Lighthouse on the Lake Read online

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to locations, events, or people (living or dead) is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 Elizabeth Bromke

  All rights reserved.

  Cover design by Red Leaf Book Design

  The reproduction or distribution of this book without permission is a theft. If you would like to share this book or any part thereof (reviews excepted), please contact us through our website: elizabethbromke.com

  LIGHTHOUSE ON THE LAKE

  White Mountains, Arizona

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1—Amelia

  Chapter 2—Kate

  Chapter 3—Clara

  Chapter 4—Megan

  Chapter 5—Amelia

  Chapter 6—Kate

  Chapter 7—Clara

  Chapter 8—Megan

  Chapter 9—Amelia

  Chapter 10—Kate

  Chapter 11—Clara

  Chapter 12—Megan

  Chapter 13—Amelia

  Chapter 14—Kate

  Chapter 15—Clara

  Chapter 16—Megan

  Chapter 17—Amelia

  Chapter 18—Kate

  Chapter 19—Clara

  Chapter 20—Megan

  Chapter 21—Amelia

  Chapter 22—Kate

  Chapter 23—Clara

  Chapter 24—Megan

  Chapter 25—Amelia

  Chapter 26—Clara

  Chapter 27—Megan

  Chapter 28—Amelia

  Chapter 29—Megan

  Chapter 30—Amelia

  Chapter 31—Megan

  Chapter 32—Amelia

  Chapter 33—Clara

  Chapter 34—Amelia

  Chapter 35—Nora

  Chapter 36—Amelia

  Chapter 37—Amelia

  Chapter 38—Megan

  Chapter 39—Amelia

  Chapter 40—Amelia

  Epilogue

  Other Titles by Elizabeth Bromke

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  For Meagan.

  Chapter 1—Amelia

  One week.

  That’s how long it took to change her whole life.

  One week.

  Amelia had left Birch Harbor the previous Thursday. Now there she was, a whole seven days later, rolling back into town with her trusty sidekick, Dobi.

  She patted the Dachshund’s smooth potbelly as he panted on the musty upholstery beside her. Cigarette smoke clung to the interior of her loaner sedan, but the wind whipping through the cracked windows quelled the stench enough that she enjoyed the long drive. With the open road for a backdrop and daydreams for company, nothing stood between Amelia and her future.

  Of course, the forty-something brunette had lots to do. Her first order of business, after Kate picked her up from the car rental agency that evening, was to get settled in her new room.

  Or rather, her old room.

  Amelia Hannigan was moving back into the house on the harbor. Although, it wasn’t the house on the harbor anymore. The four sisters had settled on a new name for the future bed-and-breakfast, something befitting its emotional value and location on the quaint southern cove of the town in which they grew up.

  They would call it The Heirloom Inn.

  ***

  “Have you scheduled anything with Michael yet?” Kate asked once Amelia had finished returning her rental. The two women transferred the last of Amelia’s boxes and garment bags to Kate’s SUV.

  Amelia had left New York with as little as she had arrived with. Spending the past decade or more traveling across America on her way to a starring role on Broadway had prevented her from accumulating much. Mostly just clothes and makeup, bedding and blankets (a Hannigan could never own too many throw blankets), and Dobi’s various accessories.

  As it turned out, Amelia was more vagabond than thespian, always searching for the next big role—or, as the case may have been—any role.

  Still, despite all the rejection, she would never give up on her dream to be an entertainer.

  It all started one summer in Arizona. The Hannigan girls spent a couple of months with an aunt who shuttled them around various desert tourist attractions. Old Tucson Studios proved to be the highlight for Amelia, who was at that time fourteen years old. There, they toured wild west movie sets and mined for fool’s gold.

  During a dusty gun show, the performers asked for a volunteer from the audience. Amelia’s hand had shot up, and soon enough she slid from her hot bleacher seat and joined a Doc Holliday impersonator who instructed her to play along to a bank robbery. For the next fifteen minutes, Amelia darted in and out of wooden flats painted like Tombstone’s infamous Allen Street. Her heart pounded in her chest; her face flushed.

  After, she and her younger sister, Megan, sat and lapped up melting ice cream, giggling over the cute cowboy actors. Another visor-wearing tourist, her fanny pack slung low across high-waisted jean shorts, had stopped at the girls’ table long enough to compliment Amelia’s performance.

  Since that day, the acting bug buzzed around inside of her like a fever.

  But long years of traveling in pursuit of sporadic bit parts had steadily worn down her spirits. When she did get roles, nothing ever brought her to life quite like the historic reenactment.

  When her mother, Nora, passed, Amelia realized how much she was looking forward to some stability. How much she was looking forward to being home.

  Throwing her body against the back door of Kate’s SUV, Amelia willed the uneven boxes to keep from spilling out long enough to make it just a few miles into town.

  She let out a dramatic sigh at Kate’s question about meeting Michael.

  Michael Matuszewski was the Hannigan family lawyer, effectively. Amelia liked having a family lawyer. It felt prestigious. Aristocratic.

  If only they were aristocratic, maybe then Amelia wouldn’t even have to go on auditions. Maybe then she’d be offered leading parts merely because of her reputation as someone important. Connected.

