Off Season - Jack Ketchum [14]
The paper first. She sipped the water and scowled, wondering for the thousandth time why she bothered to buy such a miserable newspaper. She guessed just to see what the Times had left out. The scandal. The murder.
The murder always upset her though, slightly. She read about it, but knew it wasn’t good for her. A cerebral poison. The headline was: 5 KILLED IN BLOODY RIKERS RIOT. She noted the alliteration. There was plenty of international news today, but that was the Post‘s front-page story. She hardly ever bothered to actually read the stories. The headlines were usually quite enough. She flipped through the paper and the boldface type disgorged today’s necrology. Refugees Slain . . . Subway Rider Killed . . . 7 More Die in Iran . . . Youth, 17, Seized in Rape-Murder . . .
There were two stories in particular that she did read, so odd that in spite of herself they commanded her attention. In one a 45-year-old laborer in Paramus had tried to set his wife afire, having gone out to the garage after a drunken squabble to fill his glass with gasoline. He’d doused her with the gas but then, police said, was too drunk to light a match properly. In the other story a man in Virginia had hanged his beagle puppy from a tree in the backyard because it wouldn’t obey him.
Marjie read the stories through with a grim fascination. Her amazement at how desperate and crazed people could be simply never abated. These two stories were so strange they were almost comic. Yet if remembered that they were not just stories, but real events in the lives of strangers, the mind boggled and they were not funny at all. The sudden lives of strangers: where was that from? Something dark and very sad settled over her for a moment. An image of a man walking away from a struggling puppy. She tossed the paper to the floor.
In Maine, she would not have the Post. Fine. She opened the book Carla had loaned her, a wellthumbed, broken-backed volume her sister had found in a flea market somewhere, A Short History of the Maine Woods. She read Indian legends about trout and elk and the story of the building of FDR’s summer home at Campobello Island across the bridge from Lubec, near Carla’s house at Dead River. Her sister had red-penciled local stories of particular interest. Marjie sipped her glass of water and awaited sleep. The book’s style was quaint and a little stuffy. Sleep would not be far away. She read:
Lashed by gale-force winds and fierce seas, Barnet Light on Catbird Island is one of the most isolated lighthouses on the Atlantic seaboard, set high on a barren, jagged rock overlooking Dead River across the bay . . .
There was a red slash-mark beneath the words, “Dead River.” Marjie liked the feeling of her sister having read all this before her. For a moment it was as if they were reading side by side. She continued.
. . . today a federal wildlife sanctuary, Catbird Island is rarely visited by either tourists or residents due to its treacherous seas, and the Light has been unoccupied since 1892, when the Lighthouse at West Quoddy Head opened in its stead. The early history of the Island is, however, curious and worth mentioning.
Established on the southernmost tip of the Island in 1827, the Light was originally a wooden tower situated at the end of a stone dwelling that was habitable only in fair weather. Its fixed light was elevated 83 feet above high water. But in 1855 when the Lighthouse Board was informed the Barnet’s visibility fell far short of the hopedfor fourteen miles (its lack of visibility worsened by the fact that the Light is fog-enshrouded a good thirty percent of the time) a new tower was constructed to an elevation of 95 feet. A reconstruction of the keeper’s house was likewise undertaken and accomplished.
That same year Daniel Cook was appointed keeper of the Light and moved his entire family—his