“Porphyry?”
“Yes. Right near where that shipwreck was found. We always liked to hike up to the lighthouse and say hello to the lightkeepers. I can remember the rabbits all over the place. Hundreds of them. We’d chase them but never caught one. And the burned trees at the point, even decades after the fire, the trunks were still scorched and black.”
“Fire? What fire?”
“My cousin told us that there was a woman who stayed on there as lightkeeper during the war after her husband died. Apparently her daughter went crazy, burned the place to the ground, and the mother died in the fire.”
Oh my god! Emily!
“Of course then we thought the place was haunted. It made for great campfire stories.” She turns out the light in the kitchen, looks at me. “You okay? It looks like you’ve seen a ghost.”
There is more to the story.
“I’m fine. It’s just . . .”
She looks at me for a minute, and I don’t say anything. The silence starts to feel awkward, and Laurie is waiting for me to talk.
“It’s just an interesting story.”
She has one hand on the railing, one foot on the stairs, and I think she’s about to say something else. But then she doesn’t. She just tips her head to one side, smiles.
“Good night, then.” She turns and heads upstairs. “Don’t stay up too late.”
All the rooms are dark. The only light is the glow of the computer monitor. I enter more words in Google. Emily Livingstone.
There are pages and pages of hits and a banner halfway down the screen with images—her paintings, vibrant, rich, and bold—and a picture of a young woman, black and white, grainy. I click on it, and it links me through to a website.
It’s a gallery in England with a page devoted to Emily’s work. There’s a short bio: born in Canada, the daughter of lighthouse keepers, raised on the shores of Lake Superior, which provided inspiration for her body of work. It was rumored that she spent time confined to a psychiatric institution before being sponsored by the renowned biologist Alfred Tanner, who was apparently some kind of lord or something, with a shitload of money, and his wife, Mildred. They relocated Emily and her twin sister Elizabeth to England and helped introduce Emily to the art world by promoting her work at a London gallery. It goes on to say that Emily “achieved critical acclaim and commercial success in the 1970s in spite of the fact that she never had any formal training and she never made public appearances. She was reclusive, and that only seemed to make her work more desirable for collectors because new pieces rarely come onto the market.” She was last known to be living in Italy. Only one gallery was allowed to sell her work. They hadn’t had anything new in almost ten years, but there were lots of people buying and selling her old pieces. Apparently, they’re still popular with collectors.
I look at some of the paintings. They’re familiar, yet not. The prices are listed in pounds, and I don’t understand their value, but there are a lot of zeros after the numbers.
There’s a picture of the artist. I click on it so that it fills the screen. The woman is young, her dark hair pulled back and piled on top of her head, and she’s wearing a simple, high-collared blouse. She’s sitting in a chair, one hand resting on her cheek. I’m looking for Miss Livingstone—Elizabeth—in the face. There are similarities, I suppose, if I look hard enough for them, but they’re not obvious. It’s the eyes that captivate me. They aren’t at all like Miss Livingstone’s. They look right through me, like they can see deep into my soul. They’re unsettling.
When I can’t stand looking at them any longer, I shut the monitor off. The darkness swallows me.
44
Elizabeth
I am alone in the sunroom. They have, considerately, given me my privacy. The last shafts of sunlight stretch across the room, wrapping me in warmth, consoling me. I still hold the object in my hand. It is shaped like a barbell, cool and smooth along the middle and on one of its spherical ends. It is engraved, but even my inquisitive fingers cannot discern the letters etched into the metal. The other end is bumpy, ornate with pattern. I imagine it is tarnished, the black settling into the grooves between filigree swirls that run along its circumference, framing the heart-shaped perforations that tinkle with just the slightest movement. I don’t need to see it to know what it is.
I know it, but it is not familiar. I only glimpsed it once, and then oh so briefly, as it escaped from an old cookie tin, falling to the floor of the assistant keeper’s house. Beyond that, it holds no meaning. I had thought it might. I had thought that holding it would somehow tie everything together, make me complete and whole. But it hasn’t.
The book on my lap is familiar. I recognize the musty smell of its long-forgotten pages, and the raised letters on the leather cover. It is heavy, its paper drunk with the waters of the Lake, bloated as in the death of the drowned. I know the dates that are entered on the yellowed sheets and the hand that wrote them without anyone having to tell me.
They left more than an hour ago. But still I sit. I am not surprised at their news. I knew as soon as they walked down the quiet hallway, their shoes squeaking formality as they trod across the wooden floor, that Charlie’s body had been found. An autopsy will be performed, they tell me, to determine cause of death. They also tell me that his head showed signs of trauma. They think the boom caught him unaware as it swung across the cockpit, perhaps flung by a rogue wave or an unexpected gust of wind, that he had been knocked unconscious and fallen overboard. Presumed drowned.
He is not as nimble as he once was.
The Lake knew that. How unusual for her to give up her dead. I wonder what she’s trying to tell me.
There are other footsteps now. Not the efficient tread of staff nor the hesitant pace of visitors.
Morgan.
45
Morgan
I wonder if I’m disturbing her, but she lifts her head when she hears me, so I sit down across from her, the warm sun on my back. Marty told me what happened. I know there are things you’re supposed to say when you learn that somebody died. It’s really kind of stupid because it’s not like it’s my fault. I don’t really have anything to apologize for, but I don’t know what else to say.
“I’m so sorry.”
“The Lake took him,” she says. She’s calm. I don’t think this surprised her at all, but knowing it makes it final. There’s no more time, no more hope. It means saying good-bye.
“It is fitting, I suppose,” she adds. “It is how he would have wanted it.”