by Steven James
Daniel thought about it. “I’m not sure what any of that has to do with me.”
“Unless something traumatic happened to you here, while you were in this barn.”
They were silent.
Daniel shook his head. “That seems a little hard to believe—that I wouldn’t remember what really happened here.”
“But you did repress some stuff,” Nicole pointed out. “I mean it’s starting to come back to you, but that’s only because we’re here.”
As he tried to climb back through his memories, he felt like there was a door there, one that he had his hand up against, but he couldn’t quite open.
Or maybe you don’t want to and you’re holding back.
“I don’t know,” he told them. “Nothing’s coming to me.”
When Nicole asked if he knew who’d left that box up there, he said, “I’m not sure, but right now, I’m more concerned with what’s in it and what that might have to do with what’s been going on this week than with how it got there.”
Mia shuffled through the photos. “Well, these are pictures of people near a shoreline—a beach, an ocean, something like that—this one looks like they’re picnicking and playing lawn croquet. There’s a lighthouse in the background.”
Kyle was paging through the papers. “I’ve got some ledgers here, old records. I don’t recognize all the towns listed—but I do know Bayfield. That’s where Larry lives.”
Larry Richter was Kyle’s uncle and ran a sailing tour and boat rental place near the Apostle Islands, about an hour and a half from Beldon. In the past, he’d offered to let Kyle and his friends use some of the sea kayaks or skiffs whenever they wanted to, but Daniel had never made it up there.
“And this is a diary.” Nicole was thumbing through the leather-bound journal. “It’s from a lighthouse keeper back in the 1930s.”
“Mine is too.” Daniel looked at his friends. “Listen, it’s almost dark. Let’s get to the car. We can check out this lighthouse deal back at Nicole’s house.”
Stars were already piercing through the darkening sky by the time they climbed into Daniel’s car.
No Northern Lights tonight, just a pale rising moon peering over the edge of the horizon.
The four of them agreed that they could see that movie anytime, but tonight, going through the contents of the box was definitely a bigger priority.
Back at Nicole’s house, Daniel’s phone rang while he was following her into the living room.
His dad’s ringtone.
“Hey, sorry I didn’t return your call earlier,” he said after Daniel picked up. “I misplaced my phone. So you said in your message that you saw another wolf get killed?”
Daniel stepped into the hallway for some privacy. “Yeah, this morning out by the national forest. We heard a gunshot and found her tracks. She’d been shot in the chest. She died right in front of us.”
A small pause. “And you didn’t see who the shooter was?”
“No. But the wolf was tagged on its ear, you know, from the forest service for the pack studies. I sent you a photo. I was thinking: How is this person who’s killing the wolves finding them? I wondered if he could be locating ones that’ve been tagged. Were the other wolves tagged?”
“I believe they were; however, a lot of the wolves in this part of the state are being monitored.”
“But doesn’t it seem strange that only wolves that’ve been tagged have been killed? Only someone with access to the database at the forest service could have found out exactly where those wolves were.”
“So, you’re suggesting that if someone could get in, hack in, whatever, they could get real-time GPS data on the wolves’ locations?”
His dad knew that Daniel’s blurs had led him to figure out who Emily’s murderer was last fall. While he obviously hadn’t been too excited that his son was seeing and hearing things, he had learned to trust Daniel’s instincts.
“Right,” Daniel said. “Maybe you could look into who accessed those files or when they were opened. If someone was viewing them around the time when the wolves were being killed, that would be something to at least check out, wouldn’t it?”
Rather than answer him directly, his dad said, “Who else knows about this?”
“Just Nicole, Kyle and Mia.”
“Let’s keep it that way. I’ll see what I can find out, but I don’t want you sharing this with anyone. It might throw suspicion on someone who’s not guilty of anything, and that’s the last thing I want. Let me take care of it. You guys leave it alone.”
“Sure.”
Daniel described where they’d seen the wolf and told his dad that if he followed their boot prints from the trailhead toward the Traybor Institute, he would find it.
He expected that his dad might want to go out there in the morning since it was already dark, so he was surprised when he said, “I should really record that location as soon as possible. Are you in Superior?”
“No. We decided not to go see the movie. We’re actually at Nicole’s house.”
Tell him about the box or not?
No. Find out what you can about it first. Go through the stuff that’s in there, then you’ll know what kinds of questions to ask him.
“I’ll see you at the house, Dan.”
“See you there.”
After he’d joined his friends again, Nicole’s parents suggested that they throw in some pizzas for supper.
No arguments with that.
They went to Nicole’s room to wait for the pizzas to bake and Daniel told them what his dad had said on the phone. “I’m guessing that all this stuff is connected somehow—my blurs, the barn, the wolf poaching, the Traybor Institute.”
