Smile Beach Murder by Alicia Bessette

Author:Alicia Bessette [Bessette, Alicia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

• • •

Once again, Gwen and I wound up the metal steps. Lamps every ten feet provided murky light. We climbed steadily, not speaking. Ahead of me, her body language conveyed simmering anger. She had confided in me, and I’d used it against her. But I couldn’t assuage her feelings. I had my own excitement to regulate.

Pass through blue and into white. The riddle was explicit about passing through the blue, bottom half of the lighthouse. But it said nothing about also passing through white—merely into it. What if I only needed to get to the halfway point, where blue gives way to white? Halfway is good enough, my uncle had said.

The inside of the lighthouse wasn’t painted; the bricks were all the same uniform natural red from bottom to top. But there were eight stories total, which meant halfway was . . .

I stopped at the fourth landing.

“Breather?” Gwen’s voice had a cutting edge.

“This is as far as I climb tonight.”

“Whatever.” She plunked down on a step, took out her phone, and ignored me.

The semicircle landing boasted six-foot-tall displays on several centuries of shipwrecks. graveyard of the atlantic, the title declared in a font suggestive of bones. One panel chronicled African American lighthouse keepers who made daring rescues during hurricanes using only rope. Another answered the commonly uttered question, Why is there a lighthouse in the middle of a marsh? The Big Move was executed in the summer of ’84, over the course of twenty days. Engineers separated the lighthouse from its base and glided it three thousand feet west to its current location, safe from the rising sea. For now.

I skimmed the displays once. Twice. Nothing stuck out. Nothing screamed hidden sight, or even riddles in general.

Which brought me back to hold on tight. The handrailing. It curved behind the displays, and I was just flat-chested enough to squeeze behind them.

There wasn’t enough room for me to bend, so I simply slid my hands along the railing. I made one complete pass, then reversed direction, back to the start.

Nothing but dust and desiccated insects.

Another fail.

“Guess I was wrong,” I said, reemerging.

Gwen’s phone made her face glow blue. “I’m sorry, for what it’s worth.”

Swiping cobwebs off my arms, I crossed the landing and sat next to her on the step. “Sorry about what?” I asked.

“Tossing those things into the landfill. I can see that it was a mistake.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Maybe not? You made such a big deal about it.”

“I know. But to be honest, it might not matter one way or another, in the end.”

“Good, because I’m still not talking to the police. I do feel bad about things, though. Very bad, actually.”

I put my elbows on the step behind me. The railing continued without a break, stretching from behind the display straight to the stairs. I crouched and began inspecting it at eye level.

“I thought you were done,” she said.

“Me too.”

“How long is this going to take?”

A metal knot in the handrailing caught my attention. Where it inserted into the brick, there was a gap—about the width of a fat pencil eraser.

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