Maidenstone Lighthouse

by Sally Smith O'rourke

  “Last night, I guess,” he replied uncertainly. “I was there last night to pick up Bobby’s stuff…” His voice trailed off. “Anyway,” he continued after a nervous pause, “when I came back this morning for the rest of it, the door was standing wide-open and the place had been ransacked.”

  “They didn’t get any of Bobby’s things!” I heard the panic rising in my voice again.

  “I don’t really know,” Damon stammered guiltily, a sure sign that he was lying. “I mean, dammit, Sue, they went through everything. So they might have taken some of Bobby’s stuff. But I don’t see what damned difference it makes. Half of it went to the dump and you told me to give the rest to the Goodwill, anyway.”

  “The bastards!” I dropped the phone and fell back onto the pillows, shattered by the thought of some slimy New York junkie walking around in Bobby’s treasured leather flight jacket, or wearing his favorite running shoes. “The dirty, lousy bastards,” I moaned through a sudden flood of tears.

  I felt like killing somebody.

  “For God’s sake, girl, pull yourself together!” I was dimly aware of Damon’s concerned voice shouting up at me from the fallen cell phone. “If I hadn’t told you, you’d never even have known I didn’t just take all that crap to the Goodwill,” he yelled. “It was just a bunch of worthless personal junk and clothes, Sue!”

  Something snapped inside of me.

  “Damn you, Damon!” I screamed, scooping up the tiny phone and hurling it across the room. It bounced harmlessly off the wardrobe, skittered back across the polished hardwood floor and came to a stop at my feet. The tiny ON light beside the antenna pulsed like a malevolent green heartbeat.

  Great, wracking sobs shook my body as I stared at the chunk of seemingly indestructible black plastic. “You were always jealous of Bobby!” I blubbered accusingly, though it’s unlikely that Damon heard me.

  Without bothering to pick up the phone I lurched out of the bed and ran to the bathroom where I felt like I would be violently ill. I leaned on the sink trying to regain control of myself.

  Once the sobbing had subsided I questioned whether I was feeling real pain for what I perceived as another of Damon’s inflammatory stabs at Bobby or the newly discovered guilt causing what now seemed an overreaction.

  I took in a stuttering breath. I could dimly hear the little phone ringing from the bedroom. It rang and rang and rang.

  It was very late by the time I finally fell into a deep and troubled sleep, dreaming.

  I was walking down the same New York street where Bobby and I had met. As it had been on our first day together, the sidewalk was wet with rain. But that had been a warm spring rain, full of hope and promise. This rain was cold and fell heavily, promising nothing but an endless succession of dreary winter days to come.

  People kept coming toward me on the street, their faces hidden beneath big black umbrellas. In fact, everyone I saw had one.

  Everyone but me.

  My hair was drenched and my clothes were sodden with freezing moisture. I quickened my pace, anxious to get in out of the rain.

  Then across the traffic-filled street I glimpsed a lone figure hurrying away from me. He was tall and blond, dressed in jeans and a familiar old leather flight jacket. And, like me, he had no umbrella.

  I called out to him. He stopped and looked at me through the rushing traffic. Then he smiled and I saw that it was Bobby.

  I started to run to him, splashing through the overflowing gutter and into the busy street. A truck blew its horn and swept past me, blocking my view of the opposite sidewalk and spraying me with foul black water.

  When the way was clear again, Bobby had vanished.

  I stood there in the rainy street calling his name. I could feel the hot, bitter tears of frustration coursing down my cheeks. But nobody saw my tears because the pouring rain continuously washed them away.

  I moaned in anguish and cried out for Bobby.

  Then I felt a cool, soft hand on my forehead and heard a soothing voice in my ear. “Hush now, dear,” someone whispered. “Everything will be all right.” I slowly opened my eyes, realizing that I was safe in bed and had only been dreaming again.

  The lovely ghost was sitting at my side, smiling down on me with her sad, dark eyes.

  “Oh, God!”

