The Night Mark. Tiffany Reisz

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      Faye tore herself from the painting and entered the tourist center’s front office. She found a teenage boy with his nose buried in his phone manning the receptionist’s desk. Either covering for his mother, she surmised, or doing community service for any of the usual teenage misdemeanors that deserved a punishment more than grounding but less than prison.

      “Do you know anything about that painting of the lighthouse in the window?” she asked.

      “Which one?”

      “The one with the lady in the painting.”

      “Lady painting. Um...hold on,” he said, sounding tired, hungover, stoned maybe. He wasn’t moving very fast, either, as he took a binder off a shelf and flipped through the pages. She’d been amused by the terrapin-crossing warning signs she’d seen around Beaufort with the outline of the turtle in the middle. If she had such a sign she’d hang it over this boy’s head. Then she would clobber him with it.

      “Okay, here it is,” the boy said between yawns. “Watercolor. Sixteen by twenty inches. The Lady of the Light. Fifty bucks.”

      “That’s it? That’s all it says about the painting?”

      “Um...no. It says if you buy it, the artist accepts personal checks made out to the Historical Society.”

      “I wasn’t planning on buying it. I want to know who the woman in the painting is.”

      “I told you—the Lady of the Light.”

      “Who’s that?”

      “Some lady.”

      “Okay,” Faye said, counting to ten before she murdered this boy. “What about the artist? From the angle of the painting, it looks like he or she painted it from the beach, which meant they were out there. You’re not supposed to be out there, since it’s a private island. You know anything about any of that?”

      “Um...”

      “I’ll take that as a no.”

      “You can ask Father Pat about it, I guess.”

      “Father Pat?”

      “He’s a priest.”

      “Why would I ask a priest about the painting?”

      “Because he painted it.”

      “He’s a priest and a painter?”

      The boy shrugged. “What else are you going to do if you’re a priest? Not like you can join Tinder. Maybe you can. I’m not Catholic.”

      “Is his number in the phone book?”

      “What’s the phone book?”

      Now he was just messing with her. She hoped.

      “His number’s in here. Hold on.” The boy waved her off and flipped through the binder again. Finally, he found the phone number and wrote it down for her.

      “Thank you,” she said.

      “You should buy the painting. Father Pat would really like that.”

      “I just got divorced. Took one week. Do you know how much money I had to give up to get my divorce finalized in one week?”

      “You can have it for twenty-five dollars. It says so in the book.”

      “Fine. Give it to me.”

      Faye wrote out her personal check to the Historical Society. At least it was a tax write-off. The boy offered to wrap up the painting for her in some newspaper—she was shocked he knew what a newspaper was—but she declined and carried it back to the Church Street house. Faye wondered if sweat could damage a watercolor before recalling how much she had paid for it. As she opened the gate, Ty opened the front door. He stopped, looked at her and at the painting.

      “Don’t ask,” she said.

      He held up his hands in mock surrender. “I’m not asking a thing,” he said before putting on his helmet and scootering away.

      Faye set the painting on her desk, propping it against the wall. Father Patrick Cahill might be an amateur, but he was a talented one. His work had a Degas flavor to it, blurry, shaky, giving the impression of the lighthouse and the outline of the woman without giving way the details. She wondered if he painted en plein air or if this had been a work of pure imagination. He could have seen the lighthouse from a boat like she had and then painted it at a different angle later. But what about the woman? What about the white bird on the pier? Either the universe was trying to tell her something, or...

      She was losing her mind. Faye thought she could put money on the second option.

      First, so as not to be intrusive, Faye attempted to send Patrick Cahill a text message. She composed it carefully, saying she had bought the painting of the lighthouse and the lady and admired it greatly, and if it wasn’t too much of a bother, she’d like to ask him a few questions about it. She signed her name and sent the message. She received an immediate error message.

      It was a landline.

      Fabulous. Father Cahill had a landline. How quaint. Now Faye understood why Hagen was so annoyed with her wanting to live in the past. She took a deep breath and dialed the number next. She hated cold-calling the man. Priests didn’t make her nervous, but she’d talked to very few of them in her time. Even when on assignment photographing the interiors of churches, she’d spent more time with the secretaries and deacons than the priests, who had more pressing matters to attend to. Father Cahill didn’t answer, but he did have an answering machine. Not voice mail. Answering machine. Would she need a time machine just to find the man?

      She relayed her message to his answering machine and thanked him profusely for his time, which he actually hadn’t given to her yet. Still, this was the South, and she knew it was best to play the honey card instead of the vinegar card if she wanted a man to do her bidding.

      After gathering her gear, she set out again to work. She had never accomplished anything by sitting and waiting for the phone to ring, so she drove out to Saint Helena Island. She preferred shooting her outdoor photography in the early-morning and late-evening hours, but she didn’t want to waste an entire day brooding and overthinking things. She’d done enough of that in her life.

      First stop, the Penn School. According to its historical marker, Northerners during the Civil War had come to the region to start a school for the people newly freed from slavery. Faye could imagine how well that went over with the local white population. But the school, with its cream-colored exterior and red tile roof, was lovely even in the vertical noon sunlight. Faye made a circuit of the school, shooting it at every angle, even climbing a tree to get a shot of it through the branches sagging with Spanish moss. A good picture, but not good enough. She would have to suck it up and come back tomorrow morning around dawn to get the shot the way she envisioned it.

      Next Faye drove down to the Chapel of Ease, or what was left of it. Four walls of tabby plaster, no roof and that was it. She took a few shots of the chapel but focused most of her pictures on the adjacent cemetery. A lovely, peaceful place until a bus arrived and belched tourists out onto the hallowed ground. Faye waited until they СКАЧАТЬ