by Steven James
The water somehow felt even more frigid than the ice itself.
Despite himself, Daniel shivered as he shook the drops off his hand.
“What did I tell you?” Kyle said.
Daniel pointed farther down the inlet. “Let’s check down there, see if it gets any thicker.”
Though he still didn’t appear excited about the idea, Kyle rowed while Daniel checked the ice at regular intervals and eventually, about thirty-five yards away, found a spot where a section of thinner ice had broken away and drifted off. The ice that remained was several inches thick.
“Hold on,” he told Kyle. “This looks good.”
From here, the ice stretched nearly forty feet to the rocky shoreline.
Daniel had heard that the average depth of this lake was more than four hundred feet, so even this close to shore he doubted that the anchor rope would be long enough. However, they needed to do something to keep the boat in place. He tried the anchor, and thankfully, after about fifty feet of rope had played out, it came to rest on the lake bottom.
He cranked up the slack to keep them in place.
“Okay,” Kyle said, “let’s assume for just one minute that you don’t crash through the ice and drown.”
“I’m good with that.”
“What if you find something there at the lighthouse? How are you supposed to get it back here if you’re crawling across the ice?”
“That’d be a good problem to have. I’ll deal with that when the time comes.”
After handing over the map and compass, Daniel placed one of the oars on the ice with the blade parallel to the boat.
He tried curling his hand around the shaft and found that, because of the way the oar had been cut, there was just enough room for his fingers to fit between the shaft and the ice.
It was a tight squeeze, but it would work.
All things being equal, water freezes first close to shore, where it’s shallower and the current isn’t as strong, so he figured he would need to be the most careful here, near this edge where the ice wouldn’t be as thick.
Kyle shook his head. “There is no way this is a good idea.”
“You’re probably right.” Daniel lined up the second oar. “I’ll keep my life jacket on to avoid the drowning part.”
“Somehow that doesn’t exactly reassure me.”
“Let me see your phone.”
“For what?”
“I can use it as a flashlight if I need to look around inside the lighthouse.”
“It’s not waterproof. If you wreck it when you drown, I’m going to be very upset.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
After pocketing the phone, Daniel gingerly climbed over the gunwale, and finessed himself so that he was kneeling on the oars.
Distributing his weight was tricky and getting back into the boat later was going to be even trickier, but he decided not to dwell on that right now.
Just don’t fall through the ice or it’s gonna be one long, cold trip back to Larry’s.
As he eased forward, the ice let out a faint groaning sound.
Immediately, he stopped crawling. It seemed like his heart somehow paused midbeat and, at the same time, slammed out its rhythm even harder than before.
“It’s not too late,” Kyle said softly, as if he were afraid that the weight of his words might somehow crack the ice Daniel was kneeling on. “You can still get back to the boat.”
“I’m good. I know how to swim and besides, you’re a lifeguard, right?”
“Sorry, buddy, but I’m not diving in there for you.”
“Not even for your phone?”
“Well . . . Maybe for the phone.”
“Spoken like a true friend.”
“Just take it easy, okay?”
“Yeah.”
Daniel moved one oar then the other, using them to support him as he crawled toward the island. Occasionally, the ice would creak under his weight, but he was careful not to let either of his knees slide off the oars’ blades.
At first it was slow going, but by the time he was about halfway across, he was able to get into a rhythm. From there, it went faster, and before long he’d covered the rest of the distance between himself and the shore.
Once he was on the bank, he called to Kyle, “See? No problem.” He set the oars beside one of the boulders. “I’ll be back in a couple minutes.”
“Be careful.”
“My middle name is Mr. Careful.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“I’ll see you in a few.”
Scrambling up the ice-covered boulders on shore was a little dicey, but he made it. Once he had his footing, he took off his life jacket and laid it on the rocks, then stepped onto the snowy field that he would need to cross in order to get to the lighthouse.
All was quiet on the island except for the splish-wash of waves against the ice as the wind began to pick up.
From here it was maybe twenty-five yards to the lighthouse.
Fresh deer tracks were the only thing that marred the otherwise pristine snowy field in front of him. With the woods beyond it and the snow continuing to fall, the day was tranquil and beautiful.
Then he reminded himself that this was the field where, supposedly, an eleven-year-old girl had burned to death.
You saw her in your dream. You saw her at the game. Are you going to see her again here?
Maybe she would appear to him standing in the snow, her blackened body sizzling as the snowflakes touched it, her arms outstretched toward the tower where her uncle was when her nightgown caught on fire.
Or maybe she would emerge from the top of the lighthouse and stand there, staring down at the island she would never leave.
