Swan Light: A Novel, page 20
Teach’s office was four floors above Dodd Seawhether’s. The stairway exit door clicked open at Julian’s keycard, and they stepped into a dark space lined with messy cubicles, papers overflowing from plastic bins, half-eaten food still littering some of the tables. A quick lap of the floor showed nothing resembling archives or storage. Julian walked along a row of closed conference rooms, sticking his head into every one until he said, “Bingo.”
The archive’s linoleum floor was hidden by dozens of boxes stacked haphazardly on top of one another, overflowing to lean against the computer in one corner and the tall metal supply cabinet in the other, its doors open to reveal yet more boxes. Julian and Mari pulled on their gloves and got to work. Thankfully, Teach’s organization was better inside the cardboard than out of it. The contents were sorted by location, and it didn’t take long to find C. CANADA—N&L. “Here,” Mari said, pulling it open. And, like a miracle, everything they needed was sitting at the bottom. She pulled out a small leather book, a stack of photographs, a sheath of newspaper clippings, dozens of other loose brittle pages. Nathaniel Vettrey’s bank records, letters to Halifax, photos of gold. Adrenaline shot down her spine.
“Here’s our boy,” Julian said, handing her the stack of newspapers. The words LIGHTKEEPER SWAN sat at the top of the first page like a beacon. “I’ll take this one.” He gingerly pulled open the leather journal and began snapping pictures page after page, not stopping to read. Mari did the same with the newspapers and other sheets, and had just turned her attention to the photos when there was a clatter from the glass front door and the harsh static feedback of a walkie-talkie.
They both froze. “Hurry up,” Mari hissed. But Julian was only halfway through the journal. And now there was a new sound: footsteps, getting louder.
Julian moved to the vertical supply cabinet, but the boxes stacked inside left no room to fit. “Back here,” he whispered, flattening himself against the wall behind it and pulling the door open all the way to hide himself from view. Mari squeezed in beside him, so close her shoulder was pressed against his chest. She could feel his heart beating through his suit. Mint and woodsmoke, as always. But above that, something new. Had he put on cologne?
He was definitely wearing cologne.
This was definitely the wrong time to be noticing it.
“It will take a bit to pull the tapes,” the walkie-talkie buzzed as the footsteps got closer. “All we know is something tripped the alarm. Keep an eye on the stairs and the elevators.”
“I’m only one person, boss,” a real voice said, right outside, and Julian tensed.
“Stay where you can see them both, then,” the radio voice said, irritated. “Adrian and Park are on their way.” The footsteps passed them, pausing at each door, then proceeded back around the corner, the static fizzing away.
“Shit,” Julian breathed, reopening the journal. He set his camera to video and held it over the book as he flipped quickly through the remaining pages. “That was fast. We can grab stills from this later. It’ll have to be good enough.”
Mari pushed the articles back into their box but held on to the photos, torn. There was no time to take pictures of them. Would Teach really notice them missing? Even if they did—if there were security tapes like the man on the radio had said, Mari and Julian were already in huge trouble. What was one more crime?
And before she could think better of it, she tucked the black-and-white photographs into her purse.
Back in the main office a man was standing just outside the open glass door to the elevator bank, his back to them. The down button was already glowing white.
“Under there,” Mari whispered, pointing to the desk closest to the stairs, and together they crouch-ran across the room to hide beneath it. Mari picked up a sunglasses case sitting on top of it and took aim for the conference-room doors. The sound of it hitting the glass seemed riotously loud in the silence, and as the man at the door dashed around the corner Mari and Julian burst into the stairwell and down the four flights to the gala.
“Whoa, there,” a woman said, jumping back as Julian swung the door into her. But her glare gave way to a good-natured eyebrow wiggle as Mari slid, panting, up beside him. “There’s a hotel down the street, you know,” the woman said, grinning. “You two might be a little more comfortable.”
Julian stared blankly, and Mari elbowed him. “Look at him in this suit, can you blame me?” she slurred, wrapping her arms around his waist, and Julian caught on and draped an arm over her shoulder. The woman chuckled as she rejoined the dance floor, clearing the way for Mari and Julian to be swallowed up into the crowd.
