Kiss River - Diane Chamberlain

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walked outside, Sasha running ahead of him, and Lacey followed the two of them, leaving Gina hugged, chastened and deserted all at once.

      She knew that Clay was a widower. Lacey had told her his interior-designer wife had died in an accident in November and that he was still not over it. They’d had a fantastic marriage, she’d said. Gina was not a believer in fantastic marriages, but she was not about to argue the point with Lacey, who obviously missed her sister-in-law. And Clay, although quiet and understandably humorless, was nevertheless treating her very kindly. He’d even let her use his computer to check her e-mail, something she had been anxious to do since leaving Bellingham, and he told her she could use the computer anytime she liked.

      Sitting in her car in the parking lot, she thought about using it now to check her e-mail again, although she had done so just before noon. She glanced toward the broken lighthouse, and noticed that the ocean sounded calmer and quieter than she’d heard it since her arrival. There were a few more hours until sunset, she thought. She would go for a walk. Maybe she could find the Coast Guard station from Bess’s diary.

      She left her sandals in the car and walked along the short path through the shrubs until she came to the lighthouse. Wading through the shallow water past the tower, she turned right onto the beach. The coastline was obviously quite different from the days of Bess’s diary and not at all easy to walk on. Now, the beach was very narrow, even disappearing in some places where the waves chewed at the green groundcover instead of sand, and Gina had to walk through water. The waves were little more than ripples slipping toward shore.

      In the pages of the diary, the Coast Guard station seemed to be no more than a half a mile from the lighthouse, but Gina walked at least a mile without seeing a trace of it. She had seen no buildings, as a matter of fact. The slender thread of beach butted up against hardy-looking trees and shrubs. She’d seen no people, either, and the solitude was eerie, the only sound the lapping of the nearly flat waves against the shore and the occasional breaking of twigs in the woods to her right. She was glad she’d learned that the horses and hogs were gone.

      Dead bodies had washed up on this beach, she thought as she walked. And a man had been murdered here.

      Her gaze was drawn to the water a distance ahead of her. Someone was swimming in the ocean. As Gina grew closer, she saw it was an older woman, who was now coming out of the water onto the beach, wringing the sea out of her long gray hair.

      The woman waved at her, reaching down to pick up a towel from the sand.

      “Hi,” Gina called as she neared her. “How’s the water?”

      “Glorious,” the woman said. “It’s so calm. I think I swam about two miles today.” The woman looked like a swimmer, with broad shoulders and powerful thighs. She tilted her head at Gina. “I come here almost every day and you’re just about the first person I’ve seen out here,” she said.

      “I was looking for the Coast Guard station.”

      “Coast Guard station?” the woman said. “You mean a life-saving station?”

      Gina recalled that the Coast Guard stations had originally been home to the life-saving crews. “Yes,” she said.

      “The nearest are up in Ocean Sands or down in Sanderling,” the woman said, toweling off her arms.

      Gina was confused. “I thought there was one right about here.”

      The woman shook her head, then a spark came to her eyes. “Oh,” she said. “I know the one you mean. I’ve read about it, and it was along here, you’re right. But it was lost in a storm in the sixties, I think. That was before I moved here, so I’m not sure exactly when. A lot of erosion along here since then.” She waved her hand to take in the beach. “It’s changed a lot even since I moved here.”

      “Ah, that figures,” Gina said, disappointed. Storms, storms, storms. She was coming to realize that weather was the source of devastation around here. “Well, thanks,” she said with a wry smile. “I guess I can stop looking now.”

      “Sorry,” the woman said. She bent over to pick up her beach bag. Straightening again, she looked at Gina.

      “You have a nice evening,” she said, then waved as she walked toward a path leading into the vegetation near the beach.

      “You, too,” Gina said.

      She watched the woman disappear into the trees, then turned and headed back toward Kiss River.

      She walked along the beach, her feet slapping in and out of the shallow waves, feeling alone. When she reached the lighthouse again, she stood in knee-high water, staring out at the sea. She thought of that woman on the beach, walking out of the water. Gina could swim, but she had never before been in the ocean. The Pacific off the coast of Washington was far too cold to swim in. Her eyes searched the water in front of her. What if the lens was just below the surface? Maybe it would not even need to be raised to suit her purpose.

      She’d brought no bathing suit with her, since swimming had certainly not been part of her plan when she drove east from Washington. But she had on shorts and a T-shirt and no one was around to see her make a fool of herself. Slowly, she started walking into the water. It was nearly high tide, probably not the best time for a search, but the sea was rarely this calm. She would do this methodically, she told herself. She’d walk in an arc around the ocean side of the lighthouse, expanding the arc each time she changed direction. The idea suddenly seemed amazingly simple. The lens weighed three tons. Even if it had broken apart when it fell into the sea, the pieces should still be large enough for her to find.

      She walked quickly at first, whisking her hands through the water in all directions, hoping to feel something hard and smooth. Then she had to slow down as the water grew deeper. Occasionally, her feet stumbled over chunks of brick and mortar, but nothing resembling glass. Finally, she was deep enough that she was half swimming, half treading water, trying not to think about sharks and riptides. She’d never experienced either of them, but had certainly heard enough about both hazards. A couple of times, she held her breath and dipped her head below the surface of the water, opening her eyes to look around her, but she couldn’t see more than a couple of feet away from her in any direction and the salt burned her eyes.

      She’d been in the water a long time when she turned to look behind her and was stunned to see how small the lighthouse had become. A little jolt of fear shot through her. She was far out into the sea, but still, it was not that deep here, perhaps only a couple of feet above her head, and she calmed herself with that thought as she swam toward shore, a heavy aching in her chest. She had covered a lot of territory out here. She had touched every speck of the sea bottom with her feet and found nothing. The lens, with its tie to both her past and her future, had simply disappeared.

      Chapter Ten

       Thursday, March 19, 1942

      THE MOST SHOCKING AND HORRIBLE THING happened to me today. I am not even sure I can write about it because words just can’t tell how awful it was, but I think it might make me feel better if I write it down, so I will try. It’s midnight now and I can’t sleep, anyway. I’m afraid if I go to sleep, I’ll have nightmares.

      I like to climb trees. I always have. Mama scolds me about it, saying that I think I’m so grown-up and all, but I am still just a little kid who climbs trees. Well, I don’t know if I’ll ever outgrow that, or even if I want to. I plan to climb trees with my own children someday. Anyhow, I like sitting up in the trees above the beach just south of Kiss River. There is a wonderful tree there, not very tall, with its branches spread out almost like a platform about ten feet above the ground, and I usually sit up there after school, eating an apple or something and sometimes reading. And to tell the truth, I sometimes sneak out of the house and sit up there at night, because that is the stretch of beach that Jimmy Brown patrols and I like watching him. I would die if he ever knew I was there, but the trees are thick and I am sure he can’t see me at night, even if he turned his flashlight on me.

      So today, after school, it was really warm out and not as windy as

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