Page 86 of Tempest at Annabel's Lighthouse
Shea put a hand on Holt’s arm.
He waved her off, slipping into the shadows of the room, just out of view of Captain Gene.
Shea narrowed her eyes. Was Holt going to pounce on the man? A surge of empathy for her intruder, and irritation toward her would-be protector, flooded her then.
“That’s it!” Shea’s words cracked through the silence.
Holt jumped, and his shoulder struck the wall, sending a small oil painting of a black bear careening from its hook and sliding across the floor. Captain Gene fell against the doorway, clutching the jamb for balance, his eyes growing big in his wizened face.
Shea flicked on the light switch, thoroughly finished with the subterfuge.
She got her first good look at Captain Gene, and for a moment her world tilted like a ship on the crest of a tidal wave. Dark eyes set in his wrinkled face, shaggy white hair sticking out over his ears. His nose was rounded on the tip like a cuddly Santa Claus, but it wasn’t red and chapped from the cold. Instead, it was weathered from the buffeting wind, the years spent in the Porcupine Mountains. His flannel shirt was half untucked in his faded, navy-blue trousers. His jacket was a khaki-colored slicker with a patch over the right side of his chest, boasting a pine tree in green embroidery and the wordsProtect the Trees. But it was his eyes. His expression. His startled stare that burrowed into hers that was so eerily familiar, Shea could only swing to the younger version of Captain Gene, who now stiffened in the corner of the room.
“You!” She shifted back to the captain, calculating the visual evidence of what was still remarkably unclear to her. “You’re...” She couldn’t finish.
It was very apparent that Holt and Captain Gene shared a large amount of DNA. If someone put Captain Gene’s life into rewind, the years would strip away the influence of age from his face and body. His form would straighten into a broad-shoulderedstature. His eyes would become less lined, less sunken in his face. His hair would grow blonder, and he would essentially become like Holt, and Holt would become Captain Gene. It was only the decades that separated them. The decades and, apparently, the truth.
Captain Gene seemed to recover from Shea’s impatient outburst. He held his arm out toward Holt, his palm extended, whether to shush him or keep Holt at bay, Shea wasn’t certain. He was stern when he faced Shea, and Holt was, strangely enough, obedient and silent.
“It is time for you to go.” Captain Gene’s declaration was controlled and authoritative. It was as though his age alone demanded compliance.
But Shea was not the compliant type, and Pete lay upstairs with a busted arm. There was no way she was going to leave him behind. “Give me one good reason why I should go.”
34
REBECCA
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee...
Annabel Lee
ANNABEL’S LIGHTHOUSE
SPRING, 1874
SHE’D WANTEDTHIS MOMENT TO COME—had ached for it, in fact—but with the onslaught of recollection came the assault of pain such recollection caused. They came in waves, forceful and strong. They held Rebecca under the waters of memory and dared her to try to swim to the surface and break free. But breaking free from such reminders of pain was as impossible as saving a doomed ship after it had foundered and slipped below the waves.
Rebecca no longer struggled against her restraints. Instead, she sagged against the wall of the shack, desperate to regain some sort of hope, some semblance of reason to keep fighting—andshe couldn’t find any. That was how it had all begun in the first place. When one lost the will to fight, one was left with only defeat. If defeat became the bed in which she was going to lie for the rest of her life, then any risk to escape it was no risk at all. She would merely dodge death for as long as she could until it came and saved her from this agony she’d lived in since childhood.
She would not bring her own babe into such a world. Rebecca knew she would be judged harshly for that were someone savvy enough to read her mind. But a babe had never been a part of the life Rebecca struggled to escape to. She would never submit an innocent into this world of darkness, of selfish entitlement. And it wasn’t Abel’s decision—he didn’t know,couldn’tknow—what it meant to grow up in such darkness. To cower in the corners beneath the doom-filled sound of heavy feet thudding against the floor on a mission to find you. Ghosts? What were ghosts in the wake of human hatred?
Maybe she should throw herself at Annabel’s mercy and allow the spirit of her mother to take her once and for all, to rescue her from this evil as any mother should do—asshewould do—for her own child.
Maybe death was better than life. This was a riddle too many misunderstood. Kjersti had already gone before. Eternity was supposed to be filled with hope and grace, and wouldn’t that be a better place to dwell?
But the babe! If she ceased to live, the babe would too, and then she would be a killer—like her father was threatening to do with her. But how could she bring a child into this dark and awful place?
Rebecca closed her eyes against the battery of her internal conflict. The shack was growing chilled. She could hear Bear outside the door, grumbling and growling to himself. The smoke from his pipe—a sickeningly sweet scent of tobacco—wafted toward her through the cracks in the wooden door.
It all came down to this.
This shack.
This place Hilliard, her father, believed would be where Rebecca finally confessed, revealing where she’d hidden the papers—papers she now remembered were the numbers—columns of them—and notes—pages of them—that would prove he’d been partaking in fraudulent business practices. Proof that his investors would be horrified to learn. It would ruin Hilliard. It would ruin his investors if they didn’t find out the truth.
And then there was the map. The map of a silver vein? If true, she could see why Hilliard was gambling, fixing numbers and moving funds. He would start to mine a new vein—one that wasn’t going belly-up—and then the investors would never know of the money he’d stolen.
The miners and their families coming to Silvertown, coming to the Porcupine Mountains, deserved better than Hilliard’s schemes of wealth. She had seen the papers. She had seen what they exposed. She had also seen other fraudulent papers, ones she hadn’t bothered to steal. The modified ones that Hilliard exposed to his investors, promising a controlled wealth of silver in an area where silver would go dry in months.
