The Night Mark(13)

Thankfully everything that wasn’t an island was within walking distance in Beaufort. The tourist center was housed in a clementine-colored brick storefront house on Bay Street. Between last night and this morning, the wholly uncanny feeling of the lighthouse keeper’s photograph had faded from her consciousness the way a nightmare fades, mostly gone but leaving a strange, smoky pall over the day.

And yet...it was strange. Too strange to ignore, although too strange to take seriously, as well. But finding out the man’s name wouldn’t hurt, would it?

In the front window sat six watercolor paintings on easels. All of them were paintings of Lowcountry—the beach, the Hunting Island lighthouse, the Penn School...

And there it was, set off behind the others, a single painting of a solid white lighthouse and the pier that no longer existed. At the end of the pier stood a woman in a light gray trench coat. The woman faced the ocean and seemed to be holding something in her hand, something Faye couldn’t see. And behind the woman on the pier?

A large white bird perched on a pillar.

Faye froze, unable to walk away from the painting, unable to look away. The uncanny feeling returned times a hundred. First the photograph and now this...

What the hell was going on?

Faye tore herself from the painting and entered the tourist center’s front office. She found a teenage boy with his nose buried in his phone manning the receptionist’s desk. Either covering for his mother, she surmised, or doing community service for any of the usual teenage misdemeanors that deserved a punishment more than grounding but less than prison.

“Do you know anything about that painting of the lighthouse in the window?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“The one with the lady in the painting.”

“Lady painting. Um...hold on,” he said, sounding tired, hungover, stoned maybe. He wasn’t moving very fast, either, as he took a binder off a shelf and flipped through the pages. She’d been amused by the terrapin-crossing warning signs she’d seen around Beaufort with the outline of the turtle in the middle. If she had such a sign she’d hang it over this boy’s head. Then she would clobber him with it.

“Okay, here it is,” the boy said between yawns. “Watercolor. Sixteen by twenty inches. The Lady of the Light. Fifty bucks.”

“That’s it? That’s all it says about the painting?”

“Um...no. It says if you buy it, the artist accepts personal checks made out to the Historical Society.”

“I wasn’t planning on buying it. I want to know who the woman in the painting is.”

“I told you—the Lady of the Light.”

“Who’s that?”

“Some lady.”

“Okay,” Faye said, counting to ten before she murdered this boy. “What about the artist? From the angle of the painting, it looks like he or she painted it from the beach, which meant they were out there. You’re not supposed to be out there, since it’s a private island. You know anything about any of that?”

“Um...”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“You can ask Father Pat about it, I guess.”

“Father Pat?”

“He’s a priest.”

“Why would I ask a priest about the painting?”

“Because he painted it.”

“He’s a priest and a painter?”

The boy shrugged. “What else are you going to do if you’re a priest? Not like you can join Tinder. Maybe you can. I’m not Catholic.”

“Is his number in the phone book?”

“What’s the phone book?”

Now he was just messing with her. She hoped.

“His number’s in here. Hold on.” The boy waved her off and flipped through the binder again. Finally, he found the phone number and wrote it down for her.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You should buy the painting. Father Pat would really like that.”

“I just got divorced. Took one week. Do you know how much money I had to give up to get my divorce finalized in one week?”

“You can have it for twenty-five dollars. It says so in the book.”

“Fine. Give it to me.”

Faye wrote out her personal check to the Historical Society. At least it was a tax write-off. The boy offered to wrap up the painting for her in some newspaper—she was shocked he knew what a newspaper was—but she declined and carried it back to the Church Street house. Faye wondered if sweat could damage a watercolor before recalling how much she had paid for it. As she opened the gate, Ty opened the front door. He stopped, looked at her and at the painting.

“Don’t ask,” she said.

He held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m not asking a thing,” he said before putting on his helmet and scootering away.

Faye set the painting on her desk, propping it against the wall. Father Patrick Cahill might be an amateur, but he was a talented one. His work had a Degas flavor to it, blurry, shaky, giving the impression of the lighthouse and the outline of the woman without giving way the details. She wondered if he painted en plein air or if this had been a work of pure imagination. He could have seen the lighthouse from a boat like she had and then painted it at a different angle later. But what about the woman? What about the white bird on the pier? Either the universe was trying to tell her something, or...