  In reality, Amelia had just received her most recent and crushing rejection: a coveted role as Lady Macbeth. And she’d ended things with her younger, more attractive boyfriend. And then her mom died.

  Oh, yeah... and she’d sublet her New York studio in order to return home to Birch Harbor to help her older sister pull things together on the four—no, make that five—properties their mother’s wobbly will had left in its wake.

  Hers was not an aristocratic life, but that of a pauper. A commoner left to scrap together a living out of the shambles of a once hope-filled life.

  Then again, perhaps having a claim to so many deeds did position the four Hannigan women in the upper echelon of small-town society, even if those properties were hodgepodge at best and ramshackle at worst. First, though, they’d need to shine the places up. It was one thing to own four places. It was another to own four projects. Oh, right. Five.

  Amelia tucked Dobi onto her lap and stretched the seatbelt over her body. “Nothing formal, but Michael and I did text a little.” She stared ahead but felt Kate’s eyes on her. “What?” Amelia asked, flushing above her tunic before smiling at her older sister.

  “Nothing. Nothing!” Kate replied and changed the subject. “So, Megan won’t be in until this weekend at the earliest. Clara offered to come tomorrow after school. I have a couple ideas to get us started, but I didn’t know whether we should meet with the lawyer first, or...?”

  Kate was referring to the two big jobs that lay ahead of the Hannigan sisters. The renovation
of the house on the harbor would first allow Kate and Amelia to take up residence there. Amelia suspected Kate intended on living in the oversized house for the long run, becoming a small-town innkeeper and hosting scores of tourists.

  Amelia, however, saw a different future for herself. Though what, she didn’t know.

  Equally important to the reno project was to make sense of the recent revelation of the lighthouse.

  In one of their mother’s diary entries—the journal itself had yet to be unearthed—Nora Hannigan had vaguely referenced that the Birch Harbor Lighthouse would go to the girls, Amelia and her sisters.

  As though the Hannigan estate wasn’t complicated enough, the matter of the historic and abandoned property added a new layer of mystery.

  The lighthouse had belonged to their father’s parents, the Actons (yes—the Actons; Nora Hannigan never took her husband’s name and instead forced a matrilineal tradition upon her daughters).

  One would assume that upon the death of the Actons, ownership of the Birch Harbor monument would fall to their only son, Wendell Acton, the Hannigan girls’ father.

  But that was the problem. Wendell Acton had disappeared in 1992.

  Chapter 2—Kate

  Impatience thrummed beneath Kate’s skin. She had grand plans for the Heirloom Inn, but this whole business regarding the lighthouse felt like a distraction.

  Was it big news?

  Yes.

  Would they find answers about their father?

  Maybe.

  Was Kate interested in pursuing a man who’d left them high and dry over two decades earlier?

  Not a chance.

  They pulled up to 131 Harbor Avenue, the red house leaning into the sunset. Amelia had asked that they spend the evening getting settled first. Then, later, she would reach out to the lawyer and ask what needed to happen in order to open the conversation and proceedings regarding the Acton property.

  “Here we are.” Kate put the SUV into park and looked across to Amelia, who was studying the house through the windshield.

  “Are you going to pull in?” Amelia gestured to the garage. The house had been built in the late 1800s and, originally, the secondary building functioned as a storage shed and boathouse. It may have even played barn to some animals, from Kate’s understanding. Their mother converted it to a detached garage sometime in the nineties.

  Kate answered, “No. It’ll be too hard to unpack the SUV in that tight space.” She glanced back at the sloppy piles of cardboard boxes towering at odd angles in the back seat and beyond. Amelia’s life spread across the second row and filled the far back of the vehicle. A messy life—so very Amelia. Kate smiled. “Come on. Let’s get something to eat. You must be starving.”

  Kate herself hadn’t officially moved into the house on the harbor. She was still waiting to sell her home in the suburbs of Detroit. As a realtor, she intended to list it through the agency she worked for. Over the past week, Kate had taken four trips to and from Apple Tree Hill, the ample family home she’d shared with her late husband and their two sons who were currently away at college, shielded from their mother’s big changes.

  Slowly but merrily, Kate had begun bringing her personal effects to Birch Harbor. Furniture, appliances, and other big possessions would stay at Apple Tree Hill as staging for when the house hit the market.

  But even without her furniture, Kate settled into her childhood room with surprising ease. Her old iron-frame bed still sat squarely beneath the window, thick lace curtains hanging heavily behind it. The lace managed to remain white thanks to a set of roman shades Nora had installed after Kate moved out for college.

  Years earlier, Clara, the youngest of the Hannigan brood, had helped Nora drape everything in the house in dense white sheets. It was more a gesture of drama than one of practicality. Nora should have sold the furniture, maybe even the house.

  Kate was glad she didn’t.

  On either side of the bed stood a wooden nightstand, though the left did not match the right. Kate had found them at the swap market in eighth grade and had scraped enough money together in order to negotiate with the seller. Later she asked her father to meet her at the corner of the entrance, where he kindly hefted them into the bed of his Toyota.

