The Night Mark(53)

Faye went out the front door and down the path to the pier. The moon shone so brightly that she didn’t need her candle. She blew it out and left it sitting on the seawall. Careful in her bare feet, Faye made her way down to the dock and stepped onto the wooden walkway, which extended fifty feet over the water. Overhead the lighthouse flashed its beam. At her feet the ocean swished and swirled around the pier. Faye’s heart beat painfully hard as she walked to the end and stood with her toes overhanging the edge. As soon as she was there, she shivered as if someone were standing next to her.

“Faith,” she said. “You were here, weren’t you?”

Faye looked down at the water glinting in the moonlight. Above, the stars were so numerous, the sky looked like navy blue fabric covered in thousands of polka dots.

“Why were you here?” she asked. “What were you doing? Were you committing suicide? No, I don’t believe that. Why would you run away from your piece-of-shit husband but then kill yourself once you were finally somewhere safe?”

Last night Faye had waded into the shallows and accidentally dropped Will’s ring into the water, but what had Faith been doing out here? It seemed to matter, although Faye didn’t know why. One more mystery she had to solve.

Faye turned her back on the ocean and returned to the house. In the kitchen she found that someone, Dolly no doubt, had left dinner waiting for her under a red-and-white-checkered dishcloth. Dinner tonight had been some kind of ham casserole and creamed something. Faye picked up the fork and took a bite. Creamed squash. Not bad. Better than she’d expected, certainly. She sat down and ate every bite of her dinner, and then hunted down the last quarter of the peach pie they’d made today.

Faye took one bite of the pie and decided that maybe, just maybe, she could get used to living in 1921. Even cool from hours of sitting under a dish towel, the first bite tasted warm in her mouth. The salty crust dissolved on her tongue, and the sweetness from the sugar and the peaches set her cheeks to aching. There were no artificial ingredients. No Splenda to replace the sugar, no low-fat margarine to replace the butter. Real sugar. Real peaches. Real butter. Real everything. It didn’t taste like heaven, and it wasn’t an orgasm in her mouth. It tasted like pie, pure, unadulterated perfect pie.

When she’d eaten her fill, Faye washed her dishes and put them away by candlelight. She found it almost...pleasant? Maybe that was the word. Something almost pleasant to Faye about the quiet, about the candlelight, about the solitude. Faye knew she should be scared out of her mind, and part of her still was. Yet another part of her drank up the beauty and the silence like a desert succulent in a rainstorm. Was this what the first astronauts who’d visited the moon felt? Equal parts terror and tranquillity?

Faye went back upstairs to dress. Her skirt and blouse were sweat-stained and dirty from the weeding she’d done that day. She was tempted to put on clean clothes but with Dolly doing the laundry—probably by hand—Faye didn’t want to add to the wash pile more than necessary. And since Faye was helping with the chores now, she didn’t want to add to her own work.

“Oh, God, the chores.” Faye put her hand on her forehead and groaned.

She’d forgotten to milk the stupid goat.

Well, the goat surely wouldn’t mind seeing her in her underwear.

Faye stepped out the back door and into the pitch-black night with nothing but her candle to light her path to the goat pen. When was the last time she’d experienced a world without electricity? Had she ever? A couple camping trips as a child? Then it had been a novelty, something to be enjoyed for a weekend before returning to civilization. Now it was her new reality.

She hardly needed the candle to find the goats. All she had to do was follow her nose. It smelled like a petting zoo, like warm animal bodies, sweat and oats and dung. The three goats drowsed lazily in their shed, seemingly content with their lot in life. They looked up at her with their weird eyes, their horizontal pupils dilating by the light of her candle.

“Hey there, goats,” Faye said. “Don’t mind me. I’m just here to grope one of you against your will. I’ll be gentle, I promise.”

The billy goat had terrifying curved horns on his head though otherwise he seemed fairly sleepy and innocuous. The littlest one appeared to be a female, but Faye didn’t plan on looking close enough to find out. Nanny eyed her curiously before bleating so loud Faye was certain Carrick could hear it all the way up in the lighthouse. Nanny had a rope around her neck, a sort of collar, and Faye winced as she reached for it. Thankfully Nanny seemed used to being handled and didn’t put up any sort of fight as Faye led her through the wooden gate to a smaller holding pen. Faye assumed that was where the milking took place as a tin bucket hung off a hook there. She found a three-legged stool, secured Nanny to a post and put the bucket on the hay-strewn floor.

Faye sighed. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”

Nanny bleated again. It didn’t sound like a vote of confidence.

“Maybe I should get you drunk first,” Faye said. “Maybe I should get myself drunk first.”

“I might have some bourbon around here somewhere.”

Faye started and turned around. Carrick stood in the doorway of the pen. It appeared he was trying very hard not to laugh at her.

“Where’d you come from?” she asked.

“Up. I was on the walk and saw you leave the house. Thought you might need some company.”