Red mourning, p.10
Red Mourning, page 10
part #2 of Rosie Casket Cozy Mystery Series
Inside, I grabbed two leftover lobster claws from the fridge and cracked one open and went for a walk in the woods.
As I approached the base of the lighthouse, the half-gray dusk had become an inky purple.
Perfect timing. Eldritch emerged from the keeper’s house, stopped for a minute to salute the frayed American flag hanging over his porch, and then limped down the well-worn path toward the lighthouse.
I waved the second lobster claw at him. “I brought you a snack.”
He smiled. “You shouldn’t have.”
“It’s no big deal.”
“No really, Red. You shouldn’t have. I already ate.”
“Right,” I said, remembering that even though night was falling, his day was just beginning. Technically, this would have been his breakfast. “Your loss,” I said and forced myself to eat another one.
“One of these days, you’re gonna start lookin like a lobster.”
I patted my belly. It was flatter than it had been in years. The unintentionally restrictive diet—all lobster meat and no carbs—was starting to have an effect. “When’s the last time you saw a fat lobster?”
“You’re lookin good, Red. The walk brings out the red in your cheeks.”
That sounded like something Mr. Darcy would say to Elizabeth. “You are such a good liar, Mr. Eldritch.”
“I’ve had plenty of practice in tryin to convince the township not to upgrade the lamp.”
“Is that why you still burn kerosene?”
“Ayuh. When they finally decide to automate it and run the electrical lines, I’ll be out of a job. And then what? I’ll have to trade my smock for a blue vest and greet people at the Walmart in Bangor. No thanks.”
“And here I thought that you still burned kerosene because Dark Haven was woefully behind the times. You’re duplicitous.”
He shrugged. “The township is desperate for those tourist dollars. What leaf peeper is gonna bother drivin all the way out here to see an electric light bulb?”
I smiled. With Stanley Eldritch manning the lamp, tourists got the chance to meet an honest-to-God lighthouse keeper, a relic of centuries past.
“You carved yourself a niche,” I said.
“If you wanna stay in business, you’re gonna have to do the same.”
I followed him up the spiral staircase, all the way up to the lantern room. There, I sat on the brick ledge beneath the giant windows and chewed on my rubbery lobster meat as he went about preparing for his nighttime vigil. I imagined it was the way most little girls felt when they sat on on their porch and watched their daddy fix the lawnmower.
“Whatcha doing now?”
He poured a can of kerosene into the basin below the wick. “I’m filling the reservoir.”
“You have to do that every night?”
“Ayuh.”
I picked a piece of shell out of my teeth and flicked it out the open window. It disappeared in the last gasps of purple light.
There was no good way to broach the subject. “Sooooo, this afternoon, I was thinking about that night when my sister disappeared.”
He didn’t look up. The can of kerosene went glug glug. “Don’t do that to yourself, Red.”
“I know, I know, forgive me, but something still doesn’t make sense. You’ve been on this property longer than anyone. Did you know about the cave beneath the cliff?”
“Ayuh. One of my first duties was to report the severity of the tide. I was measurin the depth at its lowest point one mornin when I saw a little eddy by the rock wall and found the crevice. How do you think I knew where to go that night to find you?”
“How come you never told anyone about it? Even when we were in court, you didn’t say anything about the scream.”
“I knew if folks thought there was a chance of finding Stangood’s treasure, they’d swarm the place and make my life harder.”
Below, lights twinkled on the water. The first of the low-tide peepers were making their way toward the bluff. “You were right about that.”
Eldritch sighed, traded the can of kerosene for a rag, and then wiped down the lens. To prevent himself from accidentally scratching the tinted scalloped glass, his smock was sans buttons. “When I first found the cave, I had just gotten this job. It was after Vietnam and I was glad to have the money and a place to live.”
“How did you know I was down in the cave?”
“I heard the screamin. I figured either I was hearin ghosts, or someone was trapped in the rocks.”
“I wish I could do something to pay you back.”
“Don’t worry about it, Red. It’s my job.”
“Still, I feel horrible. You nearly died.”
He pocketed the rag. “Your company is enough, Red. It’s a lonely job,” he said. He motioned for me to stand. “Kay, it’s time to light the wick. I need you to go down below.”
“If you don’t mind, I’d like to watch.”
“I do mind. It’s too dangerous. A keeper on Devil’s Island once blew himself to smithereens.”
“So every night you come up here, you’re basically lighting the fuse on a stick of dynamite and hoping the flame doesn’t burn all the way down to the blasting cap?”
“Ayuh. Basically. But I been doin this every night for a long time, and I've got a lot less to live for than you do. I’ll be fine. If the devil takes me here, then who am I to refuse a dance?”
“Okay, okay,” I said and heeded his warning and went down to the quarters below.
A few minutes later, the lamp was lit and the red beam cut across the harbor. Eldritch descended the staircase heavily, hopped over the railing, and plopped onto the cot and put a hand to his forehead and took a deep breath.
“It ain’t as easy as it used to be,” he said.
“I’d be happy to come and help.”
“Maybe someday,” he said. He flexed his fingers as if trying to flush out the arthritis. “For now, I’ve still got two good hands.”
