The Night Mark(35)

“I hope so. I...” He paused, stuffed his hands in his pockets. He’d put on another shirt, and he looked the very picture of a rough workingman in the 1920s. “I need to know...you did just fall tonight, didn’t you? A wave caught you and that was all?”

He gave her a searching look.

“What else would it be?”

“Don’t hate me for asking this,” he said. “I saw you on the pier and looked away. Second I looked back you were gone. You...didn’t mean to fall off the pier, did you? You didn’t jump, I mean?”

“What? No.” She shook her head. “I thought I dropped something, and I went to grab it out of the water. A wave got me.”

“I had to ask. I know you haven’t been happy. I know being here is hard for you. But you might come to like it. I did.”

“I’ll try to like it,” she said, her voice hardly more than a whisper. Smiling wasn’t easy, but she forced herself to play along. “I’m going to try to sleep now.”

“You should. I’ll be up if you need me. I’m always here if you need me.”

He didn’t seem to know how to tell her good-night. She could tell he wanted to kiss her again, but she held back, not wanting to encourage further intimacy.

“Thank you for the milk.”

“Sleep well, love,” he said again. “Don’t fall out of bed.”

“Carrick,” she said when he turned to leave.

“Aye?”

“What I said earlier... I didn’t know what I was saying. I’m sorry.”

He shrugged again, hands deep in his pockets. He looked so much like Will then that it made her angry at him. How dare he steal her husband’s face and voice and eyes and shrug and smile? How dare he look like the man she loved and not be him?

“First day I stepped onto dry land when the war was over, all over, and for good, I kissed the first ten girls who would let me and proposed marriage to five of them. You’ve been in a war of your own. I won’t take it personally if you need to kiss a few boys to celebrate winning even if one of those boys is me.”

He smiled at her and turned away, and she watched him walk down the dark hall until all she could see was the faint outline of his body in what bits of moonlight had managed to sneak into the house. Then she was alone again, alone and afraid.

Faye sat on the edge of the bed and took a sip of the warm milk Carrick had brought her. As soon as she tasted it, she spat it right out into her hand. It tasted sweet, very sweet, and heavier, thicker than normal milk. Of course. Whole fat milk, that was what it was. And it was probably unpasteurized. She took another sip of it and found it better the second time. By the third sip she’d warmed up to the taste. By the fourth, she decided she might like unpasteurized whole milk. She’d never been much of a milk drinker but she could get used to this. Except...this house had no electricity, did it? So where had Carrick gotten fresh milk?

Oh, God, it came straight from a cow, didn’t it? Faye spit the milk out again. Carrick must have gone out in the night and milked some poor sleepy dairy cow and brought it to her straight from the udder. Rationally Faye knew all milk came from cow udders, but when it came directly from the udder with no stops in between? Faye groaned. She poured the rest out her bedroom window and onto the ground.

If the milk situation weren’t bad enough, Faye had a full bladder. They had indoor plumbing in the twenties, didn’t they? After some fumbling in the darkness relieved only by the flash of the lighthouse beacon every seven seconds, she found the matches in the bedside-table drawer. She lit the wick of the hurricane lamp again and sneaked out of the room. The floor creaked under her feet and she winced at every sound. Every step sounded like a snapping twig in the overwhelming silence. Every breath sounded like a windstorm.

“Thank you, God,” she sighed when she found a bathroom. She saw pipes on the wall and a cooper tub and a toilet. She could have kissed it. She did her business as quickly and quietly as she could. So far she’d succeeding in getting from the bedroom to the bathroom silently. The toilet had a pull cord to flush it, and Faye tugged on it. The sound of the flushing was like a small but concentrated tornado.

She waited to hear footsteps or Carrick’s voice. Nothing. Good, he was probably in the lighthouse. She was safe to walk around for now, safe to run if she could. But where?

First she found a set of dark stairs and crept down them. They were slick on her bare feet, as if they’d been freshly washed and waxed. With her left hand, Faye clung to the banister as she descended and clung to the lamp just as hard with her right. Death could come from a failure of either hand—if she slipped on the steps, she could break her neck, or if she dropped the lamp, she could burn the house down. It had been a long time since she’d felt fear like this, like fire in her blood.

At the bottom of the steps, she stopped and caught her breath. She’d survived this far. She lifted her lamp and gazed around the room, which appeared to be the living room or sitting room or whatever they called it here. It held a light fixture like the one in the bedroom, but Faye saw no electric outlets down here, either. She did find a candle box on the coffee table and two big brass candlesticks. The table sat in front of a cane-back sofa covered in blue cushions embroidered with wildflowers the colors of the setting sun. The focal point of the room was a brick fireplace. On the mantel sat two more candlesticks, which framed a wooden mantel clock on the left side. On the right, a peach-colored ceramic jug held an elegant array of yellow jasmine and white daisies. An indigo armchair with lace doilies over the arms sat to the side of the sofa with a bookcase against the wall just behind it.