Time that had seemed to pause while they were upstairs unspooled in a rush now, and Mari felt suddenly unsteady. Julian’s arm was still around her shoulder, and she gripped his hand as the last ten minutes—was that all it had been?—came crashing in. “We have to run,” Julian said, but the same triumphant glee was dancing in his face and he didn’t let go of her hand. She couldn’t get the sound of him saying Here’s our boy in reference to a long-dead lighthouse keeper out of her head. He was warm and solid, the only solid thing in this room. A piece of iron on a shifting seafloor. And he’d said the word run but neither of them had moved an inch, his eyes dark on hers, their fingers still twined together, and suddenly no wreck in the world was as important as leaning forward and kissing him.
He pulled away almost immediately. It gave her enough time to think about how she’d once compared him to a British guard, serious and immovable, and how kissing one of them mid-crime-spree was probably a terrible idea too. But then his arm tightened around her shoulders and his other hand moved to her jaw and he was pulling them back together, his lips catching hers. And then what she’d thought was solid iron was alive with silt and sunlight, and Mari felt their giddy euphoria giving way to something else right in front of her, the heat of the moment turning to the inexorable churn of the sea. She pulled him closer and it wasn’t close enough; bit his lip as he made a sound into her mouth, careful Julian Henry from Bergy Bits with his fingers curled into her hair and her arms tucked under his, and the only coherent thoughts in her head were a combination of Why haven’t we been doing this the whole time? and Well, shit.
“Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention for a moment,” the DJ said, and Mari felt a gut-deep stab at the security guard’s raised walkie-talkie, and then a second, stronger, at the look on Julian’s face.
Careless.
Reckless.
Run.
“Come on,” Julian said, grabbing her arm. They snaked back to the front door while the crowd was still quieting and made it into the elevator before the guard had said a word. They didn’t stop running until they’d made it the four blocks home.
The rest of the night passed in a blur: the cab to the airport, the frantic ticket change, the gate. Moving quickly had never felt so unnatural, time jerking ugly from A to B to C. Julian wouldn’t look at her and there wasn’t time to talk about it, and Mari flipped Clara Vettrey’s photos over and over in her hands until she worried they would tear. “What did you do?” Julian hissed when he saw them.
“Teach has the digital copies,” she said, defiant. “I should have taken the journal too. It should all go to Evangeline.”
“Then we should have asked Teach, like I wanted. Mari, this is a crime.”
“Well, it’s already done,” she said shortly. “Can we talk about what just happened?”
He met her eyes for the first time since they’d kissed. “No,” he said quietly, and that, more than his anger, flooded Mari with shame. “I think I’ve had enough for one night. Let’s just see if we got anything to make this worth it.”
Her skin prickling, Mari looked down at the photos in her hands. And thumbing through them, her irritation faded. Because one frame at a time, Clara Vettrey’s time at the cliff came alive under her fingers. There again were the shots of Saint Gray at the bottom of the cliff, of the lighthouse seen through Silvestre Swan’s window. There were more of the lighthouse and more of the sea, several of a dark-haired boy playing with a Labrador dog. There was Highs Harbor, glutted with ships. There was a pile of misshapen berries. And then—Mari caught her breath. Then was an old man, his hand a blur in front of his face but not quite enough to cover it. The emotion of it caught her off guard. After a century forgotten, here was Silvestre Swan again.
“There’s another connection,” Julian said, snapping her back.
“Between what?”
“The Vettreys and the Normans.” He tapped the screen. “Clara married one. Lou Roland. I skipped to the end. They lived in St. John’s, and she’s talking about him volunteering for World War I. She says, loosely quoting here, that she hopes his penchant for doing the right thing doesn’t get him killed.”
Mari frowned. She’d looked into Cortney Roland, but they’d never found anything about a Lou. “Does it say anything else about him?”
