The Night Mark(79)

“Oh, yes. They were like family, she said, she and the Chief were—that’s what she always called him—Chief. And he’d lost a daughter and my grandmother lost her daddy...and they were close. Not in any way that wasn’t right,” Miss Lizzie said quickly. “They were the only two people there when his girl drowned in the storm. My grandmother watched it happen.”

“A storm,” Faye repeated. “His daughter drowned in a storm?” Is that what had happened? They’d watched her drown? Originally Faith had been killed a week earlier when she’d fallen off the pier into the water. Faye had changed the past, but only in the smallest of ways. The present, it seemed, was otherwise unchanged. Thank God for small favors.

“It wasn’t quite a hurricane, but it was bad,” Miss Lizzie said. “My grandmother never talked about what happened until the night before the Chief’s funeral. Then she told us the whole story, about how it was her who’d almost died that day. She fell in the water and the keeper’s girl dived in after her and fished her out. But before the keeper’s girl could get out of the water, a wave hit, and she went under. Never came up. My poor grandmother had to drag the Chief out of the water before he drowned himself looking for her. They spent the night in the lighthouse. My grandmother said it was the worst night of her life. Every few minutes she had to stop him from running out and throwing himself in the ocean. She said she slept stretched out in front of the hatch to stop him. She said...she said she’d never seen anyone grieve like he grieved for that girl of his.”

Faye leaned back in her chair, all appetite gone. Carrick... He’d mourned for her like she’d mourned for Will. He thought she was dead, and here she was, alive and well and eating pie. His grief was for nothing. She hadn’t died, but how could she tell him that?

“I can’t imagine watching someone drown, someone I loved,” Faye said. “I don’t want to imagine.”

“My grandmother and the Chief carried that night with them all their lives. I recall my mother telling her she didn’t want to go to Chief Morgan’s funeral. He was a Catholic man, you see, and none of us had ever once stepped foot in a Catholic Church before, and this was a white church, very white. But my grandmother said, ‘We are all going.’ So we went.”

Faye could scarcely breathe thinking of Dolly at Carrick’s funeral, of her grief and Carrick’s and all of it that could have been avoided somehow...should have been...

“I was fifteen or so then and liked my grandmother a whole lot more than I liked my mother. You know how girls are at that age. So I sat by her side through the funeral,” Miss Lizzie continued. “You know, I had never seen my grandmother cry before. And she...she wept.” Miss Lizzie said those two words with finality. “She wept so hard the priest tried to cheer her up afterward by asking her if she was Chief Morgan’s girlfriend. I laughed at that—teenage girls find everything like that funny—but my grandmother did not. She never talked much outside the family. But that day she spoke, clear as a bell. She held that priest’s hand and said, ‘Father Cahill, the Chief was my friend.’ And that was that.”

“Father Cahill? Pat Cahill?”

“You know him? He lives around here now.”

“I know him. And I think I need to go have a little talk with him.”

Faye stood up and reached for her plate of half-eaten pie. Miss Lizzie put one finger on the edge of the plate.

“You can leave that right there,” she said with a meaningful smile.

Faye grabbed her purse and her car keys and was heading out the door when her bag buzzed at her. When she pulled out her phone, she saw a text message from Hagen flashing on the screen.

Four simple words: I’m calling. Please answer.

Faye sighed. Sure enough, the phone buzzed in her hand. She sat on the bottom step in the foyer. Something told her she’d want to sit down for this call.

“Okay, I’m answering,” she said to him.

“Thank you,” Hagen replied. “I swear this won’t be a fight unless you want it to be.”

He sounded sincere. Sincere and panicked.

“I don’t want it to be,” she said. “What’s up?”

“I got an email confirmation about an MRI for you from our insurance company? What the hell, Faye? Are you all right?”

Damn it. The insurance was still in Hagen’s name, his email address, his phone number. She’d forgotten to tell them to change it.

“I’m fine. I don’t have anything wrong with me. They were just checking.”

“Doctors don’t do emergency MRIs for fun. Were you in an accident? Are you hurt?”

“Not hurt. I may have accidentally mixed up my Ambien with Tylenol. I blacked out. Nothing else.” Ty’s theory had been reasonable, a very male “stupid girl” theory that Hagen was likely to believe as it put the blame squarely on her.

“Jesus, Faye, you could have killed yourself. Are you keeping all your pills in one bottle? Were you drunk?”

“You know, our whole ‘let’s not fight’ plan is not going to fly if you start accusing me of getting drunk and mixing booze and pills. Does that sound like something I’d do?”

“I’m not accusing. I’m scared. I’ve pried pill bottles out of your hand before.”