Maidenstone Lighthouse

by Sally Smith O'rourke

  Heedless of the noise I was making, which I assumed was lost in the roaring gale anyway, I pedaled even harder and twisted the throttle all the way to its stops. The wonderful little motor buzzed to life as I passed the Volvo’s back bumper and I accelerated down the driveway.

  A sharp right turn onto the street at the end of the drive would take me directly into the heart of Freedman’s Cove—and other people—in less than five minutes. If I could make it that far I would be home free. Because Bobby, I was certain, would not dare follow me anyplace where he might be seen.

  Raindrops lashed my unprotected face like burning needles, forcing me to squeeze my eyelids into narrow slits. As I approached the front of the house I swiveled my head around, trying to see and half-expecting Bobby to leap down from the front porch.

  But there was no one there.

  My luck was still holding.

  Swinging my face back around into the blinding storm, not yet daring to turn on the headlight, I squinted toward the end of the drive, preparing to make the hard right-hand turn to Freedman’s Cove and safety.

  Then, out of the rain and darkness a tall figure loomed up directly in front of me.

  Bobby!

  He stood in the center of the drive, where it met the street. His back was to me and he was looking toward Freedman’s Cove, and blocking my way. The hurtling motorbike was almost upon him as he slowly turned, raising the deadly survival knife in one hand and switching on the flashlight in his other.

  The glow of the flashlight imparted a demonic look to Bobby’s revenge-crazed features and his ruined mouth opened in a strangled scream of rage as he clumsily lunged at me with the knife.

  I felt rather than heard the shiny nylon sleeve of my padded ski jacket ripping. Then a fiery streak of pain shot up my right arm from elbow to shoulder. The scream in my throat froze as I threw the Vespa into a sharp left-hand skid that threatened to hurl me onto the pavement at my murderer’s feet.

  The skidding rear tire struck Bobby’s leg a glancing blow, knocking him awkwardly to his knees. For one horrible second our faces were inches apart and his maddened eyes locked with mine. Looking into those cold, cruel eyes was like peering into windows cut directly into the side of Hell. For they promised nothing but suffering and death.

  The instant was shattered as the Vespa’s fat, knobby tire suddenly caught hold on the slick pavement. Then the motorbike straightened and I was speeding away into the darkness. Away from Bobby Hayward and my own certain death, but also away from Dan and Freedman’s Cove and the refuge they promised.

  For my encounter with Bobby had forced me to turn left, toward the stone causeway and the beckoning finger of the storm-bound Maidenstone Light.

  A few hundred yards from the house, at the point where the stone causeway began, I slowed to a stop and switched the Vespa’s headlight on. The powerful beam lanced out ahead of me, revealing a scene nearly as terrifying as the one I had just departed.

  The raised causeway leading to Maidenstone Island was just barely visible above the surging sea. And as I stared, a particularly large wave broke against the stones, sending a froth of swirling white water all the way across the narrow road.

  I looked behind me, able to make out only the dim outlines of the empty Victorians ranked along the deserted street—the street that was the only route back to Freedman’s Cove.

  That was the way to safety, and Dan.

  But it was also the way back to Bobby and the murderous blade of his razor-sharp knife.

  I hesitated for a moment longer, wiping my eyes to clear them of the pelting rain and stinging salt spray. An errant thought nagged at me from the farthest corner of my mind, warning that nothing but danger awaited at the Maidenstone Light. Stay away, something pleaded. Don’t go there!

  But I had no other choice.

  So, gritting my teeth, I revved the Vespa’s engine and drove out onto the partially submerged causeway. For there was at least a chance I could make it to the lighthouse and the emergency telephone I remembered having seen up in the beacon tower.

  The power of the wind and the sting of driven rain that I had thus far encountered were nothing compared to the elemental forces that smashed into me the second I rode out onto the unprotected causeway. With blood loss and the pain of my injured arm rapidly sapping what little strength I still had, just keeping the moped upright in that howling tempest required all of my effort.

