BEACON

BEACON
The Stray Files: Book Two

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St. Augustine, Florida. October, 1990.

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When historian Nora Genopoly falls from the St. Augustine Lighthouse in the dead of night, the case looks like a tragedy — until the autopsy comes back. Her lungs were full of seawater. She drowned before she ever hit the ground.

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Ever since she lost her brother, private investigator Dana Reeves has carried one voice the living can't hear. Lately, others have started coming through. Now she's working her first official case for a secret federal bureau that handles what the rest of the government won't touch — partnered with an ex-priest who still says the words, answering to a handler who doesn't believe in anything he can't file. Their assignment: explain how a woman drowned standing up in a dry tower, beneath a beacon that burns with no wires, no lamp, and no earthly reason.

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The nation's oldest city is happy to help. Ghost stories abound. The locals are charming. The museum curator who found the body is cooperative, grief-stricken, and lying. And an old shrimper nobody has believed in forty years keeps saying the same thing: the bed is awake.

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As the drownings spread — a locked car, a bolted office, a boat on dry land — Dana learns what four centuries of stories can build beneath a town. Something down there has been keeping count of the drowned. Something has been keeping the light.

And on All Souls' Night, when the whole city prays for its dead, it expects the courtesy returned.

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Some things should never be preserved.