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  But then I'd been invited to make the pleasant drive along the coast from Seattle, all expenses paid, as the guest of the Lighthouse Farmer's Market. I could do my research into house flipping during my visit, at no cost to myself other than a few hours of my time, which I had in abundance now that my office was shut down. Getting the most out of any opportunity was just the sort of thing I'd always recommended to my financial planning clients; minimizing expenses was as important to financial planning as maximizing income.

  Based on all of my mother's stories, I'd expected to have, at best, a boring weekend, but it was turning out to be quite pleasant, with the town seeming much more like the chamber of commerce's description than my mother's. The Ocean View B&B was easily the equal of the very best B&Bs I'd stayed in elsewhere. Even my mother, predisposed to dislike everything in Danger Cove, couldn't have found any fault with it or with its manager.

  And then there was the director of the Danger Cove Historical Museum, Gillian Torres, who'd issued the invitation and had been waiting for me when I arrived at the market this morning. Gil—pronounced with a hard G, she told me, and not a J sound—was a statuesque black woman with a tendency to break into song at the least little provocation. She'd been humming the theme from Gilligan's Island at the beginning of the play, which would have been annoying if anyone else had done it, but her voice was so rich that my only complaint was that she'd stopped too soon.

  Gil was seated in the folding chair beside me in the front row of the audience. The thirty-minute play had barely begun when she looked down at her phone and then leaned over to whisper, "I'm sorry, but there's something I need to take care of. I'll meet you at the entrance to the lighthouse when this is over."

  I nodded my understanding. Gil had arranged to give me a tour of the lighthouse where three generations of my ancestors had lived. Normally it was closed to the public out of safety concerns. The exterior had been rehabilitated in recent years, thanks to the Save the Danger Cove Lighthouse Committee, but the interior renovations were still very much a work in progress. I'd been told that the town was still raising funds for the work, and some of the proceeds from today's events, including the raffle of the quilt being completed over near the parking lot, would go to that cause. My great-great-great-grandmother had been a quilter, and I'd read somewhere that quilting was a three or four billion dollar a year industry. Maybe I'd look into the opportunities there more thoroughly if house flipping didn't work out.

  The play continued, with a variety of heroic efforts to get a boat into the water to go after six dripping wet sailors pantomiming going down for the third time in the portion of the stage that represented the waters outside the cove. It was perhaps five minutes after Gil had excused herself when I heard shouting over to my left, where the actual farmer's market was set up with temporary stalls selling produce, baked goods, and craft items.

  There were two rows of stalls lining opposite sides of a ten-foot-wide path that led up a slope to the lighthouse. A thin man, probably in his late twenties, with long dark hair pulled back into a ponytail and dressed in a bright Hawaiian shirt and sagging jeans, stood in the middle of the path between the two rows of stalls, stopping people at random and telling them, at the top of his considerable lungs, just how much he loved hot peppers.

  "Try it, you'll like it," he shouted before turning to the next clump of people. He repeated his words and pointed back over his shoulder at the first stall in the far row. The farmer there had ducked out of sight, apparently not terribly appreciative of the free advertising.

  Another man, around the same age as the disruptive one, but in khaki pants and a T-shirt printed with the town name and an image of its lighthouse on the front and Market Manager in bold letters on the back, ran over to intercept the boisterous pepper fan. The manager was a good six inches shorter than the loud man and about fifty pounds overweight. The manager began arguing with the other man, although his voice wasn't quite as loud, and I couldn't make out his words. The manager's hand gestures, pointing toward the exit, made his meaning clear: Leave. Now.

  "Peppers here," the loud man shouted. "Get 'em while they're hot!" He broke into giggles, oblivious to the manager's clenched fists and escalating anger.

  A few yards away at the quilting bee, a white-haired, frail-looking woman seated at what was clearly the most honored spot around the quilt frame rose to her feet. Another woman, brunette and probably ten years younger than the first, rushed to the first woman's side, and both went over to where the commotion continued.

  The white-haired quilter said something that immediately silenced both the disruptive man and the manager. The pepper lover hung his head, covered his mouth as another giggle threatened to escape, and turned toward the exit. While the younger quilter escorted the evicted man to a uniformed officer in the parking lot presumably to ensure that he left, the white-haired one kept the manager in the path outside the pepper farmer's stall. A farmer in jeans and a lime green T-shirt with a logo I couldn't read from here came over to talk to the manager, and the white-haired woman headed back toward the quilting bee. The two men engaged in a heated conversation, but it wasn't as loud or entertaining as the one with the pepper fan.

  The play had come to a stop while the potentially more entertaining real-life events were taking place. I turned back to the stage to see a short, chubby woman with shoulder-length, dark brown hair peeking around the edge of the stage's front curtain above the narrator's head. She was far too old to be part of the play itself. Close to retirement age, I thought, which meant she was probably the teacher who'd sponsored and directed the play. She was waving her arms and hissing to get the actors' attention.

  The narrator was the first to turn around and look at her. The teacher whispered, "Go back to the last voice-over. Loudly."

