Devlin's Light (12 page)

The cabin, like the morning, lay wrapped in a quiet lassitude. Nothing moved around the house, as nothing moved across the bay except for India herself, who jumped at the sound of the gull that screamed and scolded from the roof of the porch that wrapped around the lighthouse like an old woman’s shawl.

India folded her arms and watched the gull as it cracked a crab shell with its beak, flinging the discarded pieces of shell to sail off the porch roof and land on the hard yellow sand upon which the lighthouse had been built so many years ago. This second version of Eli Devlin’s lighthouse had incorporated the original two rooms of the structure, which had been built in the 1700s and rebuilt following a fire. Of course, local legend hinted that old Eli himself may have set that fire after drinking himself into a stupor following the wreck of a ship on the rocks that formed a natural jetty out past the point. The ship was reported to have carried Eli’s wife and youngest child, who were returning to Devlin’s Light after a trip to the Massachusetts colony, where Mary Devlin had paid a visit to her parents and sisters to prove to them she was well and enjoying a life of relative wealth in the wilds of the new whaling port that her husband and his brothers were helping to establish.

* * *

The wind did roar and the rain did slash

Down through the stormy night.

And come the morning, old Eli lay dead

At the foot of Devlin’s Light.

The snippets of the children’s rhyme rang in her head from across the years, the rhyme they had once jumped rope to and sang in the school yard from swings that spiraled skyward on long thick ropes. Every kid who grew up in Devlin’s Light knew it. As a child she had been alternatively pleased and mortified by her connection with the rhyme, with old Eli.

A shiver ran up her spine as the words taunted her.

Lay dead at the foot of Devlin’s Light.

The irony occurred to her for the first time. For an instant she wondered if it wasn’t perhaps some obscure, albeit macabre, coincidence. Had it been someone’s idea of a cruel joke? If so, it could indicate that Ry’s killer had grown up in Devlin’s Light or had at the very least spent enough time here to know the local legend. It wasn’t much, but it could serve to narrow the field. Before India returned to Paloma, she’d make it a point to stop by the police station to run the theory past Chief Carpenter.

This new possibility could also take the killing into another realm, the realm of premeditated murder. Whether Ry’s murder had been a crime of revenge or a crime born in anger or passion, if someone had plotted it out with such deliberation, it could not have been, as they had all hoped, a random killing, a matter of Ry being in the wrong place at the wrong time. The thought made her sick to her stomach and weak at the knees, and she sat down on a small patch of grass in the shadow of the lighthouse till the feeling passed.

India tilted her head back as far as it would go and, using both hands to shield her eyes from the sun, looked clear up to the top of the lighthouse, where it jutted into the sky like Rapunzel’s tower. It was hard to remember that this was a place that had so recently seen death. A China-blue sky hung overhead like a giant tent, the sun a blazing ball of orange now that the clouds had all burned off. The waves lashing against the rocks and an occasional gull made the only sounds. It was still and quiet here, but it was no longer
a safe refuge from the rest of the world, no longer a place where she could find peace. She cursed Ry’s killer for having taken that too from her.

India stood up and brushed the sand from the back of her shorts and the soles of her feet, ever mindful that if she was ever to reclaim the feeling of ease she had once known here, it had to be now. She blew the air out of her lungs in one heavy sigh of determination, then walked around toward the front of the building, the side that faced the bay, her bare feet cautious to avoid the sharp shells and stones that littered the sand.

Ribbons of yellow pine clapboard wrapped around the lighthouse, where the old white paint had been stripped, some errant strips of which still clung to the sea grass growing near the porch footings. Ry had wanted to restore the lighthouse, every inch of it, from painting inside and out to repointing the stone foundation. A few days before his death he had called India at her office and chatted excitedly about some plans he had for its restoration and what he had referred to as its “new life.” But India had been on her way to a hearing and had only half listened. She had meant to call him back later that night, but that night, like so many others, had seemed to get away from her, lost in a haze of files filled with reports from the medical examiner, with grisly photographs. She wished she had listened. It was the last thing of importance that he had wanted to share with her, and knowing that hurt her now.

India thought back to Corri’s sad little drawing, the poignant self-portrait of a small, solitary figure in the middle of an otherwise blank piece of paper. Would she be able to help her to someday see herself in more complete surroundings, to fill up that small life with enough love and happiness that the paper would no longer be blank? Or would Corri too disappear behind a mound of evidence reports and witness statements?

She pushed the miserable thought from her mind.
First things first
, she told herself.
I cannot help Corri lay her demons to rest until I have dealt with my own.

Resolved to do exactly that, India continued her walk toward the front door, passing the rocks atop which three double-crested cormorants stood like silent sentinels, their
dark brown wings outspread to dry in the sun. They eyed her warily as she passed; then one by one, in rapid succession, each jumped from the rocks and, as if playing Follow the Leader, ran along the shoreline. India watched as the birds gained speed before taking off into a cloudless sky, where they soared upward, seeking a rising thermal of air to gain altitude from which they would soar, still in a straight line, across the bay.

It was, she thought as she watched them, a fitting home-coming. She took the steps three at a time and crossed the porch directly to the front door and was surprised to find it open. The door swung back, and India hesitated only for an instant before stepping inside, willing herself not to be afraid.

A lone wasp buzzed angrily at one of the windows in the front room, which at one time had been a sort of keeping room. A massive brick fireplace covered one entire wall, reminding India that at one time, long ago, her ancestor had lived in the original two rooms that formed one section of the L-shaped structure. Eli Devlin had been born with a malformed leg, a deformity that had kept him from going to sea. In the New London community, where he and his brothers had been raised, he had served as apprentice to the lightkeeper, whose daughter he would later marry. After having moved south with the West India Trading Company, Eli had built his own lighthouse and manned it himself, ever watchful for ships captained by his brothers and, in his later years, his sons and his nephews.

