The Night Mark

“Only locals call it that. And it wouldn’t be in the guidebook. It’s private. Rich black lady owns it,” Miss Lizzie said with quiet pride. “Paris Shelby.”

“Any idea if Ms. Shelby allows visitors on the island?”

It sounded promising, an old lighthouse on a private island. Maybe it hadn’t already been photographed to death. Perfect subject for a preservation society calendar.

“I wouldn’t know. And Mrs. Shelby hasn’t been around much this summer.”

“Thank you anyway. Maybe I can find a way out there.”

“Here’s your key,” Miss Lizzie said, handing her a silver key on a brass ring. “Now, you remember this isn’t a hotel. I won’t be changing your sheets or bringing you breakfast. That’s your job.”

“I don’t need much of anything, I promise.”

“You can use the kitchen. We let the kids use it as long as they clean it up, so you can use it, too. The top shelf in the fridge is yours. I cleaned it off.”

“I appreciate it. I’m only here to work this summer. I’ll stay out of your hair.”

“My hair thanks you kindly,” Miss Lizzie said with a debutante’s coy smile. “There’s not much left of it to get into anyway.” She patted the wispy curls back into place and left Faye alone in her new home.

Faye set her suitcase on the luggage rack and her equipment case on the bed. A fine room. Perfect for her needs. She’d live the simple life this summer—no television, no movies, no surround-sound speakers and five remote controls only Hagen knew how to work. She’d sleep and she’d eat and she’d work, and when she wasn’t working she would walk or read or do nothing at all.

She lay on the bed, staring up at the canopy and planning her itinerary for tomorrow. A drive around the islands to scout locations and maybe a few pictures if the light was right. No time to waste. She was no one’s wife anymore. If she didn’t work, she didn’t eat. She should have been afraid, but she wasn’t. Supposedly she’d lost “everything” in the divorce and had been left with almost nothing. Turned out almost nothing was exactly what she wanted.

With help from a sleeping pill, Faye slept well that first night in her new room. In the early dawn hours, when the sun had just begun to peek into the room, she woke up and felt the strangest sensation, a sensation she hadn’t felt in more than four years.

Hope.

Hope for what, she didn’t know, but she knew it was hope because it got her out of bed before six o’clock. She knew there was something out there she wanted and something told her if she chased it, she just might catch it. She put on her bathrobe and opened the French doors, but froze when she saw the visitor perched on the wooden railing of the little balcony.

She wasn’t sure what it was—a heron or a crane or an egret—but it was a big damn bird, that was for certain. Two feet tall, white body, blue-black head and a long bill, sharp as a knife. Faye considered retreating but stayed riveted in place, staring.

“Have we met before?” she asked the bird. Its only reply was to turn its head rapidly toward the sun. She wasn’t sure if that was a yes or a no.

“Wait a second... I remember you.”

Faye recalled a cold morning on the Newport pier, a morning she would never forget, though she might want to. She’d gone at sunrise, early so no one would see her and try to stop her. On that winter morning, she’d found herself the sole visitor on that lonely pier, a sorrowful sight in her gray trench coat and Will’s ashes so terribly heavy in her hands. As she walked to the end she was tempted to keep walking. What was that old insult? Take a long walk off a short pier? Yes, that was exactly what she’d wanted to do. But then a large white bird with a black head had landed on a boat tie-up, startling her with its size and sudden appearance. They’d eyed each other for a few seconds before Faye had continued walking toward the end of the pier. She’d fully expected the bird to take off as she neared it, but it hadn’t. It stayed while she knelt on weathered gray wood and poured the ashes into the water and it stayed when she stood up again. It flew off only as she started to walk toward land. For a second—a foolish stupid second—she’d thought the bird was watching over her, making sure she didn’t take that long walk off that short pier.

“What are you?” Faye asked the bird, not expecting an answer. The bird merely shook its wings in reply, and Faye sensed it readying to take off.

“Hold on. Stay there one second, big bird. I want to get my camera. Just a camera. Don’t be scared.” Faye backed into the room, trying her hardest not to make the floor squeak under her feet. From her leather camera bag, she pulled out her Nikon. Carefully, she crept to the doors, but the moment she lifted the camera to her eye, the bird launched itself off the balcony. The one shot she captured was a blur of white in the distance. Faye laughed. Well, there was a very good reason she hadn’t gone into nature photography.

After an early breakfast of cereal and tea, she found Miss Lizzie weeding her garden out back. Faye sidestepped a discard pile of murdered plants. Discerning what was weed and what was garden took better vision than Faye’s twenty-twenty, and she wasn’t sure Miss Lizzie could tell the difference, either. Faye asked her if she knew anyone with a boat. Miss Lizzie suggested she talk to Ty Lewis in Room 2 on the first floor. He was a marine biology student doing some project on the islands over the summer. He went out on a boat often, Miss Lizzie said. Even if he couldn’t take her out he could probably point her in the direction of someone who could.

When she returned to the kitchen she found her man. Had to be him. He wore a T-shirt—a shark and octopus locked in battle on the front with the words The Struggle is Real underneath. He had dark brown skin inked with dozens of black tattoos up and down both arms—fish, it looked like, lots and lots of fish—and half a dozen silver piercings: eyebrow, both ears, nose and lip, plus a bonus upper-ear piercing. He had dreadlocks pulled back in a ponytail. He was also handsome enough Faye had to remind herself she was thirty, not twenty.

Twice she reminded herself of that fact.

“Are you Ty?” she asked, pulling a mason jar—Miss Lizzie’s version of iced tea glasses—from the cabinet.

“I am if you’re asking.” He gave her an appraising look and the appraisal came in high.

“I’m asking,” she said. “Faye Barlow. And don’t flirt with an old lady. Our hearts can’t take that much excitement.”

“If you’re old, I’m Drake. What can I do for you?”

“I heard you have a boat? Or access to a boat?”

“I might have access to a boat,” he said between bites of scrambled eggs and sausage. He sat on the counter, not at the table. When was the last time she’d sat on a kitchen counter? High school?

“Would you let me pay you to take me out somewhere on your boat? I need to take some pictures of a lighthouse.”

“You can drive to the lighthouse. Best beach in the state. Don’t tell anybody that, though. I wanna keep the tourists at Myrtle Beach, where they belong.”

“Miss Lizzie said there’s another lighthouse, one on some place called Bride Island. Do you know it?”

“I know it. Hard to get near it, though. There’s a sandbar in the way.”

“Guess that’s why they needed a lighthouse. Can you get into the area at all? I have a long-range lens on my camera.”

“I can probably do that.”

“Today? Tomorrow?”

“This evening? Five?” He hopped off the counter and poured himself a massive glass of orange juice, so big it made her teeth hurt and her blood sugar spike just looking at it. Did college kids know that their days of eating and drinking like that were numbered? She wanted to tell him, then decided to spare him the awful truth that time was a thief, and a metabolism like his would be the first thing it stole.

“What’s the charge?”

“Dinner. With me. You know, after we get back from the boat.”

“You’re too young for me, and I’ve been divorced for about—” she pretended to check her watch “—ten days.”

“You celebrate the divorce yet?”

“Is that a thing people do? Celebrate the painful dissolution of a marriage?”

“Who wanted the divorce?”

“I did.”

“You love him?”

“No.”

“Like him?”

“No, but he didn’t like me, either.”

“You have kids?”