RED LIGHTS: OVER THE OCEAN
Prologue Part One: Robert
Her name was Anne. Anne Cassidy. Robert Buckley found out one day late in May when he tied up his Zodiac at Crow Island, five miles off the coast of southern Maine, climbed the slick stone stairs up the breakwater, and, following that, ascended the eighty-six steps up to the lantern room when Cassidy failed to answer the bell at the worn front door of the keeper's house.
She wasn't the first living being Buckley met on the island, though: as his head came level with the rocky, grass-stubbled ground at the head of the stairs, a massive black dog loomed suddenly and silently up in front of him. Buckley, surprised, nearly fell sideways off the narrow steps; he froze and fought simultaneously to keep his balance: the stairs at this time of day put at least twelve feet between him and the water slapping the jagged rocks below, and the fall would be a nasty one. But the dog simply went still, too, and stood watching him, not baring its teeth, not growling. Buckley recognized it as a Newfoundland. The thing stood a yard high at the shoulder if it stood an inch. He stepped cautiously from the stone stairs onto Crow Island proper; the dog surrendered a step backwards in turn, making way. It studied him a moment longer with its black eyes. Then, as if in response to a call Buckley couldn't hear, it turned and trotted toward the keeper's red-roofed, white-sided house. Buckley followed. The dog seated itself on the stony ground while Buckley rang the bell and then thumped the door with a fist; when the door went unanswered, it stood again and resumed its easy trot, this time toward the lighthouse itself, a granite-and-brick tower a hundred feet or so from the house.
Again, Buckley followed.
He found the tower's weathered steel door ajar; he pushed it all the way open and stepped inside and, finding no one in the lower-level staging area, called up the curving steel-mesh stairs: "Hello—?"
No reply. Buckley ascended the stairs. About twenty feet up, a porthole of a window facing out over the windswept Atlantic at his left elbow, he heard music. A violin solo, sweet and minor-keyed, against a backdrop of strings, winds, and continuo. Vivaldi, possibly. He continued climbing, called more loudly: "Hello—?"
The music stopped. A woman's voice echoed down the tower from the lantern room: "Come on up."
He found her kneeling on the floor at the lantern's gearbox, surrounded by tools, bits of machinery, greasy cans of lubricant, a battered portable CD player. She was in her mid-twenties, by the look of her, lean but not bony, her chestnut-brown hair tied back in a pony tail. She was dressed in a heathered gray henley, jeans, and boots, all equally sturdy, all equally worn. As Buckley stepped up into the lamp room, she toweled off with a rag, stood, and offered him a right hand still smudged generously with black grease. He took it. Her grip was wiry and strong.
"Hey, hello," she said, smiling a smile that seemed absolutely genuine for seeming absolutely unrehearsed. Guileless, Buckley thought, was the word. She wasn't apt to see too many strangers on the island. Her gaze was direct, her eyes a sparkling dark brown. For a moment, he simply looked back at her. For one thing, he was slightly winded. For another, the situation— the hound of the Baskervilles standing guard, the lighthouse, all of it— was well out of the ordinary. For a third, she was far prettier— no, make that far more beautiful— than he'd expected. Wideset eyes, sculpted, wind-freckled cheekbones, sensibly full lips free of lipstick or gloss.
"I'm Robert Buckley," he said at last. "We spoke on the radio."
"Right. You have papers for me to sign—?"
"Yeah, I— umm—" Buckley unzipped the inner pocket of his waterproof jacket. "Standard clearances—"
"Maybe I'd better wash up properly first, yeah?" She knelt again, proceeded to pack away her tools. "I'm Anne, by the way. Anne Cassidy."
"Nice to meet you, Anne." For a moment, watching her, Buckley got the impression that she'd forgotten he was there. Then he thought how, after a while, the mere presence of another human being wasn't enough to dispel isolation. "Aren't you afraid," he said, well enough aware that, despite his lack of height and brawn, his brown hair was far enough short of a cut and his early thirties face, though unconventionally handsome in its oddly high-cheekboned way, was far enough along in the growing of a beard to make for the look of a recently shipwrecked Robinson Crusoe, if not a lunatic (and one with eyes whose glass-blue a former girlfriend on her way to becoming an ex had labeled "freakish"), "being up here alone?"
"Book knows who to let up. He's a great doorman."
"Book?"
"You met him downstairs." Cassidy grinned as she straightened again. "If he hadn't approved, you'd be in bloody chunks on the jetty."
Buckley tried to smile back. "Sure."
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They descended. Cassidy, her work in the lamp room undoubtedly unfinished, left behind her tool bag and boombox; she said, as she led the way back down the curving stairs, "Sorry you had to climb all the way up."
