The Secret Keepers

by Trenton Lee Stewart

  “My God,” Mrs. Meyer said, and her eyes went to Reuben, who nodded. She looked back at the inscription. “My God,” she repeated. “It’s finally happened.”

  By the time Reuben finished his second bowl of cullen skink, Penny’s mother had telephoned every Meyer in Point William. There were, evidently, a few who had grown up in the keeper’s house and knew about Penelope and Jack but now lived in town—Meyers who had chosen not to keep the light but nonetheless kept the secret. In addition to these were the men and women who had married them and been entrusted with the Meyer family secret. And Mrs. Meyer’s first phone call had been to Penny’s father, who, it seemed, had a job in town, so all told there would soon be more than half a dozen adults slopping across the mudflats to the island, for of course no one could bear to wait for the tide.

  When at last everyone had been called, Mrs. Meyer turned to Penny. “I’m going to send your brothers across to help the great-aunts. I’ll tell Jack. Will you fetch Luke? The intercom is on the fritz again.” She squeezed her daughter’s shoulder, smiled uncertainly at Reuben (she did not know yet what to make of this boy showing up on his own, out of nowhere), and went out.

  Penny turned to Reuben. “Want to go up with me? Luke’s in the tower.”

  Reuben nodded, hurriedly scraping the last of the soup from his bowl.

  “I hope you like stairs,” Penny said.

  “I don’t mind them,” Reuben said, but he soon would.

  Out the back door and across a strip of grass, the two children entered the lighthouse tower through a metal door so heavy Penny needed both hands to pull it open. Right away they started to climb. The cast-iron steps spiraled up and up around the interior of the tower’s stone cylinder, with a narrow metal landing every twenty steps; and though Reuben, peering up through the open space in the middle of the spiral, could see that there was an end to the steps, it wasn’t long before he felt as if they must ascend all the way into the sky. As much as he loved to climb, he had a belly full of stew, and these stairs were unusually steep. His face burned, and to his embarrassment his breathing grew noticeably ragged.

  Penny, meanwhile, climbed lightly and easily ahead of him as if gravity did not apply to her. “You get used to it,” she said sympathetically. “I pop up and down these steps about a hundred times a day. Dad installed an intercom system, but it’s always shorting out, what with the damp and the mice, and even when it’s working, you can hardly make out what the person’s saying on the other end. It’s easier just to run messages up in person.”

  “If you say so,” Reuben panted. “Why does your”—he panted—“dad have a job in town? Isn’t he”—pant—“the lighthouse keeper?”

  “Well, officially, yes, but really our whole family has the job. Though, to tell you the truth, it isn’t much of a job anymore. By the time I was born, just about every lighthouse in the country was automated. Ours is, too, now, but there’s been a ton of wrangling with the Coast Guard and the local government and my family—a big legal mess about who actually owns the place and who should be in charge of maintaining it.”

  Penny was backing up the stairs now so that she could face Reuben as she spoke. He got the sense that she had slowed down for his sake. Still embarrassed, but grateful nonetheless, he made a weak gesture and a spouting noise to indicate that she should keep talking.

  “There’s been a controversy about it my whole life,” Penny said. “A few people in town think it isn’t fair that it’s always Meyers who get to live here—I guess the government paid for the house and owns the land, or thinks it does, and it’s traditionally paid the keeper’s salary, but that was supposed to have changed with automation.…”

  Penny tossed her hair with an air of exasperation. “I don’t know—it’s all very confusing. But at least you can understand, right? Of course we couldn’t leave! How could we? We had to stay here because of Penelope and Jack! And we couldn’t tell a soul about it! So the Meyers have made a few enemies, fighting for the right to stay on. It’s only nasty people who’ve made a fuss, though, nobody you’d care to be friends with, anyway.”

  Reuben nodded, panting, to show he understood. That must be the reason for the teasing Penny had endured at the sleepover.

  “We made a kind of settlement in the end,” Penny said, “but the whole business has been awfully unpleasant, as you might imagine. They even did a story about it in the paper that wasn’t at all nice.”

