“The opposite, actually—attention on the lighthouse only intensified. People could not be dissuaded—they saw what happened to those boys as a clear sign that the building was haunted, or at the very least that a curse had been placed upon it. No one dared to go near it after that, not even those who might have doubted all the stories before. The incredulous few who rolled their eyes at talk of ghosts and dead spirits—even they became avid believers.”

“And then what? What happened next?”

Ryan shrugged. “Nothing,” he said. “That’s pretty much it. As a result of the incident, the town erected a fence around the building, boarded up its doors, and left it to slowly decay. Decades have passed, not a soul has been inside since.”

“No one?”

“No one.”

Amy put her arms out and leaned back, meditating on what she’d just been told. A flock of gulls swooped overhead and disappeared below the precipice of the cliff, their squawking still audible. As she gazed out at the ocean, she thought back to what she’d overheard in town and understood at once why the beam of light had caused such a fervent stir.

“Quite the story, huh,” Ryan said.

She nodded. “Kinda makes a lot of sense.”

“You mean about what happened last night?”

“Yes. Now I really wish I’d seen it for myself.”

Ryan coughed loudly, not bothering to conceal his skepticism. “Yeah, so do I,” he quipped.

“How can you be so sure it didn’t light up?”

“I’m not saying it didn’t.”

“Oh, so you do think it’s possible?”

“The jury is out, let’s put it that way.”

“Interesting,” Amy said with a smile. “That’s different to what you said before.”

He stared back at her. “What did I say before?”

“I believe the phrase you used was ‘No way, no how’—wasn’t it?” She leaned in a little closer, playfully nudging him in the ribs. “Has someone changed their tune?”

“If I may—” he started to say, eager to rush to his own defense but caught off-balance by the mischievous glint radiating from her eyes. “When I used those words—”

“Hmm?”

“—it was merely to dismiss any suggestion that a ghost would have been involved, which I’m sure is the prevailing consensus going around town.”

“And how can you be sure it wasn’t? You don’t believe in ghosts?”

“I’m quite sure the tower is haunted—heck, you wouldn’t ever catch me going inside—but the suggestion that a ghost can fire up a lamp that isn’t even there sounds a little bit too kooky to me.”

Amy agreed, but that didn’t preclude the possibility of another scenario, the one first suggested by her cab driver.

“All right,” she said, “ghosts aside, what do you think about this being a case of history repeating itself?”

“Someone trying to fool the town again?”