Devlin's Light

by Mariah Stewart

  “What was that?”

  “Corri has been refusing to use a last name. She’s registered as Corrine Devlin, which is how your brother registered her last year. But when she returned to school last month, she refused to use a last name. When I talked to her about it, she said she didn’t know how to make a capital D or a capital S, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to know how to make either letter.”

  “D for ’Devlin,’ S for ‘Steele,’ her mother’s name.”

  “So I understand.” Miss Millet smiled and turned back to the classroom. “Corri, would you come here please and show us what you are working on?”

  Corri beamed and bounced from her seat, a tiny munch-kin in a blackwatch plaid jumper and a short-sleeved navy turtleneck shirt.

  “It’s my numbers, see? One, two, three… I’m still working on the four,” she explained earnestly.

  At the top of the paper, in childish scrawl, was printed her name. Corri D.

  India’s throat tightened. “You’re doing a great job. Those are handsome numbers, Corri.”

  “You may go back to your seat now.” Miss Millet patted Corri on the back.

  “Looks like she’s decided who she is.” India cleared her throat of the obstructing lump.

  “She tells me you’ll be leaving in a few days,” the teacher said pointedly.

  “I have to get back to Paloma. I work for the district attorney’s office, and I’ll be starting a new trial the week after next.”

  “No chance of taking some time off?”

  “Not right now, I’m afraid. The trial that I’m assigned to is an especially important one.”

  “Corri’s an important child.” The retort had been sharper than the teacher had intended, and she reddened quickly. “I’m sorry, I had no right…”

  “Of course you do.” India sighed. “And of course, you are right. She is very important. I will tell you very honestly I do not know the best way to resolve this, Miss Millet. I have commitments in Paloma that I have to see through right now. As far as Corri is concerned, I really don’t know what’s best for her in the long run. I don’t know whether I should take her with me and put her in school in Paloma.”

  Frustrated and defensive, India’s normally cool facade began to disintegrate rapidly.

  “Perhaps you might work out an arrangement to spend some time with her on the weekends. If she knew she could count on that time with you, maybe it would be enough for now. And let’s not lose sight of the fact that Devlin’s Light is her home. She has friends here and, of course, she adores your aunt. This is all that is familiar to her. Given the fact that there has been so little security in Corri’s life, I don’t know that removing her from Devlin’s Light would be a particularly good thing.”

  “So what you’re saying is that she needs me and she needs the stability of her surroundings.” The suggestion had a familiar ring, India noted wryly, having been proposed twice now in less than twenty-four hours.

  “That pretty much sums it up.” Miss Millet offered India her hand as she prepared to return to her classroom, her point having been made. “Ideally, I think the best thing for Corri would be to live with you in Devlin’s Light, but of course, that’s a decision only you can make.”

  With a smile that left no doubt in India’s mind that Miss Millet clearly felt there was no real decision, she closed the door, leaving India standing alone in the hallway to contemplate her choices.

  It was almost ten o’clock when India set the thermos of coffee in the bottom of the rowboat and dug her heels into the sand for that first big push toward the bay. Once she had the boat off the dune and moving, it was easier to pull it by the rope tied to the bow than to push it across the sandy beach. She reached the edge of the bay gratefully and stepped into the water, smooth stones and rough-edged pieces of shell beneath her feet, and pulled the small boat out to where the sand dropped off a few feet in depth. Maneuvering the boat around, she climbed in, her shorts heavy with bay water, her wet shirt sticking to her abdomen, and locked the oars in place. With steady and deliberate strokes, she headed toward the mouth of the inlet and the lighthouse that served as its guardian.

  India and Ry had shared a love of the structure that had seemed almost inborn. Ry once joked that their love for the bay, like their love for the lighthouse, could probably be found in their DNA, along with hair color and body type. India had laughed and wondered aloud if perhaps that might be true. Now she pulled in the oars slightly, resting them across her knees, and let the rowboat drift for a few moments, riding the swells. She loved being on the bay, loved the smell of its brackish green-blue water and loved its inhabitants. Leaning slightly to one side, she watched a large lion’s mane jelly fish, a translucent mass of floating goo, bobbing up and down in the gentle waves, riding the tide toward the shore, where it was certain to be stranded. She leaned a little closer, watching the long waving arms of seaweed ripple right below the surface of the water. The storm of the night before had left the bay churned up, so where on another day she would be able to see clear to the bottom, where the large blue-clawed crabs hunted for food, today she could see only seaweed.

  Thinking about the crabs made her think of Maris. It was on a day much like this one, she recalled, that Maris had dragged a rowboat to the edge of the bay and pushed it in, much as India had herself done minutes earlier, and headed out past the lighthouse to crab. The storm that had sent the waves crashing and drawn the small boat out to sea had, apparently, come from nowhere. Why Maris had taken the boat into the uncertain waters beyond the lighthouse was a mystery to India. The crabbing was just as good in the inlet, maybe better, since these shallow waters allowed the crabs to be scooped up by a net, as opposed to the more tedious means of dangling a baited string over the side of the boat and waiting for a bite, a method India had never had much patience with. Ry said that Maris had often taken the boat into the bay, though everyone knew—surely everyone told her—that the currents were unpredictable.

  I guess some people have to learn the hard way, India thought as she slid the oars back into the water and began to steer toward the lighthouse, now in view.

  India never grew tired of that first view of it from the water as she rounded a bend in the cove and cleared the stand of pines that graced the dunes almost to the shoreline. She loved the structure of it, loved the way the tower rose from the little Victorian-styled house and lifted toward the clouds. The small boat rose and fell with the waves, India rocking from side to side as she drifted with the tide toward the shore. With a sigh, she dug in the oars and guided the boat to shore, careful to avoid the rocks close to the front of the lighthouse, seeking the clear passage to the deeper waters on the bay side, where she would navigate past the jetty without danger of scraping the bottom of her boat.

  Once she was within ten feet of the shore, she hopped out, tugging at the rope to pull the boat along until she reached the beach, where she pushed the small vessel onto the sand. The trip across had taken her a leisurely twenty minutes, though she had on many occasions made it in much less time. How long had it taken Nick Enright to make the trip across that night, she wondered, unconsciously looking across to the opposite side of the cove where the old crabbers cabin stood facing the bay.

  India climbed upon the rocks, her back to the lighthouse, to get a better view across the inlet. A new deck wrapped around the cabin, which no longer appeared as primitive as it had the last time she had been there. But that had been some years before, and Nick’s mother had made “a few renovations” since then. Shielding her eyes from the mid-morning sun, India grinned. New cedar siding, light tan now but which would in time weather gray, covered the outside walls; and if she wasn’t mistaken, that was a new dock right there off the deck, where a rowboat was tied to the new pilings. She watched the slow faint curl of smoke make its way from the top of the stone chimney and tried to remember if the little house had in its previous life had a fireplace. She wondered what other changes might have been made inside the dwelling
. She tried to bring to mind its interior as it had appeared the last time she had been inside, but it had been too many years since she’d been there. All she could imagine when she closed her eyes was the cabin’s inhabitant, and she couldn’t help but wonder what he was doing on this fine Indian summer morning.

  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.