  Three times during the crossing, breaking waves smashed over the stones beside the roadway, hiding the pavement beneath swift cross-currents of rushing seawater that tugged and pulled at my wheels and threatened to drown my tiny engine. With the road thus obscured, only the constantly rotating beacon of the lighthouse kept me from losing my way and driving off into the sea.

  By the time I finally rode up onto the slightly higher ground of Maidenstone Island my injured arm was sending jolts of pure agony to my brain and I was barely able to force my benumbed hand to maintain its grip on the throttle.

  Alarms were going off in my brain. I was dizzy from loss of blood and my vision was blurring, and I knew that I was dangerously close to losing consciousness.

  If I did not get to shelter, and quickly, I realized, I was going to die in the cold.

  Urging the Vespa onward, I sped past the darkened lightkeeper’s cottage and up the flooded walkway leading to the door at the base of the lighthouse tower.

  Its lifesaving work done, the staunch little moped fell onto its side as I stepped off and stumbled to the lighthouse. To my great surprise, the heavy steel door swung open easily at my touch and I gratefully stepped into the dry, dimly lit interior of the lighthouse.

  I stood there swaying dizzily, resisting the compelling desire to simply collapse on the black-and-white-tiled floor and rest for just a moment. Behind me, the steel door clanged noisily against its frame, demanding my waning attention.

  “Don’t go getting stupid on us now,” Miss Practical scolded from her hidden nook in my brain. “Close that damn door and lock it. You’re doing great so far, but if you managed to find a way to get here, then Bobby might find a way, too.”

  Nodding dumbly, I forced myself to walk back to the door and with great effort pulled it shut against the screaming wind. “There’s no lock on it,” I wailed, examining the simple latch that allowed the door to be opened from either side.

  From the corner of my eye I glimpsed the ripped, blood-soaked sleeve of my ski jacket. My eyes followed the blood welling out of the ripped nylon to the end of my arm, then to the floor, and I stared in fascination at the sizable crimson pool growing beneath the dripping fingers of my limp right hand.

  I screamed and, feeling suddenly faint, slumped to the tile and sat there rocking slowly back and forth, cradling my bloody, injured arm with my good one. “Dan,” I murmured. “I want Dan.”

  The relative warmth of the room, combined with the soft hum of the independently powered electric motors spinning the huge light high over my head and the distant sounds of the storm were making me incredibly sleepy.

  My eyelids fluttered shut as I tried to remember why I had come to this pleasant place.

  “Wake up, dammit!”

  Miss Practical’s shrill voice brought me instantly to my senses and I looked around, trying to decide how long I had been sitting there. Seconds? Minutes? I had no way of knowing.

  I knew only that I had to get to the emergency phone in the cupola atop the lighthouse.

  Clambering to my feet with the aid of my good arm, I crossed the room to the foot of the winding iron stairway and craned my neck.

  Miss Romantic softly urged me up the dizzying flight of steps. “Go on. You can do it, honey.”

  I placed one foot on the first step, clinging tightly to the cold iron railing with my good hand. “But if I pass out up there, I’ll fall,” I whimpered, pulling back.

  “If Bobby comes, you’ll die,” Miss Practical reminded me.

  So I started to climb.

  I don’t know how much t
ime passed before I at last reached the circular glass room at the top of that endless flight of stairs. I only know that my progress was agonizingly slow and that I had to stop several times to catch my breath. Once, when I was perhaps two-thirds of the way up, I stumbled and fell, bouncing on my tailbone down five or six sharp-edged metal steps before coming to a dazed and painful halt.

  I sat huddled and shivering against the cold stone wall for another long while after the fall, drifting in and out of consciousness and softly weeping as I relived the bizarre chain of circumstances that had brought me to this unthinkable place in my life.

  So weak and weary and racked with pain was I that the temptation was great to surrender to sleep and let Bobby come and find me.

  In the end, though, it was not thoughts of Bobby’s murderous eyes that drove me upward once more, but sweet memories of Dan’s tender kisses and the loving care he had bestowed upon me.

  Such love can neither be denied nor abandoned.

  So I forced myself to get up and go on.

  Many minutes later, I stepped into the circular room at the top of the Maidenstone Light.

