“Right. Up.” Up the lighthouse steps to do whatever it was lighthouse keepers did.
“How’s your head?” He gently caressed the side of her face.
It took everything Faye had in her to not recoil violently from the touch of his hand. Why was he so gentle? Why was he so like Will? She enjoyed his touch despite a voice inside her screaming in protest.
“It doesn’t really hurt,” she said.
“Good.” He nodded. “You can’t sleep?”
“Rough night.”
“That it is,” he said.
“You saved me, didn’t you?”
“Saved you? Nah. I saw you fall off the dock and pulled you out of the water. That’s all.”
“That’s kind of the definition of saving someone.”
“What was I going to do? Let you drown?”
“I guess you could have?”
“I’d be the world’s worst wickie if I let someone drown out of my own damned house. Sorry.”
“Sorry? For what?”
“I’m not used to a lady in the house. Well, a lady who can hear my foul mouth.”
“I don’t mind your foul mouth,” Faye said.
“That’s good. I’m out of practice. Give me another week and I might remember how to talk to a girl again.”
“Another week,” she said. “I haven’t been here long.” She could tell that from his tone and his words.
“No, but you’ll settle in if you give it a chance. I know it’s been hard for you these past few days. I know this isn’t what you hoped.”
“I’ll be fine,” she said. It seemed to be what he wanted to hear.
“I hope so. I...” He paused, stuffed his hands in his pockets. He’d put on another shirt, and he looked the very picture of a rough workingman in the 1920s. “I need to know...you did just fall tonight, didn’t you? A wave caught you and that was all?”
He gave her a searching look.
“What else would it be?”
“Don’t hate me for asking this,” he said. “I saw you on the pier and looked away. Second I looked back you were gone. You...didn’t mean to fall off the pier, did you? You didn’t jump, I mean?”
“What? No.” She shook her head. “I thought I dropped something, and I went to grab it out of the water. A wave got me.”
“I had to ask. I know you haven’t been happy. I know being here is hard for you. But you might come to like it. I did.”
“I’ll try to like it,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. Smiling wasn’t easy, but she forced herself to play along. “I’m going to try to sleep now.”
“You should. I’ll be up if you need me. I’m always here if you need me.”
He didn’t seem to know how to tell her good-night. She could tell he wanted to kiss her again, but she held back, not wanting to encourage further intimacy.
“Thank you for the milk.”
“Sleep well, love,” he said again. “Don’t fall out of bed.”
“Carrick,” she said when he turned to leave.
“Aye?”
“What I said earlier... I didn’t know what I was saying. I’m sorry.”
He shrugged again, hands deep in his pockets. He looked so much like Will then that it made her angry at him. How dare he steal her husband’s face and voice and eyes and shrug and smile? How dare he look like the man she loved and not be him?
“First day I stepped onto dry land when the war was over, all over, and for good, I kissed the first ten girls who would let me and proposed marriage to five of them. You’ve been in a war of your own. I won’t take it personally if you need to kiss a few boys to celebrate winning even if one of those boys is me.”
He smiled at her and turned away, and she watched him walk down the dark hall until all she could see was the faint outline of his body in what bits of moonlight had managed to sneak into the house. Then she was alone again, alone and afraid.
Faye sat on the edge of the bed and took a sip of the warm milk Carrick had brought her. As soon as she tasted it, she spat it right out into her hand. It tasted sweet, very sweet, and heavier, thicker than normal milk. Of course. Whole fat milk, that was what it was. And it was probably unpasteurized. She took another sip of it and found it better the second time. By the third sip she’d warmed up to the taste. By the fourth, she decided she might like unpasteurized whole milk. She’d never been much of a milk drinker but she could get used to this. Except...this house had no electricity, did it? So where had Carrick gotten fresh milk?
Oh, God, it came straight from a cow, didn’t it? Faye spit the milk out again. Carrick must have gone out in the night and milked some poor sleepy dairy cow and brought it to her straight from the udder. Rationally Faye knew all milk came from cow udders, but when it came directly from the udder with no stops in between? Faye groaned. She poured the rest out her bedroom window and onto the ground.
