The Night Mark(51)
Faye had no choice but to follow even though she was absolutely certain she was walking into the lair of the king of spiders and all his spider children. Was Dolly trying to scare her to death? Or kill her? It sounded as if Faith Morgan had never done chores in her life, so maybe this was some kind of baptism by fire. But no...it wasn’t a spider’s secret kingdom, although Faye did see a few of the creatures. Five of them. She counted. Five too many. Dolly didn’t seem the least bit perturbed by their presence. And Faye had to admit it was kind of nice down there. It was a root cellar. Cool, damp air filled the room. Faye guessed its temperature at fifty degrees. If it weren’t for the spiders, Faye might have been tempted to bring a chair and a lantern down here and do some reading.
Dolly pointed at the shelves. They were bleached planks, weathered, worn and full of nail holes. One had writing on it—SS something she couldn’t read. These planks had been part of a ship once. A wrecked ship? Possibly. On the shelves were bags and bags of food. Faye found onions—red, yellow and white. And at least six buckets of potatoes. In the darkest corner of the cellar, Faye spied a black box the size of a piano bench or large ottoman. She lifted the lid and saw several blocks of ice inside.
“Oh, so that’s why it’s called an icebox,” Faye said. “It’s a box of ice.” Now she knew where to get ice for ice water. Not that she’d want to ingest this ice. Who knew where it had come from? She wondered if the previous lighthouse keepers had saved and stored the ice from last winter. That ice could be six months old for all she knew. At least it was something she could use as a refrigerator or a freezer. She saw a large jug of milk in the box and some sides of meat wrapped in white paper.
Dolly pointed to a bag on the top shelf, and Faye pulled it down and found it full of peaches. They weren’t as fresh as they could be, but they hadn’t gone bad, either. Overripe bananas made for the best banana bread, and overripe peaches likely worked just fine when cooked in a pie.
Back in the kitchen, Dolly whipped up a bit of puff pastry to make the crosshatch shell. Faye stood behind Dolly and watched her roll out the pastry, cut it into strips and lay the pieces on top of the pie with an elegant precision even Martha Stewart would have applauded.
“You know more about running a house at sixteen than I do at thirty,” Faye said, glad Dolly couldn’t hear her. “I don’t know if you want to get married, but if you do, your husband will be a lucky man. You might not be lucky, but he will be.”
Faye heard the sadness in her own voice, the bitterness. Married. This little girl married? But what other choice did a black deaf teenage girl in 1920s South Carolina have? Sure, there were black colleges, but did they cater to the deaf? Faye didn’t know but she doubted it. This girl, so smart and talented and hardworking—did she have a snowball’s chance in a South Carolina summer of doing anything with her life other than getting married, having babies or working as a housekeeper? Did Faye?
Since waking up in 1921, Faye had felt almost everything—fear and terror, confusion, anger, lust and loneliness. But for the first time she felt real regret. She almost wished she could send Dolly to 2015, and Faye would stay here in her place. No, it wasn’t perfect in her time, but it had to be better than this?
Still...there was hope, wasn’t there? Women had worked during World War I in unprecedented numbers. They’d had to. After that, many of them had fought to keep those jobs. And right now, out there somewhere, Dorothea Lange was learning her trade, a trade that would eventually lead to a job with the government taking pictures of the effects of the Great Depression and the dust bowl. If Dorothea Lange, a woman with a husband and children, could have a career as a photographer in this time, Faye could, too. Couldn’t she? But before she could take on the world, she had to finish baking this damn pie.
Dolly gave Faye the pie, and Faye placed it in the moderately hot oven. When she instinctively went to set the oven timer, she found it had none. No egg timer, either. Had they not been invented yet? She’d have to check the clock on the mantel and peek at the pie every few minutes to make sure it didn’t burn. The engineers of the world had figured out how to build lighthouses and steamboats and tanks and machine guns, but they hadn’t invented a basic kitchen timer yet. As if Faye needed any further proof she lived in a world run by men.
The mantel clock said it was 11:40. With the pie taking forty-five minutes, she’d need to take it out at 12:25, if not sooner. Faye tested her prowess with the oven by making a pot of tea and then set out to weed the garden while it steeped. She’d had a flower garden at Hagen’s house. The gardening itself had never been all that much fun for her, but Faye had loved taking pictures of the flowers as they’d budded, bloomed and died. Although she’d never had a vegetable garden, a weed was a weed, and she set to pulling them. Even with the ocean breeze wafting up from the beach, Faye still had to stop every few minutes, drink tea and towel herself off. She would have preferred a tall glass of ice water, but she didn’t want to drink anything that wasn’t boiled. The water for the house apparently came from a cistern and a rain barrel. Faye had no desire to acquire the Lowcountry version of Montezuma’s revenge. Especially since the pie looked so good when she took it out of the oven. She wanted to survive to eat this damn thing.
After two hours of weeding, Faye was pretty sure she was going to die. Whoever had decreed that women had to wear full-length skirts and long sleeves while working outside was both insane and sadistic. Even wearing the large hat she’d found hanging on the back of the kitchen door, Faye felt the sun’s heat like an ant under a magnifying glass. But if it killed her, so be it. If she died again, she’d either end up back in 2015 or in a morgue. She didn’t care which—both had refrigeration.