“When you found that cave, did you ever see anything strange in there?”
“Like what?”
“Bones.”
“You’ve been having bad thoughts, Red. What is this all about?”
I didn’t want to get into Hardgrave’s situation, not now. “It’s hypothetical.”
“I never explored the cave too hard. All them twisted rocks made me feel like I was headed toward the underworld.”
“Soooo…that night when my sister disappeared—”
“Red, seriously. Knock it off. You’re draggin your pot along the rocks, here. You do it too long and the nails will start to pull apart."
“I know, I know, but I still can't help but wonder exactly what you saw that night. How often do you come down from the tower in the middle of your shift?”
“Only when there’s a problem.”
“Exactly.”
He sighed again. “Ain’t nothin happened that I didn’t tell the cops. I heard you bangin on my door, so I came down. That’s it.”
“But at the hearing, Mr. Flint insinuated something about a late night rendezvous. Where’d he get that idea?”
Eldritch tugged on the bags under his eyes and rubbed his cheeks. “I told him I saw a vehicle.”
“What vehicle?”
“It ain’t important.”
“I need to know. Please.”
“I can’t be sure. There were headlights, I think. Maybe a pickup. The vehicle was parked in the ditch by the road. It flashed its high beams. It was a long time ago, though.”
“I saw a flash of light that night, too. We saw the same thing.”
“I figured it was probably just a leaf peeper come for a late-night look at the lamp in action. Mr. Flint’s the one who thought your sister might have been meeting up with someone.”
“He thought I was a pushover, didn’t he?”
“No, he thought you were young. There’s a difference,” Eldritch said. He smiled. “But you near gave him a heart attack when you did that trick with Tolstoy.”
"It wasn't a trick," I said. I didn’t want to push my luck any further and stood and went to the window. “Where’s the bathroom up here?”
“There ain’t none,” he said. “You gotta pee off the catwalk.”
No wonder female lighthouse keepers were few and far between.
“On the holidays, when I have a nice big glass of Red Rum all to myself, I go up there and stand on the balcony and let her rip, just let the wind take the stream where she wants to go."
Yuck. I blinked away the image of a golden mist blowing toward my house. “I don’t want to know what happens when you need to go number two.”
He patted his belly. “Thankfully, I got guts of steel,” he said and tapped a fist on his knee. “But knock on wood, in forty years, I’ve only had to let the light go dark once on account of my bowels. But shhh. Don’t tell the township, or they’ll drag old Edison up here so fast, I won’t see him coming.”
I shut my eyes, debating if I should go for one last question. I wanted to know if he had seen anyone in that vehicle that flashed its lights. I wanted to know if Chrissy had met with someone that night.
The heck with it. “Sooo, that truck parked in the ditch, did you happen—”
“Enough, Red. Seriously,” Eldritch said. He got up to crank the revolving mechanism. “One of these days, you gotta make peace with it. She’s gone.”
I gave a fake smile and headed for the stairs. “I won’t have peace until I know I couldn’t have done anything else to help her.”
Chapter 15
Instead of heading back home—it still felt weird to call it that—by going through the woods, I followed Eldritch’s snaking driveway over to Beacon Street.
Not only was the road a shorter route, but I wanted to see the spot where the vehicle he mentioned might have parked. Its headlights might have been responsible for the flash of light I had seen right before I tripped, right before I thought I heard Chrissy scream, right before she disappeared.
While the scream had turned out to be the sound the cave made when the tide was low and a storm was coming, it may have provided the perfect cover for Chrissy to climb into that vehicle and disappear.
The question was—how devious was she?
Remembering Phyllis’s admonishment to avoid the road or else get turned into Manhattan-style chowder, I stayed off the shoulder and trudged along the forest-side of the ditch.
The grass and leaves were wet and spongey, somewhere between the rot at the bottom of a pond and pure mud. Since the vehicle in question would have been parked there more than a decade ago, I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for, but clinging to some kind of desperate hope like toilet paper clings to the bowl.
There certainly wouldn’t be any tire tracks left. But maybe I could find a relative degree of solace, some new angle that would lull the capricious gremlins in my head back to sleep. The little ogres kept twanging the nerves and sinews connected to my stomach.
About a hundred feet from Eldritch’s driveway, I stopped. I could clearly see the red beam from the lighthouse cutting through the woods. There was even enough of a gap between the trees to see the lightning rod, as clear as a syringe against the dark purple sky.
Maybe this was the spot.
If you headed straight for the cliff from where I was standing, I estimated that the root where I had tripped and heard the scream was only about fifty yards away.
An unexpected blast of wind tousled my hair. A bright light flashed across my glasses and a loud HONK crashed on my eardrums.
I half-jumped, half-fell backward into the ditch and landed in a great splash of oily decay. A delivery truck whipped past me and ruffled the parts of my hair that hadn’t been cemented to my head by the splash of mud.
I grabbed the nearest log and pulled myself to my feet. Phyllis had been right. The road was treacherous. That truck had almost turned me into salsa, chunky-style.