  Unlike the interior of the windowless stone tower below, the cupola was isolated from the full fury of the storm outside by nothing more than panes of glass. It was a frightening, claustrophobic place, a tiny lighted bubble suspended in a measureless black maelstrom of shrieking wind and racing clouds above a heaving, tortured sea.

  Several feet above my head, in the center of the room, the massive Victorian brass and crystal mechanism of the beacon turned majestically on its track, its dazzling lifesaving beacon slicing like a laser through the driving rain.

  Moving as quickly as I could, I made my way around the wall to the wooden desk beside the antique brass telescope and spotted the black emergency phone that I’d seen on my earlier visit.

  I slumped gratefully onto the padded stool beside the desk and stared at the unusual telephone. It had no dial or keypad, only a small placard that read USCG EMERGENCY USE ONLY.

  I lifted the heavy handset, praying that it was working.

  There was a brief, reassuring buzz of a dial tone, and then a crisp male voice answered with the words, “Coast Guard Rescue Station, Narragansett. Seaman Kowalski speaking, sir.”

  “Thank God you’re there!” I breathed into the mouthpiece.

  Coastguardsman Kowalski sounded startled. “Ma’am, this is an emergency military line,” he began…

  “Well, Kowalski,” I said a bit indignantly, “I just happen to have an emergency. I am stuck at the top of the Maidenstone Lighthouse and I need to be rescued…”

  Kowalski hesitated. “Yes, ma’am,” he replied after a moment, “I can tell where you are from the line you’re calling on. What exactly is the nature of your emergency?” he inquired politely.

  I started to tell him that I was being pursued by a knife-wielding madman, but I’d watched enough television to know that would probably only confuse the issue.

  After all, I wasn’t talking to the police and I didn’t want to waste time being transferred to them or anyone else. I just wanted to be rescued—the sooner, the better—and I knew the Coast Guard could do the job. So I said, “I’m alone, injured and bleeding badly and the causeway to the island is impassable.”

  That was enough for Kowalski, God bless him. “Yes ma’am,” he said, “stand by one…” I heard him excitedly conversing with somebody else, then he came back on the line. “A rescue helicopter with a paramedic onboard is being dispatched from Quonset Point Naval Air Station. They will be airborne in less than three minutes and should reach your location within fifteen minutes. Can you hold on that long?”

  Feeling strangely light-headed, I smiled dopily into the phone. “Oh, yes, Kowalski.” I giggled. “I can hold on for fifteen more minutes, twenty even, if I have to. I am a natural-born holder-oner.”

  “Ma’am?” The young coastguardsman’s voice seemed to be coming to me from a great distance. I frowned and pressed the phone more tightly to my ear. “Ma’am,” Kowalski sounded concerned, “have you applied direct pressure to the bleeding?”

  “Direct pressure?”

  “Yes, ma’am. If you press down hard on the place the bleeding is coming from, it will slow down…I think you might have lost a lot of blood,” he added diplomatically, “because you’re beginning to sound very weak.”

  “Mmmm,” I murmured with a drunken nod, “I do feel very weak, now that you mention it. Thank you so much, Kowalski. I’ll try that direct pressure.”

  Carefully balancing the telephone handset as if it was an incredibly heavy weight, I replaced it on its cradle. Then I hefted my bleeding arm up onto the desktop and stared at the bloody mass of nylon and shredded insulation, trying to remember what I was supposed to do.

  The black emergency telephone rang.

  I stared at it, wondering who on earth would be calling me here at this time of night, especially when I was having so much trouble catching my breath.

  The phone rang again.

  I slowly lifted a leaden hand to reach for the receiver, intending to firmly but politely tell whoever it was that I did not need any magazine subscriptions this evening, thank you very much.

  I saw my hand pause in midair as the whole room started slowly revolving in perfect time with the huge lighthouse beacon.

  The phone rang, again and again. Gasping for air, I stubbornly willed my hand to continue its slow journey toward the irritating instrument.

  “Don’t answer that, Sue.”

  I rolled my eyes upward and saw Bobby standing over me, his face deathly pale.

  “Kowalski is coming…to rescue me in his…helicopter,” I gasped, no longer afraid.

