Live-Writing Exercise Day 1

Carly got to the lighthouse just before ten in the morning.  Not bad for a four hour drive.  Not surprisingly, the old man was already waiting for her, sitting in a little folding chair, reading a large print Louis L'amour collection.
"News lady?" he said, glancing up at her.
She pushed away the sarcastic response that had come to her lips, what with the camera and tripod on one shoulder, her sound bag in the other.  "That's me."
“You made the trip over,” he mumbled, slowly putting the book down, and even slower rising to his feet.  “Even though it’s prolly for nothin’?”
“It’s not for nothing,” Carly said.  “I get to see your beautiful lighthouse.”
“Beautiful,” he grumbled.  He was an ancient-looking man with a white beard, a sailor hat over a bald head, and about a million wrinkles.  He had huge ears and a huger nose, and his chest made a wheezing sound when he breathed.  “Ain’t been beautiful in about twenny years, decades of rust and peelin’ paint back.”
“Well, I—” she began.  She was tired from the drive and her coffee had run dry eighty miles back.
“View’s nice, though,” he added.  “Let you decide if it’s beautiful.”
“Sounds like a plan,” she said, and followed him into the old lighthouse.  Carly ____ was surprised to find so few lighthouses on this part of the Oregon coast.  Her internet search showed old pictures, painings, and records of the past, and classified this one, at Puente Dormido, as being “Closed.”  Turned out the old man who ran the lighthouse years before had spent all his money, including selling his father’s house, to buy the disused relic, and lived there now, a sort of aged window into a bygone era, same as the edifice itself.
When she’d tracked him down on the telephone—at a cantina in town he frequented thrice a week, he could guess what she was after.  “The monster won’t come here,” he’d said.  “Not that I think there is a monster.”
“You don’t know that,” she said, sitting in front of the computer, satellite photos on the screen showing a tail, a bulbous head, and a long body, though not in the same shot.  “And there is a monster.”