  The boy nodded, consulted the script on the floor next to him, and began to speak. By the time he was finished, the rest of the players had returned to their places on the stage. The girl playing Maria Dolores punched one of the wet sailors in the upper arm. He rubbed where he'd been hit, said "Hey," and then seemed to realize where they were. "Oh. Right." He resumed his drowning motions and called out, "Help! Help! We're poor, lowly sailors, pressed into service, who never learned to swim!"

  The remaining ten or so minutes of the play went on without a hitch. All of the wet sailors were rescued, one dropped to a knee in front of Maria Dolores to say, "Thank you, Maria Dolores for saving our worthless lives."

  Maria Dolores pulled him to his feet with the words, "It's all in a day's work for the women of the Danger Cove Lighthouse."

  Behind her, one of the other rescued sailors had taken the hand of her "daughter" who was giggling. I wasn't sure if that little romance was supposed to be part of the play or not, but the narrator stood up to announce, "And they all lived happily ever after."

  I clapped enthusiastically and rose with the rest of the crowd to give the actors a standing ovation. The children formed a line and took a bow as they'd obviously been coached to do. Then they turned to where I'd seen their teacher/director in the wings and began chanting, "Mrs. Kerrigan, Mrs. Kerrigan, Mrs. Kerrigan." It took quite a bit of encouragement before she emerged from the wings, looking a bit flustered at so much attention. The teacher let herself get pulled out onto the stage for a brief curtsy before scurrying back out of sight, leaving the kids to soak up the remainder of the praise.

  After a few more bows, the applause died down, and the kids raced out into the audience to find their friends and family. I wasn't needed any longer, so I headed for the rocky path that led to the lighthouse where Gil would be waiting for me. As I passed the farmers' stalls, I noticed that each one had an official-looking certificate identifying the owner and the farm where the products came from. The market manager might not have great people skills, but it looked like he'd put considerable effort into the planning and setup to ensure the visitors' safety. In addition to screening the vendors, he'd arranged for a first aid tent, easily identifiable wit
h its red and white stripes, right at the beginning of the two rows of stalls. Across from it, the embarrassed pepper seller was still nowhere to be seen, although his stall was still set up, and his certificate identified the owner as Tyler Kline.

  I didn't have time to really appreciate the various products on display at the moment, but I looked forward to checking them out on the way back from the lighthouse. In particular, there was a mouth-watering scent of apple fritters at the last stall before the hillside became too uneven and boulder-strewn to use for the market. As I emerged from the shadows cast by the stalls, I noticed that, while it was barely midday, not even remotely a dark and stormy night, a few clouds had gathered, and beyond the stiller waters of the cove, the ocean's waves were powerful and angry-looking. The lighthouse, even unlit and unoccupied, radiated a sense of security, despite its precarious perch on the rocky arm of land that hugged the outer edge of the cove.

  Before tackling the final steep slope, I paused to admire the view. The lighthouse was six-sided and four stories high. The bulk of the tower was a white-shingled wooden structure, and on top was the glass-walled observation area that had once housed powerful lights. That section was painted a cheerful red.

  At the base of the lighthouse was a shed-like structure that served as the entrance to the tower. That was where Gil should have been waiting for me, but she must have been delayed, because there was no one in sight.

  The scent of disinfectant mingled with the much more pleasant salty tang of the air. A row of four porta-potties were tucked over to my right, discreetly out of casual view. As long as Gil wasn't waiting for me, I had time for a quick break.

  The first three were occupied, so I continued to the end of the row. As I reached for the handle, I thought I caught a glimpse of movement on the ground beyond it, almost out of sight around the corner. I froze, convinced that some sort of wildlife was about to jump out at me. When nothing immediately roared or slithered or clawed out from the far side of the port-a-potty, my paralysis melted, and I was able to back up a step. I didn't need to use the toilet that badly. I might have come from tough and stoic stock, the sort that would rescue a dozen sailors from a deadly storm and dismiss it as just a day's work, but I'd never had to actually do anything like that, and I didn't intend to start now. Not at the risk of damaging the manicure I'd had done specifically for this trip. The color was a soft pink, just dark enough to be eye-catching without being too distracting, and the finishing touch was a tiny turquoise lighthouse decal on the pinkie nail. I doubted anyone would notice, but I appreciated the fact that my tank top was a perfect match to the color of the lighthouse.

  I was turning to go back to the lighthouse path when I heard something that sounded like a human plea for help. Not the melodramatic, verbose calls of the young actors in the play, but a garbled, barely intelligible sound mingled with the wheezing of a person trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get a breath of air.

  I did come from tough stock, after all, and if I'd grown up here in the lighthouse, I'd like to think I would have gone out to rescue drowning sailors if needed. I didn't have to do anything quite that brave right now. I just had to peek around the corner of the porta-potty, and if I wasn't just imagining the sounds, there were plenty of potential rescuers that I could call on for help. The medical tent was only about a hundred feet away, after all.

  Bracing myself to turn and run away if the sound was coming from a wild creature, I peered around the corner. There on the ground was the market manager, struggling to crawl toward me. He was clearly having trouble breathing, and all around his nose and mouth, his face was covered with something dark red. Not blood, as I first thought, but more like something had been ground into his face. It was the color of a tomato, but the texture was different, more opaque, and less watery.

