Chapter 29 - The Black Tide of Penobscot
Every rung of the ladder was coated in a treacherous skin of freezing sea spray and black soot.
My fingers were so numb I couldn't tell if I was holding onto the iron or if my knuckles were simply locked in place by instinct. Julian climbed just below me, his right arm virtually useless, leaving him to haul his weight using his left hand and the friction of his combat boots against the salt-encrusted stone wall.
Above us, the lighthouse groaned—a long, agonizing shriek of bending iron and crumbling granite.
"Don't look up, Nola!" Clara shouted from behind me. "Just keep your feet moving! One rung at a time!"
A wave struck the lower base of the tower with the force of an artillery shell. A freezing curtain of brine shot forty feet into the air, drenching us completely, knocking the breath from my lungs and nearly tearing my frozen grip from the ladder. I choked on salt water, gasping for air as the freezing wind instantly turned the moisture on my cheeks into needles of ice.
Ten feet above the water line, the ladder ended where an old storm had sheared the lower rungs away decades ago.
Below us lay a narrow shelf of slippery, kelp-covered rocks, barely three feet wide, battered mercilessly by the surging tide. Beyond that shelf, tucked into the lee of the lighthouse’s natural granite breakwater, bobbed a small, battered fiberglass skiff—the decoy vessel Ruth and Julian had used to reach the island hours before.
"Jump!" Julian yelled, dropping down onto the rocks first. He landed hard, his knees buckling on the slimy weed, but managed to stay upright by bracing his good arm against the granite face.
Clara and I dropped together. The impact sent a jolt of fire up through my shins, and I slipped instantly, my hand plunging into a pool of freezing tide-water. Clara grabbed my hood, hauling me upright with frantic motherly strength.
"Ruth!" Clara screamed into the wind.
My grandmother was still on the ladder, five rungs up. She wasn't looking down. She was staring out across the churn of the bay.
Out in the darkness, the seaplane had paused its taxiing run. A spotlight mounted beneath the left wing snapped on, cutting a brilliant, blinding swath of blue-white light across the water. The beam swept across the waves, found the collapsed base of the lighthouse, and pinned us against the stone wall like insects on a display board.
"They're coming around to finish it," Julian said, drawing his sidearm with his left hand, his teeth bared in agony. "The pontoon has a side-mounted rifle port. We're completely exposed."
Ruth looked down at Clara. The noise of the collapsing lighthouse above us was deafening now—cracks were racing up the masonry like jagged lightning bolts.
"Clara," Ruth said. Her voice didn't waver. "The five words I said to you on Christmas. Do you remember them?"
Clara froze, the freezing water swirling around her shins. Tears welled in her eyes, freezing almost instantly against her eyelashes. "'He was never your father.'"
Ruth nodded slowly, the spotlight framing her thin white hair in a halo of blinding light. "I told you that so you wouldn't look for his ghost. But you need to know the rest of it now, Clara. Before this night is over, you need to understand why I let you hate me for thirty years."
"Get in the boat!" I screamed, lunging forward and physically grabbing Ruth’s boots, dragging her down from the ladder onto the rock shelf. "We talk about this when we aren't drowning!"
Ruth tumbled onto the slick kelp just as the seaplane’s engine shrieked to maximum throttle.
A hail of high-caliber rifle fire stitched a deadly line across the granite above our heads, showering us with stone chips and pulverized mortar. Julian fired three shots into the blinding glare of the spotlight, but the range was too great, his left-handed grip too unstable.
"Push the boat off!" Julian shouted, throwing his shoulder against the gunwale of the skiff.
Clara and I put our backs into the hull. The fiberglass groaned against the barnacle-crusted rock, then slid smoothly into the deep, black swell of the inlet. We scrambled over the transom just as a massive section of the lighthouse’s upper lantern deck sheared away eighty feet above.
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A two-ton iron capstone crashed directly onto the rock ledge where we had stood three seconds earlier, pulverizing the granite and sending a wave of displacement water that picked up our tiny skiff and hurled it like a leaf into the roaring dark of the open channel.
***