If the milk situation weren’t bad enough, Faye had a full bladder. They had indoor plumbing in the twenties, didn’t they? After some fumbling in the darkness relieved only by the flash of the lighthouse beacon every seven seconds, she found the matches in the bedside-table drawer. She lit the wick of the hurricane lamp again and sneaked out of the room. The floor creaked under her feet and she winced at every sound. Every step sounded like a snapping twig in the overwhelming silence. Every breath sounded like a windstorm.
“Thank you, God,” she sighed when she found a bathroom. She saw pipes on the wall and a cooper tub and a toilet. She could have kissed it. She did her business as quickly and quietly as she could. So far she’d succeeding in getting from the bedroom to the bathroom silently. The toilet had a pull cord to flush it, and Faye tugged on it. The sound of the flushing was like a small but concentrated tornado.
She waited to hear footsteps or Carrick’s voice. Nothing. Good, he was probably in the lighthouse. She was safe to walk around for now, safe to run if she could. But where?
First she found a set of dark stairs and crept down them. They were slick on her bare feet, as if they’d been freshly washed and waxed. With her left hand, Faye clung to the banister as she descended and clung to the lamp just as hard with her right. Death could come from a failure of either hand—if she slipped on the steps, she could break her neck, or if she dropped the lamp, she could burn the house down. It had been a long time since she’d felt fear like this, like fire in her blood.
At the bottom of the steps, she stopped and caught her breath. She’d survived this far. She lifted her lamp and gazed around the room, which appeared to be the living room or sitting room or whatever they called it here. It held a light fixture like the one in the bedroom, but Faye saw no electric outlets down here, either. She did find a candle box on the coffee table and two big brass candlesticks. The table sat in front of a cane-back sofa covered in blue cushions embroidered with wildflowers the colors of the setting sun. The focal point of the room was a brick fireplace. On the mantel sat two more candlesticks, which framed a wooden mantel clock on the left side. On the right, a peach-colored ceramic jug held an elegant array of yellow jasmine and white daisies. An indigo armchair with lace doilies over the arms sat to the side of the sofa with a bookcase against the wall just behind it.
She had seen rooms like this before, in books, in old hotels, in houses turned into museums. There should be red velvet ropes around this room and a tour guide saying, “And here’s where the family would sit in the evenings and read together. Families spent more time together back then but not necessarily out of love. In winter, this would be the warmest room in the house... Now let’s move on into the kitchen, folks. And please don’t touch any of the antiques.”
Antiques? Maybe in Faye’s time, but here the sofa looked new and the ceramic flower jug on the mantel had no cracks in it, no signs of age. Even the books on the shelves looked new. Strange, but new. They were all hardcovers, every last one. Nice ones, too. Some were clothbound, others leather-bound. She flipped through a few. The colors of the clothbound cove
rs were bright and bold and the pages had no foxing or staining. She knew some of the titles, the classics—Jane Eyre, Ivanhoe, A Tale of Two Cities, Emma... But the other books? The Rosary by Florence Barclay? The Devil’s Garden by W. B. Maxwell? The Tree of Heaven by May Sinclair? Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed? These were not Will’s books. Will read Lee Child novels and Stephen King, all seven Harry Potter books, the occasional sports memoir and anything by Michael Lewis. He did not read Ivanhoe. Nobody read Ivanhoe.
Faye moved her lamp and saw a round-top table by the end of the sofa. Someone had painted a pretty little night scene on it—the moon, the stars, the ocean underneath them. On the table was something wrapped in brown paper and string. Faye carefully removed the paper and found a book inside—The Moon and Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham. The cover was a dull tan and the title and author’s name were printed in black script. She opened to the copyright page. Faye dropped the book like it had bitten her. Copyright 1919. First American edition. The book was brand-new. The spine never cracked. The pages bright and the ink fresh.
Inside it was an invoice, a bill to be paid to a bookstore in Charleston, South Carolina. The date of the invoice read June 10, 1921.
It had been June 10 in 2015 when she’d woken up this morning. She’d also been Faye Barlow this morning. Tonight she was Faith Morgan.
But according to the plaque on the lighthouse, Faith Morgan had died on June 10, 1921.
How was Faith Morgan even alive? Hadn’t Pat said she’d drowned?
