The Night Mark(38)

Father Pat had been right.

She should have stayed out of the water.





10


When Faye woke up, it was still 1921.

She knew this from the bed she lay in and by the clothes she wore and the smell of the salt water on her skin. Faye had opened her eyes as sunlight flooded the room. It seemed like she’d fallen asleep only a few minutes before and now it was already morning. Her first sensation upon waking was terror, which, in a way, was an improvement over her usual waking sensation of emptiness and despair. Sleep had long been a reprieve from the prison of her grief, and she woke up every morning back behind the iron bars of her loneliness. For four years she’d woken up disappointed to find herself still alive. That morning, however, was different. That morning she’d woken up scared she was going to die.

Stay calm, Faye told herself. Unless she was having the most vivid hallucination in the history of the world, she was actually in 1921. Whatever the reason she was here, she would need to drink water, eat food and cause as little trouble as possible until she figured out what the hell was happening. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all she had. Also, she should play dumb. If she had to blame a nonexistent head injury for anything strange she said or did, she would milk that nonexistent head injury for all it was worth.

Before Faye could get her bearings, a girl entered the bedroom. The girl glanced at her and flashed her a tight but polite smile before bending to gather clothes off the floor, which she then tossed in a large tin bucket. Not a bucket, a washtub. Faye had seen those in movies and photographs from the Great Depression. Or maybe she’d seen one on Little House on the Prairie.

“Good morning?” Faye said. The girl said nothing, just continued her circuit of the room—straightening and tidying and picking up clothes. She was a pretty girl, young and dark-skinned. She wore a bright yellow scarf on her head, tied in a bow at the nape of her neck. The scarf matched her yellow cotton blouse and red checkered skirt. Faye guessed her age as fifteen or sixteen. She had a teenager’s spindly frame and thin wrists, but that didn’t seem right. Why would a girl so young be cleaning her room?

From behind a chair, the girl picked up a coat Faye recognized. A gray coat, still damp from the ocean water. It was June, summer, South Carolina. Why had Faith Morgan been wearing a coat last night?

The girl seemed unnerved by Faye’s staring.

“I fell off the pier and hit my head,” Faye said. “Sorry if I seem out of it.”

The girl only shrugged and said nothing. She merely stood and walked out, shutting the door behind her without saying a single word.

Who was she? Faye climbed out of bed and peeked into the hallway. The girl walked purposefully, knowingly. She had to be a servant of some kind. A housekeeper? She seemed far too young to be anyone’s housekeeper. Then again, it was 1921. Were there any child-labor laws on the books yet?

The girl hadn’t just tidied and picked up the laundry. She’d laid out clean clothes for Faye. It was then Faye saw the brass hand mirror on the dresser. Her hands shook as she lifted it and gazed into it.

It was her, Faye, and yet not her. They had similar faces, but not quite the same. First, the girl in the mirror was nowhere near thirty. Her nose was a little straighter and her hair a tad browner and much longer. The eyes were the same, though. Same violet color. Same loneliness.

Faye saw that she hadn’t come out of her adventure last night entirely unscathed. Under her right eye she sported a yellow-green bruise, the exact shade of broccoli-cheddar soup. It looked disgusting, to say the least. Faith—or whoever she was—must have hit the water very hard. Or maybe she’d hit the corner of the pier when she fell.

Faye put the mirror down and took the clothes to the bathroom to dress. She ran water into the sink and held some in her hands. She sniffed it, studied it. The water was lukewarm and mostly clear. Faye tried splashing some on her face. When nothing bad happened, she worked up the courage to brush her teeth with it. In the bathroom cabinet she found a rather delicate-looking toothbrush and the initials MAC engraved on the handle. It had a white handle—bone maybe?—and thick worn-down bristles on it, more like a hairbrush than a toothbrush. She guessed they were animal hairs of some sort, but she tried not to think about that part too much. The initials were neither Faith’s nor Carrick’s, but she couldn’t imagine this little toothbrush in Carrick’s large male hands, so she assumed it was for her use. While she found no toothpaste in the cabinet she did find baking soda, which worked well enough in a pinch. It tasted acrid and weird, but it did the job. Then Faye washed her body as best she could with a wet washcloth. She discovered more bruises by daylight. Twin bruises on her thighs and one blue bruise on her arm that looked like she’d been grabbed very hard and pulled. That one made sense. Of course Carrick had had to grab her and haul her out of the water.

Most days Faye wore makeup—concealer, mascara, whatever she needed to look human for Hagen. But that wasn’t an option today. She found no cosmetics at all in the medicine cabinet, which meant the bruises would have to stay out in the open. In this heat, she’d probably sweat any makeup off within an hour of applying it anyway. There was a jar of cold cream in the cabinet, a few bottles of this and that—mineral oil and lavender. Headache powders and cough syrup and scissors. If she needed any further proof this was a different time, the active ingredient listed on the cough syrup bottle was morphine. She’d save that in case any of them required surgery. Apart from that, she found a hairbrush, a comb and Carrick’s shaving supplies, which he clearly hadn’t used for a while.