“She noted his regiment number; let’s see.” Julian switched screens from the video of the journal to Memorial’s database. “His unit deployed to Greece in 1914, to assist with war efforts in the Mediterranean. The next record is when part of the regiment departed for Marseilles the following November aboard the—” He stopped, his eyes going wide.
Mari felt it before he spoke. Greece to France in November. It was a route etched into her core. A bright blue sea shattered by an underwater gun. It can’t be. She made her mouth move. “What?”
He looked up at her. “Aboard the chartered British troop carrier SS Californian.”
Swan, 1913
November was almost over. It took Swan several days to notice, as Clara had taken over writing the logbooks in her own journal, tearing out the last few pages of Swan’s for her own reference and pressing them carefully into a small leather book she’d found in town, interspersing the typical straightforward observations with her own musings on things she saw around the cliff. Subtly and steadily the air had grown raw and hostile, the wind sharp and bitter and strong. And one early, especially gusty morning, the tower let out a sound louder than anything Swan had heard from it before.
It was just after dawn and Clara had just put out the light, Swan awake by habit but still in bed. The sky out his window was as pale as the tower stone, the air heavy and iron-tipped with frost. Swan reached for the bit of glass from Saint Gray that he left beside his bed, the tiny bull’s-eye that Clara had brought him that first morning, saying it was like his own tower lens. It was icy to his touch. He ran his finger along its edge, thoughtful. It reminded him that he should bring the pickaxe back up to the lantern room from its place in the shed. Soon enough it would start to snow, and they’d need it to break ice from the windows. And then the tower shuddered with a keening sound that was more animal than stone, high and guttural, cutting off with a snap that echoed out over the water.
As it faded the whole cliff seemed to shudder too, the gulls quivering where they sat on the matted grass, the waving branches cutting sharp lines across the sky. Stay barked. Swan rose and pulled aside the curtain into the kitchen to find Clara there tinkering with the black box, only the slight quiver of her hands giving away that she’d heard the sound too. “I need to take more pictures of the cliff,” she said briskly, without looking up. She raised the camera and set off a burst of light directly into Swan’s eyes.
“What?” Swan yelped, pressing a hand to his face. Lou emerged from the side room, his hair unruly.
“What on earth was that?” he asked.
“She’s blinded me,” Swan said.
“No—before that,” Lou said. “The lighthouse. Is it okay?”
And Swan felt the room get colder still.
In all the time the two children had been here, it had been Clara carrying on conversations with the tower, Clara who understood its sounds. Never Lou. For him to have heard it now meant that the tower’s distress was even worse than Swan had thought.
Swan leaned against the window as Clara and Lou went outside with the camera, studying the tower. It seemed to be sagging, its base shriveling like a rotting vegetable where it met the cliff. The rail around the lantern room was no longer quite parallel with the horizon, and its plaque was slightly angled, its words dipping toward the sea. He pressed a hand to the windowsill, dizzy. Thinking about the tower falling was one thing. Watching what came before it was quite another.
But he forced himself outside and into his chair. And he stayed there until Clara tired of scampering around with the camera and collapsed into the chair beside him, opening her arms for Stay to jump into her lap. “I’m going into town again,” she said. “Will you be okay to get the light going?”
“’Course I will,” he said gruffly. “I’m not that soft yet.”
She grinned. “Good. You should do some work around here, for once.” Swan couldn’t help grinning back. Clara lifted the camera and snapped it in his face.
He held his hand in front of his eyes just in time. “Could you stop that? You’re not going to town to get another one of those, are you?”
“No,” she said, then stood. “Come take a proper photo. Just one. Please?”
“Fine,” Swan said.
“Lou,” Clara called. “Go stand by the lighthouse.”
Lou frowned at her. “No, thank you.”
“Come on,” she wheedled. “If Mr. Swan can take a photo, you can stand a little closer to the edge.”
Lou and Swan stood at the base of the tower, right below its plaque, Stay stretched between them. And once she’d taken the photo Clara wavered for a minute, then launched forward toward Swan and threw her arms around him. “Thank you,” she said. And before Swan could summon any resistance she was skipping back to the house, looking for all the world as if this was where she’d always been.