“She did drown...” Faye took a shuddering breath. Faith Morgan did die tonight—or she was supposed to have died tonight. In 2015 Faye must have died and somehow come back here in Faith’s place. But how? And why? What had Faye changed by coming here? Had she damaged the future? Fixed it? Did the life of this one girl in South Carolina in 1921 matter to anyone but Carrick?
Tonight as she’d been drowning in the ocean, she’d heard a voice calling for her. But now she understood the voice was calling for Faith, not Faye. It was Carrick’s voice. He had saved her life but it wasn’t her he meant to save. It was Faith, who he said was his daughter but clearly was not. If she wasn’t his daughter, his biological daughter, then was she his adopted daughter? A stepdaughter? No, those were real daughters, and no decent man would kiss his adopted daughter or stepdaughter the way Carrick had kissed her. A foster child? No. Faye was no child. Neither was Faith. She’d been seventeen at her death according to the plaque on the lighthouse. Maybe Carrick had taken her in? Faye’s mind whirred with possibilities. Either the man was a monster or she wasn’t related to him in any way. She feared the former, wanted to believe the latter. If she could ask him—but no, she shouldn’t. Too dangerous. She would seem insane to him, kissing him, not knowing the year. It was a miracle he hadn’t called for the men in white coats already.
Faye leaned against the fireplace mantel. She rested her head on her forearm and cried until she felt dizzy. It was 1921? Why did it have to be 1921? Of all the random, awful, stupid years to wake up in. Why not 2010 and she could meet and marry Will all over again? Why not 2006? She could have gone to the same college Will had. Even if he’d still died, she would have had him in her life for five years instead of only one. They could have lived in a world of indoor plumbing and electricity and vaccines and the internet. Had Carrick been Will, she would have given up all that and more gladly. But Carrick wasn’t Will and she had to accept that. She’d thrown herself at him tonight, and if she didn’t keep her guard up she would do it again, because it would be so easy—too easy—to pretend he was Will.
She forced herself to wipe away her tears.
“I’m in Freaky Friday, aren’t I?” she said to the empty room. Faye sighed, stood up straight. Either she was calming down or the shock was setting in. She had no idea how to react. Collapse into tears again? Scream? Run away? Surely this was the first time in history this had happened to anyone. Or maybe not? Maybe this happened all the time, and no one ever found out because no one would ever believe someone who said she was from the future. Faye wouldn’t. And if Faye wouldn’t, a lighthouse keeper in 1921 certainly wouldn’t.
Faye picked up her lamp again and wandered through the house.
In the kitchen she found another antique that wasn’t an antique—a black-and-white enamel stove. Copper pots hung from the ceiling. Cast-iron pans hung on the wall. And by the door there was a one-year calendar on a piece of white linen. A calendar just like her grandmother had in her house, a gift from a local bank. It said 1921 at the top, and underneath it was a New England farm scene. Faye backed out of the kitchen and into the living room again, where she bumped into the coffee table. On it she found a Sears catalog beneath a large hardbound Bible. No, not a Sears catalog—a Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog. She picked it up and opened a random page. A men’s three-piece suit was for sale—$24.95. Not a bad deal. The Good Housekeeping magazine on the coffee table had a picture of a little girl in green carrying a hat box. The issue was dated May 1921 and the ink still smelled fresh on the pages.
Faye continued her explorations of the downstairs. Off the living room was another bedroom much smaller than the one upstairs. The bed was a twin, and the headboard and footboard were iron. It looked a little like a monk’s cell with nothing but the bed and washbasin and the prie-dieu. The prie-dieu? Faye examined it and found it identical to the one in her room back at the Church Street house. Sitting on top of the prie-dieu was a little red prayer book also identical to the one in her room back in Beaufort. Wrapped around the prayer book was a set of rosary beads, solid silver. The medal above the cross read S. Brendanus, Ora Pro Nobis. Faye eased the book out of the wrapping of rosary beads. Sure enough, on the inside cover was written a name—Carrick Morgan. And a handwritten prayer for God’s forgiveness. A prayer she’d read a few hours ago. A prayer she’d read ninety-four years in the future.
Faye shut the book in an instant, wrapped the beads around it and returned it to its place.
