Читать книгу The Night Mark - Tiffany Reisz - Страница 11

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 Morgan “said” he was a widower. Did that mean he wasn’t? Was his daughter illegitimate? That sort of thing didn’t fly back in the 1920s like it did now. Faye could easily imagine a man in a government job trying to protect his daughter from the stain of scandal by lying about his past.

“Where did you find this picture?” Pat asked. He hadn’t stopped staring at the picture since she’d handed it to him. “I’ve never seen it before.”

“I took that picture,” Faye said.

Pat’s brow furrowed. “Not possible. Carrick was dead long before you were born. Died in ’65.”

“It is possible, Pat, because this isn’t Carrick Morgan. This man’s name is Will Fielding.”

“Who?”

“My husband, Pat. My husband, who’s been dead four years.”

“My God...” Pat breathed. His shock was palpable. Faye felt it, too. “They’re twins.”

“Twins born a hundred years apart?”

Pat shook his head in obvious disbelief.

“Pat?”

“I’m sorry,” Pat said. “It’s just...strange. Very strange.”

“Imagine how I feel,” Faye said. “First I see a picture online last night of a man who looks like my dead husband. This morning I see a painting of a woman who looks like me the morning I scattered his ashes. And now I find out they were father and daughter? Oh, and that damn bird is back.” Faye looked up at the overcast sky and shook her head. “I am going crazy.”

“No, you are not, Miss Faye.”

“You sound pretty sure of that,” she said. “Wish I could be.”

She crossed her arms over her chest and faced him.

“Why did you paint her on the pier like that? You wouldn’t have been alive when she died.”

Pat turned and leaned back against the railing of the dock, putting the Marshlands before him and the lighthouse behind him.

“Retirement age for a priest is seventy. Did you know that?” he asked. It wasn’t what she expected him to say, but she trusted he had a reason.

“No. I’m not Catholic.”

“I retired from the Church when I was sixty-four. I should have hung on for six more years, but I couldn’t do it anymore.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve painted all my life. It’s my second religion. A few years ago my hands started shaking when I held anything heavier than five pounds. Then it was four pounds. Three pounds. A priest isn’t supposed to drop the communion wine. I had to take early retirement.”

“I wondered about your painting style. Kind of impressionistic, like Degas.”

“Degas was almost blind at the end. And I can’t hold a pen without it shaking like a leaf. I used to paint in a more realistic style. Impressionism was all that was left to me after the tremor started.”

“Your work is lovely.”

“It wasn’t, in the beginning. It was just awful, embarrassing. Whatever technique I’d developed over the years was gone. I painted like a child. Imagine if someone took your camera from you.”

“They can pry my camera out of my cold dead hands.”

“That’s what I always said about my brushes. But no one had to pry them out of my hands. They fell out.”

“I’m so sorry,” Faye said.

“It was hard to keep my faith after the tremor took the priesthood away from me, took painting away from me. My only two loves. So I went out to the lighthouse with a heavy heart. I had lied to Ms. Shelby, telling her I wanted to paint the lighthouse. But that wasn’t the real plan.”

Faye heard a note of shame in his voice, embarrassment maybe. She pictured herself curled up on the floor of the bathroom, the pill bottle in her hand while she worked up the courage to take off the lid. That was how Hagen had found her. The real plan, Pat had said. Yes, she knew exactly what the real plan had been.

“That would be quite a fall from the top of the lighthouse, wouldn’t it?”

“And onto rocks,” he said. “When the tide’s out, it’s nothing but rocks. A quick drop to a certain death.”

“I’ve been there,” Faye said.

He nodded. “I imagine a widow would know that place all too well.”

“What changed your mind?” she asked.

“The lighthouse. I won’t pretend a miracle happened. No angel stayed my hand. No voice from heaven. The lighthouse has always been a beacon of hope. That’s why you see it so often in Christian art. ‘A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all...’”

“Very pretty.”

“Matthew 5:15. I suppose it’s a cliché to say I saw the light. But there was a moment, an instant where I thought I saw the lighthouse lamp burning again. Just the sunlight tricking my eyes, I know. But it... I don’t know, it made me feel something I hadn’t felt in years.”

“Hope?”

He nodded. “Hope. Something told me to paint the lighthouse. And when I did paint it, I painted it well. Not like my old style, but not bad. And I painted it again. Eventually I wanted to paint it more than I wanted to throw myself off the top of it.”

“And the lady in the painting? The Lady of the Light? Why did you paint her?”

