Read Online The Light Keeper's Legacy (A Chloe Ellefson Mystery) by Kathleen Ernst - Free Book Online

It was surely a cold and lonely death.
    The trail wound through the woods, offering glorious glimpses of the lake. Chloe descended among stands of birch and beech and juniper. After a mile or so she was ready to unzip her jacket and enjoy the sunshine.
    This is why I came here, she thought, drinking in the day like champagne. She’d always relished solitude, always craved being outdoors. During her college days in West Virginia, she’d had plenty of friends to go camping with but still sometimes headed out on solo backpacking trips. Dolly Sods Wilderness Area, Canaan Valley, the Appalachian Trail … the natural beauty, and the absolute freedom to set her own pace, always did her good.
    She paused to watch a nuthatch work its way down a tree. And I needed something good, she thought. Even before she found a body tangled in fishnet and started hearing children at night. She remembered how disapproving Roelke had looked as she packed the car. He was so different from any other guy she’d ever dated! She was used to hanging out with history nerds who got passionate about vernacular architecture or colonial foodways, folklorists who wore hand-painted neckties or earrings made from old watch parts, naturalists who didn’t blink when a friend headed off for some solitary trek. Roelke was an overprotective, tightly wound, oh-so-German cop.
    Who was also smart. Who loved and cared for his cousin’s kids. Who had taken her sky-diving when she needed it—even though she hadn’t had a clue she needed it. Who looked pretty darn fine when he lost the uniform and gun, and went for hiking boots and jeans and a tight T-shirt instead.
    My feelings are clear as custard, Chloe thought.
    About a mile and a half from the lighthouse, the canopy opened and revealed a meadow. The limbs of several old apple trees were bent with red fruit. The lake rippled in jewel tones of green and blue beneath a sky studded with cumulous clouds.
    “ Oh ,” Chloe breathed, enchanted. She left the trail as if lured by the Pied Piper.
    If Rock Island’s green forest still clung to late summer, the meadow had embraced early autumn. Chloe walked through waist-high grasses rippling brown and tan in the breeze. A few clumps of goldenrod and pale purple asters glowed in the sun. With every step a cloud of grasshoppers flew ahead of her. Two crows scolded from a dead birch tree. “Don’t mind me,” Chloe told them. “I’m just visiting.”
    The meadow ended at a fringe of shrubby deciduous trees above the cobbled beach. Chloe didn’t realize she wasn’t alone until she almost stumbled upon another woman. “Oh!” Chloe said again.
    “Good morning!” The woman had been crouching beside the trees, winding string between four stakes marking a square of disturbed ground about the size of two shovel widths, but she rose. “I’m Brenda Noakes. Are you Chloe?”
    “That’s me.” Chloe shook the offered hand, trying to think. Ah, yes. Brenda Noakes—the archaeologist.
    Brenda was perhaps fifty, deeply tanned, with light brown hair pulled away from her face in a simple ponytail. She wore a blue ball cap monogrammed with EC . “Any relation to the local Ellefsons?”
    “It’s pretty distant. So, you’re doing a dig here?”
    “I wish.”
    “Um … ” Chloe glanced pointedly at the stakes. It sure looked as if Ms. Noakes was conducting a dig.
    “Oh.” Brenda gave a wry smile. “I have a permit to define the limits of the fishing village site. Right now I have a little window of time between the summer crowds and the autumn leaf-peepers. Next week I have to head back to Escanaba. I teach there.” She waved her arm in the vague direction of Escanaba, Michigan, which was maybe thirty miles distant across the lake to the northwest.
    “Ah!” Chloe nodded. She’d taken one basic archaeology course in grad school, and tried to retrieve some intelligent tidbit from memory’s rusty file drawers. “Test pits?”
    “Right. I’m excavating a few pits,