Then Faye opened the closet door and saw clothes hanging inside—sturdy canvas work pants, sturdy cotton shirts, a long heavy coat, an oilskin slicker. Not a baseball T-shirt in sight. Yet there on the wall of the closet hung a black-and-white photograph—a photograph of a sailor in uniform. Brass buttons, chevron on the sleeve, US on a badge on the high stiff collar. It was Will in the photograph. It was Will in a US Navy uniform. Except it wasn’t, because Will had never served in the navy. The only uniform he’d ever worn was his baseball uniform.
Faye couldn’t take her eyes from the photograph. It was Will. Her Will. Younger than the Will she’d seen tonight by a few years, this was the Will she knew, the Will who only wore a beard during the play-offs—even if he wasn’t playing in them.
“Will...” she whispered, touching the face in the frame. She knew she shouldn’t do it but she couldn’t stop herself. Carefully, she eased the back of the frame off and read the words written on the back of the picture in pencil.
Senior Chief Petty Officer Carrick Morgan, 1918.
The year 1918 was when World War I had ended. Carrick Morgan had served in World War I. The wound on his side...a war wound? She put the framed photograph back on the wall and closed the closet door. But only for a second before she opened it again. What she was doing was wrong, horribly wrong, but she had to do it. She’d spied a box on the top shelf and had to know what was inside. She set the lamp on the prie-dieu and held the box into the halo of light. It was a small wooden box, hand carved, the kind one kept secrets inside. Maybe there was one about her in there. Not her, but Faith, whoever Faith was.
“Oh, my God...” Faye breathed when she opened the box. It was full of medals and letters congratulating Carrick on earning them. A Navy Cross. A Distinguished Service Medal. A Good Conduct Medal. Even a Medal of Honor.
“You’re a Boy Scout, Carrick,” she said, shifting through the various medals, the letters of commendation from superior officers full of words like noble and courageous, dauntless and indefatigable.<
br />
“Forget the Boy Scouts,” Faye said. “You’re Captain Freaking America.”
Faye knew there were seemingly good people who hid dark sides behind their masks of innocence or decency. But it was impossible for her to believe a man who could earn such honors, yet was humble enough to hide them in a box at the top of his closet, was the sort of man who would do anything as sick as kissing his own daughter. And since she couldn’t believe it, she didn’t. She wasn’t any closer to finding out who Faith Morgan was, but she knew who Faith Morgan wasn’t. She was not, in any way, shape or form, Carrick Morgan’s daughter.
So who the hell was she?
Faye quickly packed up the medals and put them away before Carrick found her.
She left the little bedroom and pressed her hand to her forehead as a wave of panic and nausea rushed through her. It was happening again—the fear, the foreboding, the sense that she was losing all touch with reality. She had to get out of here, out of this house, out of this time and this world. How had she gotten here? The water had brought her. Maybe if the water had brought her, the water could take her back again. Fleeing the house, Faye ran to the ocean’s edge and waded into the water up to her thighs. Nothing happened. She waited for a wave to hit her, but no wave came. The water behaved, merely licking and lapping at her legs. She waded deeper. She put her hands in the water; she put her arms in the water. She even knelt in the water, soaking herself through her shirt to the skin again. Nothing happened. The water was calm—no riptides, no hidden currents. And no denying it—Faye was trapped in 1921. The water had brought her here. The water seemingly had no intention of taking her back.
After a while, Faye grew cold. The cold helped in a way, calming her like a compress on a fevered forehead. She trudged out of the ocean and sat on the beach, almost bright as morning in the moonlight, her arms around her legs, shivering. She forced herself to breathe the way both Will and Carrick had made her. In and out, in and out. Whatever was happening, it wasn’t the end of the world. Faye opened her eyes and looked around.
The water’s edge was farther out than she remembered. At least forty feet farther out. And where before there’d been nothing but pilings, now she saw the long wooden pier. And where before there’d been only a line of rocks worn away by the elements, now there stood a two-story white house with dark trim on the windowsills and eaves. Green trim, maybe? Black? Hard to tell at night. The house was a perfectly symmetrical rectangle with a wide wooden front door in the center of the house and two casement windows on each side. Two brick chimneys jutted up on either side of the steeply pitched roof, and a painted porch ran the full length of the front. And where before the lighthouse had been dark and abandoned, now there was light. A bright beacon shining out from the top of the lighthouse and blinking on and off every seven seconds.
The Night Mark Page 12