“I’m a decent person,” she said.
“And me? From what little you’ve seen. Am I evil?”
“No sir. I don’t believe you are. I don’t know you. I don’t know what sort of parents you come from. I don’t know if tragedies have happened to you. I’m sure things have caused you to behave…”
“Destructively.”
“Yes.”
“Is anyone evil, Karen?”
“People get damaged. They malfunction. But no, I don’t believe in evil.”
“I see. Thank you for talking so candidly with me.”
The blindfold was removed.
Karen stared through iron bars across a half mile of pines and marshland and dunes to the Atlantic. From this height and distance the ocean was mute though in the light of the yellow moon she could make out the ragged thread of surf extending for miles down the coastline.
Her captor was gone.
She managed to sit up and saw that she occupied a small observation deck encircled by iron railing. At her back a ladder climbed the last six feet of the tower up to the lantern room of the Bodie Island Lighthouse.
Its beam was blinding. It flashed on for 2.5 seconds. Off 2.5 seconds. On 2.5 seconds. Off 22.5 seconds. This rhythm repeated, dusk to dawn, and she could not behold the mighty lens as it magnified its 160,000 candlepower beacon out to sea.
Karen strained against the rope but the knots held. As she dragged herself around the platform, her eyes followed the ribbon of Highway 12 as it skirted beach and marsh and finally, three miles south, traversed the troubled waters of Oregon Inlet onto Pea Island. From there it would be sixty miles of desolate sound and seashore and tiny beach communities and then Cape Hatteras and Ocracoke and the Core Banks.
But she didn’t know place-names.
She didn’t even know she was in North Carolina or that her captor had cut two locks with a bolt cutter in the oil room and carried her up a rickety spiral staircase to the top of this 131-year-old lighthouse.
How the hell am I gonna get down from here? Fuck it, I’ll find a way. Flag down a car. Get to an airport. Call Scott Boylin, have him wire some money. It will feel so sweet to be back in my apartment again. First thing I’ll do is listen to Ashley Chambliss and drink an entire bottle of that chardonnay and I won’t even feel guilty about it. Everything will be different now. I’ll be a better person. Publish better books. Stop living on autopilot. This experience might actually turn out to be a—
Rounding the base of the lantern room, she froze.
Oh God, why is he still here and squatting over a pile of rope?
The man with long black hair looked over his shoulder and smiled.
“Be right with you, Karen.”
When he turned and stood she saw that he held a noose by its coil.
He came forward as she tried to crawl the other way and slipped the noose around her neck. Then he hoisted her up over his shoulder and set her down on top of the railing facing him.
Unable to muster a scream, Karen glanced over her shoulder, felt a needling in her stomach. Far below she saw the adjoining oil room at the granite foundation of the lighthouse. She saw the roof of the nearby Keeper’s Quarters and the visitor parking lot. Westward beyond the marsh, she took in the waters of the Pamlico Sound and further on, the blinking red lights of radio towers on the mainland.
“This is a black and white banded lighthouse,” the man said. “I’ve measured out the rope so you’ll hang in the middle white band facing the visitor’s center. Imagine the face of whoever finds you first. Maybe some minivan family from the Midwest, with lots of little ones.”
He laughed.
Karen looked at the skein of climbing rope at his feet and the bulky knot he’d tied to the railing. He held her by the waist belt of the bathrobe she’d worn since her abduction.
She sought out reason in his eyes and found it. They were not wild or impassioned but black and serene. And if they burned, it was a smoldering like embers.
Now only clutching her with one hand, he brushed his black hair from his eyes.
Karen felt gravity pining for her, a waterless undertow.
She upchucked on his windbreaker but he did not let go.
“Karen,” he said. “Now do you believe?”
He released the belt of her robe, watched her fall.
She screamed for two seconds, then the rope silenced her.
Back and forth she swung, still fifty feet above the lawn, a pendulum for the lighthouse.
19
AT two in the morning the Impala streaks south on Ocracoke Island, a ribbon of land less than a half mile wide. To the west the Pamlico Sound yawns out into darkness. Oceanside the Atlantic shines like black blood under the jaundiced October moon.
In the trunk, Elizabeth Lancing sleeps and she does not dream.
Behind the wheel the smiling driver is tired and happy, the window down, his hair whipping across his pale face. He inhales deeply, the tepid air redolent of kelp and saltwater and driftwood and the carcasses of fish on tidesmoothed sand.
At last he sees it beyond the dunes that now hide the sea—his hometown, a faint incandescence on the black horizon.
And he wonders, Old Andrew, since I’ve shown you the way, will you come?
V I O L E T
20
THE last Wednesday of each month is unfailingly baked spaghetti night at Lighthouse Baptist Church. It is tradition, a comforting inevitability for this Christian community.
The congregation slowly progressed from the kitchen into the fellowship hall much as it had done every Wednesday evening for the past twenty-two years. Each churchgoer carried a paper plate laden with baked spaghetti, a yeast roll, a salad of wet lettuce and shredded carrots, and a Styrofoam cup of sweet tea.
They dined with their brothers and sisters in Christ at the circular foldaway tables, happily consuming the insipid meals, the fellowship hall resounding with myriad conversations and rampant children, while praise music flowed from speakers on the stage, an auditory warmth. Through tall windows the dying sun funneled weaker and weaker, now only a suggestion of purple in the late October sky.
Violet King sat at a table with her parents, Ebert and Evelyn, and a friend of her parents named Charles. Charles was thirty, single, and on fire for Jesus. Violet disliked the way he looked at and spoke to her, as though he were privy to some secret she had not disclosed, as though he were something more than a shallow acquaintance.
Charles had been monopolizing the conversation for the last five minutes, narrating his attempt to witness to a “troubled black youth.”
But Violet wasn’t listening. She just stared at the cube of baked spaghetti on her plate.