Lighthouse Bay (11 page)

She blinks, reorientating herself. Sitting on a stool next to the bed is a bearded man with a serious expression. The lighthouse keeper. She is at the lighthouse at last. She groans with relief.

“What is your name?” he asks, gently.

She opens her mouth to give him her name, but then stops herself. What if the Winterbournes come looking for her?

“Mary Harrow,” she says.

“Do you think you can stand, Mary Harrow? I have soup and bread, and clean water. You ought to eat, get your strength back.”

“How long have I been asleep?”

“Six hours. It’s nearly midnight.”

Isabella sits and gingerly lowers her feet to the floor.

“Here, let me help you,” he says. With his arm around her waist, he leads her from the bed, past a spiraling staircase to a small, low-ceilinged room. There is a sink, a round table with a single chair, a cast-iron cooker. A smell of cooked fish and tobacco
lingers in the air. He slides her onto the chair. She sees the wooden chest, still tied in the petticoat rope, sitting by the door on the bare floorboards.

Isabella sits quietly. The lighthouse keeper is in charge now; she can stop. He goes to a chest under his sink for a box of first-aid supplies, then lights a lantern and positions it on the table close to her outstretched palm. While he cleans and dresses the wound, he doesn’t meet her eye. His head is bent in concentration, so Isabella has ample opportunity to study him: his dark curling hair and neat beard flecked with gray, his serious eyebrows, his agile fingers.

“Where are you from?” he asks her, at last.

“I can’t say.”

“What was that box on your back?”

“A burden I soon hope to rid myself of.”

He bends to look at the chest, and she flies from her seat and throws herself in front of him. “You mustn’t touch it.”

Startled, the lighthouse keeper recoils. He speaks to her as he might speak to an injured animal, palms held up gently. “Steady,” he says. “I won’t touch it if you don’t want me to.”

Isabella is desolate and uncertain. She feels as though her edges are dissolving, as though she is made of sand and the wind is eroding her. “I’m so hungry,” she says.

He nods, then stands and moves to the cooker. She stares at her bandaged hand, and can’t remember how she cut it. She strains her memory. Flashes come to her. Eating lizard. Hunting berries. Pushing her feet up the beach. Then she remembers that she cut her hand just hours ago, climbing up the rocks. The fact that a hole seems to have opened up in her memory makes her panic. What is happening to her mind? She shoots out of her seat again and begins to pace.

The lighthouse keeper turns to her with a plate of steaming soup. He watches her pace and he stands very still, as though his stillness can infect her. Eventually she stops, blinking at him in the growing dark.

“My name is Matthew Seaward,” he says.

“I’m so hungry,” she says again.

He nods towards the table, and she sits. The lighthouse cottage smells oily and hot: trapped air, old seaweed, moldy wood. She doesn’t mind. She breathes in the present, and it fills her lungs brightly. She is safe, for now. The soup is salty and thick. Her mouth and her stomach are in heaven. She eats her fill, then washes it down with a cup of clean, cool water. Her mind slowly seems to reassemble itself. She settles.

“I have nowhere to stay,” she says. “I don’t know what to do.”

He leans back on his sink, his gaze traveling from her hair to her dress to her hands and then finally to her eyes. “Your eyes are haunted. What have you seen?”

She shakes her head. “Please don’t ask me.” She sinks forward onto the table and puts her face on her outstretched arms.

The lighthouse keeper allows the silence to stretch between them, and then finally he speaks. “The town is just a half-mile from here. I’m sure somebody will take you in.”

“I can’t go looking like this.”

“There are clothes in the bedroom, left over from the previous keeper’s wife. And shoes. There’s a big house at the nearest end of the main street. Pale pink boards. Mrs. Katherine Fullbright. She will take you in.”

Isabella’s stomach drops with disappointment. She doesn’t want to go to town. She wants to stay here, completely still, on this stool. The ordeal is supposed to be over, but clearly it is not. And now she considers it, the ordeal will never be over. She was broken
before the ship went down, now her pieces have become muddled.

When he speaks he is infinitely gentle, despite his size and obvious strength. “Mary, you can stay here tonight. Tomorrow, you can bathe and make yourself presentable. Mrs. Fullbright stands on ceremony and a torn dress and dirty face won’t do. You cannot stay here for longer than a night. It isn’t right.”