  I sat up with a start as the room filled with an incandescent flare of white illumination from the passing lighthouse beacon. The figure before me vanished in the light. Then I was alone in the darkness once more.

  “You were only dreaming,” I murmured through chattering teeth. Though the coils of the old electric heater in the corner were glowing cherry red, the room was freezing. I turned my eyes to the windows.

  The lace curtains were billowing gracefully around the antique maple wardrobe. For a moment I was certain my ghostly visitor was standing there in the shadows. But then I saw that the curtains were simply caught in a cold draft from a partially open window.

  I got out of bed and scurried barefoot across the chilly floorboards, intending to close the window. As I drew closer I could hear a faint melodic voice drifting up from the lawn below. I looked outside, telling myself it must be the sound of the blowing wind, or perhaps one of the feral cats that Aunt Ellen used to feed. But the air outside was deathly still and nothing moved in the inky shadows around the house.

  Then I heard the voice again, louder than before. My body shuddered with a chill that had nothing to do with the frigid air pouring in through the open window. Because it was unmistakably a woman’s voice. Somewhere in the darkness below she was singing a sweet, sad melody.

  The lighthouse beacon swept across the house again, illuminating her shimmering figure beside the wrought iron fence out front. She was dressed all in flowing white lace, as she had been the night before.

  She did not look up at the sound of my astonished gasp. Instead, still softly singing words that I could not quite understand, she glided away in the direction of Maidenstone Island.

  I stood in the window until the last faint traces of her voice were lost among the ordinary sounds of wavelets lapping against the nearby beach. With shaking hands I closed the window and went downstairs to make myself some tea.

  I knew that I would not sleep again before morning.

  When the tea was done I sat at the kitchen table, trying with little success to separate reality from imagination. For though I believed the beautiful spirit was real, I could not explain her appearances, which twice now had coincided with my vivid, unhappy dreams of Bobby.

  Was it possible that she had heard me weeping and had come to comfort me in my grief?

  But why? Who was she?

  Desperate for an answer, I climbed the steep stairs to the large attic space above the main house. In the middle of the large expanse of the dark room I could see the white cord hanging from the bare lightbulb secured into one of the rafters high above me in the main peak of the roof. When I pulled it a yellow glow seemed to fill the room and I stood looking around.

  In his zeal to finish the remodel Damon had deposited here many of the things that had not been sold or discarded. Leaning against the far wall were the dreary family portraits that had hung in the parlor, hall and stairwell all of my life. But there was one I’d never seen before. I pulled it into the light and looked into Aunt Ellen’s beautiful brown eyes. She must have been sixteen or so when this was painted—I had no idea she had been so beautiful—in a gown of white lace with a brilliant blue sash. By the time I remember her she was old and always wore black. I set the picture near the door; it belonged over the fireplace in her parlor.

  I turned back to the room and found her folding rocking chair, the cushion a petit point rose design that I had done the summer I was fifteen. Aunt Ellen believed that ladies should know how to do handwork and so I had learned. I sat in her chair and could smell the violet fragrance that she loved so much. A tear came to my eye. I missed her.

  In spite of my perceived rebellion as a young woman I had, in fact, enjo
yed the cotillions, the afternoon teas, the special shopping trips that filled my dresser with gloves and hats because “ladies didn’t leave the house without gloves and hats.” Learning the ways of a Victorian lady had actually been one of the highlights of my girlhood.

  I rubbed my eyes, back to the present. I found among the dusty relics of that vanished age Aunt Ellen’s massive family Bible and her stack of carefully tended photo albums in a large leather trunk, exactly where I had placed them after her death.

  Hauling an armload of heavy books down to the kitchen, I made myself another pot of tea and began searching the albums for some clue to the identity of the beautiful young woman I had seen in my room.

  The flyleaf of the old Bible seemed the best place to start. Because, beginning in 1842, all the marriages, births and deaths of five generations of Marks family members had been meticulously recorded there. Near the bottom of the list I found my own name, penned in Aunt Ellen’s prim, no-nonsense style. Above it, written in by other hands, were the names of my father, my mother, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins.

