The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  “Did you ever love me?”

  “I tried.” Faye closed her eyes, and twin tears rolled down her cheeks, scalding hot on her cold skin. “I swear I did try.”

  “So no?”

  “No,” Faye said.

  This time when the silence came she knew Hagen had hung up.

  Faye hated this part, hated when it hit her full body like she’d been thrown against a wall and nothing could stop her from feeling everything she didn’t want to feel. Her chest ached and her face, too. Her throat tightened like a strong man’s hand was clutched around it, squeezing. Her stomach roiled like boiling water. From her feet to her guts to her heart to her eyes, she ached with pure unadulterated panic. She hadn’t had a panic attack since before Will died. But she remembered this feeling, this vise on her chest, this unbearable urge to run away, to scream, to fly and to fight. She’d tumbled headfirst into the pit, and nothing could get her out of it—not a rope or a pickax or her own bare hands clawing at the dirt walls.

  She lowered her head to the steering wheel and squeezed the leather as hard as she could. In her twenties her panic attacks had been triggered by her student loan debt combined with her erratic income from freelancing. One bill could send her spiraling into the cold sweats, nausea and a sense of being choked to death by an invisible hand. Pills helped a little, but nothing helped more than Will putting her on his lap and holding her as he rubbed her back.

  “Breathe, babe. In and out,” he’d say, his voice strong and calm as she gasped and swallowed air. “It’s not the end of the world. It only feels that way. We’ll just be poor,” he would say to make her smile. “We’ll live in a cabin in the middle of nowhere with no electricity or running water. We’ll smell horrible. We’ll grow our own food. We’ll have cows and chickens and no TVs. We’ll have so much free time, babe. I don’t even know what we’ll do with all that free time... Wait. I got it. Blow jobs three times a day.”

  And Faye would laugh through her tears, which only Will could make her do.

  “What about baseball?” she’d asked him.

  “Just a game, babe. It’s just a game. You and me, we’re the real thing. Right?”

  “Right.” She’d put her head back on his big broad chest and ride out the wave of her panic in his arms.

  “Breathe, sweetheart,” Will would say, rocking her like a child. “I’m here, and I love you.”

  But he wasn’t here anymore.

  And he didn’t love her anymore.

  If the dead could love, they had a terrible way of showing it.

  But breathe she did—in and out—and sure enough, when she raised her head she saw people walking into the gas station, a little boy racing to beat his sister to the door so he could be the one to hold it open for their mother. A robin pecked at a rotting pretzel on the asphalt. A shiny blue Corvette with Georgia plates pulled in for a fill-up. Life. It was still happening. The world hadn’t ended. Not even her little corner of it.

  Once she was back in control of her emotions, Faye started her Prius. As always she was taken aback by how quietly the car ran. She really never knew if it was running until it moved. Same with her—she didn’t know she was alive unless she was moving—so she kept moving.

  The phone rang again. Hagen calling back, either to keep fighting or to apologize. She ignored the call, and she also ignored the urge to toss the phone out of the car window into Port Royal Sound.

  Faye found Federal Street easily, thanks to her tourist’s map. Father Pat Cahill had said he’d be painting the marshlands, but that didn’t narrow things down much. The entire place was surrounded by marshlands. She drove to the very end of the road; if she’d kept driving she’d drive straight into the water. Although tempting—today especially—Faye imagined with her luck the car would land on a dense patch of swamp, and she’d have a few hours to wait before sinking enough to even get her feet wet. Although she couldn’t think of many good reasons to go on living, she also couldn’t think of any good reasons for dying. So she went on as most people did for want of a viable alternative.

  Two beautiful old white houses stood proud and dignified on either side of Federal Street, but only one of them had a man sitting on the lawn in front of an easel. The house he painted was a grand antebellum mansion, three stories, white, red roof, green shutters and a porch one could get lost on without a map and a compass. Before leaving the car, Faye checked her face in the mirror looking for any telltale signs of her recent breakdown. The makeup was an easy fix, but she couldn’t do a thing about the redness in her eyes except hope Father Cahill didn’t notice it. She grabbed her camera bag from the backseat. Might as well get some work done while she was here.

  She strode across the lawn toward him, and he turned her way and gave her a broad smile.

  “Are you my new patron?” he called out. “If so, I thank you and owe you an apology.”

  Faye smiled back. “No apologies necessary. The kid let me have it for twenty-five bucks.”

  “Twenty-five? Highway robbery.” He rubbed his palms on his paint-smeared khaki slacks, and then held out his hand to her. She was struck by how much he looked like Gregory Peck in the late actor’s last years. Minus the mustache but still with the glasses. His black T-shirt was as paint riddled as his pants. Did he wipe his paintbrushes on his clothes?