“And the diaries too,” Mia noted, “because of the phrase you wrote down in your notebook in that same handwriting.”
Nicole took a seat on her bed next to her pile of stuffed animals. “So, what’s our next step?”
Daniel held up two diaries. “We find out who wrote these puppies—who that lighthouse keeper was.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
After splitting up the contents of the box the same way they had at the barn, the four of them got started.
Though Daniel and Nicole had their work cut out for them paging through the journals, it didn’t take Kyle and Mia long to make their way through the papers and photos. When they finished, they shifted their attention to finding out what they could about lighthouses, using their phones to search online.
To save time, Daniel and Nicole decided to read the diaries in depth later. For now they scanned the entries, looking for the author’s identity or anything unusual, especially anything that might have to do with Daniel’s blurs or the events of the last couple days.
In a diary you don’t necessarily list your own name, and that’s what it was like in this case, so they still didn’t know who the keeper was.
Nicole’s mom called up that the pizzas were done and the four friends made their way to the kitchen. Nicole rounded up sodas, and after bringing some paper plates and pizza slices to her bedroom, Mia and Kyle spent a few minutes sharing what they’d discovered about lighthouses.
Mia said, “This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything, but when you start talking about lighthouses, the idea of warning ships off the coast apparently goes back to ancient Greek times. They’d build fires on hills near the ocean in areas where there were rocks.”
“And every lighthouse has a different signal,” Kyle added, in between sizable bites of his crushed red pepper-covered slice. “They call it flash and dark times. One lighthouse’s light might go on for two seconds and then off for three, while another has a steady pulse of flashing and going dark every four seconds. It happens when the lens spins. Some of the ones in the Apostle Islands also have different-colored lights—green, white, red. It’s all so the guys on the boats can tell the difference, see where they are as they pass through the islands.”
Mia took a sip of her root beer. �
�The more I think about it, the more I think I should maybe be doing my novel about a haunted lighthouse instead of a monastery. I mean, some of the stories out there are amazing. With all the shipwrecks and tragedy, the lonely hours and the lighthouse keepers going mad and . . .”
She caught herself, glanced at Daniel, and must have realized that the phrase “going mad” was not the best one to use around him. “I mean, they were probably mentally ill to begin with.”
“Sure.”
“That didn’t really help a whole lot, did it?”
“Not necessarily, but you’re good.”
“I’ll just shut up now.”
“Let’s look at some of these diary entries,” Nicole suggested.
Daniel flipped open his diary. “The truth is, most of the ones I went through are pretty trivial.”
He read a few:
May 12, 1936
Breakfast—oatmeal and jam on bread that I cooked yesterday. I am planning pancakes and muffins later this week.
May 15, 1936
I have planted onions, carrots, radishes and some lettuce and cabbage.
“Then in June the strawberries and raspberries ripen and he stores the preserves in the root cellar. It goes on like that. You get the picture—But they’re not all that lame.”
July 1, 1936
Tonight, on the edge of the wind, I thought I heard a woman scream.
I lit a lantern and searched the island, calling out for anyone who might have, by some stray chance, been there. All to no avail. For it is true—I am alone on this island and I know it was just my mind seeking either companionship or solace here in this place of rocks and gulls and cliffs that plummet into the fearsome depths.
“Okay, that’s a little creepy,” Nicole said. “Can you imagine being out on an island like that and you start hearing things?”
“And it’s a totally different feel than the early entries,” noted Mia. “More poetic.”
“What happens then?” Kyle asked Daniel.
“From what I can tell the screaming woman isn’t mentioned again—at least not in the entries I read. But check this out.”
August 30, 1936
The storms have come now, the windiest season of the year.
Sometimes I stand in the tower and stare out across the lake into the night.
In the gales, I can hear the waves rage against the rocks below me and all I can think of is the souls who are out on the water and who are searching for a glimpse of my light.
Perhaps it is true of all light keepers, perhaps just true of me, but a thought crawls into my mind unbidden, unwelcome: a temptation to put out the light.
I do not know where this damnable idea comes from, be it a devil or a dark place in my own soul, but it is real and it raises its head when the strongest winds blow and the fiercest storms rage.
Oh, dear God, I must resist!
“So did he ever do that?” Kyle finished off his pizza and put his empty plate on Nicole’s desk. “Turn off the light?”
“If he did, he didn’t write about it. The last entry is at the end of October. Apparently, since there wouldn’t be any ships coming through when there’s ice on the lake, they didn’t have the lighthouses running during the winter months. The last page is just about him leaving to go back to the mainland.”
“So, okay.” Nicole opened the diary she was holding. She’d dog-eared a few pages and now turned to the first one. “Mine picks up the next year when he went out there to work at the lighthouse again. The ones at the beginning of the summer are like the ones Daniel read—about gardening or things like that, but then it gets interesting.”
