The Night Mark(20)

“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.”





6


Faye sat in the living room of Father Pat’s little Duke Street cottage, a pretty fern-green one-story nothing-special sort of house. Nothing special on the outside, but the inside was an art gallery, a Pantone dream. He’d painted every room a different hue—sunflower gold for the kitchen, cornflower blue living room, lagoon-green bathroom. And every wall boasted watercolor paintings of the sea and the sun; every horizontal surface held books on paintings, on how to paint watercolors, on the history of painting. She expected something in the house to give a sign that it belonged to a priest, but there was nothing, not a cross in sight.

Pat got her settled on his sofa and gave her iced tea in a Pilsner glass.

“I’d never guess you were a priest,” she said. “By your house or anything really.”