Down the hall it was silent, Dustin, hopefully, asleep on the couch, getting some rest for another day that would be long and arduous with just the two of them.
Can you hold out? Joe Taft had asked.
She wished he hadn’t phrased it like that. As if she were under siege.
Are you not, Audrey? What would you call it?
She opened her eyes again, well aware that sleep would not come. Outside the bedroom window, the cats were quiet and the trees were dark. Once they would have been lit by that constant, pulsing glow. Now you had to remind yourself that the lighthouse was there.
As they neared the lighthouse, Jacqueline stared in fascination, bending down so she could see the top, where glass glittered in moonlight. She was in the passenger seat now—Kimble saw no point to putting her in the back this far along in the journey—and she leaned across him to get a better view, her hair falling forward and brushing his arm, her hand on his leg.
“It’s the strangest thing I’ve ever seen,” she said. “He had to have cleared so many of these trees to build it.”
“He cleared the trees to build his home. The lighthouse came later.”
“I want to go in,” she said. “I want to see it.”
“We will.”
He shut off the lights and they stepped out of the car and went to the gate. She waited, arms folded across her chest against the cold, looking so small in his jacket. He opened the gate and let her through and then they went up the path, footsteps crunching on the thin layer of snow, and a moment later he had the lighthouse door open and they were inside.
She gazed around as he shut the door behind them, locked it, and turned on his flashlight.
“Larger room than what I’m used to,” she said. “But I wouldn’t want to live in it, either.”
She made a slow circle, studying the thumbtacks in the walls. “What did he have up here?”
“Maps and photographs. The names on the maps belonged to people who died out here. The photographs belonged to people who didn’t. People like you.”
“People like me,” she echoed. She twisted and looked back at him, her face split between shadow and light, just as it had been that night in the farmhouse. He didn’t say anything, and after a moment she turned away again.
“Can we go up?”
“Sure,” Kimble said, and he opened the door that led to the wooden staircase, then waited so that she could go first, and handed her the flashlight. He didn’t want her standing behind him.
They reached the top and stepped up into the glass shell. A lion roared somewhere below, and the sound jarred Kimble, as it always did. Ahead of them the moon glowed, and Jacqueline turned away immediately, toward the west, where the spiderwebbed glass that had received Wyatt’s suicide round created a jagged sparkle against the flashlight beam. She stepped closer, reached out, and traced the shattered glass with her fingertip.
“Careful,” Kimble said. She smiled, as if his warning were amusing, and then lifted her head, looking off across the treetops and over the ridge to where the night fog clung stubbornly to the trestle.
“Can you see them even from here?” Kimble asked, but she didn’t answer. He watched her stand there and stare off at the horizon with her finger on the shattered glass and he realized that Wyatt had been facing away from the trestle when he pulled the trigger. He would have been facing away from whatever demons he saw there.
Jacqueline clicked the flashlight off.
As the darkness draped them, Kimble reached for his gun.
She said, “Relax, Kevin.”
He hesitated, then he slipped the weapon from the holster anyhow. She turned, searched his face in the shadows, and then looked down at the gun in his hand. It seemed to disappoint her, but she returned her attention to the trestle.
“Can you see them from here?” he said again.
“Yes. I can see the fire, at least. It’s too far to make out the faces. I’m glad of that. It’s hard to have to see their faces. Wyatt’s especially. I’d met him. I knew him. When he was alive, I knew him, and to see him now… it’s awful.”
She was not lying. Kimble realized that and knew that the rest of his life would never be the same, that you could not stand in the presence of someone who saw these things and then go on about your business as if nothing had changed. He didn’t know how life would go from here, but he knew that it would be different.
Jacqueline turned and studied the main light, saw that it was broken.
“I don’t understand why he would have broken it,” she said. “It seemed to matter so much to him that he’d leave a light on.”
“He didn’t break it. The person who found the body did.”