The Night Mark(65)

Faye yawned. “Sorry,” she said. “Just woke up from my nap.”

“You should go down, get back to bed.”

“I’m fine. I’m waking up. I’ve never worked so hard in my life as I’ve worked in the past two days. And still, Dolly did five times the work I did. And she’s what? Fifteen? Sixteen?”

“Seventeen. Just turned.”

“Seventeen... So much work for a girl so young.”

“Everybody works,” Carrick said.

“Except ladies?”

He sighed. “Even ladies,” he said. “So I’ve been told.”

“Yes, even ladies. So tell me more about the lighthouse. If I’m going to be your assistant I suppose I should know everything there is to know about it.”

Carrick stared at her a good long while, stared without saying anything. He did that a lot, and it worried Faye, made her think she’d done something wrong, something Faith wouldn’t have done.

“You really want to stay here with me?” Carrick asked. “I mean, for good?”

“I keep asking myself that question,” Faye said.

“Got an answer yet?”

“I don’t know how long I’m going to be here. But I’m here now. And while I’m here, I want to learn everything I can.”

It sounded good and it sounded true. And it was true in a way—Faye still had no idea what her purpose was back in this time, but she knew she wouldn’t figure it out hiding in her room. But the real truth was—and this she would not tell Carrick—that she simply wanted to be with him. With him and near him and around him and close to him. And if he spent his nights at the top of a lighthouse, then that was where she wanted to be, too.

“All right,” Carrick said. “I’ll teach you what I know. We’ll start at the beginning—do you know how a lighthouse works?”

“Um... I know there’s a big light up there.” She pointed upward. “And it shines out there.” She pointed at the ocean.

“It’s a start.”

Carrick dropped his arms to his sides, turned around and rested his lower back against the railing. Faye matched his pose and followed his finger where it pointed high up in the air.

“Working our way from top to bottom, that pole way up there is the—”

“Lightning rod?”

“Give the lady a prize.”

“What did you say?” Faye stared at Carrick.

“Nothing. Just ‘give the lady a prize.’ You know, since you knew it was a lightning rod.”

“Sorry. I just...” Will always said that to her. Give the lady a prize. It was what he said when she guessed something right, when she beat him at bar trivia, when she gave him a particularly good blow job that merited more than a simple “Thank you.”

“It’s grounded, right?” Faye asked to cover her confusion. “The lightning rod?”

“Of course it’s grounded.” Carrick’s brow furrowed. “At least I think it’s grounded. I hope to God it’s grounded. I’ll check on that tomorrow. Moving on down—that big ball on top is the vent.”

“Very big ball,” Faye said, nodding her head in solemn agreement.

“The bigger the lighthouse, the bigger the ball.”

“I’m thoroughly impressed with your big ball,” she said, and from the corner of her eye she saw Carrick grin.

“You should be. Moving down farther is the roof. Nothing special there except it keeps the rain out. Then that room up there is the lantern room, which you’ve seen. Every morning and every evening that gets cleaned. I clean the windows, I clean the lens, I clean off any dead birds that hit the glass. Then I drape the lens and hang the curtains—”

“Hang curtains?”

“Around the lens,” he said. “The sunlight can damage the prisms. So I hang the curtains and clean the windows inside and out. There are many fine things to being a wickie, but washing windows on a skinny gallery in high winds or on hundred-degree days is not one of those fine things. That’s why we do the window washing right after sunrise. The light pops off and I start cleaning. Better do it then before it gets hot out.”

“That’s smart,” Faye said. “I can imagine the height and the heat have caused a few accidents.”

“More than one. But I have a rope and harness I strap around myself when I clean the outside the windows. Moving down again, the light in there’s a third-order Fresnel lens. We salute the French for their ingenuity. They’ve saved a million lives.”

“Vive la France,” Faye said, and Carrick turned and gave a jaunty salute in the vague direction of France.

“You know all about the clockwork and the sun valve,” Carrick continued. “And the acetylene I’ll show you tomorrow. The cylinders are stored in that building right there.” He pointed down to a small brick shed at the base of the lighthouse. “I don’t want you touching them unless you have to.”

“Are they really that dangerous, or were you just trying to scare off Hartwell?”

“A little of both. They used to make the acetylene on-site at one station. Until there was a leak.”

“What happened?”

“Goodbye, lighthouse. Goodbye, keeper.”