The Cottage on Nantucket by Jessie Newton

Author:Jessie Newton [Newton, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JEN Publishing

“Mm hm,” she said, her feet squishing in the wet sand. “That’s fine, ma’am. I can do that.”

“And don’t be bringing any of that fake crab,” the old woman said. “And don’t ring my doorbell. I’m deaf anyway and I won’t hear it.”

Janey smiled into the sky, but it faded quickly. “Yes, ma’am,” she said, wondering how she’d taken a call if she couldn’t hear. “Tomorrow at noon.”

“Don’t be late,” she barked, and the call ended.

Janey tucked her phone under her bra strap and against her shoulder bone and turned away from the water. She’d wanted to visit Viola Martin today, but the woman said her house wasn’t fit for visitors. She’d also been very keen to know how Janey had gotten her number.

It was amazing what a professional voice and a quick call to the Nantucket Historical Society could yield her.

The Lighthouse Inn stood proudly to her right, and Janey gazed up at it. Built up on a cement platform, the lighthouse seemed to right straight up out of the ocean. The beach sloped around the sides of it, but the front definitely had a rock wall fifteen or twenty feet up before the ground leveled.

She’d never stayed in the inn, but she’d toured the place lots of times. She couldn’t believe they’d closed, and she hoped the Historical Society would be able to find new caretakers and get the four-room inn reopened.

She even had the wild thought that she could do it.

That idea got dismissed quickly as she approached the dock attached to the inn. Whoever ran the inn had to have nautical knowledge, and Phil Michaels had been a sailor in the Coast Guard before coming to the inn with his wife, Margo.

She’d often played in the foamy water under the dock here, though Mom didn’t like it. She said sharp shells got deposited here, and Tessa had cut her foot on one once, long ago.

Today, a few fishing lines lay lazily in the water from the poles up on the dock. Janey heard people talking in voices muted by the water rushing ashore beneath the dock, where she walked, and she let her mind ebb in and out like the water.

She watched her footsteps appear in the wet sand, and then blur and disappear, especially when a wave came ashore.

Someone coughed, and this person wasn’t up above her. Janey looked up sharply and froze at the sight of Riggs several paces away from her, standing next to a pillar holding up the dock, water up around his ankles.

His fishing pole had not been threaded with a line and hook. In fact, it stood against the pillar without even a reel of line in it. Janey couldn’t see a tackle box at all, and she wondered if he hid it in the grass somewhere between here and his house.

Just the fact that she thought such things increased her heart rate, and she felt sure Riggs would hear the booming pulses as they moved through her ears.

He muttered something to the water and walked away from her, around the pillar.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.