He chuckled, and as she happened to have turned to face him, she saw how his green-brown eyes lit up and the way handsome laugh lines crinkled at their corners. “You exclaimed, but you didn’t scream,” he said. “Big difference—as you, a wordsmith, would know.”
“Ithink so, but for some people, such subtlety might be lost on them.” She smiled, suddenly realizing shelikedthis guy—her unexpected and unwanted housemate.
He was nice. And funny. And pretty laid-back, all things considered.
And he’d come to her suite to make sure she ate.
“Well, I feel a little bad about disturbing the poor things,” she said, stepping through a little more gingerly this time. “It’s a little early for them to be out and about—still light out for another hour or so.” She squinted in the unrelieved sunlight blasting through the glass walls, looking up into the lantern room’s cap. “They must have gone out through some hole in the top.”
To her relief, nothing else moved in the small space. She stepped aside to make room for Oscar to join her on the narrow walkway around the giant glass lenses that did, in fact, form the shape of a beehive.
The glass-walled lantern room was approximately twenty-five feet in diameter, with the massive set of lenses taking up the center of the space. Each lens was shaped like the interior of a cathedral: straight sides arching to a point at the top. There were six lenses—or sides—each about eight feet tall, attached to each other in the hive shape. Every side was an intricate study in glass: rippling and wavy in texture at the top and bottom, but circular in the center where the bull’s-eye was located.
There was just enough room for two people to walk side by side around the lenses between its glass enclosure and the glass hive itself. There were three different windows that opened like doors onto the exterior walkway around the outside of the lantern room. Open to the elements and lake breeze, that walkway had only a slender metal railing around it.
Still inside the protective glass enclosure, Teddy walked around the massive set of lenses. Because of the texture on the glass, it was difficult to clearly see the lighting element inside, but it looked like a very large electric piece. They’d passed by the entrance to the small room beneath the lantern where the lighting element could be accessed for repair, and when she looked down, she could see the opening that led to the space—and the evidence of the bat congregation down in its depths.
“Look what I found,” he said, holding up a pair of binoculars. “They were hanging right here.”
He offered them to Teddy, and she took them with a smile. “Thanks.”
By the time she’d made her way completely around the lens, looking both inward and outside, with and without the field glasses, Oscar had opened one of the glass doors and gone out to the exterior walkway. She hesitated, but the lantern windows hadn’t been cleaned for years, and the view was distorted by dirt and bird droppings. She could see, but not as well as she’d like.
So Teddy carefully stepped out the door and paused, standing in the opening well away from the edge as a strong breeze buffeted her. “Wow.”
Lake Michigan stretched as far as the eye could see—and from thirty feet up, that was far. From this height, she looked down on the texture of varied treetops: pines, oaks, maples, birches, cottonwoods, and many others she couldn’t name. The mainland shore was behind her and curved southward along the left, a broad stripe of pale sand bordered by shrubby grasses, then forestation. Further away, small, rolling hills were turning dark with shadows as twilight approached.
In the west, the sun had moved swiftly toward the horizon over the last thirty minutes, and its bottom was just touching the lake. Fiery pinks, reds, oranges, and golds splashed over the sky like a spilled tray of watercolors onto a blue canvas, then dripped in ripples on the moving waters of the Great Lake.
Seagulls, calling with their annoying shrieks, dove and soared above, and Teddy saw a blue heron take flight from some patch of tall grass near the shore on the mainland. The bats she’d disturbed were nowhere in sight. Two fishing boats were zipping along far from shore, likely heading back to their marinas before dark, and in the distance, Teddy saw the outline of a freighter scooting along the horizon. It looked as if it were heading southwest, toward Chicago. She lifted the binoculars and watched the vessel gliding along the seam between water and sky.
When she lowered the glasses, she stood and watched with her naked eyes. For a moment, she was a sea captain’s wife, watching for the safe return of his ship…praying that the horizon would remain clear of rolling clouds that portended evil storms, that the sails of his vessel would appear like white beacons on the water.
Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor’s warning.
So tonight would be a clear one, and he would get that much closer to home safely.
“Are you afraid of heights or something?” Oscar had walked back to stand next to her, jolting her from her fanciful thoughts.
“No. Not really. But it’s a little disconcerting, being up this high with only that tiny railing between me and the ground.” Teddy couldn’t control a little shiver as she brushed loose wisps of hair from her face. The wind was riffling Oscar’s short, bright hair and molding the light cotton shirt to his arms and shoulders like the hands of a lover.
To prove to herself she wasn’t nervous, Teddy stepped out from the doorway and approached the railing next to Oscar. It was hardly more than a metal pipe strung around the parapet, just above waist height, fixed every four or five feet with an iron bar.
And the ground was a loooong way down.
“So someone jumped or fell from up here?” Oscar said. “Or was pushed,” he added, giving her a sidewise look.
“Would be an easy thing to do,” she said, gripping the railing. “One little shove by the villain, and over they go—”
Crash!
Already a little on edge, Teddy pivoted wildly at the loud, violent sound, sending the binoculars around her neck slamming into Oscar’s belly. “What the—”
But the wind had simply blown the glass door shut.
She looked at Oscar, ready to apologize for being so jumpy, when she saw his expression.Arrestedwas the only word to describe it.
He muttered something and started to move toward the door. His brow was furrowed and his mouth set.