“Carrick never got over losing Faith. Maybe I just wanted to bring her back to life. The lighthouse gave me my life back. I guess I wanted to return the favor.”

“Pat,” Faye said. “I need to get out to that lighthouse.”

“Bad idea.”

“Why?” she asked.

“That lighthouse is dangerous.”

“You said it saved your life.”

“It could have taken it, too. It’s not safe out there. Some kids went out there a few years ago, got drunk on the beach and drowned when they went for a midnight swim. The lighthouse was there for a reason. There’s the sandbar and one hell of a riptide, too. We already have one Lady of the Light. We don’t need another.”

“How did she get that nickname?”

“People swear they see her sometimes. But lighthouses are notorious for having ghost stories attached to them. Parents use her as a warning, a scare story to keep their kids from breaking into the lighthouse or swimming near that corner of the island. The real story is much sadder. Faith hadn’t been at the lighthouse long. Just a few days. Nobody knows why she went out on the pier at night, but she did. A wave hit hard and high, and she fell into the water.”

“How old was she?”

“I can’t say for sure. A young woman.”

“Where was she before? In school or something?”

“She was with other family members,” Pat said.

“And why did she come down here?”

“A love affair gone wrong,” Pat said. “She was a beauty, they say. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Stop it.”

“I’d love to paint you. I’d have to get the right purple paint for your eyes. Elizabeth Taylor eyes.”

“Got them from my grandmother. I swear, I think her proudest achievement in life was passing her eye color on to me. She wanted to be Elizabeth Taylor when she was a girl. Even did her hair like hers. Black bouffant even in her sixties.”

“I might have had to go to confession after seeing Father of the Bride as a boy.”

“You know, I can tell when someone is changing the subject. Why don’t you want to talk about Faith Morgan?”

“It’s...” He waved his hand dismissively. “Some things just don’t make sense to me. Priests want things to make sense. She came down here to start a new life. Instead she died. And Carrick never recovered from losing her.”

“Ah,” Faye said, nodding. “Carrick and I have something in common then.”

Pat crossed his arms over his chest. He would have to be seventy-six or seventy-seven if he was twenty-seven in 1965. He didn’t look much over sixty to her. But now he did look older, just for a moment. Faye saw his hands tremble slightly. He clenched his fists, released them, and the tremor was gone.

“Poor girl,” he said. “Had it been today she might have been fine. She had a dress on, a heavy dress, heavy shoes. And she couldn’t swim.”

“A lighthouse keeper’s daughter who couldn’t swim?”

“Women didn’t do a lot of swimming back then. Carrick tried to save her and couldn’t. Jumped in the water, swam after her... Waves got her. Haunted him the rest of his life.”

“It wasn’t his fault.”

“Ah, but Carrick was a lighthouse keeper, a man whose job was keeping people safe. To lose her like that, on his watch...and then to find her body days later.”

Faye held up her hand to stem the tide of his words. She didn’t want to hear any more. She’d been spared seeing Will’s body until they’d cleaned him up at the hospital. And that had been bad enough, the sickening indentation in the side of his forehead, the shaved patch of hair, the crude stitches, the blue-gray pallor of his cold skin, the sheet pulled up to his neck hiding his otherwise perfect corpse from her. But to find the body of your own child...bloated, battered by the current...

“It was the beginning of the end of the lighthouse when Faith died,” Pat said. “Carrick couldn’t keep the light anymore. They merged the Bride Island station with the Hunting Island station and automated the light in 1925, which was a tragedy of its own.”

“How so?”

“Lighthouse keepers did more than just keep the lighthouse. They watched the coast, too, gave aid when necessary, rescued people in distress when called for. In the fall of ’26, a fishing boat broke apart right off Bride Island’s north shore during a storm and all fourteen souls aboard died. If the lighthouse had been manned at the time, those men might have lived. The world needed Carrick’s light but losing Faith... That snuffed it right out.”

Pat took off his glasses, wiping them with the only clean corner of his T-shirt.

“Carrick moved down to Savannah after leaving Charleston. He worked for a shipping company and then the Georgia Port Authority. By his own account it was a long and hard and very lonely life. He came back to Beaufort after he retired just like I did. He said it was the last place he was ever happy.”

“Was he a good man?”

“Too good,” he said. “Too good for this world anyway.”

“Funny,” Faye said, although it wasn’t.

“What is?”

“Today I said exactly the same thing about Will.”