When Clara and Lou had gone and dusk started gathering in the treetops, Swan climbed the tower stairs for the first time in days. He relished the cool press of the air in the stairwell, the way it ballooned downward when he opened the hatch to the lantern room. But in the lantern room he found himself unable to look away from the water. Was it closer than it had been yesterday? Would the tower fall in one piece, or hit the cliff and crack? Would it hit Saint Gray, still lying down there at the bottom? Would the waves push it into the cove the way they did everything else? Or would it be like that orange stone from his childhood, there and then simply gone?
They were terrible thoughts, and he made himself stop before the tower got angry with him. But its stone was silent, and he realized that other than that snap in the morning, it had barely made a sound all day. It worried him. He pressed both palms to the lens, studying the bull’s-eyed pattern. “Soon, my friend,” he whispered. Nothing. Not a murmur. And Swan knew it, deep in his bones.
The tower would fall tonight.
Mari, 2014
“Evangeline has to have known Louis Roland sailed on Californian,” Mari said for the dozenth time. “Has to. How else do you explain that a random man from Newfoundland ended up on the same ship I’ve been researching for twenty years? It can’t be a coincidence.”
For the dozenth time Julian nodded without looking up. She knew he agreed, that she didn’t have to keep saying it. But at this point she was repeating it for her own sake, because a full twelve hours after the gala she still couldn’t believe it. It was too convenient to be true. But if she was right, if this was why Evangeline had wanted her for Swan Light, how would she have expected Mari to make the connection? Mari never would have looked into the Normans or the Rolands or the Vettreys, never would have heard about them at all, if Teach hadn’t been here asking about them.
Mari felt her brain was trying to move in too many directions at once. She itched for the plane to fly even faster. She had a lot of questions for Evangeline.
But at least her constant questioning had so far kept the journey from being awkward. Julian still wouldn’t meet her eyes. Mari was willing to chalk their kiss at the gala up to adrenaline and the heat of the moment and carry on being friends, but evidently her dive partner wasn’t. And now Mari couldn’t stop thinking of Vanessa—or, more accurately, couldn’t stop thinking of Julian thinking of Vanessa, the other faceless diver she was sure he was comparing her to. So she forced herself out of it with thoughts of Californian. Its manifest had been lost in the explosion, but other records were very clear that only one person had died when it sank: a fireman named Harding. Whatever had happened to Louis Roland, he hadn’t died on that ship. She thought about Ursula’s shape appearing on the sonar, the edges and scatter of something once magnificent that had been ruined. But no, not Ursula. Ursula with the too-long hull, Ursula that put them back at square one, with nothing from the other targets but iron and coal and—
And gold.
The odds were so slim it was laughable. But the rest of this had happened, hadn’t it? A needle in a haystack in a barn full of haystacks under four thousand feet of water. Maybe, sometimes, you found it.
Mari pulled out her printed copies of Hector’s notes and flipped through them until she found the assessment of the gold they’d found on Cherry. It had been cast in 1899 in San Francisco. That was all they knew. Its very existence on the Cherry wreck site had been a strike against it in Mari’s eyes, because there was no reason for there to have been American gold on a British ship. But was it so unlikely to think that Louis Roland had kept some of it with him when he’d deployed, that it had gone down with Californian?
There was only one way to find out.
She flipped through Hector’s notes until she reached her own, and the mag chart that had first shown them Saint Gray. They’d never done a proper sweep, since Julian had insisted that the wreck was outside their purview and he was the one controlling the boat. But from what they did have—hits smeared one over the other in a vaguely straight pattern—she guessed that what they’d found was an edge of the ship, not part of the middle where it had torn open, like they’d seen in Clara’s photos. The specie room, where the gold most likely would have been stored, would have been toward the center of the ship, deep in the hull. But when the ship had hit the cliff its gold could have gone any- and everywhere. Mari studied the chart, thinking hard. One hundred years in rough waters. Unlike the stone lighthouse, gold wasn’t heavy enough to sink right into the sand. Especially at the tail end of a storm, it would have been buffeted out into the bay, at the mercy of the current . . .