Daniel peered up through the falling snow and could see the outline of the tower.
No girl.
No blur.
And she wasn’t in the field either.
It was just a hushed, snowy day on an island in Lake Superior. Nothing out of the ordinary about it.
Was Betty real?
Did a girl actually die out here in this field?
He didn’t know, but maybe the answer lay inside the lighthouse.
It looked like the only way into the tower was through the house.
The snow came up to his knees as he crossed the field and arrived at the front door of the keeper’s home.
The windows were shuttered, but the door hung at an awkward angle on its rusted hinges.
It resisted, but Daniel muscled it open.
And stepped inside.
CHAPTER
FORTY
The entryway was littered with trash. Crude graffiti covered the walls. Stumps of candles and discarded beer cans lay in the corners.
It didn’t really surprise him that this would end up being a place where people would come to party, but it did make him wonder if there would be anything helpful left here for him to find.
With the windows boarded up, the interior of the home was thick with shadows, so Daniel pulled out Kyle’s phone and scrolled to a flashlight app.
Using it to guide his way, he entered the first room.
It must have served as some sort of central living space because it led to the kitchen and a short hallway with two attached rooms. One of them was only about eight feet long. With the shelves on one side, he guessed it might have been used for storage. The other was probably the keeper’s bedroom.
Maybe Betty slept there in the storage room.
That is—if she was ever really here.
Turning to the left, he used the phone to illuminate the kitchen, which was still, inexplicably, stocked with a large pile of split logs to use in the potbellied stove.
Who knows—the wood might have been brought in by the people who come here to part
y.
Nothing appeared to be suspicious or out of place for an old abandoned lighthouse.
After searching through the storage room and the bedroom once again and coming up empty, he decided to investigate the tower itself.
The spiral staircase leading up into it appeared to have been designed for someone short, so Daniel nearly had to duck.
Kyle would have had a rough time being a keeper here.
There were no windows, making Daniel’s ascent feel even more confined, but the door at the top must have been open because light was filtering in and windblown snow curled down around him.
These are the stairs that Jarvis Delacroix climbed six times every night when he came up to make sure the light was still burning.
Six times.
Every night.
Daniel wondered what it would’ve been like to do that, to know people were depending on your ability to stay awake—that they were betting their lives on the fact that you could keep the light in this tower burning.
He arrived at the top.
The glass from the light had been shattered and shards lay strewn across the floorboards. A narrow balcony hugged the tower. Cautiously, he stepped onto it.
The railing was gone, rotted away, so he was careful to stay close to the tower as he looked around.
From here he could see the barren shoreline stretching out in both directions, but with the snow cascading down on the lake he couldn’t make out any of the other islands or the mainland.
He did, however, catch sight of Kyle in the rowboat. At the moment, he was looking toward the forest nearby rather than at the lighthouse.
Daniel tried calling to him, but his words were fighting the wind and Kyle apparently couldn’t hear because he didn’t face him. Thinking that if he yelled any louder it might make Kyle think something was wrong, Daniel turned his attention to the island instead.
Beyond the field, a wide swath of woods lined the rocky coast and, even though the deciduous trees had lost their leaves, the grove was dense enough so that, in the snowfall, Daniel couldn’t see through it.
Jarvis Delacroix had written that he’d buried Betty on this island in a place where no one would ever find her.
Maybe that’s why you’re here. To find her body.
But no, there had to be something else, some other reason why he’d been drawn here, because there was no way he was going to find a hidden grave that’d been out here for nearly eighty years, especially not in frozen ground under two feet of snow.
Looking back at the boat, Daniel saw his friend staring in his direction and waving to him.
He waved back as Kyle called out something that he couldn’t quite hear. He held one hand to his ear to indicate for Kyle to yell louder, but all he could make out was the word “Going.”
Probably just telling him it was time to get moving.
There wasn’t anything else to see up here.
After gazing one more time at the snowstorm blowing in across the lake, Daniel started down the stairs.
He’d descended twenty-nine steps when he felt something in the empty stairwell bump against his leg.
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
He stared around uneasily.
Nothing was there.
You weren’t imagining that, Daniel. Something touched you.
However, he was most definitely alone on the stairs.
Spurred on now to get out of the tower, he took the next few steps more quickly, but then felt it again. This time something banged even more solidly against his shoulder.
When he looked up, he saw what had touched him.
Boots.
A body was hanging there, swaying slightly, perhaps from the force of Daniel knocking against its feet.
From where he stood, he could see the dead man’s face, lifeless and bloated and pale. There was a noose around his neck, at the end of a long rope leading up into the tower.