  On the day she had showed me the old picture, Aunt Ellen had indicated that her mother’s uncle George, who was presumably the disgraced girl’s father, had gone to New York to plead for her to return home. So I backtracked through the years until I found the names of George Hector Marks, Aunt Ellen’s great-uncle, and his wife, Emily.

  According to the Bible entries, George Marks was born in 1861, married in 1884 and had three children. The eldest, born in July of 1885 was a girl named Aimee. Two boys, Harold and Thomas, had followed in 1889 and 1890.

  But there the paper trail ended.

  The marriages and deaths of the two boys were duly recorded—Harold died young in France during the Great War in 1917, Thomas as an old man in Providence in 1969. But of Aimee Marks, who, if she was indeed my ghostly visitor, had looked in the photo I’d seen to be no older than twenty-five, no record had been made beyond her birth.

  Frustrated, I put aside the Bible and tackled the old albums, searching the years between 1900 and 1910 for the studio photo of the girl that Aunt Ellen had briefly showed me but refused to name.

  I had been at it for nearly an hour when the dark eyes and pretty face of my ghostly visitor jumped out at me from another old photograph. This was not a studio photo, but a group shot of several young people posing together on a beach.

  Turning the picture over I discovered on the back a faintly penciled inscription that read “Aimee’s Sweet 16 party, July 1901.”

  “Yes!” Though the girl in the picture was younger than my ghost, she was definitely the one I had seen in my room. And if she was born in 1885 Aimee Marks would have turned sixteen in the summer of 1901.

  Excited by my discovery, I pushed the album to one side and closely examined the sepia-toned photo. There were half a dozen teenagers in the picture, the girls all dressed in high-necked swim costumes, complete with dark stockings extending to their ankles, the boys in comical striped bathing suits and jaunty straw boaters. At the revelers’ feet sat a wicker picnic hamper on a plaid blanket. And the familiar outline of the Maidenstone Lighthouse tower could be seen in the distance.

  In the center of the photo Aimee was perched coquettishly atop an angular black bicycle, supported by two smiling boys, both of whom had their eyes fixed jealously on her. And despite the bulky, dark-colored swimming costume that clung damply to her slim, high-breasted figure, it was easy to understand the boys’ transfixed expressions. Because, even at sweet sixteen, Aimee Marks had been an absolute knockout, with long, shapely legs that her prudish long stockings did little to conceal.

  Though the whole party was stiffly posed for the picture—film exposures in that time being long, tedious affairs requiring many seconds of absolute stillness—there was something in Aimee’s expression that set her apart from the other girls in the scene. Unlike the two captivated boys who seemed unable to take their eyes off of Aimee, the other girls were all squinting awkwardly into the camera—doubtless because the photographer had the sun at his back.

  Aimee’s eyes, however, were focused elsewhere. On someone or something that lay just beyond the range of the lens.

  Excited by my discovery, I worked my way through the rest of the albums for the time period, expecting at any moment to find another picture of the girl. I examined scores of fading family portraits, wedding shots and summer outings, until I determined from the gradually shifting trends in fashion, hairstyles and automobiles that I had reached the 1920s—far later, I believed, than my ghostly visitor had remained alive.

  But I found no more photos of Aimee Marks. And, oddly, even the studio portrait that Aunt Ellen had showed me was nowhere to be found in the albums. In fact, not one of the hundreds of photos of the Marks family and friends that had been taken during the brief period when she had lived and died contained another image of Aimee Marks.

  The first weak rays of the rising sun were lighting an ominous line of approaching clouds above a slate-gray sea as I closed the last thick volume.

  Exhausted and vowing to more fully research Aimee’s life as soon as I was fully settled into the house, I went back upstairs to bed and finally slept. Strangely, in my dreams, I was a teenager once more.

  Danny Freedman was at the wheel of his old red Mustang and I was beside him. The sensual salsa rhythm was pounding in time to the beat of the gutted mufflers.