  “Thanks for meeting with me, Father Cahill.” He had a nice handshake, firm and friendly.

  “Pat, please. And I’m retired, so it’s not like I have a full dance card. Pull up the stool and tell me about yourself.” He didn’t say card, he’d said cahd. She knew she was dealing with an old Boston boy. If Kennedy had lived, this was probably how he would have sounded in his seventies.

  He passed her his wooden stool and he sat on the stone bench where he’d set up his paints and brushes.

  “Not much to tell. I’m in town for a couple months taking pictures for a fund-raising calendar.”

  “I know that calendar well. They preservation society ladies are nice enough to buy my paintings every now and then. Their mission in life is to take pity on old relics.”

  Faye laughed. “You’re not an old relic.”

  “What makes you think I was talking about me?” He winked at her to show he was kidding. “How’d you swing this gig? You’re not a local. Sound like a damn Yankee to me.”

  “Friend got me the job. But you’re not a local, either,” Faye said.

  “What gave it away?” he asked.

  She smiled. “I’m from New Hampshire. You’re not my first Masshole.”

  Pat laughed loudly, a good rich laugh.

  “Guilty. I was a pastor here in the midsixties. My first church. Fell in love with the islands back then. Always planned to come back, and here I am.”

  “Midsixties? You must have been a baby.”

  “I was. Big twenty-seven-year-old baby. God help that dumb do-gooder kid. I was not ready for the South during desegregation. Let me tell you this—anyone nostalgic for the past never lived there.”

  “Says the man who is painting a two-hundred-year-old plantation house. Thought you were painting the marshes.”

  “Marshlands. That’s the name of the house. The owner wasn’t a planter. He was a doctor. The doctor who discovered a treatment for yellow fever. You discover something that can save lives during an epidemic and you get a free pass to own a nice house.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “It is a gorgeous house.” Faye pulled out her camera and examined it through the viewfinder.

  “Light’s not very good today,” he said. “Too overcast. I doubt you’ll get a decent shot. At least in painting I can pretend the sun’s there.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow if the sun’s out. I got some beautiful shots of the Bride Island lighthouse yesterday. A friend took me out on his boat.”

  “Yes. It’s very nice.” He didn’t sound as enthusiastic as she’d expect from someone who had painted the lighthouse so lovingly. Very nice? That’s all?

  “What can you
tell me about the lighthouse?”

  “Not much. Only what Ms. Shelby told me. She said it was built to protect ships from the sandbar. Third-order Fresnel lens. Seven-second night mark. Solid white day mark. Decommissioned in, oh, ’45, ’46? It’s been rotting there ever since. That’s about it.”

  “Ms. Shelby? You know her?”

  “I do. Met her at a party, and she and I had a nice talk. I asked if I could paint it, and she said I could go out there anytime I want as long I stayed out of the lighthouse. It’s not structurally sound anymore. That whole corner of the island is very dangerous.”

  “What else is out there?”

  “Ms. Shelby prefers to keep the land as pristine as possible. There’s not much out there.” He flicked a fly off his canvas. “Trees. A few houses, but those are on the south side of the island. A barn. Handful of horses and horse trails. A few ruins. A few graves. And then there’s the lighthouse and what’s left of the keeper’s cottage, which isn’t anything but the stone foundation.”

  “How did a lighthouse get on private property?”

  “The government leased the land from the old owners. Four acres, which is a postage stamp on that island. That was back in the 1800s, when lighthouses were popping up along the coast. After they decommissioned the light in the forties, they left it up. Cheaper to let the elements have it than tear it down. Can I ask what your interest is in the lighthouse?”

  Before Faye could answer, a small gray tour bus rattled up the driveway to the Marshlands and stopped. Pat gave a dramatic sigh as it unloaded a batch of tourists onto the lawn.

  “Now, before we go into the house,” the pretty young tour guide said, shouting over the murmur of elderly tourists, “let’s walk over to the telescope and take a look at the sound.”

  “Every single damn day...” Pat sighed. “I should have found a different mansion to paint.”

  “Through the telescope,” the tour guide went on, oblivious to Pat’s annoyance, “you can see the sound side of Seaport Island, or what we locals call Bride Island. It’s an unusual island rich with history. If you look up you’ll see the top of a beautiful white lighthouse peeking through the tree line,” the woman said in her sweet-as-pecan-pie accent. “Pretty as it may be, the lighthouse is closed to the public. The water is notoriously choppy at the north seaside of the island, and more than three dozen people have lost their lives in those waters in the past hundred years—”

  “Including the Lady of the Light,” Pat recited along with the tour guide, word for word, not missing a single beat. “Faith Morgan, the lighthouse keeper’s beautiful teenaged daughter...”