Legend had it that once the notorious pirate Ian Landry had been given safe passage from the open sea in a storm and had rewarded Eli’s grandson, Nathaniel, by having his men hide a large cache of his ill-gotten gains amidst the rocks on the opposite side of the inlet, guided by the light that shined from the very top of the tower. If the pirate failed to return for it before twelve months had passed, so the story went, the cache would belong to Nathaniel. No one knew whether Ian or Nathaniel had retrieved it, but it was said that on nights when the moon was full, a lantern hung at the top of the lighthouse would shine directly on the treasure.

India smiled. So much local history, real or imagined,
had a Devlin at the heart of it. The fireplace was large enough for a man—several men—to walk inside. Though the furnishings were long gone, she could close her eyes and see the room as it must have looked in the 1700s, when it had served as home first to Eli, then to Nathaniel, who had inherited his grandfather’s love for the light, for the bay. Whenever she had suspected that a Devlin from centuries past still lingered here, always it had been Eli or Nathaniel she thought of. Never anyone else. She wondered today if she might catch a sense of Ry in this place.

India wandered through the front room into the area where the steps descended in a wide spiral from the top of the tower. She had expected to feel…
something
, something of Ry standing here, in the place where he had fallen, but all she felt was sad. Almost without thinking, she began the long ascent to the top, taking each step slowly, as if inexorably tired. From the windows on either side she could see the whitecaps out on the bay as she climbed upward, upward, the stale, hot, dusty air wrapping around her head like a helmet, her feet and legs beginning to feel as if they were wrapped in lead weights by the time she reached the top. She opened the door to the platform that stood at the very top of the lighthouse and stepped out, eager for fresh air and relief from the stifling atmosphere.

India leaned on the railing and took in the welcome sight of the bay and filled her lungs with the pungent scent of salt and seaweed, of sand and decomposing sea creatures. From one vantage, she could see clear across the bay to Lewes, Delaware; from another, she could see Cape May, New Jersey. From yet another, she could see several small islands that appeared to be comprised totally of sea grass; and by looking back toward the beach, she could see the beginnings of the salt marshes. She leaned back against the railing and tilted her head back, a strong sea breeze whipping her hair around like a scarf, wrapping it around her face. Eyes closed, she could hear him. When Ry and she were kids they would sneak forbidden trips to the top of the rickety steps, to lean on the unstable railing and look out at an endless vista.

“Indy, if you lean back and close your eyes, you can kiss
the sky,”
Ry had told her.

The railings were new, installed by Ry last spring. India leaned back and closed her eyes, trying to bring back that feeling of power, of being mighty enough to embrace the clouds.

And she would swear until her dying moment that she had, on that day, kissed the sky. And there, with none but the gulls to hear her, she cried for her brother who had given her so much, who had taught her to believe in a world where wishes came true and the rainbow’s end was no farther away than the nearest wishing star.

India was eleven when she found out that there were some things in life that could not be wished away; that, try as she might that summer, things would never be the same for her again. But Ry had tried to help her believe, and for his sake, she had pretended to, because it had seemed so important to him to make things right for her, to take away the evil that had come so close and bring back her innocence. Somehow she had known, even then, that some things, once lost, could never be wished back.

The discordant hum of a boat’s motor, loud and nearby, drew her back to the present, to reality. Off to her left a Bayrider was slowing down, riding the wake it had created. A skier dropped off the side of the boat, holding on to the towline and floating his skis ahead of himself. The boat maneuvered, slowly straightening the towline until it held taut like a yellow pencil line across the water. The skier held fast, securing first one ski, then the other. With a wave of his hand, he signaled the driver of the boat that he was ready. The engine whined, louder, then louder still, as the boat picked up speed and took off across the bay. India watched until the skier was but a speck bobbing on the waves.

Just another early autumn day.

As India turned toward the steps, her eyes fell on the cabin across the inlet, and she stood for a very long minute, staring at the small house.

She
was
in the neighborhood. She
should stop
in. If for no other reason than to let Nick know that she was home for a few days and maybe see how he was doing with that list they’d talked about.

After all, they were friends, weren’t they?

Chapter 8

From halfway across the inlet, India could hear the music floating from the cabin. The Temptations. “Just My Imagination.”

Shades of Ry Devlin. Enright was a Motown fan.

She let the tide roll her gently to the floating dock. India grinned as she stepped out of the rowboat and onto the new floating boardwalk that rode atop the water, rising and falling with the bay. Must be another of his mother’s little “improvements.”

India tied up the boat and started up a wide set of steps that in turn led to a deck. By the time she got to the top, he was leaning over the deck railing, sipping from a red mug and watching her with a smile that grew wider with every step she took. The smile, and the welcome it held, were genuine, she knew, and just for her. The thought warmed her. Maybe a bit too much, it occurred to her as she crossed the deck, wondering idly if the sound that suddenly filled her head was her own heart beating in her ears or the flapping of the wings of the dozen or so Canadian geese that were just at that moment taking off from the marsh behind the cabin.

“Hi,” she called up to him.

“Hi,” he called back.

“I was just in the neighborhood …” Lame, Devlin. You sound
lame.

“And I’m delighted you stopped by.” He offered her a well-worked and tanned hand as she started up the last few steps to the deck. “I heard you were home for a few days. I was hoping I’d get a chance to see you.”

“I rowed over to the Light,” she explained. He was still holding her hand, and the unmistakable current running back and forth between them made her blush unexpectedly.

“First time since Ry’s accident?” he asked, pretending not to notice that her face was delightedly pink and her hands had gone clammy just before he let her fingers slip from his.

“Yes.”

“How was it?”

“Not as hard as I thought it would be, in some ways. More difficult in others.”