The Night Mark(40)

Faye heard the door open behind her but she didn’t turn around. She knew the sound of male footsteps when she heard them.

“Nice morning,” Carrick said, standing at her side. He stared out at the water, and she stared at him.

“What time is it?”

“Seven or thereabouts. You sleep well last night?”

“Not really.”

“Ah, well, that’s to be expected.”

“Maybe I’ll sleep better tonight. You...you’re going to bed?”

“Haven’t eaten yet.”

Faye nodded. So Carrick slept after breakfast. That made sense. He’d treat breakfast like dinner and dinner like breakfast. She would sleep during the day, too, if she lived in a house without air-conditioning in the South in summer. Better to sleep through the heat of the day so she could be awake during the cool of the evening and night.

“Dolly said breakfast was almost ready.”

“Dolly said?”

Carrick laughed. “You know what I mean. She told me breakfast was about ready.”

“Dolly,” Faye repeated, committing the name to memory. “She works very hard.”

“Aye, she does.”

“She’s young.”

“Too young, I think, but she wants the job,” Carrick said with a sigh. “Better here than in town, what with her ears and all.”

“What exactly is wrong with her ears? Do we know?” Faye asked. “I don’t remember if you told me.”

“Her father said Dolly had a brain fever when she was one or so. That’s their best guess.”

“A brain fever...” That could mean anything in this time—meningitis, a viral infection, staph or strep or anything that made a child very sick. Wasn’t it scarlet fever that had caused Helen Keller to go blind and deaf as a toddler? God, Helen Keller was alive in 1921. She’d been a grainy photograph in her second-grade textbook and a girl on a stage when they’d been taken to an amateur theater production of The Miracle Worker. But she wasn’t a fictional character. The woman was real and alive and Faye could probably meet her if she wanted to.

“Her papa says she almost died,” Carrick went on. “They’re just happy she lived and has all her wits.”

“People are so fragile,” Faye said. “Scary to think about.”

“It is,” he said. “I could have lost you last night. I keep seeing it, in my mind. I was up on the walk, and I saw you on the pier. I looked away one second—one second—and you were gone.”

“You didn’t lose me,” she said.

He leaned over and rested his forearms on the railing, glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said. “If you trust me, stay with me, let me protect you, we’ll be all right. It’s better than the other choice, isn’t it? Better than before? You don’t want to go back, do you?”

“Back where?”

“Back home.” He nodded at the expanse of water that if crossed would take her north. Was that where she’d come from? Somewhere north? “Back to him.”

To him?

A clue. Finally, a clue.

Faith had left a man and come here.

“Do you think I should go back to him?” Faye asked.

“I know what the law would say. I know what the Church would say.”

“What do you say?” she asked.

“I say if I see Marshall again, I’ll throw him off the widow’s walk into the ocean. Any man who raises his fists to a girl deserves no better, especially when that girl’s his wife. But that’s me. He’s your husband.”

Husband. Marshall. A husband named Marshall.

Faye inhaled sharply. It clicked into place all at once. Faith wasn’t Carrick’s daughter. Faith, whoever she was, was someone’s wife. And that someone, Marshall Something, had abused Faith, and she had run away and come here for safety. And to avoid scandal, Carrick had lied and told everyone she was his daughter, the child of a marriage to a woman he was estranged from who had died. She could have laughed in her relief, could have wept. Instead, she said nothing until Carrick made a note of her silence.

“I shouldn’t have brought him up,” he said.

“It’s all right,” she said. “I just... I gasped because I’m sore. From the fall last night, I mean.”

“Let me take a look at you.”

She turned to him, and he touched her chin, tilting her face into the light.

“He’s a dead man next time I see him,” Carrick said. “But I hope to God neither of us ever see him again.”

“Do they look that bad?” she asked. How strange it was to wear someone else’s bruises, someone else’s suffering. Hagen had been a thoughtless husband sometimes, even callous, but never ever had he hit her.

“They look a sight better today than when you turned up here,” he said before lowering his hand.

“I left my husband, and you took me in,” Faye said aloud, needing to hear Carrick confirm it.

“No decent man on earth would turn away a girl crying, ‘sanctuary’ on his doorstep. I don’t know why you chose me, but I promise you this—I’ll take care of you for the rest of your life.”