  I started screaming, every bit as incoherent as the manager was, but loud enough to draw a crowd. He looked up at me, his eyes filling with relief that he'd been found. When I heard footsteps running in our direction, I stopped screaming and knelt beside the man. "It's okay. People are coming."

  "Al," he said, barely more than a whisper, before the wheezing grew too labored for him to speak. He squeezed my hand. "Tell them Al…"

  He dropped back to the ground just as someone grabbed my shoulders and pulled me out of the way. He was wearing a jacket with a red cross on it and carrying a bag with the same symbol.

  I was only too happy to let him take over. I suspected my great-great-great-grandmother would have approved of my handling of the situation. After all, part of the reason she'd been so heroic was that there really hadn't been any other option. She and her family had been the only people available to help the shipwrecked sailors. If she was as much like me on the inside as she was on the outside, she would have much preferred planning and supervising rather than doing the actual rescue. If she'd been in my shoes today, she would have done exactly the same thing that I did: call for professionals to take care of the man in trouble.

  Still, I couldn't help thinking that she wouldn't have left it at that. She would have stuck around to make sure the rescuers did their job right.

  * * *

  I could count on just one hand the number of times I'd ever talked to a police officer before today. A couple of minor fender-benders, a burglary from my dorm room during college, and… And nothing else. That was it.

  Until I'd arrived in the sleepy, friendly little town of Danger Cove and quickly doubled that number. First, there was the responding officer whose name I never got, who told me to "wait over there," apparently referring to the first row of seats in front of the stage, until the detective arrived. Next up was the detective himself, an older man in a dark suit, Bud Ohlsen. He'd set up a command station in the back corner of the stage, turning the prop dinghy upside down to serve as a desk, and placing two folding chairs on opposite sides of it. Another officer, much younger, blond and in uniform, stood guard a few feet behind the detective, blending into the dark and stormy backdrop.

  Ohlsen came to the edge of the stage and gestured for me to come up and take the seat that had its back to where the audience had been this morning. On his way around the dinghy to the other chair, he asked me to tell him, step by step, what I'd seen.

  Ohlsen was tall and large-boned, and if I were him, I would have tested the relatively lightweight metal chair before perching on it gingerly, but I'd always been the cautious type. Not Ohlsen. He threw himself into the lightweight folding chair as if it were made of titanium, and as soon as I began to recount what little I'd seen near the porta-potties, he rocked onto the back two chair legs, raised his arms to lock his hands together behind his head, and stared up into the rigging above us as if he would find answers there.

  It only took a minute to give him the sort of concise run-down of facts that I'd learned to do in business school. Maybe he wasn't used to a witness being quite that brief, because after I stopped talking, he remained silent, staring upwards until I couldn't take the silence any longer. "That's everything I know."

  He still didn't move. Maybe he'd fallen asleep. I'd once known someone who could sleep with his eyes open. I spoke a little louder, in case he'd missed it the first time. "On my way to the porta-potty, I heard a sound, looked to see what it was, and saw the market manager on the ground, with something red smeared all over his face. He was having trouble breathing, but he was conscious. He said the name 'Al' twice before passing out just as the paramedic arrived."

  Ohlsen released his hold on his head and let the chair fall forward so that he was looking at me. "Right. That's all I need for now. The uniformed officer will process you, and then you can leave. Just not too far without checking with me first. I understand you're from out of town. Do you have a local address?"

  Not really, unless the lighthouse qualified, since it was my ancestral home. "I stayed at the Ocean View B&B last night."

  "If Bree doesn't have a room for you there tonight, I'm sure she can recommend somewhere else that's suitable."
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  I hadn't been planning to stay another night, but I knew an implied order when I heard one. I'd used similar tactics myself in the past, first with my much younger siblings and later with my clients. "I'll call the B&B as soon as I'm done with your officer."

  I might as well have saved my breath. Ohlsen had rocked back in his chair to study the rigging again, or possibly to resume his nap.

  The young cop in uniform introduced himself as Richie Faria and escorted me over to a patrol car where he took my driver's license and then climbed into the front seat, presumably to do a quick check on my identity. I tried to ask how the market manager was doing, but the officer made it clear that he wasn't going to answer any questions.

  Curious to see who else Detective Ohlsen was interviewing, I turned back toward the stage. He had someone in the hot seat, but it wasn't anyone I recognized. I turned my gaze from the witness to a tall, dark-haired man in cargo pants and a sports shirt in an unappealingly muddy brown color leaning against the edge of the stage. Probably the next person to be interviewed. I was about to look away when it struck me that it was odd to see someone writing in a notepad these days instead of typing into a phone.

  He looked up and caught me staring at him. I should have looked away, but I couldn't. I knew that face. I wasn't sure exactly how, except that he was famous. Or he had been. What was a celebrity doing here? My mother had never mentioned anyone famous who'd come from Danger Cove, except for the mystery author Elizabeth Ashby, and I had no idea what she looked like. Mom had discouraged me from reading her stories, saying they were full of lies, and if the author had told the truth about Danger Cove, the books would be placed in the horror category, not mystery.