The Night Mark(39)
Faye started to dress. She found in the clothes the girl had laid out for her the least attractive pair of underwear she’d ever seen in her life. These weren’t granny panties. These were great-granny panties. But the white-cotton garment did fit her well. All the clothes fit her—the bandeau bra, the ankle-length blue skirt, the ivory-colored blouse with the matching blue tie. When she was done she looked at herself in the mirror.
“Oh, my God, I am Anne of Green Gables.” Clearly the flapper style of the Roaring Twenties had not yet reached coastal, rural South Carolina. She’d just have to make do.
As Faye hadn’t had hair this long since elementary school, she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She had no elastics to use to pull it back or plastic hair clips. For ten solid minutes Faye fussed with her hair, braiding and twisting it until it was in a semblance of a Gibson girl topknot.
Scared of encountering Carrick again, Faye crept quietly from the bathroom. She returned to her bedroom and made the bed as best she could, since it seemed like the sort of thing a woman in 1921 would be expected to do. After Will had died, his mother held her in her arms and said, “When you’re going through hell, just keep going.” Faye would keep going. What other choice did she have?
Reluctantly, Faye left the bedroom and went downstairs, trying to walk as purposefully as the girl with the yellow scarf in her hair had. Surely the girl had a name. Faye would need to find it out quickly. Her entire being was concentrated on one task—learn everything she could about Carrick Morgan, Faith Morgan and this house so she could blend in the best she could until another, better plan presented itself.
Morning sunlight flooded every room in the cottage and Faye studied the layout. The front door opened to a mudroom with rain boots in cubbies and oil slickers on pegs. Through the mudroom door was a hallway. To the left was the living room; to the right, Carrick’s bedroom. At the back of the house were the kitchen and pantry. The stairs went straight up from the center of the hall, her bedroom on the right and the bathroom on the left. A small house, lovely in its simplicity. Had she been here by choice, she would have fallen in love with the place instantly. But she wasn’t here by choice. She was a hostage taken by time.
Faye found the girl in the small celery-colored kitchen cooking something that smelled so good Faye’s mouth literally watered. It smelled like heaven, like love, like home and family and Sunday mornings at her grandparents’ house. It smelled like...
“Bacon,” Faye said with a sigh of bliss. She hadn’t eaten real bacon in years. Too fattening. Too high in cholesterol. Too everything. In the large cast-iron skillet, the girl was also frying eggs. Eggs and bacon cooked in lard. Maybe there was something to be said for living in the past after all.
“That smells really good,” Faye said, smiling at the girl. The girl smiled back but still didn’t speak. “Can I help?”
The girl’s attention was on her skillet, and she didn’t reply, nor did she look at Faye this time. That was when it occurred to her that perhaps something was going on with this girl. Was she disabled? Mute? Deaf? That seemed possible. Faye had had a friend in college who was deaf. She’d worn a lanyard around her neck with a laminated “I am deaf, please face me and speak clearly” sign on it and hearing aids in both ears. But this was the twenties. Hearing aids probably hadn’t been invented yet, and even if they did exist, Faye doubted a black teenage girl in rural South Carolina would have access to one.
Could the girl read? Could she write? Faye wasn’t sure how to ask about this quiet young woman without revealing that she didn’t know the things Faith Morgan should know. The girl was obviously comfortable enough with Faye to waltz right into her room without knocking.
Unsure what to do with herself, Faye walked out the back door and into the sunrise. The light was low in the sky, and the shadows were long—early morning still. She could see that the paint on the house was a warm off-white and the trim a deep dark green. Facing the back door, the lighthouse butted up against the left corner. Carrick wouldn’t have to take more than ten or twelve steps to go from the kitchen to the lighthouse. Faye walked around the right side of the house and stood on the front porch facing the ocean.
It was lovely, yes, beyond lovely. Nothing this lovely could be had without a price. In her time, the lighthouse stood but the house was long gone, destroyed by a tropical storm or a hurricane decades ago. It was exposed, weak and far too vulnerable to the elements. If a storm came, she knew to hide in the lighthouse and let the wind and the waves take the cottage. In her time, the beach was gone, too. Fifty feet of beach and the pier. Had anyone bothered to take photographs of this place? Probably not. Faye hadn’t seen any during her online search for pictures of the island. Did Carrick have a camera? Would he let her use it if he did? She would ask him if she could work up the courage. Where was Carrick anyway? Asleep? Did he work all night and sleep all day? Not all day surely. If his lighthouse keeping ended at sunrise, that would be around six in the summer. If he slept eight hours, he would be up around two. What would she do then? Claim amnesia and tell him she couldn’t remember what to do or how to do it? No, she couldn’t do that. She’d have to fake it as best as she could.
Faye rested her hands on the porch railing and gazed out at the water, watching the waves advance and retreat, advance and retreat, hypnotizing her with the beauty. She hated the beauty, hated it like she hated how much Carrick Morgan looked like William Fielding. The beauty felt like a trap. What if she fell for it?