Dale Pruitt turned out to be a pleasant man with a firm handshake and a ring of keys the size of a dinner plate. He walked her to the lighthouse himself, talking the whole way about property taxes and rotting timber, and about how a sensible buyer could take the whole headache off her hands. “No rush,” he said at the door, in a voice that suggested there was. “Think it over.”
When he had gone, Nora stood alone in the keeper’s hallway. The air smelled of cold stone and old paraffin. She found the staircase at the back, a spiral of iron, and began to count. Ninety-nine steps. At the top, her legs aching, she pushed open a narrow door and stepped into the lamp room. The great lens rose before her, a glass beehive as tall as she was, throwing small rainbows across the floor.
She put her palm against the brass housing beneath it. It was warm. Not hot, not blazing, but warm, the way an engine is warm after it has just been switched off. Nora took her hand away slowly. The lighthouse had been dark for ten years. Everyone in the village had said so.
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