"That's alright. It's good for the legs." Buckley kept his eyes on Cassidy's lithe back, not so much out of appreciation but out of a sense of vertigo. Nothing separated him from the space filling the tower. He kept a grip on the iron railing bolted to the tiled inner wall. "You make all the repairs to the lantern?"
"Pretty much. The problem is, the Coast Guard is for modernizing, the historical society that holds a one-third ownership in the island wants to keep things as they were in eighteen seventy-eight, the state is undecided, and between the three..."
"You have to make do."
"Exactly."
"But you're not a keeper by profession."
"Pardon?"
"You're not a lighthouse keeper by—"
"Oh. No. Oceanography. I'm about two semesters shy of my degree. I'm just here for the summer, making a few bucks. Soaking up atmosphere."
They reached the bottom of the stairs; Buckley followed Cassidy out the steel door. Book was waiting outside. He fell into step beside Cassidy as she led the way to the keeper's cottage.
"Soaking up salt air and engine grease, you mean...?" Buckley offered, following.
"What I get for having a knack with motors. I maintain the light and the horn, perform painting and make any other necessary repairs around the station, and monitor the current and weather reports. I read; I run. I play host to the odd sailboater or kayaker who ventures this far out. When it's not too rough or too cold, I swim." She reached, and opened, the door to the keeper's house. To the query or concern in Buckley's expression, Cassidy said: "Have my own lifeguard, don't I? Book. That's his job. What he's bred for."
She went inside. Book stood aside to let Buckley pass. An area for the stowing and hanging of foul-weather gear and boots opened into a white-walled kitchen area; the kitchen, in turn, opened into a living area furnished with a worn maroon sofa, two shambling dun-colored easy-chairs, a coffee table, bookshelves packed with books, and a CRT television on a stand whose second shelf held a combo DVD-slant-video-cassette player. A bank of double-paned, insulated windows directly ahead of Buckley provided a view of the lighthouse at the island's northeast tip and the station's handful of red-roofed white outbuildings.
"Make yourself at home." Cassidy went to a washroom off the kitchen. To the splash and sputter of the tap as she scrubbed her hands, Buckley seated himself on a straight-backed wooden chair at the kitchen table and unfolded from his jacket the sheaf of papers requiring the signature of the lightkeeper of Crow Island. Book padded into the living area and lay on a worn green-weave rug at the back of the sofa. He laid his huge black head on his paws at an angle— half-turned Buckley's way— that suggested he was content to doze if the keeper's visitor would be good enough to mind his manners.
"Coffee—?" Cassidy asked, emerging from the washroom.
"Sure. Thanks."
At the kitchen tap, Cassidy filled the base of an old-fashioned two-stage glass percolator, spooned coffee into the topside filter, and lit the kitchen's stove with a stick match. She put the coffee on to boil and joined Buckley at the table. He slid the papers her way.
"'Happer Oceanographic,'" she read. "Makes a change from Woods Hole."
"We're the snotty young upstarts. Horning in on all that big research action."
Cassidy smiled, reaching for a pen among a handful standing in a blue stoneware mug at the table's center. She continued reading the top form, using the pen's tip as pointer. "Bio-luminescent algae," she said. "This far north?"
"Yeah. Indicative of warming trends in local ocean currents." He added, as Cassidy raised her eyebrows: "Thrilling, I know."
"All part of the bigger climatological picture, isn't it?" Cassidy signed the top form, the two others beneath it. "At least it doesn't bite."
"Nope. I prefer the little guys." Buckley grinned. "Leave the great whites to Spielberg. I'll take the stuff that fits under a microscope."
Cassidy chuckled. "That's funny. I know someone who'd disagree. Or at least he'd insist he'd disagree. Dick Tulley, local fisherman, supposed shark-hunter. He runs the supply boat out here."
"He's hunting great whites? This far north?"
"I suspect it really translates into 'thresher-with-an-attitude.' But, hey, I'm only a student: what do I know?" Cassidy separated the copies she would need to retain for the station's records, re-stacked and straightened the remaining papers, and handed them back to Buckley. "There you are, Dr. Buckley. You now have permission from Anne Cassidy, acting on behalf of the Keeper's Service of the Coast Guard of the state of Maine, to gather biological samples in and around the littoral vicinity of Crow Island."
Buckley folded the papers and zipped them back into his pocket. "On behalf of the Happer Institute, Keeper Cassidy, many thanks."
He looked across the table at her. Their eyes met. Met and held. For a second, Buckley thought he saw more than windburn in the coloring of Cassidy's cheeks.
From the stove came a burbling sound.
Cassidy looked away. She got up. "Coffee's ready," she said.
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To be continued...