  “Let’s go out to the island and have a few beers,” Danny suggested, slipping his arm around me and pulling me close.

  “Well-bred young ladies do not drink beer with house painters,” Aunt Ellen intoned from the tiny backseat of the Mustang. “It was one of his kind that ruined poor Aimee.”

  When I awoke, nearly eleven hours later, darkness was once again falling over Freedman’s Cove and a high wind accompanied by hard, driving rain was shrieking around the house.

  Chapter 12

  Though I had hardly noticed at the time, the line of approaching clouds I’d seen that morning had heralded the arrival of the season’s first big nor’easter. By late afternoon a frigid cyclonic storm roaring straight down from the Canadian Arctic was enveloping the rocky Rhode Island coastline in thundering surf accompanied by torrents of ice-laden rain.

  Fortunately, after I’d left Krabb’s the night before, I had forced myself to drive to the Food Mart. So I was well supplied with groceries and the other necessaries that one lays in before winter comes to Freedman’s Cove. There were canned goods of every kind—in case there was no power to run the fridge. As an additional precaution against an electrical outage I had bought candles and boxes of big wooden matches for every room, along with extra batteries for the flashlights and a small portable radio for my nightstand.

  The grilled cheese sandwich and canned tomato soup was comforting; a reminder of childhood lunches with Aunt Ellen. Of course she would have included sticks of celery and carrots because you had to have vegetables. I smiled at the memory. But with night closing in I hurriedly did the dishes and set about storing my supplies, checking the windows and shutters and generally battening down the place to withstand the unexpected bad weather.

  Later, as the storm did its best to batter the sturdy old house, and with the distant boom of high surf crashing against the causeway, I phoned Damon to apologize for my unforgivable behavior of the previous night.

  There was no answer at Damon’s apartment, so I left a contrite message on his voice mail asking him to call me back when he got in.

  As part of the remodeling before the house was put up as a rental property, Aunt Ellen’s gloomy old formal parlor had been turned into a cozy sitting room. The idea—Damon’s, of course—had been to create a cheerful space where summer vacationers might retreat on cold and rainy afternoons, not uncommon in Rhode Island, even in high summer. There they might enjoy a game of cards, a glass of wine or a film on DVD. And to that end the room had been furnished with comfortably cushioned wicker lounges and equipped with a nice reproduction Mission-styl
e cabinet that hid a CD player, television and DVD player.

  So, when my supplies were stashed and the windows all had been checked I went into the parlor and lit a fire in the cast-iron grate. I dashed outside and retrieved my laptop PC and a handful of favorite CDs from the Volvo, then brought a pot of hot chocolate from the kitchen and settled in to get organized.

  Patsy Cline’s heartrending “Crazy” was playing softly on the CD as I opened a new file and created a comprehensive list of chores still to be done around the house.

  There was the phone to be turned on, of course. And if I was going to spend any substantial time up here during the approaching winter the heating oil tank in the basement would need to be checked and topped off, storm windows installed and a number of other basic but essential preparations made.

  Boring though it was, I lost myself in the mundane details of the work, which was exactly the kind of structured activity—or so Damon had always claimed, anyway—that made me an asset to our antique appraisals business. Actually, I’ve always enjoyed the detail work. And that night in Aunt Ellen’s house, with a good fire crackling at my feet and the pot of warm cocoa at my elbow, I felt positively snug and secure.

  Might it be possible, I wondered, to move my work up here? After all, telecommuting was the in thing these days. Most of my duties in the city really involved nothing more than the writing of detailed reports and appraisals on the laptop. And that work was usually performed while I was at home listening to my favorite music.

  As for the auctions and estate viewings that I was frequently required to attend on behalf of clients, as often as not I had to drive or fly to them in various locations, mostly in New England. But here I was in New England already. So why not adopt Freedman’s Cove as my new base of operations? Certainly, I reasoned, anybody could answer the phone in the Manhattan office.