  The story he’d read on microfiche, Reuben realized. Or tried to read.

  “There’ve been lots of times,” Penny was saying, “when Mom and Dad have wanted to just give up and move out. And believe me, until I learned about the secret, I wanted them to! I wanted to have a normal life, like the other kids in town.”

  Reuben, pausing with his hands on his knees, nodded again. “I’ll bet,” he panted, “I’d have felt the same.”

  “Old Jack made a sacred promise, though,” Penelope said in a reverent voice. “And the Meyers have always kept it. Can you imagine being the one to break it? What a horrible thought! Oh, there’ve been plenty of arguments about it over the years, but in the end everyone always agrees that Jack and Penelope were trying to do something extremely important and that we must all do right by them. Well, almost everyone agrees—my brother Jack hates the whole business. But that’s just Jack. So are you ready to go on up? Or should I just skip ahead while you rest? I kind of need to hurry.”

  “Sorry,” Reuben said, straightening again. He was curious about this rebellious brother of hers, but he had neither the breath nor the time to ask about him. “Yes, I’m ready.”

  One more curve of the spiral brought them to an open doorway. A small room stood before them, its walls lined with maps and equipment, its windows revealing open space and a glimpse of the ocean horizon. “This is the watch room,” said Penny, hurrying inside. “But looks like Luke is up in the dome.” She scrambled up the iron rungs of a nearby ladder, which led through an opening in the ceiling.

  Reuben followed her up into a brilliant world of sunshine and glass. The lantern dome was composed mostly of windows, and its interior was almost entirely occupied by the enormous lamp apparatus (an imposing system of prisms and lenses, rather than the simple giant bulb that Reuben had imagined). Everywhere he looked, light danced and sparkled; it was like being inside a diamond.

  “We’ve come a long way since the days of kerosene,” Penny said, noting his look of surprise.

  Luke emerged from the other side of the lamp—a wiry, redheaded teenager, so sweat-soaked he looked as though he’d gone swimming in his clothes. “What’s the excitement?” he asked when he saw Penny’s expression. He looked wonderingly at Reuben. “And where did he come from?”

  In an excited rush of words, Penny told Luke what was happening. Her brother’s expression, skeptical at first, rapidly shifted to one of delight. When he understood that he was needed below, he wasted no time with follow-up questions but only laughed and said, “Well, what do you know! So today’s the day? Amazing!”

  He pumped Reuben’s hand and gave him a wink, tousled Penny’s already tousled hair, and scampered down the ladder. “Pull the drapes, will you, Pen?” he called up. They heard him laugh once more as he hurried down the steps.

  Penny went about the lantern dome, lowering canvas drapes over the windows. “He was cleaning the glass,” she explained. “We generally keep these covered during the day; otherwise it gets so hot it can damage the prisms.”

  This came as no surprise to Reuben, who was sweltering in his sweatshirt. Yet despite the heat, Penny was painfully, maddeningly thorough, making sure she had done her job exactly right, and by the time they descended into the watch room again, Reuben felt ready to faint.

  “Here, let’s go onto the gallery,” Penny said, opening a door to the outside. Reuben followed her out onto a railed walkway that ringed the tower. It was blessedly cool on the gallery, and the view was spectacular, with the ocean stretching away far below them on one side, and on the
other side the town laid out like a three-dimensional map, its grid of streets and tiny-looking buildings all, from this height, plainly apparent.

  Wind was whipping Penny’s red hair every which way about her head, so that from down below she must look like a strange animation of flames. She produced a sailor’s cap from somewhere and tucked at least a portion of her hair beneath it. “Look!” she cried over the wind in their ears. “There’s my dad and my uncle!” She pointed out two minuscule figures hurrying side by side across the town square. Reuben could just distinguish the two redheaded men—like walking matchsticks—among the other pedestrians.

  Several members of the Meyer family had already begun to assemble on the mainland dock, and trudging across the mudflats to meet them now was Penny’s brother Luke, followed at a slower pace and considerable distance by another young man, wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt, who must be Jack.