  Once home, Nora had complimented Kate’s choice. She liked that they didn’t match. It would add character to her bedroom. But first, Nora admonished, she had to strip, sand, and stain the two pieces from tip to toe.

  They’d sat in the barn, on the brink of rot, until Wendell Acton went in one day and handled the job, surprising Kate late that evening with the project. It had charmed Kate, and she remembered thinking her father was the type of man she would marry one day. She was certain of it.

  But that was before.

  ***

  “I’ve got a fruit platter and iced tea in the fridge and a frozen lasagna ready to pop in the oven. Are you still dieting, or can we throw some garlic bread in, too?” Kate cocked a suspicious eyebrow at Amelia, who threw up her hands.

  “Bring on the carbs,” Amelia declared, adding, “We can work it off later.”

  Kate grabbed the pitcher of tea from the fridge, and Amelia slid the fruit tray out behind her.

  They situated the tray and the pitcher and two glasses on the table before lowering themselves onto the dated wooden chairs. Amelia reached for a round of kiwi, slipping it between her lips and puckering.

  Grinning, Kate grabbed one for herself. It wasn’t as sour as Amelia’s face had suggested, but her mouth immediately watered around the sweet fruit. Her stare fixed on the wooden serving tray, a relic from their childhood.

  “You know, Amelia, Mom left so much stuff here. And yet, the cottage is crowded with things, too.”

  Years earlier, when Nora decided the house on the harbor was too much work, or too full of memories, she left it to move inland, away from the water.

  Before he'd left, Nora had asked their father to work on building a little cottage by Birch Harbor Creek. The Hannigan matriarch declared she wanted a second home where they could stow away after the birth of the youngest, Clara. At the time, Nora had felt it best to keep everything private, and the house on the harbor was decidedly a public venue, really. Wendell agreed easily and got to work right away, managing to make fast progress before he disappeared later in the summer.

  When Nora and her daughters returned home from their extended vacation, not only was Wendell gone, but the house was incomplete.

  It took some time until their mother found the help and the wherewithal to get the project done. But she did, and the cottage would eventually become the home where she slipped from the earth into the ether, her soul finding its resting place in Heaven, Kate never doubted.

  Despite the woman’s hardness and searing work ethic, she loved her daughters. She loved her husband. Nora Hannigan had only ever done what she thought was best for them, even when the decision was wrought and twisted like a crooked iron gate. That’s what Nora had done. She’d forged an impenetrable barrier between her family and the rest of the world. In her later years, once Clara had grown up, Nora began unlocking the gate, letting some people in and exploring the town for herself as a single woman. Single and heartsick. But no one in Birch Harbor knew how deep Wendell's absence had cut the steely-eyed Hannigan. As far as the town could see, Nora was a beautiful force who ran a severe household by day and joined in raucous Bunco games at the country club by night. An elegant and fun-loving divorcee, perhaps—though there had been no divorce between Nora and Wendell. At least, none that Kate was aware of.

  “I think it’s what happens,” Amelia said.

  “What do you mean?”

  A sigh filled her younger sister’s chest. Amelia took a sip of tea before replying. “When people age, they start clinging to the things that sort of... I don’t know... tie them to Earth.”

  “They become collectors,” Kate added thoughtfully.

  Amelia nibbled on a sliced apple. “You know?” she asked between bites. “I suppos
e that was a good thing. I mean, sure, it’s a lot of work. But look at this, Kate.” She waved her arms around.

  It was true. For all that Nora and Wendell lacked as parents—availability to help with homework, interest in volunteering at school or bringing sliced oranges to softball practice—they worked hard to leave their daughters a legacy.

  Kate Hannigan intended to keep that legacy alive. She glanced around the kitchen, taking in a dated wooden spice cabinet, a butcher block for knives—each one rusty along where the blade disappeared into the handle, no doubt—and the hardy, rustic kitchen furniture and treatments.

  The house on the harbor was going to be more than a little lakeside inn.

  It was going to be a living history.

  Grinning in agreement, Kate tugged a pad of paper and a pencil from the center of the table to the space in front of her. “You’re right. Now let’s talk inn-keeping.”

  Chapter 3—Clara

  The final bell rang, and Clara Hannigan fell into her desk chair, momentum rolling her back into the window.

  Teaching was draining. Emotionally, physically, and mentally draining. But she loved it. It would be good if she strode out with the kids, keeping an eye over them as they rushed down the hall and out toward the busses and their waiting parents. Teachers were supposed to reign over teenage hormones at every moment, but Clara needed to be in her classroom just then, away from the chaos. It was a mental health choice.

  She stared out the window which featured a view to the back of the school. Few students left that way—only those with parents who worked in one of the school buildings, since it was the faculty and staff parking lot. Most spilled out the front doors, automatically veering to one of the two busses that sat waiting or beyond to the parent pickup line. Anyone who lived within a mile or had plans to be at a friend’s house within a mile or so, simply left on foot, braving the onslaught of summer tourists in order to make it home.

  Of the high schoolers from the secondary building, the ratio was sharper, with many walking or driving themselves away from campus.