  Bobby coughed and nodded. “Yes, I know,” he said. “I heard you talking with him.” Then he moved away, out of my field of vision.

  I frowned, trying to recall something that I knew about Bobby, something very important. But it was too hard, because I had to keep remembering to breathe. So I sighed deeply and stared down at my bloody arm instead. “God, that really…hurts,” I moaned, looking around to see where Bobby had gone.

  I saw him standing by a small metal-framed door set between two large panes of rain-streaked glass. He opened the door and a blast of icy wind roared into the small room. He briefly stuck his head outside, then beckoned to me.

  “What?” I asked. Bobby’s lips were forming words that I could not hear above the shrieking wind. Leaving the door standing open, he walked back to my side and bent to shout into my ear.

  “The helicopter is here, Sue. It’s waiting for you.”

  I smiled and tried to stand, but my legs felt faraway and oddly disconnected from my body. Bobby obligingly put a hand under my elbow and boosted me to my feet. Then, with his arm around my waist, he slowly walked me to the door.

  I squinted out at the narrow catwalk and the howling void that lay beyond. “No!” I whispered, attempting to pull back. “I’m afraid.”

  Bobby wordlessly pushed me through the door, at the same moment releasing his grip on me. I lurched forward, falling to my knees against the slender safety railing. Far below I saw the familiar outline of my Volvo. Its headlights were burning brightly, illuminating the rows of giant rolling breakers that were thundering onto the black shiny rocks at the base of the lighthouse.

  The sight of the car instantly brought me back to my senses. I swiveled my head around just in time to see Bobby advancing on me, his mouth twisted into an evil smile. “It will be much easier for me this way, Sue,” he shouted as he grabbed the collar of my jacket and attempted to hoist me over the railing.

  The myth about your entire life passing before your eyes in the final moment before death is just that, a myth. At least it was for me.

  Because what flashed before my eyes in that moment, as Bobby struggled to tip my helpless body over the edge of the catwalk atop the Maidenstone Light was a crystalline image of Laura in her tastefully decorated Park Avenue office.

  Sitting in
her Italian leather chair, her long legs enticingly crossed in the direction of a grim-faced investigator, my fashionable shrink was clucking her pretty pink tongue and saying that the suicide of Manhattan antiques appraiser Susan Marks, while surely lamentable, did not surprise her even one little bit.

  After all, Laura went on, poor, demented Susan had been acutely depressed, emotionally distraught and had of late been experiencing increasingly vivid hallucinations in which she was always reunited with her dead lover.

  I cannot tell you how badly that pissed me off.

  Huffing and puffing like an asthmatic in a dust storm, Bobby finally had the upper half of my body bent over the railing. He turned me around to face him, then grabbed hold of my legs and was in the process of tipping me over backward.

  “Oh, my God!” I croaked, staring wide-eyed at the incredible sight just beyond his shoulder.

  Startled, Bobby looked back and his flushed features turned instantly the color of dead ashes.

  For floating above him, her white gown billowing softly about her slender form, was Aimee Marks. Bobby dropped me. I fell heavily onto the catwalk as my gentle spirit opened her mouth and emitted an ear-shattering scream that drove him backward with the force of a sledgehammer blow.

  Bobby’s icy-blue eyes rolled toward me, pleading for some explanation, as he was catapulted sharply backward and disappeared into the darkness below.

  Then Aimee smiled at me and she, too, was gone.

  As my eyes fluttered closed Dan’s face floated above me. I felt myself smile before everything went black.

  Chapter 35

  I opened my eyes as a handsome young paramedic deftly slipped a needle into my good arm. He smiled, telling me it wouldn’t feel any worse than a bee sting.

  I couldn’t seem to talk so I didn’t tell him that I’m allergic to bee stings. I felt like I was at the bottom of a swirling whirlpool and wondered why I was thinking about bee stings.

  My arm felt detached, like it wasn’t really connected to my shoulder, but my fingers moved when I wiggled them. Your arm has to be attached to move your fingers, right? So why was it twice its normal size? And white? The idea that I had been wrapped in bandages entered my muddled brain and I heaved a sigh of relief.