The Night Mark

by Tiffany Reisz

  Father Pat had been right.

  She should have stayed out of the water.

  10

  When Faye woke up, it was still 1921.

  She knew this from the bed she lay in and by the clothes she wore and the smell of the salt water on her skin. Faye had opened her eyes as sunlight flooded the room. It seemed like she’d fallen asleep only a few minutes before and now it was already morning. Her first sensation upon waking was terror, which, in a way, was an improvement over her usual waking sensation of emptiness and despair. Sleep had long been a reprieve from the prison of her grief, and she woke up every morning back behind the iron bars of her loneliness. For four years she’d woken up disappointed to find herself still alive. That morning, however, was different. That morning she’d woken up scared she was going to die.

  Stay calm, Faye told herself. Unless she was having the most vivid hallucination in the history of the world, she was actually in 1921. Whatever the reason she was here, she would need to drink water, eat food and cause as little trouble as possible until she figured out what the hell was happening. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was all she had. Also, she should play dumb. If she had to blame a nonexistent head injury for anything strange she said or did, she would milk that nonexistent head injury for all it was worth.

  Before Faye could get her bearings, a girl entered the bedroom. The girl glanced at her and flashed her a tight but polite smile before bending to gather clothes off the floor, which she then tossed in a large tin bucket. Not a bucket, a washtub. Faye had seen those in movies and photographs from the Great Depression. Or maybe she’d seen one on Little House on the Prairie.

  “Good morning?” Faye said. The girl said nothing, just continued her circuit of the room—straightening and tidying and picking up clothes. She was a pretty girl, young and dark-skinned. She wore a bright yellow scarf on her head, tied in a bow at the nape of her neck. The scarf matched her yellow cotton blouse and red checkered skirt. Faye guessed her age as fifteen or sixteen. She had a teenager’s spindly frame and thin wrists, but that didn’t seem right. Why would a girl so young be cleaning her room?

  From behind a chair, the girl picked up a coat Faye recognized. A gray coat, still damp from the ocean water. It was June, summer, South Carolina. Why had Faith Morgan been wearing a coat last night?

  The girl seemed unnerved by Faye’s staring.

  “I fell off the pier and hit my head,” Faye said. “Sorry if I seem out of it.”

  The girl only shrugged and said nothing. She merely stood and walked out, shutting the door behind her without saying a single word.

  Who was she? Faye climbed out of bed and peeked into the hallway. The girl walked purposefully, knowingly. She had to be a servant of some kind. A housekeeper? She seemed far too young to be anyone’s housekeeper. Then again, it was 1921. Were there any child-labor laws on the books yet?

  The girl hadn’t just tidied and picked up the laundry. She’d laid out clean clothes for Faye. It was then Faye saw the brass hand mirror on the dresser. Her hands shook as she lifted it and gazed into it.

  It was her, Faye, and yet not her. They had similar faces, but not quite the same. First, the girl in the mirror was nowhere near thirty. Her nose was a little straighter and her hair a tad browner and much longer. The eyes were the same, though. Same violet color. Same loneliness.

  Faye saw that she hadn’t come out of her adventure last night entirely unscathed. Under her right eye she sported a yellow-green bruise, the exact shade of broccoli-cheddar soup. It looked disgusting, to say the least. Faith—or whoever she was—must have hit the water very hard. Or maybe she’d hit the corner of the pier when she fell.

  Faye put the mirror down and took the clothes to the bathroom to dress. She ran water into the sink and held some in her hands. She sniffed it, studied it. The water was lukewarm and mostly clear. Faye tried splashing some on her face. When nothing bad happened, she worked up the courage to brush her teeth with it. In the bathroom cabinet she found a rather delicate-looking toothbrush and the initials MAC engraved on the handle. It had a white handle—bone maybe?—and thick worn-down bristles on it, more like a hairbrush than a toothbrush. She guessed they were animal hairs of some sort, but she tried not to think about that part too much. The initials were neither Faith’s nor Carrick’s, but she couldn’t imagine this little toothbrush in Carrick’s large male hands, so she assumed it was for her use. While she found no toothpaste in the cabinet she did find baking soda, which worked well enough in a pinch. It tasted acrid and weird, but it did the job. Then Faye washed her body as best she could with a wet washcloth. She discovered more bruises by daylight. Twin bruises on her thighs and one blue bruise on her arm that looked like she’d been grabbed very hard and pulled. That one made sense. Of course Carrick had had to grab her and haul her out of the water.