Isabella struggles to comprehend him in her addled state. It finally sinks in that he is trying to preserve her reputation. She no longer cares about her reputation, but she nods because she sees he will be immovable.

“Thank you. Thank you.”

She eats, then returns to the rough bed. The mattress sags. The room is unmistakably male: no fancy cushions, no curtains, no tablecloth, no cut-crystal decanters or vases for flowers. It smells of tobacco, papers, oil and dust. Matthew Seaward’s things. And in Matthew Seaward’s bed she sleeps, dreamless.

2011

L
ibby devoted a week to getting her life back in order, creating some kind of routine. She felt like an ant whose tracks had been washed away and who had to create a new path through a new place. She shopped at the local greengrocer and got to know the owner’s name as he boxed her vegetables. She had her electricity and phone connected and her windows cleaned. She registered to borrow at the nearest library. She scrubbed her cottage from top to bottom. She avoided her sister: the cool reception had told her that Juliet still harbored nothing but ill will for her. She swam every afternoon in the sea, as the evening closed in and the bright lights of Noosa to the misted south blinked into life. And she sketched, spending long hours in the well-lit art room, curled in a rocking chair with her sketchbook on her knee, with a plan to paint something very soon.

Between each activity she had to stop, rest and fight the tears. The grief weighed on every thought, every action. She pushed herself to keep going, keep setting up this new life. It was what Mark would have wanted for her.

A week after she arrived, Libby bought a new SIM card with a local number for her mobile phone and, before inserting it,
charged the phone to see if there were any last messages on it. She expected nothing, so she was surprised to hear the familiar voice of Cathy, Mark’s secretary, on her voicemail.

“Oh, good morning, Libby. It’s Cathy here from Winterbourne Jewelers. I wonder if you might call me back. I have some mail here for you and I need your forwarding address.”

Libby listened to the message again, confused. It was one in the morning in England now. She would have to endure eight hours of curiosity.

She glanced up at the view through the sparkling windows: a wide wedge of blue sea, golden sunlight on its white caps. Mark was on her mind again now. Sometimes, she forgot about him for a blissful five or ten minutes. Her body still felt bruised from the inside, but sometimes she forgot just how devastated she was. Then it came tumbling back, and she hated herself for having stopped remembering him, even for a little while.

She got through the day, absorbed by her drawing and cleaning and swimming in the sea. After her shower, while another dish of frozen lasagna heated in the microwave, she called London.

As the phone rang at the other end, her heart thumped hard. The last time she had called this number, she had said what she always said: “Hello, Cathy, it’s Libby Slater. May I have a word with Mark, please?” She would have to find a new sentence.

“Winterbourne Jewelers, Cathy speaking.”

“Cathy. It’s Libby Slater, returning your call.” There, not so hard after all.

“Oh, hello, Libby! You’ve left Pierre-Louis. We couldn’t find you.”

“I’m back in Australia.”

“That was sudden.” Cathy was the only person whom Libby suspected of knowing about her affair with Mark.

“I’d been unhappy at PL for a long time. I got your message.
Something about mail?” Libby realized she was pacing, so she forced herself to stop and lean against the kitchen bench. The smell of the lasagna began to fill the air.

“Ah, yes. Bit of a mystery. I’ve been going through the papers in Mark’s office. As you can imagine, it’s terribly sad.”

“I’m sorry. That must be difficult.” Libby swallowed over the lump in her throat, wishing she could be there in London to go through Mark’s papers; to have any keepsake of him, even a scrawled sample of his handwriting.

“We all miss him terribly, Libby.”

“His family . . .”

“I haven’t seen either of the girls, though I understand the eldest is pregnant. Emily is doing well, I think. Obviously she’s devastated, but she’s been in at work every day since the funeral, and it looks like she’s going to take over Mark’s job, at least in the short term. But let’s sort out this mystery with the mail. I found six letters, all addressed to you care of Mark’s post office. Mark hasn’t opened any of them, just shoved them in a drawer.”

Libby was both thrilled and terrified. Why would anyone write to her care of Mark? Was this some secret surprise Mark was keeping from her? Or was it blackmail? “Do they have a return address?”

