the women in this town all seemed to know how to do. "Well. She's a nice woman. Lonely, I think, under all that polish." She hitched the bag one last time. "You'd tell me if you knew something, wouldn't you?"

"There's nothing to tell."

"No. Of course not." Sally smiled—not like she'd won, but like she'd gotten the one measurement she'd come out here for. She started off down the walk, then turned back. "Get out of this heat, Marty. Go put your feet up. You work too much for a man with nothing to show for it."

"Thank you, Sally. Truly. A real comfort."

Her laugh carried back to him as she went.

He didn't go straight home. Home was a few rooms over the shop, and he told himself it was the heat in the apartment. The rooms upstairs held the day's warmth, and a walk along the water would cool him some. That was part of it.

The waterfront had gone quiet and blue. Out past the breakwater the Gulf lay flat and burnished, holding the last of the light. He walked with his hands in his pockets. There was nobody around to catch him at it, so he let himself think about her.

Fiona Wells. She'd come into his shop like a woman braced for disappointment and stayed to take him apart over the merits of a locked-room mystery. She was sharp in a way that didn't show off. She knew more about books than she let on. Far more. Every time she let a little of it slip, she'd pull back fast, like she'd shown a card she meant to keep. He'd noticed. He noticed everything about her, which was its own kind of problem.

She argued the way Annette used to argue. That was the thing he kept circling back to. Not to win. Annette had never once cared about winning. She'd cared whether the idea was the truth. She'd push and push about something because she loved it. People only fought that hard about something they couldn't stand to see gotten wrong.

He stopped at the rail and looked out at the water for a while.

"You're a foolish old man," he said, to the harbor.

The harbor, like the boxes in his shop, declined to argue.

He hadn't felt this in sixteen years. He'd been careful not to. A man learned, after a thing like Annette, exactly how much it cost to want somebody in the room with him. He'd let a person matter once. Then the world did what it did, and he'd ended up at a kitchen table for one, learning the size of the empty house all over again. He'd made his peace with that. He'd built a whole quiet life on the peace he'd made.

And now here was a woman who fought about Faulkner. Who brought him coffee. Who looked at his rare collection like it meant something.

"It scares me," he said to the water, because there was nobody to hear it. "There. I said it."

He walked on.

The path curved out toward the point. The lighthouse stood pale against the darkening sky, the way it had stood since 1885, the way it would stand long after he'd stopped walking past it. The cottages sat in their half circle below, light spilling out of the windows. He knew the order now without meaning to learn it.