Dale Pruitt arrived at dusk with a bottle of wine and a new offer. He sat in the keeper’s kitchen and praised the tea, the view, the stubborn charm of the tower, and then named a price that was almost insulting in its generosity. “More than it’s worth,” Nora said. “It’s worth exactly that to the right buyer,” Pruitt replied. “A company I know would like to build a monitoring station here.”
“Which company?” He smiled. “Does it matter?” Nora poured him more tea and kept her face perfectly still, the way she had once learned to do in archive reading rooms when a curator wanted to know what she had found. “Let me sleep on it,” she said.
After he left, she bolted the door, climbed to the lamp room and watched his truck wind down the hill. Halfway to the village, it stopped. Pruitt got out, looked back at the tower for a long moment, and made a phone call.
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