CHAPTER 28
BETWEEN THE TIME I’d spent among the rocks and the hours I’d devoted to examining the pendant with Oskar, I’d lost all opportunity for sleep. When I reported to the lighthouse for my shift, I’d been awake for over twenty-four hours. I finished my first round of chores—refilling the oil reservoirs, clipping the wicks, changing the mantles, and setting the chain at the top of the tower—and then pulled the table underneath the spot where the chain of the foghorn came inching down, climbed onto it, and folded a rag under my head. I counted on the chain’s cold, heavy touch to awaken me, knowing that then I would have the time it would take for the chain to travel the distance from the tabletop to the floor in which to run up the stairs and pull it to the top so as to keep the horn sounding its proper rhythm. The table was a hard bed, but I was asleep the moment I closed my eyes. In what seemed like minutes later, I was awakened not by the chain but by a hand on my arm.
“Dangerous,” Archie Johnston said, “sleeping by a burning lantern.” His breath was sharp with liquor, and he smelled unwashed. “I saw you today on the beach. Far down the beach. What were you doing there?”
“Drawing. I’m making a catalog of—”
He shook his head violently. “Not that. I don’t care about that.” He clutched my arm again. “What you had around your neck. It’s hers, isn’t it? Did she give it to you?”
“Yes. Well, I don’t know for certain,” I said, pulling my arm away and pushing myself into a sitting position on the table. “I found it.”
“So you haven’t seen her?”
I shook my head.
“It’s for scaring snakes,” he said. “She showed Euphemia once. The women wear them when they’re harvesting. The shell flashes in the sun—zing, zing!” He made a quick motion with his hands near my eyes, and I drew back, startled. “That keeps the snakes away.” He pushed his face as close to mine as he could. “Do you need protection from snakes?”
“She was mine, you know!” he said suddenly, pulling back and beginning to pace, propelled by anger. “‘Stay away from her,’ my sister says to me, as if she’s my keeper. But when she wanted something, she took it. She makes out like she’s so superior, but she’s no better than anyone else, my sister.”
He stopped speaking and looked into the distance, or perhaps toward the house where Euphemia presumably lay asleep, there being no reason on this calm night that I should need her help. Then he leaned toward me, his breath heavy on my face. I could see the black dots where his beard grew.
“Listen,” he hissed, “whatever you do with her, you and Swann, I get a share. She’s mine, after all. I found her.”
“What are you talking about? We’re not doing anything with her!”
The first link of the foghorn’s iron chain fell against my shoulder. “The horn!” I exclaimed, alarmed.
To my relief, he made no attempt to stop me as I slipped off the far side of the table and rushed upstairs. I stayed there a good while, calming myself by deliberately performing the tasks the light required. When I could find no more to do, I crept as quietly as I could halfway down and bent low to peek into the boiler room. Archie had gone.
? ? ?
Oskar was sitting on the side of the bed when I came in the next morning, doing what he called his “strengthening exercises.” He’d put a can of green corn into our valise, hooked the handles over the ankle of his bad leg, and was lifting it, sweating with the effort. He counted quietly as I told him what Archie had said.
“And he was drunk! It was disgusting!” Archie’s smell lingered in my nostrils. I inhaled it with every breath.
“I wouldn’t take him too seriously . . . two, three, four . . . He’s obviously angry . . . two, three . . . frustrated . . . four . . . under the Dragon’s thumb.”
“I would have thought you’d be more concerned for my safety!” Weeks ago, I’d told him the gist of Euphemia’s story, and he’d been suitably appalled.
“If you’d screamed, I would have come,” he promised. “Broken leg or no. Obviously, he didn’t do anything terrible enough to make you scream.”
I shook my head, though it was true that Archie hadn’t hurt me, and I was far too tired to argue. I pulled the covers back and began to climb into the bed without bothering to change into my nightdress or let down my hair.
“What are you doing?”
“I told Euphemia there’d be no lessons today. I haven’t slept in so long!”
“No, no.” His hand was on my arm, as Archie’s had been. “You have to go back to where you found this.” He fingered the pendant hanging from the bedpost.
Later, I would tell him Archie’s story about its purpose, I thought, closing my eyes. Oskar had been right that it was more than a necklace.
“Trudy, I’m serious. If I could go, I would. I’d be there already.”
I was nearly asleep.
He shook me. “What if she left something else? She’ll be expecting you.”
He kept at it until his conviction that she might be waiting for me or have left some other object fully entered my mind and began to nag at me. I sat up and pushed my bare feet into my shoes.
“All right,” I said, stumbling around the room. “I should bring her something. A gift in exchange for the pendant. What do you think she’d like?” I thought of some of the loose items on the table in the parlor. A steel crochet hook? A thimble? A pen? What did I have that she might desire? I pulled a clean lace-trimmed handkerchief from my pocket. It was pretty, and she would have none like it.
Oskar snatched it from my hand. “No! Trudy! You mustn’t corrupt her! If she uses our things, how will she be different from us?”
? ? ?
It was remarkable that I didn’t fall down the mountain, as Oskar had done, so unsteady was I on my feet. At the bottom, I kicked off my shoes and splashed into the freezing water, which, together with the stiff wind, braced me for a time. Soon I was barely plodding, nearly unconscious, hypnotized by the regular wash of the surf, too tired to turn back. More than once, I nearly lay down on the sand.
At last I reached my tide pool and saw that the stone where the pendant had been was bare. I circled the pool gamely, grabbing up a crooked stick of driftwood and a shattered shell. The first had obviously been tossed up by the sea or washed down by the rains; the second, dropped by a passing gull. There was nothing human in them. Disheartened, I lay on the sun-soaked rock to rest awhile before plodding back.