The Night Mark(50)

Sweep & wash floors





Wash windows





Sew curtains





Make soap





Beat rugs





Bake pie





Milk Nanny

This house had a lot of damn lamps and that was a big garden out there. Make soap? What, was she supposed to be Granny on The Beverly Hillbillies now? Beat the rugs? What had the rugs done to deserve that?

Just reading these chores aged Faye a good ten years. So much for her pretty fingernails.

“This is a long damn list,” Faye said out loud. Dolly looked at her in shock and confusion. Apparently Dolly could read lips a little bit and had seen Miss Faith say something entirely not very Faithful.

“You do all this?” Faye wrote.

Dolly nodded.

“What do you want me to do?” Faye asked.

“Can you milk Nanny?” Dolly wrote.

Nanny? Who was... Oh, yeah, Nanny. That had to be the goat Carrick had milked last night for her. Faye tried not to make a face.

“I’ll try. I’m not great with goats.”

Dolly was not sympathetic. She wrote two words. “Good luck.”

Faye reread the list.

“I can bake a pie,” Faye wrote. “And weed the garden.”

Dolly smiled, looking both relieved and grateful. Better inept help than no help at all.

“Do you like working here?” Faye wrote.

Dolly nodded enthusiastically. Faye added Why to the beginning of her question.

Dolly wrote her answer on the board, and Faye read it. It told her all she needed to know about life on this island in 1921. And if a bus had pulled up outside with a sign on the side that said Destination 2015 with a travel time of ninety-four years, Faye would have boarded that bus then and there.

“Because it’s so easy.”





13


Maybe Faye wouldn’t bake that pie after all.

In the cupboard over the sink, Faye had found a cookbook. She found the manual for the oven in the junk drawer under a notepad, a rubber band ball, a screwdriver, a set of jacks and some twine. And while she did have some experience baking an average dessert, that was in the twenty-first century with 2015 technology. The cookbook was not helpful. The ingredients for peach pie were simple enough—peaches, butter, flour, sugar. And the instructions were fairly straightforward—combine, stir, cream and so forth. The final sentence of the recipe, however, was a cryptic puzzle: “Bake in a moderately hot oven for forty-five minutes.”

Moderately hot oven? That’s it? No temperature listed? What did that even mean—moderately hot? How moderately hot were they talking here? George Clooney in Ocean’s Eleven hot? Or Daniel Craig in Skyfall hot? Probably not Daniel Craig hot. That heat level would scorch any straight girl’s peaches.

If the vague temperature directions weren’t bad enough, the recipe for the piecrust called for ice water. Ice? In June? In South Carolina? On an island? In 1921? Clearly this was a Northerner’s cookbook.

Where the hell was she going to get ice water? Forget it. The crust would get tepid water from the tap, and it would just have to like it. Faye preheated the oven and started hauling bags of flour and sugar out of the pantry and setting them next to the cans of peaches on the kitchen counter.

She sighed.

“It’s just a pie, Faye,” she reminded herself. She had a degree from an Ivy League university, she’d taken photographs that had appeared in Vanity Fair, Esquire, The Atlantic, Newsweek, TIME and even Garden & Gun. Surely she could make a pie without falling apart.

Faye dug through the drawers and under the stove to find measuring cups, mixing bowls and the pie plate. When she stood up, Faye saw Dolly staring down thoughtfully at the assembled ingredients.

Faye sprinkled some flour on the counter, and in the white powder wrote, “Something wrong?”

“Crust?” Dolly wrote back in the flour pile.

Faye showed Dolly the recipe in the book. Dolly shook her head, then walked into the pantry. She returned with a box of saltine crackers.

Dolly wiped her hand through the flour, erasing the words. She wrote, “Watch me.”

Faye watched her.

First Dolly took out several fistfuls of crackers and laid them on the counter. With a whack of the rolling pin loud enough to make Faye jump, Dolly smashed them. Faye saw a smile around Dolly’s eyes as if she’d enjoyed making Faye jump. If Faye had to work a job this demanding at Dolly’s age, she’d probably pull pranks on her employers, too.

Dolly rolled the pin over the crackers, breaking them into smaller and smaller bits. Instead of the measuring cups Faye had found, Dolly used a coffee mug and measured out two cups into the mixing bowl. The butter had already softened from sitting out, but Dolly melted it further in a small pan on the stove. From the junk drawer, Faye took the pad and with a little red stub of a pencil wrote down everything Dolly did. Dolly’s nimble fingers would do any Cordon Bleu chef proud.

Wanting to help, Faye grabbed the jar of peaches and started to twist it open. Dolly waved her hand again, motioning Faye to follow her out to the garden. They walked past it and toward a small brick shed painted the same bright white as the lighthouse. A sign above the door read Oil House, and Faye could smell the faint scent of kerosene. But inside the shed she found nothing but a few empty old canisters and some old stained rags. Dolly lifted the cord to open a wooden trapdoor on the floor, lit a candle from a box on the inner wall and started down the steps.