“They’re all from the same place. A company called Ashley-Harris Holdings in Australia.”

A company. So not blackmail, and probably not a secret surprise either. “I have no idea who that is, or why they are writing to me at Mark’s address, Cathy, but can I ask you to pop them in the mail to me?”

“Of course,” she said.

Libby gave Cathy her new address, reluctantly realizing that as soon as the phone call ended, her connection to Mark would be severed again.

But then Cathy said, “There’s one other thing, Libby, and I don’t know what you’ll say, but Emily said I must ask you.”

Libby’s stomach clenched. Twelve years of keeping their affair secret had taught her to be afraid of Mark’s wife’s name. “What is it?”

“Pierre-Louis called looking to secure our account again, but when we discovered you were no longer there we didn’t sign for this year. Emily was very keen that we ask if you’d be happy to design our catalog again as a freelancer. Now, I know perhaps you have reasons for not doing design work anymore, but—”

“Yes!” Libby said. “I would love to.”

“Splendid! Emily will be so pleased. She’s a great admirer of your work.”

“She is?” Mark had never mentioned Emily’s name if he could help it. She felt strangely exposed.

“Twelve years on the same job, Libby. You were highly regarded at Winterbourne Jewelers. Now Mark is gone, we’d like to continue the association.”

“I’m so flattered. I . . .” Libby remembered she had no computer, no Internet connection, no e-mail address. “Can you give me a week? I’m just setting up my new office over here and . . .”

“Certainly. Call us when you’re ready and the account is yours.”

They said their good-byes just as the microwave beeped, but Libby didn’t retrieve her dinner. She stood in the kitchen, staring out the window at the darkening sky, feeling the distance between her old life and her new. Mark was, and would forever remain, a million light-years away. But then she straightened, and told herself to stop being maudlin. What would Mark want for her, if he were here? To make up with her sister? Well, that hadn’t gone well so far, but she had hope. Solve the Winterbourne family mystery? It didn’t seem likely she could do that, and yet he would definitely
want to drive up to Winterbourne Beach to see it with his own eyes. Tomorrow, then.

S
he left just after eight. Paris traffic had never been like this at rush hour. In fact, there was no rush hour at Lighthouse Bay. A couple of cars queued on the roundabout and a few cyclists on the beachfront road, but nothing else. Libby recalled the packed platforms on the Metro, choking on somebody else’s cigarette smoke or strong perfume, the constant beeping of car horns as mad Parisian drivers tried to make their way around each other on narrow roads. She put her window down and breathed in the sea air and sunshine. The drive north took just under an hour, along a straight highway hemmed by cane fields.

Winterbourne Beach was smaller than Lighthouse Bay, a tiny village surrounded by bushland, a vast deserted beach and a general store that doubled as the tourist information center. She stopped to buy a chocolate bar and a juice, and picked up a brochure about activities in the bay.

Want to find a lost treasure? Dive the
Aurora! Libby flipped the brochure over and scanned it. The owner of the dive company lived four houses down, according to the map. Her phone was out of range up here, so she decided to visit him. Libby followed the map in the hot sunshine, and soon stood outside a weatherboard house with a large motorboat on a trailer out the front. If the boat was in, he’d be home.

She started up the path when a shirtless man with an enormous belly emerged from behind the boat and called out gruffly, “No diving today.”

Libby smiled. “I don’t want to dive, I just want to ask you a few questions,” she said. “Do you have a few minutes?”

He rubbed his hands on a greasy cloth. It looked as though he’d been working on the boat’s engine. “What do you want to know?”

“History of the shipwreck?”

He nodded. “Look, love, my boat’s been out of operation for a week. I’ve lost a lot of money. You pay me fifty bucks and I’ll make you a cup of coffee and tell you everything I know. Fee for service.”

Libby spread her hands. “Of course. But it had better be good coffee.”

The man grinned and held out a meaty hand for Libby to shake. “I’m Graeme Beers.”

“Libby Slater. A pleasure to meet you.”

He took her upstairs and through a bright, airy living room, then sat her at an outdoor table on a wide verandah that looked over the scrub to the ocean. The sun was on Libby’s shoulders, and she cursed herself for not putting on a layer of sunscreen. She backed her chair as far as she could against the wall, flinching out of the sunshine.