This time she read more slowly. “‘Death was in that poison’d wave,/And in its gulf a fitting grave/For him who thence could solace bring/To his lone imagining/Whose solitary soul could make/An Eden of that dim lake.’”
When she finished, he told her, “Thank you, Danni. Now tell me anything else he said.”
“What does it mean?” she asked.
“It means he hasn’t killed himself yet, not as of four minutes ago anyway. So I need you to please just think hard and answer my questions now, okay? Did he say anything else or did he just recite the poem?”
“Yes, he said, uh…he said something about seeing the whole way across the lake. About being able to see the lights in Canada.”
“He said he could see them from where he was?”
“No, he said he’d be looking at them in a few minutes. He said there were no stars out tonight because of the clouds but he was near a place where he could…how did he put it…‘ascend to the heavens’ I think. That was it. He said he could ascend to the heavens and from there look down on the lights in Canada as if they were stars. So that he would have to come down to them to get to heaven. It just made no sense to me, and the way he sounded, his voice was so low and tired or something. It’s hard to explain.”
“You did fine,” he told her. “You did wonderfully. I have to hang up now, but if he calls back, you try to find out exactly where he is, okay? And then you call me immediately.”
“I will,” she said.
He hit the End button, then brought up his call log for the telephone company’s number. Then he realized that it would take several minutes to get the necessary information from them, so instead, he pocketed the phone and hurried into the convenience store. In addition to the middle-aged female clerk behind the counter, there was a thirtysomething male standing at the dairy cooler, half a gallon of chocolate milk dangling from his hand while he studied the display of Ben and Jerry’s pints, and a teenage couple loading up on chips and Slim Jims.
“Could I have your attention please?” he said loudly and held his ID above his head. “My name is Sergeant Ryan DeMarco of the Pennsylvania State Police and I need your assistance. I am looking for a place, probably within a couple of miles of here, where it would be possible to see across Lake Erie to the lights of Canada. Can anybody think of anyplace like that?”
The man at the dairy cooler said, “That’s like forty miles across.”
The clerk said, “You can see lights from that far, I think.”
The man with the milk came toward the front. “No, because of the curvature of the earth. It would be like trying to look over the horizon.”
DeMarco said, “A high place. Somewhere a person would have to climb. A hill, a tower, something like that.”
The clerk said, “There’s a cell phone tower just a mile or so up the road toward North Springfield.”
“The lighthouse,” the teenage girl called out.
“What lighthouse, miss?”
The man said, “Would that be high enough?”
“Miss?” DeMarco said again. “What lighthouse?”
To her boyfriend she said, “You tell him.”
“Just out at the point,” the boy said.
“Tell me exactly where.”
The man said, “I don’t think it’s high enough. Besides, it’s all fenced off. I don’t think you can even get to it anymore.”
DeMarco crossed to the teenage couple. He looked directly at the boy. “This is extremely important,” he said.
The boy said, “It’s high enough. And you can get to it. You just can’t take your car up to it because the road is blocked off. And you have to climb over a chain-link fence.”
DeMarco said, “Tell me how to get there.”
“Just take 531 east until it swings south. There’s a dirt road there that veers off to the left, straight toward Perry Point. But you can only drive about twenty yards, then there’s these three metal poles you can’t get past. The old lighthouse is another couple hundred yards up that road. Behind an eight-foot fence.”
“And you’re sure you can see the lights from there?”
The boy said nothing for a moment. Then, “I, uh…that’s what I heard anyway. I mean there’s No Trespassing signs all over the place so…”
DeMarco looked at the girl. She smiled and said, “We’re sure.”
Forty-Nine