June 12, 1937
And so it is.
Duty and routine.
The light.
I must keep her burning. I must!
Thirty minutes before sunset I ascend the tower.
Using a cotton cloth I wipe the lens and the mirrors, then trim the wick, light it and center it in the middle of the lens. I adjust the flame and place it in position, then release the brakes so the counterweights will continue to rotate the lens.
Six times a night I climb the spiral stairs and check on it.
You cannot let the light go out: That is what the constant voice in my head is telling me.
Mia, who’d been holding onto the photos, set them on the floor. “This guy is obsessed with keeping that light burning.”
“Or not keeping it burning,” Nicole added.
“Can you blame him?” Daniel said. “I mean he spends months out there by himself and he has only one job, one thing he has to do every day. It makes sense that it would become kind of an obsession for him.”
Nicole shook her head. “He wasn’t always alone.”
“What do you mean?”
She flipped to the next dog-eared page.
June 22, 1937
There is a deep loneliness here.
The days stretch out long and hollow, running together in my mind. I climb the stairs, light the lamp, and check it throughout the night to make sure that it stays lit.
Perhaps all of this will change after July 4. Perhaps with companionship will come the end of tedium.
“Companionship?” Mia said. “So who’s going to be his companion?”
Nicole paged forward in the diary.
July 4, 1937
My sister dropped off her daughter to spend two weeks with me. The girl just turned eleven yesterday.
I have promised to care for her as if she were my own child.
“An eleven-year-old girl?” Mia looked at her quizzically.
“Yeah. Why?”
“Hold on a sec.” She sorted through the photos, then held one up for Daniel. “Is that the girl from your blur?”
Seeing her again sent ice running down his spine.
“Yes.” He accepted the picture from Mia. “It is.”
The girl was standing beside a rocky shoreline. Rather than the nightgown she’d worn in his blur, here in the photo, she had on a plain skirt that, although dated, Daniel imagined was probably in style back then. She was smiling and holding up a metal watering can.
Who are you? What do you want from me?
Nicole had paused while Daniel looked over the photograph, but now, as he set it down, she said, “That’s as far as I got.”
“Well, let’s hear the next one,” he said.
She turned the page.
July 9, 1937
Betty has been helping me check on the light. She enjoys going up the steps and staring out the window of the tower at the lake or standing on the narrow balcony encircling it.
She likes to carry the lantern for me, to lead the way up through the dark.
“Her nightgown caught fire in your blur, right?” Kyle asked Daniel softly.
“Yes.”
He motioned for Nicole to go on, she thumbed to the next page, and shook her head. “It’s just a description of a sunset.”
She skipped past that.
July 12, 1937
She set the lantern down beside her. Oh dear God, she did.
It was not my fault, no, no, it was not—this is what I tell myself, but it was!
I was in the tower and saw her leave the house below. She called to me and waved, but then something, some movement in the night near the edge of the clearing, must have caught her attention because she looked that direction and then stepped to the side.
The lantern.
Oh, God!
The hem of her nightgown.
No, please!
I didn’t make it down the tower in time.
No one spoke for a long time.
At last, Nicole read the next entry.
July 13, 1937
This morning I buried my niece here on the island. No one will find her. But now—oh! And what comes next?
Her mother will return in five days. And I don’t know what I will tell her. What is there to say?
Perhaps that she went swimming in the surf and never returned?
But no—the truth.
God, not the truth! It is too terrible a way to die.
“There are some random words there, like he started to write something and then changed his mind. Nothing that makes sense. But then it goes on.”
Seagulls hover and dive into the surf that is crashing up on the shore.
I see a specter.
The girl. Standing now in the twilight, now in the day, burning, her hands raised toward the tower but I cannot get to her in time.
Nicole went to the next page.
July 16, 1937
Every night now I see her and it cannot go on. I must end this. Yes!
Tonight, one last time I will go up the tower steps, and then never again.
I have found a rope that is long enough. They say that hell awaits those who take their own lives. And so, if I deserve the punishment of the eternal flames, I am ready for it, for what I allowed to happen to my niece and for what I will do tonight.
She slowly closed the journal. “That’s the last entry.”
They all sat there in silence.
Kyle pulled out the ledgers and sifted through them, then held the last one up for the others to see. “It looks like whoever wrote these out—maybe some sort of supervisor, I can’t read the signature—he filled out the last one on July 18, 1937.”
“What does it say?” Daniel asked.
“Just that there was a replacement, that there was a new keeper assigned to the lighthouse instead of Jarvis Delacroix.”
“Delacroix? That was my grandma’s maiden name.”
“You think you’re related to this guy?”