The Light Keeper's Legacy (A Chloe Ellefson Mystery) (23 page)

Forty: April, 1890

Ragna was walking along
the shoreline, watching one of the new excursion steamboats filled with tourists bound for Washington Island, when Anton Jacobson came storming down the beach. “We are packed!” he hollered. “Me and my son and my sister. We are ready to go.”

“Safe travels,” Ragna said.

Anton muttered a Norwegian curse. “You are a foolish woman, Ragna Anderson. For years I have watched you walk this shore.” Anton gestured toward the lake. “He is not coming back, you know. Your Anders. You wait, and you watch, but you can’t change the past.”

But I’m not trying to change the past, Ragna thought. She wasn’t watching for Anders to come home. She was watching for Carrick Dugan.

“
…
and now I am taking my family away. You will be the only soul left in the village.”

“Good-bye, Anton,” Ragna said. “Thank you for all you have done for me.” Anton had often left fish or venison on her doorstep. His sister sometimes stopped by as well.

Anton shook his head.

“If you see my son over on Washington, give him my love.” Paul was eighteen now, a grown man with a fisherman’s big calloused hands and muscular arms. He hadn’t come to see her for months. He still fished with his uncles, and they often went twenty, thirty miles out these days to set their nets.

Ragna thought about sending a greeting to Emily as well, but decided against it. Emily hadn’t visited in over a year. She had a big family—nine children, now.

“Ragna
…
”

Anton looked so anguished that she flapped her hands in a shooing gesture. Still muttering, he turned and went back the way he’d come.

The most substantial house on southern Rock Island would now be empty. Ragna scanned the more humble dwellings where most of her neighbors had lived—cabins and cottages, many caving in. It was a good place for ghosts. There had been times during the past years when she’d longed to join Christine and Anders, to become a ghost herself.

But I waited them all out, she thought with a prick of triumph. Men came and went as keepers at Pottawatomie Lighthouse, but they paid no attention to the crumbling village or the last soul to inhabit it. Now—except for Dugan, whenever he returned—she was truly alone.

Forty-one

The hike up the
familiar trail was as peaceful as ever, and arriving at the lighthouse gave Chloe a sense of coming home. An Igloo of drinking water was waiting on the step. “Remember to tell someone you’ve moved out,” she reminded herself. And
…
she’d forgotten to pack her towels, which she’d left hanging on the clothesline. She dumped her pack in the summer kitchen, hauled the cooler inside, and detoured to the side yard. She rounded the wall of lilac bushes—and froze.

The towels she’d left out to dry had disappeared. A diaphanous cloud of opaque monofilament hung in their place, tidily draped over the line. Chloe swallowed hard. A fishnet. Modern, but still a freaking fishnet. She scanned the clearing quickly—empty.

Then she darted inside the lighthouse and locked the door behind her. OK, she thought, willing her heart to slow back to a cadence at least within spitting distance of normal. Melvin or Garrett had been here to leave the Igloo, but anyone who didn’t look behind the lilac hedge wouldn’t have seen the net. So, who would have left this here? And
why
? Why was someone trying to frighten her?

Because this net
had
been left here to frighten her, she was sure of that. She’d found two dead bodies on this island in the past five days, and each had been shrouded with a fishnet. No one could think that the sight of a fishnet,
any
fishnet, would do anything except creep her out. And replacing her towels with a net seemed to send the same signal as the pound net stake hammered into the ground near Sylvie’s body:
This ground has been claimed
.

“What the hell is going on?” Chloe exclaimed, pacing. Why was some SOB trying to scare her away from the lighthouse? What was he—or she—trying to find?

Chloe rubbed her forehead. It didn’t make sense to search for anything on the island’s northern tip. If Vikings had traveled through, they’d presumably anchored off the peaceful beaches on the other end of the island before carving runes in stone or losing some scrap of material culture for some enthusiastic archaeologist to find centuries later. Presumably James McNeil—he of the missing gold coins—had lived on Rock’s southern end as well. The legend said he liked to show off his “Yellow Boys,” so his hiding place must have been far away from the lighthouse.

But something was going on
here,
around Pottawatomie. Someone, perhaps several someones, had been drinking beer in the woods near the bluff’s edge. Based on the prescription bottle/ashtray left behind, Brenda Noakes had been one of them. All that might point to nothing more than sloppy hikers or campers, but someone had been digging holes in the cave, and on the steep slope below the lighthouse, too.