  After a few moments Reuben noticed that Penny had stopped watching her family. Instead she stood peering for a long spell in one direction, then again in another, and still again in another, until finally he asked what she was looking for.

  Penny glanced at him. “You’re sure you weren’t followed here, right?”

  “Pretty sure,” Reuben answered, and shifted uncomfortably. He knew he hadn’t been followed, didn’t he? But just thinking about the possibility unnerved him, made him feel less confident.

  “We aren’t as vigilant these days as they used to be,” Penny said, still gazing out over the town. “But we do keep an eye out for anything unusual. Anyone unusual, I suppose I should say.”

  “Someone like Bartholomew,” Reuben said.

  Penny turned to look at him. “It’s funny, I know he has to be long gone, just like Penelope. But it’s definitely Bartholomew I’m thinking of when it’s my turn to watch. It keeps me on my toes, I can tell you. If it had been me up here when you came across the mud, you can be sure—well, that isn’t fair. Luke keeps a good lookout himself. Everyone takes breaks now and then, and he had work to do in the dome.”

  Penny wasn’t just trying to be fair, Reuben suspected. She was trying to convince herself that it was a fluke that he’d arrived here unnoticed. She didn’t want to think it could happen twice.

  He returned his gaze to the scene at the mainland dock. Getting the elderly Meyers down the ladder into the mud was taking some time, with the younger men helping from above and below, guiding feet onto rungs and offering steady hands. When at last they were all down, the women produced brightly colored parasols to shade themselves from the sun, while the older men lowered the brims of their hats. Then the eldest Meyers each took the arm of a younger one, and thus began the strangest procession Reuben had ever seen: three generations of the same family slopping, slowly and painstakingly, across the stinking black mudflats, with the gaily printed parasols wavering overhead, and seabirds swooping and diving and skittering all about them in search of tidbits.

  It was a sight to see, at once comical and grave, and Reuben watched with a curious feeling of reverence. As the minutes passed, however, and the procession drew nearer the island, his feeling shifted to a mounting dread. A confrontation was coming, one from which he could not run or hide but must face head-on, and the thought of it made him queasy. More than that, he realized unhappily—he was in fact quite nauseated, and with a sudden sense of panic, he moved away from Penny to spare her, then stuck his head through the railing, sick.

  The two children lingered on the gallery, giving Reuben time to recover. Penny had fetched him a clean cloth and a bottle of water from a cooler in the watch room (“Probably too many stairs and too much cullen skink,” she said brightly), and after resting awhile with his back against the tower wall, he was starting to feel better. He wasn’t some wicked person like Bartholomew, he reminded himself. He was just a kid in danger—a kid whose mom was in danger—because of something he’d found. And he needed to do what he could to get them out of hot water. He had to make sure he could do that.

  When Reuben looked at things this way, his path seemed simple enough. But it was not going to be an easy one.

  Inside the watch room, a squawking, crackling sound erupted. Penny went inside, listened intently with her ear against a wall-mounted speaker, then pressed a button and said, “What?” More squawking and crackles. Penny shook her head and pressed the button again. “I can’t understand you! We’ll just come down. I repeat: we’re coming down!” There was a final brief squawk, like a hiccup, and Penny turned to Reuben, now standing in the doorway. “I’m sure that’s what they’re telling us to do. Are you ready?”

  Reuben’s stomach clenched again, but he was no longer sick, only anxious. He nodded.

  They were met in the kitchen by the same friendly man who had sold Reuben muck boots at the general store. He turned out to be Penny’s father. He appeared markedly more stern than he had been behind the counter, and Reuben saw Penny lower her gaze. Mr. Meyer drew her into a hug, and he gave Reuben an assessing look as he patted his daughter’s back. With another gesture, he bade them both sit down at the kitchen table. Outside in the great room voices clamored, but here in the kitchen no one had spoken yet.

  Mr. Meyer regarded them with his arms crossed. Penny looked down at the table, but Reuben forced himself to hold Mr. Meyer’s gaze. It was extremely uncomfortable, yet he felt it important to show strength from the outset.