Daniel closed his eyes and told himself that he was just seeing things, that this was a blur, just like the other ones, that there wasn’t really a body hanging right above him.
After a long moment he slowly opened his eyes again.
The body was still there, coming to a rest now, still and grim in the air.
A blur.
But it looked so real hanging there in the center of the spiraling stairwell.
Make sure.
Make sure it’s not there.
Hesitantly, Daniel reached out to touch one of the boots to see if this was just a blur, just his imagination.
The leather felt rough and worn, just like real leather might.
But no, it can’t be real. There’s no way this is actually happening.
As he was lowering his hand, the dead man tilted his head and peered down at him. When the corpse spoke, its lips barely moved, but its voice was clear and obviously not just a trick of acoustics from the wind channeling down the stairwell.
“Daniel.”
No, this isn’t real!
“Two thousand six hundred and seventy-five days, Daniel. Remember what happened on August twenty-eighth.”
Then the man’s mouth stopped moving and he simply hung there and stared at Daniel with his vacant, dead eyes.
Without looking back, Daniel descended the remaining stairs, taking them two at a time.
What happened on August twenty-eighth?
What does “two thousand six hundred and seventy-five days” refer to?
Just get out of here. Get back to the boat. Figure it out there.
But when he came to the kitchen, he recalled what Jarvis had written in his diary about storing strawberries and raspberries in his root cellar.
Wait.
What root cellar?
To get to a cellar in bad weather, it would’ve made sense that it would be located under the house. However, Daniel hadn’t seen any access doors on his way up to the building—which meant that, if there really was a root cellar, there might very well be a stairway down to it located somewhere here in the keeper’s home.
But he hadn’t come across one.
Get going, Daniel. There’s nothing here.
But maybe there is, just do a quick check, then you can get on your way.
Though he was intent on leaving, he was also here to get answers and at this point all he had were more questions.
Avoiding the stairway up the tower so he wouldn’t see the all-too-real blur of Jarvis Delacroix again, he went back through the house room by room and didn’t find any doors that might lead to a cellar.
Curious, he returned to the kitchen, and his gaze landed on the three-foot-tall pile of split logs lining the west wall.
CHAPTER
FORTY-TWO
Daniel began to move the wood aside.
As he made his way through the stack, he noticed that a couple of the floorboards beneath it had a different grain than the rest of the floor.
He kept going, removing logs.
And that’s when he saw the hinges.
Yes.
A trapdoor.
He had no idea how long this pile of wood had been here, and frankly he didn’t care, but he did care about what it was covering up.
Both more motivated and more nervous about what he might find, he set to work uncovering the rest of the trapdoor to the cellar.
A few minutes ago Kyle Goessel had watched Daniel disappear into the tower.
Since the wind had starting whipping up whitecaps on the lake, he’d tried calling to his friend, encouraging him to hurry, but with the distance he wasn’t sure Daniel had heard him.
From the start, Kyle hadn’t been thrilled about Daniel exploring the lighthouse by himself. Despite his own apprehension about the ice, he would have gladly gone across if there were some way they could’ve both made it s
afely to land.
But there was only one set of oars and once Daniel was onshore there was no way to get them back to Kyle in the boat, except perhaps trying to throw them, but the distance was too far to guarantee that they’d make it to him.
Now, the storm was picking up and the gusts coming in across the lake had a sharp edge to them.
Kyle loved creative writing and a phrase came to him: the teeth of the wind gnawing at the shore.
And you’re caught in their path.
He was waiting for Daniel to come out the front door of the keeper’s house when he caught sight of a glimmer of movement on the edge of the forest.
He’d thought he might have noticed something earlier, right before Daniel appeared at the top of the tower, but now he was nearly certain that something was there.
Using one hand to shield his eyes from the snow, Kyle stared at the trees, scrutinizing the woods, but couldn’t make out anything unusual.
But you did see something just now.
You did.
He studied the periphery of the forest: only bare trees in a strengthening storm.
It was probably just your eyes playing tricks on you.
Probably just—
No, wait.
There.
Yes.
A deer?
No.
Someone was standing behind one of the leafless oaks. It was only because of the way the person was turned that Kyle was able to pick him out.
A dark blue coat. That was about all Kyle could see.
Then the man emerged and entered the field, heading toward the keeper’s house.
Black jeans. A black ski mask covering his face.
He was carrying something.
It looked like—
Yes.
A gasoline can.
CHAPTER
FORTY-THREE
Kyle yelled for him to stop, but the wind overwhelmed his words and the man continued to cross the snow-covered field.
Finishing with the logs, Daniel tipped the trapdoor open, then started down the rough-hewn wooden steps that led into the root cellar.
