The Night Mark

“Thanks. I need it for the caption.”

“I’ll take you out there again anytime you want.”

“I might take you up on that. How much will you charge me for it?” she asked, smiling.

“One clam.”

Ty crept into the hallway and was gone, leaving Faye laughing in bed. She didn’t hear a single footstep creaking on the hardwood.

Faye tried to go back to sleep, but it eluded her. Her new life had officially begun with a bang and a whimper or two. Sliding out from under the covers, she walked naked to her camera bag sitting on the floor. She enjoyed the breezy tickle of the night air on her breasts as it wafted in under the blinds. It made her tingle in a pleasant way.

She hadn’t had a chance to upload today’s pictures yet and wanted to see the lighthouse again. She plugged her camera into her computer. Ah, there they were, her beautiful photos. The stork, the trees, the glimmering ivory lighthouse. Faye would get this photo printed out and she’d hang it in her room. It was possibly the best work she’d ever done. Maybe she’d finally found her subject. Man Ray had his nudes. Dorothea Lange had her migrant workers. Ansel Adams had his landscapes. Maybe Faye Barlow would have her lighthouses.

She typed “Seaport Island Lighthouse” into the spreadsheet she kept to label her photographs. Out of curiosity she entered that phrase into Google image search to see who else had been taking pictures of the lighthouse. She found a few amateur pictures of the island, most of them obvious iPhone pictures posted on Pinterest. As she scrolled through the results she found a few historical pictures. One of the iron skeleton of the lighthouse as it was being built in 1884. Another when it was completed.

Faye was about to shut her computer down when a tiny thumbprint photograph caught her eye. It was a faded and sepia-toned picture of one of the lighthouse’s keepers who’d been stationed there after World War I, according to the caption.

Faye narrowed her eyes at the photograph. Her heart raced. She clicked on the link and enlarged the picture until the face of the lighthouse keeper filled up the fifteen-inch screen.

“No way...” she breathed, putting the laptop onto the sewing table and leaning in closer, staring at the photograph until her eyes watered. And she stared at it even longer until the watering turned to tears.

Faye reached out to touch the photograph on her screen.

She knew the face in the photograph, knew it well.

It was the face of the only man she’d ever loved.

Will’s face.

4 (#u5dfc0014-26a7-5683-8c38-2537ef8d0be1)

When the Beaufort County Library opened the next morning, Faye was the first one through the double doors. Unfortunately, the librarian at the reference desk was fairly new to the area, a transplant from Tennessee, and she’d never heard of Bride Island and/or Seaport Island and had no idea there was a lighthouse other than the Hunting Island Light. She suggested Faye walk down to the local tourist center with a smile and a “God bless.”

Thankfully everything that wasn’t an island was within walking distance in Beaufort. The tourist center was housed in a clementine-colored brick storefront house on Bay Street. Between last night and this morning, the wholly uncanny feeling of the lighthouse keeper’s photograph had faded from her consciousness the way a nightmare fades, mostly gone but leaving a strange, smoky pall over the day.

And yet...it was strange. Too strange to ignore, although too strange to take seriously, as well. But finding out the man’s name wouldn’t hurt, would it?

In the front window sat six watercolor paintings on easels. All of them were paintings of Lowcountry—the beach, the Hunting Island lighthouse, the Penn School...

And there it was, set off behind the others, a single painting of a solid white lighthouse and the pier that no longer existed. At the end of the pier stood a woman in a light gray trench coat. The woman faced the ocean and seemed to be holding something in her hand, something Faye couldn’t see. And behind the woman on the pier?

A large white bird perched on a pillar.

Faye froze, unable to walk away from the painting, unable to look away. The uncanny feeling returned times a hundred. First the photograph and now this...

What the hell was going on?

Faye tore herself from the painting and entered the tourist center’s front office. She found a teenage boy with his nose buried in his phone manning the receptionist’s desk. Either covering for his mother, she surmised, or doing community service for any of the usual teenage misdemeanors that deserved a punishment more than grounding but less than prison.

“Do you know anything about that painting of the lighthouse in the window?” she asked.

“Which one?”

“The one with the lady in the painting.”

“Lady painting. Um...hold on,” he said, sounding tired, hungover, stoned maybe. He wasn’t moving very fast, either, as he took a binder off a shelf and flipped through the pages. She’d been amused by the terrapin-crossing warning signs she’d seen around Beaufort with the outline of the turtle in the middle. If she had such a sign she’d hang it over this boy’s head. Then she would clobber him with it.

“Okay, here it is,” the boy said between yawns. “Watercolor. Sixteen by twenty inches. The Lady of the Light. Fifty bucks.”

“That’s it? That’s all it says about the painting?”

“Um...no. It says if you buy it, the artist accepts personal checks made out to the Historical Society.”

“I wasn’t planning on buying it. I want to know who the woman in the painting is.”

“I told you—the Lady of the Light.”

“Who’s that?”

“Some lady.”

“Okay,” Faye said, counting to ten before she murdered this boy. “What about the artist? From the angle of the painting, it looks like he or she painted it from the beach, which meant they were out there. You’re not supposed to be out there, since it’s a private island. You know anything about any of that?”

“Um...”

“I’ll take that as a no.”

“You can ask Father Pat about it, I guess.”

“Father Pat?”

“He’s a priest.”

“Why would I ask a priest about the painting?”

“Because he painted it.”

“He’s a priest and a painter?”

The boy shrugged. “What else are you going to do if you’re a priest? Not like you can join Tinder. Maybe you can. I’m not Catholic.”

“Is his number in the phone book?”

“What’s the phone book?”

Now he was just messing with her. She hoped.

“His number’s in here. Hold on.” The boy waved her off and flipped through the binder again. Finally, he found the phone number and wrote it down for her.