  “You aren’t in trouble, Penny,” her father said at last. “You’re very young, and what’s done is done, and of course this has taken all of us by surprise. No one was expecting someone as young as Reuben here. No one ever imagined it was you who’d be approached, and no one here blames you. Even so, I will remind you that sometimes you may believe you’ve thought something through—and perhaps you have—but your parents, who have been around thirty-odd years longer than you have, may well know something about a situation that you do not. Does that make sense?”

  “Sorry, Dad,” Penny whispered. Reuben saw that her lip was trembling. She looked positively tormented.

  “Hush now,” Mr. Meyer said gently, laying a hand on her shoulder. “You’re a good girl, Penny. I can’t remember the last time we had to correct you for anything—”

  “Last March,” Penny mumbled, and her father laughed.

  “You see? Over a year!” Mr. Meyer lifted her chin and smiled at her until she couldn’t help smiling back. “Now then, Reuben,” he said, extending his hand. “Nice to see you again, and welcome to our home.”

  “Again?” Penny said.

  “Reuben bought some boots from me earlier,” Mr. Meyer said. “Little did I know he was headed this way. What a day! I’m sure this all feels rather remarkable to you, too, Reuben. What do you say we go in there and get this business sorted out?”

  Reuben swallowed hard and nodded.

  In the great room they found the rest of the Meyer family seated around the long dining table. The tumult of voices fell away, and all eyes turned to Reuben, who shoved his hands inside his sweatshirt pockets so that no one could see them trembling. At the far end of the table, an old man was holding the wooden box, which Reuben had left in the house. No doubt they had been passing it around, taking turns inspecting it. Except perhaps for one of them, a young man of about twenty with close-cropped red hair who stood by the cold fireplace, apart from the others. His expression was sullen, but he was paying close attention. That had to be Jack, Reuben thought.

  In the great room they found the rest of the Meyer family seated around the long dining table.

  “Everyone, may I introduce you to Reuben?” Mr. Meyer said. “I’m sorry, Reuben, I don’t know your last name.”

  “That’s okay,” Reuben said, forcing himself to speak up. “Just Reuben is fine.” All around the table eyebrows shot up. “Very nice to meet you all,” he added quickly, hoping to seem less impertinent.

  Extra chairs had been brought in, but though Penny and Mr. Meyer took seats at the table, Reuben remained standing. He felt instinctively that he m
ust remain on the outside of their group. Knowing what he knew about them, he couldn’t help feeling a strange respect for the entire family. But to be a boy in a room full of adults is to be fairly powerless, and Reuben needed to assert himself however he could.

  “Well,” said Penny’s mother, after another awkward pause, “as you can see, Reuben, everyone’s been having a look at this remarkable box. We’re all very impressed. Won’t you tell us where you found it? And where you’ve come from?”

  Reuben’s face felt very hot. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Meyer, but to be honest, I don’t feel ready to do that yet.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Mrs. Meyer said, taken aback. From all around the table came the sound of indignant gasps and mutters.

  “Everyone, calm down,” Mr. Meyer said, looking from face to face. “Let’s just calm down.”

  “The boy’s right!” barked the old man at the end of the table. With quivering hands, he set the box down. “Why should he start telling us things about himself? He doesn’t know us yet, does he? Sure, he’s heard the story—but it’s just a story to him, isn’t it? Maybe he has good reasons to be careful himself.”

  “Uncle William has a point,” said Mrs. Meyer. “Reuben, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot. I assumed you wanted to tell us—well, whatever it is that you know.”

  “It’s okay,” said Reuben. “I… I probably will. I just need to be sure of some things first. Like I told Penny, I’m in a bit of a serious situation.” He glanced at Penny, who was watching him intently. “Penny told me the story, but she left some parts out—she was being careful, like she was supposed to be. If you all could tell me everything, though, it might help me figure out what to do.”

  “You’re asking a lot, young man,” said one of the great-aunts. Her hair, done up in a tight bun, must once have been red but was now mostly white with red streaks. “You’ve presented us with an empty box. Yet you seem to expect that this will be enough to garner our trust.”