She paused to look out a window. The yard was empty, but was someone watching from the woods beyond? “What are you
after?
” Chloe demanded. If her own quest for Emily’s box had anything to do with the unseen intruder, she couldn’t fathom it. And there was nothing else here. Aside from Pottawatomie Lighthouse, this northern tip of Rock Island was remote and undeveloped—

She bit her lip.
Remote and undeveloped …
Maybe she’d been looking at the situation sideways, as she had with Zana’s memorial. Maybe she shouldn’t be thinking about what an intruder might be searching for. Maybe she should be thinking about why an intruder wanted to keep even short-term visitors like her from settling in too comfortably at Pottawatomie Lighthouse.

Clasping her elbows, she tried sorting various scraps of information in her mind, trying them this way and that, searching for a pattern. She couldn’t find a clear image, but a couple of possibilities did emerge. First and foremost: the island held hundreds of acres of forest and limestone cliffs, and only a few trails. If
whatever
was hidden in the woods, no one would care that Chloe was living and working in the lighthouse. But it seemed that someone
did
care. That meant there was something about this old magnificent building itself that she should be paying more attention to.

But I’ve crawled through every closet and cranny, she thought. There wasn’t anything inside the lighthouse except a few pieces of furniture and lots of memories. Well, except for the cellar. She’d looked around down there, but maybe she’d missed something.

Chloe peeped out a window again. The clearing was still empty, but she didn’t want to go outside—which going to the cellar required—until it was time to beat feet back down to the ferry dock. Shit, she thought. She
hated
feeling trapped.

Suddenly she remembered something Sylvie had told her the day the RISC committee had provided orientation. There were
two
ways to access the cellar.

Chloe hurried to one corner of the kitchen and kicked aside one of the beautiful woven rag rugs the RISC committee had put down, bless their protective hearts, to shield the floor from dirty shoes. She found a square trap door hidden beneath the pretty rugs. A heavy iron ring, resting in an indentation to keep the hatch flush with the floor, provided access. The ring wasn’t designed for human fingers, and the door was heavy. She had to brace her feet and make several tries before finally wrestling the door up. It slammed over on the floor with a crash that made her wince. If she’d marred the floor she’d have Herb Whitby to answer to.

A wooden staircase disappeared into darkness. Now she was doubly
glad she’d brought her pack with her. She grabbed her flashlight and began a cautious descent, flinching when cobwebs hit her face. Sylvie didn’t say these stairs were dangerous, Chloe told herself, just that they hadn’t been rebuilt. She held her breath, testing each riser before putting her weight on it, and managed to reach the bottom without collapse of wood or breakage of bone.

Chloe paused, playing the beam around the space, once again mindful of Herb’s warnings. No sign of reptilian residents. But someone had been in the cellar since she’d last visited. One of the old coolers she’d dragged to the back room had been hauled back out and left near the door.

Chloe licked her dry lips. Before examining the cooler more closely she made a hasty check of all nooks and crannies in the cellar. Whoever had been here was gone.

OK, she thought, standing in front of the cooler. It looked so innocuous! Scuff marks suggested nothing more nefarious than picnics or tailgate parties. Maybe it was simply trash, gone overboard during a family sail and washed ashore.

Or maybe there was something hidden in that cooler that someone did not want her to see.

She reached for the cooler, jerked her hand back, and finally stood on one foot so she could nudge the lid up with the other. A few truly horrid images flashed through her brain. When the lid flipped open, though, she did not find a severed hand or pirated artifacts or a cache of weapons. The cooler held dead fish. A lot of fish, very
big
fish, but just
…
fish.

Chloe exhaled a long breath. Somebody had gone to the trouble of hiding these fish here. Were they too big? The wrong species? She had no idea, but what she’d read that morning about Ragna Anderson flickered into her brain. Ragna evidently believed that someone had harmed her fisherman-husband Anders. Stig had said that people had argued about fishing regulations for over a century.

Something else poked at her brain, and after a moment she captured the thought. She’d never asked Herb about the sulfuric acid in the cellar. He could be pompous, but he seemed to be overseeing the restoration with care; it was hard to imagine that
he’d
left the bottle there. She’d originally assumed that Melvin was using the corrosive to clean rust from tools or something, but he’d told her that he kept his tools locked in the oil house. She couldn’t imagine why he’d store that one dangerous chemical in the lighthouse cellar.

Chloe couldn’t imagine why anyone else would either, or how a bottle of acid could have anything to do with dead fish. But she was pretty sure that whoever was responsible would not take kindly to her discovery. And
that
person had a key to the lighthouse.

