The lighthouse sat at the end of a sliver of land called Schooner Point. It had discontinued operation long before the hurricane had hit, but they must have been doing tours of it back then because times and prices were listed on the map. Rebekah imagined it must once have been painted such a stark, clean white, it was almost luminescent, even during the day, but now its paint had sloughed away, like old skin, and it was a finger with frostbite, blackened and decayed. As she approached, she could almost smell the rot on the wind.
She parked the Cherokee on a slash of cracked blacktop and took in the lighthouse through the plastic wrap on her broken window.
Grabbing a flashlight from the trunk, she followed a wooden boardwalk across the surface of the dunes. The sun was still out, drifting behind clouds, but it was winter and already the light was dwindling. She zipped up her top and moved onto a red-brick path. It was loose beneath her sneakers, and shifted, like a floor in a funhouse.
To her surprise, the door was open.
Nothing, so far, had been this easy, so she stopped for a moment and took it in. When, finally, she reached out and pulled it towards her, she realized she’d tensed, bracing herself for whatever surprise was coming.
But there was no surprise.
Someone had just forgotten to secure it for the winter.
She stepped into old living quarters, stripped bare of anything that might have proved helpful, then shone her flashlight to her right, where a staircase spiralled upwards. Somewhere above her, a bird flapped its wings as the glow skittered across the white-painted walls.
She started the climb, all the way up to the lantern room.
It was hexagonal, and about forty feet in diameter, although it felt smaller inside because of the huge size of the light. Floor-to-ceiling windows gave an uninterrupted view of the island, the immensity of the Atlantic rolling out on all sides of her. A hundred and one miles north-west, the mainland was a smear in the distance. But it was alone. In every other direction, there was nothing. It was infinite ocean and the curve of the earth.
She looked for any sign of life out on the water, circling the lantern, taking in each part of the island: it was different seeing it from an elevated position, a way to reinforce her knowledge of what she’d already figured out or checked and, potentially, parts she might have missed.
And that was when her eyes locked on a set of small buildings off to her left, all with corrugated steel roofs.
They were on the opposite coastline to the mainland, at the end of a mud trail coming off the Loop. Somehow, as she’d driven from the hostel down to the lighthouse, she’d managed to miss them.
But it wasn’t the buildings that had caught her eye.
It was something stored at the back.
A motorboat.