  Most days Faye wore makeup—concealer, mascara, whatever she needed to look human for Hagen. But that wasn’t an option today. She found no cosmetics at all in the medicine cabinet, which meant the bruises would have to stay out in the open. In this heat, she’d probably sweat any makeup off within an hour of applying it anyway. There was a jar of cold cream in the cabinet, a few bottles of this and that—mineral oil and lavender. Headache powders and cough syrup and scissors. If she needed any further proof this was a different time, the active ingredient listed on the cough syrup bottle was morphine. She’d save that in case any of them required surgery. Apart from that, she found a hairbrush, a comb and Carrick’s shaving supplies, which he clearly hadn’t used for a while.

  Faye started to dress. She found in the clothes the girl had laid out for her the least attractive pair of underwear she’d ever seen in her life. These weren’t granny panties. These were great-granny panties. But the white-cotton garment did fit her well. All the clothes fit her—the bandeau bra, the ankle-length blue skirt, the ivory-colored blouse with the matching blue tie. When she was done she looked at herself in the mirror.

  “Oh, my God, I am Anne of Green Gables.” Clearly the flapper style of the Roaring Twenties had not yet reached coastal, rural South Carolina. She’d just have to make do.

  As Faye hadn’t had hair this long since elementary school, she wasn’t sure what to do with it. She had no elastics to use to pull it back or plastic hair clips. For ten solid minutes Faye fussed with her hair, braiding and twisting it until it was in a semblance of a Gibson girl topknot.

  Scared of encountering Carrick again, Faye crept quietly from the bathroom. She returned to her bedroom and made the bed as best she could, since it seemed like the sort of thing a woman in 1921 would be expected to do. After Will had died, his mother held her in her arms and said, “When you’re going through hell, just keep going.” Faye would keep going. What other choice did she have?

  Reluctantly, Faye left the bedroom and went downstairs, trying to walk as purposefully as the girl with the yellow scarf in her hair had. Surely the girl had a name. Faye would need to find it out quickly. Her entire being was concentrated on one task—learn everything she could about Carrick Morgan, Faith Morgan and this house so she could blend in the best she could until another, better plan presented itself.

  Morning sunlight flooded every room in the cottage and Faye studied the layout. The front door opened to a mudroom with rain boots in cubbies and oil slickers on pegs. Through the mudroom door was a hallway. To the left was the living room; to the right, Carrick’s bedroom. At the back of the house were the kitchen and pantry. The stairs went straight up from the center of the hall, her bedroom on the right and the bathroom on the left. A small house, lovely in its simplicity. Had she been here by choice, she would have fallen in love with the place instantly. But she wasn’t here by choice. She was a hostage taken by time.

  Faye found the girl in the small celery-colored kitchen cooking something that smelled so good Faye’s mouth literally watered. It smelled like heaven, like love, like home and family and Sunday mornings at her grandparents’ house. It smelled l
ike...

  “Bacon,” Faye said with a sigh of bliss. She hadn’t eaten real bacon in years. Too fattening. Too high in cholesterol. Too everything. In the large cast-iron skillet, the girl was also frying eggs. Eggs and bacon cooked in lard. Maybe there was something to be said for living in the past after all.

  “That smells really good,” Faye said, smiling at the girl. The girl smiled back but still didn’t speak. “Can I help?”

  The girl’s attention was on her skillet, and she didn’t reply, nor did she look at Faye this time. That was when it occurred to her that perhaps something was going on with this girl. Was she disabled? Mute? Deaf? That seemed possible. Faye had had a friend in college who was deaf. She’d worn a lanyard around her neck with a laminated “I am deaf, please face me and speak clearly” sign on it and hearing aids in both ears. But this was the twenties. Hearing aids probably hadn’t been invented yet, and even if they did exist, Faye doubted a black teenage girl in rural South Carolina would have access to one.