She closed the cooler again, retreated back upstairs, closed the trap door and replaced the rug. Right, she chided herself. As if hiding the door negated what she’d discovered.

Who’d been sneaking in and out of the cellar? Mel? Garrett? Brenda Noakes probably had access to the ranger station and spare keys. The RISC committee members had keys. And in a remote community
…
well, it wasn’t hard to imagine a key being borrowed, maybe going missing.
Anyone
could be behind the trouble. Anyone at all.

Chloe checked the time—still over two hours to fill before Jack Cornell returned to Rock. Should she stay here until 4:00, or wait down at the landing? She considered only briefly. She might as well stay here and try to distract herself with the work she’d come to do. Then she’d scamper straight down to the landing and board the
Karfi
.

She grabbed the file containing William’s log and settled down at the kitchen table. With her watch placed prominently nearby and Emily’s picture at her elbow, she dug in.

Chloe had read William’s notes through July, 1877, when the inspector had instructed William to be less chatty. The next few pages were filled with a single phrase per day noting passing ships and weather conditions. It was hard to shake off her spooks and settle in, but Chloe forced herself to read carefully. She got through two years of such entries—over seven hundred of them—before William expressed frustration in 1879.

The stairs up the bluff are in very dangerous condition and have been for some years.

Leaning on her forearms, Chloe pushed on. For five more years William was circumspect. Then, in July 1884, he exploded.

If the men who pretend to keep up repairs at the light station do not provide for a water supply here before long, I shall quit this business. They make wells at other stations where water is handy without wells, but neglect this place almost entirely.

Finally, on May 11, 1886, William made a final declaration.

I am glad to get away from here for I am as tired of this business as I can be.

Chloe stretched kinked muscles. Eighteen eighty-six—that matched the letter Emily had written about leaving Pottawatomie. It was sad to think that William and Emily had left the lighthouse on a bad note.

She picked up the photograph. “Well,” she told the tiny figure captured posed in the west doorway, “you certainly had good cause to feel bitter.” Emily losing her assistant keeper’s salary had no doubt put a financial strain on the growing family. William clearly maintained the station as best he could, but when major repairs were needed, repeated requests for supplies and workers were ignored. Hauling water up steep steps was bad enough. Chloe could easily imagine how troubled Emily and William must have been if their stairs were unsafe.

“Especially once the cisterns dried up for good,” Chloe told Emily. “If it was me, that would have been the last straw. Once you learned those cisterns had failed
…
”

Chloe jerked erect. The
cisterns
. She’d overlooked the obvious when searching for Emily’s mystery box. The cisterns had officially been deemed irreparable long before the Betts family left Pottawatomie. And the useless cisterns weren’t accessible through the main cellar, or from the outside of the lighthouse. Emily could have reasonably assumed that no one would ever approach them again.

Until now.

This time Chloe ran into the summer kitchen to uncover a trap door. She grabbed the ring and pulled. Nothing happened. She pulled harder, trying to ignore the protests from tender skin assaulted the day before during her futile climb up the limestone wall. Nothing happened. Dammit! This hatch door was wedged tighter than the first had been.

But no way was she giving up. No freakin’ way. She squeezed the fingers of both hands through the ring and tried again, using every pound on her five-ten frame for assistance. When the door finally groaned loose from its casing, Chloe landed on her butt. She didn’t care.

A flood of musty air emerged from the hole. Chloe grabbed her flashlight again. Holding her breath—as if that might make a difference—she inched down the steps.

As she reached solid earth she splashed her beam around, getting a sense of the space. The light caught a flicker that might have been a teensy ring-neck fleeing from the intrusion, but that was all. There was nothing else to see except the massive cisterns, which were at least six feet deep. Chloe leaned over one stone edge, then pulled back. If she fell in there she’d need a ladder to get out.

Now that she was here, Chloe had no idea where to begin. Would Emily have tried to bury the box Ragna had given her? Probably not. Emily knew that the mortar holding the cisterns’ stone walls together was crumbling. The cisterns themselves seemed the most logical place to look for a hidey-hole.

Chloe began searching at the point where one cistern met the exterior wall. She switched the flashlight back and forth from one hand to the other, scrabbling at each stone with her fingers. When she could find purchase, she tugged. If the mortar was loose, she scraped it away. “But it shouldn’t be too hard,” she murmured. Emily had no reason to think that the next light keeper would do more than satisfy his curiosity with a quick peek down here.