The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

The wall came down on a Tuesday, which in Wren Harbor is the day nothing happens. The ferry to the islands doesn't run on Tuesdays in May. The inn changes its sheets. The library, where I had been head librarian for exactly eleven days, opens at noon and closes at four.

Between those hours I had issued one library card, to a man who wanted to read about septic tanks, and answered one phone call, from my mother, who wanted to know whether I had eaten.

I had not. I was standing on the rocks below Gull Rock Light with a borrowed thermos, watching Dale Pruitt's crew take the keeper's house apart one granite block at a time.

The town had voted to restore it. That is how things happen here: the town votes, nobody agrees, and forty years later a grant arrives. The preservation committee needed someone to catalogue anything of interest that came out of the walls, and since the library owned the only flatbed scanner in town, the job came with my key.

“Mostly you'll get newspaper,” Dale told me on the first morning. “They stuffed it in for the draught. Bring a box.”

I brought three. By noon on Tuesday I had filled one with brittle pages of the Knox County Courier, two mouse nests and a single child's shoe, laced, the leather gone black.

“Nell.” Dale had stopped work. He was holding something flat in a gloved hand, the way you'd hold a bird that had flown into a window. “This one was mortared in. Somebody meant it to stay.”

It was an envelope, the heavy kind people used to buy in boxes of twenty-five. The flap was sealed with wax gone the colour of dried blood. On the front, in a slanted hand that had been taught by nuns or by someone who feared them: For Ada, when she comes back.

Under that, smaller, a date. June 14, 1952.

“Who's Ada?” said Corey, the youngest of the crew, who had been sullen all week and suddenly wasn't.

Nobody answered him. Below us the tide was turning, and you could hear it in the way the water drew back through the rocks, one long breath. I took the envelope. It was lighter than it looked. I didn't open it. I had been a reference librarian in Boston for nine years before I came home, and there are rules about these things.

“It goes to the historical society,” I said.

“Historical society is Vera Hale,” said Dale, “and Vera's ninety-one. She's going to tell you there's never been an Ada on this rock.”

He was right. I drove out to the Hale place that afternoon with the envelope in an acid-free folder on the passenger seat, and Vera received me in her front room with the woodstove going, though it was nearly June. She had been the keeper's niece. She had spent every summer of her childhood on Gull Rock, she said, and she would know.

She held the envelope for a long time. She turned it over and looked at the seal, and I watched something move behind her face, quick as a fish under a dock.

“There was no Ada,” she said. “My uncle had no children. You can look it up.”

I did. That night, in the empty library, with the radiators knocking and the harbor lights coming on one by one across the water, I looked it up. The keeper of Gull Rock Light from 1938 to 1957 was Thomas Hale, unmarried. The 1950 census listed one other person at the light: Hale, Margaret, sister, age forty-four.

No Ada. Vera was right.

Except that in the box of newspaper from the wall, between the shoe and the second mouse nest, there was a page of the Courier dated June 20, 1952. I had flattened it under a dictionary without reading it. I read it now.

It was a short item, below the tide table and a notice about the Grange supper. The Coast Guard and volunteers from Wren Harbor and Port Clyde had ended their search for a girl reported missing from a boat off Gull Rock on the evening of June 13. About twelve years old, fair, wearing a blue cardigan. Her name was not given.

The item ended: The keeper of Gull Rock Light reports that he saw no one.

I put the envelope on the desk under the green lamp, and I didn't open it, because there are rules. For Ada, when she comes back. Somebody had waited for her. Somebody had been sure.