  Could the girl read? Could she write? Faye wasn’t sure how to ask about this quiet young woman without revealing that she didn’t know the things Faith Morgan should know. The girl was obviously comfortable enough with Faye to waltz right into her room without knocking.

  Unsure what to do with herself, Faye walked out the back door and into the sunrise. The light was low in the sky, and the shadows were long—early morning still. She could see that the paint on the house was a warm off-white and the trim a deep dark green. Facing the back door, the lighthouse butted up against the left corner. Carrick wouldn’t have to take more than ten or twelve steps to go from the kitchen to the lighthouse. Faye walked around the right side of the house and stood on the front porch facing the ocean.

  It was lovely, yes, beyond lovely. Nothing this lovely could be had without a price. In her time, the lighthouse stood but the house was long gone, destroyed by a tropical storm or a hurricane decades ago. It was exposed, weak and far too vulnerable to the elements. If a storm came, she knew to hide in the lighthouse and let the wind and the waves take the cottage. In her time, the beach was gone, too. Fifty feet of beach and the pier. Had anyone bothered to take photographs of this place? Probably not. Faye hadn’t seen any during her online search for pictures of the island. Did Carrick have a camera? Would he let her use it if he did? She would ask him if she could work up the courage. Where was Carrick anyway? Asleep? Did he work all night and sleep all day? Not all day surely. If his lighthouse keeping ended at sunrise, that would be around six in the summer. If he slept eight hours, he would be up around two. What would she do then? Claim amnesia and tell him she couldn’t remember what to do or how to do it? No, she couldn’t do that. She’d have to fake it as best as she could.

  Faye rested her hands on the porch railing and gazed out at the water, watching the waves advance and retreat, advance and retreat, hypnotizing her with the beauty. She hated the beauty, hated it like she hated how much Carrick Morgan looked like William Fielding. The beauty felt like a trap. What if she fell for it?

  Faye heard the door open behind her but she didn’t turn around. She knew the sound of male footsteps when she heard them.

  “Nice morning,” Carrick said, standing at her side. He stared out at the water, and she stared at him.

  “What time is it?”

  “Seven or thereabouts. You sleep well last night?”

  “Not really.”

  “Ah, well, that’s to be expected.”

  “Maybe I’ll sleep better tonight. You...you’re going to bed?”

  “Haven’t eaten yet.”

  Faye nodded. So Carrick slept after breakfast. That made sense. He’d treat breakfast like dinner and dinner like breakfast. She would sleep during the day, too, if she lived in a house without air-conditioning in the South in summer. Better to sleep through the heat of the day so she could be awake during the cool of the evening and night.

  “Dolly said breakfast was almost ready.”

  “Dolly said?”

  Carrick laughed. “You know what I mean. She told me breakfast was about ready.”

  “Dolly,” Faye repeated, committing the name to memory. “She works very hard.”

  “Aye, she does.”

  “She’s young.”

  “Too young, I think, but she wants the job,” Carrick said with a sigh. “Better here than in town, what with her ears and all.”

  “What exactly is wrong with her ears? Do we know?” Faye asked. “I don’t remember if you told me.”

  “Her father said Dolly had a brain fever when she was one or so. That’s their best guess.”

  “A brain fever...” That could mean anything in this time—meningitis, a viral infection, staph or strep or anything that made a child very sick. Wasn’t it scarlet fever that had caused Helen Keller to go blind and deaf as a toddler? God, Helen Keller was alive in 1921. She’d been a grainy photograph in her second-grade textbook and a girl on a stage when they’d been taken to an amateur theater production of The Miracle Worker. But she wasn’t a fictional character. The woman was real and alive and Faye could probably meet her if she wanted to.

  “Her papa says she almost died,” Carrick went on. “They’re just happy she lived and has all her wits.”