I had never fully believed her warning as I was pretty sure I would be able to see the trucks coming and would be able to dive out of their way before they creamed me.
But it looked as if there was something about the smoothness of the road, something about the acoustics of the forest as it obscured each bend in the road, something about the angle of the far-off cliff, that all conspired to make the approaching vehicles virtually silent right up until the moment their headlights blasted out my glasses.
No wonder I hadn’t heard the phantom vehicle the night of Chrissy’s disappearance.
No wonder I hadn’t heard the vehicle that dropped off Lori.
Back at the inn, I ran straight upstairs to take a shower. Without the fire going, the house was freezing. It took the pipes a full ten minutes to deliver hot water and then, not wanting to face the cold, I stayed in the shower until I was pruned.
After drying my hair, I scurried down the hall and climbed into bed. I pulled the covers up to my chin, my nose already cold and red.
The porthole window was glowing red and painting a new cobweb in the corner silky pink. Geez. I lived in a spider farm. I was going to have to go back through the entire house and dust all the rooms again. The thought of it alone exhausted me. I had just dusted the place a month ago. If I ever got this business going, I was definitely hiring a cleaning lady. Or maybe a cleaning man. Maybe a hot pool boy to clean the toilets…
Under the covers, I crossed my legs try to warm my feet. No matter how cold it got, I refused to wear socks in bed. Slippers maybe, but no socks. That was just weird.
I took off my glasses and put them on the nightstand beside me. It wasn’t until they were off that I realized a clump of dried mud had barnacled itself to the corner of the leftmost lens.
I pulled the covers over my head and watched videos of cute baby farm animals with giant eyes before facing the nightmare about my sister again.
When I woke, the porthole was faintly red. But it was too late in the morning for the lighthouse.
I pawed for my glasses. Outside, the sun was coming through the autumn leaves.
I found my phone between my boobs. I must have fallen asleep while watching baby lemurs.
I thumbed the home button, but my phone was dead.
“Perfect,” I mumbled.
In the bathroom, I scrubbed the cemented mud off my glasses while waiting for the phone to gather juice. Once the screen came back to life, I checked the call history.
A number I didn’t recognize had called me four times in the middle of the night, but the caller hadn’t left any messages.
While waiting for my phone to charge, I got dressed in a cute sweater (I was out of turtlenecks) and tight jeans. At the end of my dock, I pulled up the pot, grabbed the bug by the back, and boiled him. I ate the tail and put his claws in the fridge.
Then I called the number.
No answer.
“Fantastic.”
I didn’t want to clean the house, so I went for a drive.
The Apache rode like a mechanical bull. For the entire drive north, it protested and incited rebellion, but I kept my foot on the gas, my speed steady, and showed it who was boss.
When I arrived in old-town Orono, a quaint outgrowth of brick buildings and anachronistic lamp posts, the horizon had turned deep blue, the clouds as wispy as if someone above had pulled apart a bunch of cotton balls and left the strands all over the sky.
I parked on the lot in front of a large modern building (if you count built in the 80s as modern) with a glass facade. According to the GPS on my phone, this was the place. The glass reflected the thick conifers past the split rail fence and the wispy clouds in the distance. Atop the reflected scenery, the words Orono Center for the Arts spanned all the way to the corners of the building.
I got out. My bum was sore, either from the deep potholes along the way, or from my fall in the ditch last night. Whatever the case, I put “new shocks” on my mental wishlist, and then hobbled up to the glass door and went inside.
The floors were marble, the ceiling at least four stories above, the darkened glass throwing muted sunlight on a set of marble stairs. There was no receptionist, but a glass display on the wall contained the room numbers for the various departments.
Trying to work out the kinks in my tailbone, I forwent the elevator and climbed the stairs. Unlike the staircase in the lighthouse, the stairs were so deep, I could spread a blanket, grab a picnic basket, and enjoy the view of downtown Orono.
At the top, I made a right and came to another wall of glass. Behind it, was more glass, lighted display cases filled with artifacts from different cultures. The letters on the door said Department of Anthropology and Archaeology.
I opened the heavy door and went inside. An African American woman was standing behind a podium. She was no older than twenty, probably a student on work study.
“Good morning. Can I help you?”
“I’m here to see Professor Zither,” I said.
“Are you a student?”
I blushed and looked at my pink Vans. It had been a long time since I had been mistaken for a student. “Sort of. Does he have office hours this morning?”
“I don’t think so, but I did see his Jeep parked out front when I came in this morning. He’s supposed to be giving a tour of the museum at eleven.”
I looked at the time on my phone. It was ten forty-five. “Do you think he would mind if I stopped into his office.”
“Is he expecting you?”
“He called me a few times,” I said, hoping it wasn’t a lie. I still had no idea who had called me in the middle of the night.
She sighed. “Follow me.”
We trekked through at least four centuries of twinkling artifacts, past Micmac trinkets, ancient papooses, lots of pottery and arrowheads, and even a fully reconstructed wigwam.
At the back of the museum, my hostess opened a heavy door and led me into a dark industrial hallway, exposed pipes running overhead. There, she stopped and pointed to the door at the end.
“That’s his office,” she said.