  “You’ve heard this all before?” Faye asked.

  “It’s enough to make a man toss a tour guide into the swamp. That’s her in the painting, by the way.”

  “The tour guide?”

  “No,” he said. “Faith Morgan.”

  “The girl on the pier with the bird? That’s her?”

  Pat nodded as he capped a paint tube and dropped it into his gear bag.

  “Why did you paint her?” Faye asked. “Why not the Bride of Bride Island? Didn’t she drown, too?”

  “The subject picks the artist, not the other way around.”

  “That’s not very helpful.”

  Pat glanced at her before turning his attention back to his painting.

  “I didn’t realize you needed my help,” he said.

  Faye sensed she was asking Pat questions he didn’t particularly want to answer.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know I’m being nosy. I have a reason for asking, I promise.”

  “What’s the reason?”

  “It’s a stupid reason.”

  “Tell me your stupid reason, Faye. You’ve piqued my curiosity.”

  “I just... When I saw the painting, I thought she was someone I knew. That’s all.”

  He gave her a long searching look.

  “Someone you knew. Who?” he asked.

  “You’ll laugh.”

  “I’d never laugh.”

  Faye sighed. She was pretty sure the man would laugh.

  “Who did you think the woman in the painting was?” Pat asked, his voice awash with the tender concern that must have served him well in his decades as a priest.

  “I thought, maybe... I thought she was me.”

  5

  “Sounds crazy, right?” Faye asked. “You can laugh.”

  “I’m not laughing.” He wasn’t. He wasn’t even smiling. Maybe she’d scared him. It kind of looked like she had. “Like I said, that’s Faith Morgan in the painting. She was the old keeper’s girl.”

  “I see. So if she was the lighthouse keeper’s daughter,” Faye said, “then who was the lighthouse keeper?”

  “A former naval officer by the name of Carrick Morgan manned the light back then. Transferred from the Boston Light to Seaport in the fall of ’20, and his girl, Faith, joined him that next June. I think they say she was seventeen or so.”

  Faye felt a mix of relief and embarrassment, all of which must have shown on her face. God, she felt so foolish. Well, she’d been a bigger fool before and survived.

  “Never seen you before today,” he continued. “Honest. And even if I had, I’m not that good a painter. There’s a reason I paint landscapes and not portraits.”

  He smiled gently. “What on earth made you think she was you?”

  “Someone I loved died,” Faye said. “I went to a pier like the one in your painting to spread his ashes. It was cold, and I had on a gray coat. And I walked to the end of the pier holding the urn in my hands. The girl in the painting looks like she’s holding something. And there was this white bird on the pier when I was there. It was just like your painting. All of it. Minus the lighthouse, I mean. God, that does sound crazy.” Faye rubbed her forehead. “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Anyone would be a little spooked to see a scene from their own life on canvas.”

  “And that’s only half of it,” Faye said, laughing at herself.

  “Well, let’s go over to the dock and talk about it. I want to hear the other half.”

  Faye helped him gather his tools, and she slung her camera over her shoulder. They walked across the lawn in silence to the dock. Faye’s wedges sounded loud and hollow on the faded wood boards as they walked to the end and looked out onto the water. They were silent for a long moment. Faye sensed Pat sizing her up.

  “So talk to me, Miss Faye. What are you not telling me?” Pat asked as they stood side by side, elbows resting on the dock’s wooden rail.

  “Did you know that lighthouse keeper?” she asked.

  “I knew him, yes. Long, long time ago.”

  “Can I show you something?” she asked.

  “Go right ahead.”

  Faye took a printed piece of paper out of her bag and showed it to Pat. “Do you know who this man is?”

  “He was much older when I knew him, but I’d know that face anywhere,” Pat said. “That’s Carrick Morgan.”

  “Is it? Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  Faye went silent a moment. His certainty had scared her.

  “Faye?”

  “Sorry. Can you maybe tell me more about him?”

  “Carrick?” He shrugged. “When I knew him he was retired and living off his navy pension.”

  “Interesting name. Irish?”

  Pat nodded. “Son of Irish immigrants, named for the village they’d come from.”

  “How’d he get the job as lighthouse keeper? I thought the Irish had trouble getting good work.”

  “He’d been working at the Boston Light after the war. Carrick was brought down as an assistant keeper, took over as principle keeper when the previous family got transferred.”

  “You said his daughter moved in with him,” Faye said. “What about his wife?”

  Pat shook his head. “He said he was a widower.”

  “But he had a daughter?” Faye asked. Interesting Carrick M
organ “said” he was a widower. Did that mean he wasn’t? Was his daughter