  “People are so fragile,” Faye said. “Scary to think about.”

  “It is,” he said. “I could have lost you last night. I keep seeing it, in my mind. I was up on the walk, and I saw you on the pier. I looked away one second—one second—and you were gone.”

  “You didn’t lose me,” she said.

  He leaned over and rested his forearms on the railing, glanced at her out of the corner of his eye.

  “I won’t let anything happen to you,” he said. “If you trust me, stay with me, let me protect you, we’ll be all right. It’s better than the other choice, isn’t it? Better than before? You don’t want to go back, do you?”

  “Back where?”

  “Back home.” He nodded at the expanse of water that if crossed would take her north. Was that where she’d come from? Somewhere north? “Back to him.”

  To him?

  A clue. Finally, a clue.

  Faith had left a man and come here.

  “Do you think I should go back to him?” Faye asked.

  “I know what the law would say. I know what the Church would say.”

  “What do you say?” she asked.

  “I say if I see Marshall again, I’ll throw him off the widow’s walk into the ocean. Any man who raises his fists to a girl deserves no better, especially when that girl’s his wife. But that’s me. He’s your husband.”

  Husband. Marshall. A husband named Marshall.

  Faye inhaled sharply. It clicked into place all at once. Faith wasn’t Carrick’s daughter. Faith, whoever she was, was someone’s wife. And that someone, Marshall Something, had abused Faith, and she had run away and come here for safety. And to avoid scandal, Carrick had lied and told everyone she was his daughter, the child of a marriage to a woman he was estranged from who had died. She could have laughed in her relief, could have wept. Instead, she said nothing until Carrick made a note of her silence.

  “I shouldn’t have brought him up,” he said.

  “It’s all right,” she said. “I just... I gasped because I’m sore. From the fall last night, I mean.”

  “Let me take a look at you.”

  She turned to him, and he touched her chin, tilting her face into the light.

  “He’s a dead man next time I see him,” Carrick said. “But I hope to God neither of us ever see him again.”

  “Do they look that bad?” she asked. How strange it was to wear someone else’s bruises, someone else’s suffering. Hagen had been a thoughtless husband sometimes, even callous, but never ever had he hit her.

  “They look a sight better today than when you turned up here,” he said before lowering his hand.

  “I left my husband, and you took me in,” Faye said aloud, needing to hear Carrick confir
m it.

  “No decent man on earth would turn away a girl crying, ‘sanctuary’ on his doorstep. I don’t know why you chose me, but I promise you this—I’ll take care of you for the rest of your life.”

  “Don’t you mean the rest of your life?”

  “I meant what I said. Even if the good Lord takes me home tomorrow, I’ll keep a watch on you. And I will never let that whoreson of a bitch hurt you again.” Carrick winced. “Sorry. Told you I’m out of practice. I should put a penny in a jar every time I forget myself. We’ll be rich by Sunday.”

  She swallowed fresh tears and turned to him. She wasn’t Faith but she got a good glimpse into Faith’s heart when Carrick said those words.

  “Maybe that’s why I chose you. Because you’ll never let that whoreson of a bitch hurt me again.”

  Carrick met her eyes. It seemed he wanted to say something to her, but he stopped himself. Last night he’d kissed her so passionately there was no doubt in her mind that Carrick harbored deep feelings for Faith. How brokenhearted would he be when he learned Faith was dead? Faye knew. Faye knew all too well.

  “I know this isn’t any girl’s idea of heaven.” Carrick put his hand on the small of her back, and Faye stiffened at the touch. He rested his fingers there lightly and only for a moment before dropping his hand to his side again as if remembering he shouldn’t be doing that. “Wouldn’t have been mine at twenty years old, either. Especially since I know you’re used to a different kind of life.”

  Different kind of life. Twenty years old. She knew she’d come from a very different place than this island now and she knew her age.

  “If my old life were heaven,” Faye said carefully, “I wouldn’t have come here, would I?”

  Carrick gripped the rail of the porch and stared out at the ocean like the ship he’d been waiting for all his life was just