Favoring his ribs, Ben swam a labored sidestroke until the line to the mesh bag paid fully out. Then the sling snugged down across his chest. It felt like a sea anchor. Though he’d equipped himself with only the few things he would need, it was slow going. He was still making his plan of attack stroke by stroke as he went. He found a strange rhythm in the waves despite the bay’s apparent chaos.
Like many children of the Chesapeake, Ben was no stranger to the light at Point No Point. Though an important aid to navigation, it had been automated for decades. It was unmanned by the Coast Guard since the early 1960s. Which meant it was a prime party and trysting site for any young guy with the four Bs: a babe, booze, a blunt, and a boat.
Getting into the lighthouse would be hard. Assuming no one witnessed Ben’s approach and shot him, the rusted-out access ladder to the top of the iron caisson started six feet above mean high tide. Too high to reach, perhaps too corroded to support him if he somehow could get to it. It was for a boater, not a swimmer. There were ancient davits for holding the lighthouse keeper’s tender out of the water, but they had not been rigged for many years. There was no rope to climb. There was only one other way.
Through the hatch.
The lighthouse’s caisson foundation was not solid iron. It had one dogged watertight doorway, much like a passage through a submarine’s bulkhead. It was originally designed to admit someone from a small boat at just above the water level.
Sadly, the foundation for the lighthouse had been inadequately prepared. Time, the gradually increasing leeward lean of the iron and brick tower, and settling into the muck, conspired with one result. The lighthouse had sunk, and the four-foot hatch had sunk with it. It became half-submerged and unusable except at spring low tides within ten years of its construction. Now, a century on, the hatch was routinely five feet under water.
When Ben was a kid, he often snorkeled down to the hatch. After repeated dives with a crowbar, he had managed to break or bend back five of the iron dogs pinning the hatch closed.
The sixth dog had always remained stubborn. Immovable. Ben had never cracked it when he was younger, and now it still blocked his only way in. Worse, today the bay was gulping a high tide at the same time a severe storm surge was rolling through. The hatch would be at its deepest ever.
Ben had a bigger problem right now. Something was wrong. When he sighted the lighthouse from the wave crests, it lay more and more to the west. Instead of swimming for minor course corrections of his drift as he had planned, Ben was forced to churn harder to cover distance. Odd currents generated by tide and weather were fighting him, and to find LuAnna, he would have to fight back. At first, swimming in for LuAnna made sense. As Ben expelled uncounted snorkels full of cold, brackish water, he was having second thoughts. His decision tree for this sortie had woodpeckers and squirrels living in it.
Cold was shutting his mind down. His arms were numb. He was moving by rote, barely looking up to check his course. After what seemed an eternity, he almost swam head first into the barnacled iron caisson.
Ben bobbed like human flotsam in the roiling eddies of the lighthouse’s leeward side. There was no rhythm to this water. Waves and surges pounded in unpredictably. The dying Charlene had heard right, proving what many Hospice workers observed, that hearing was the last sense to wither as death enshrouded the human mind. Chalk and company were using the lighthouse as a shelter from which to stage their operation. To Ben’s left lay Hiram Harris’s Palestrina.
Ben was tempted to pull himself aboard the boat, curl up and rest in her cabin. The mission would not allow this. God willing, LuAnna might be nearby. With a less kindly God, she would also be in need. Ben dared not tread water too close to the lighthouse. The waves would rasp him up and down the barnacled caisson flaying him to bloody shreds like a giant grater.
He hung on the side of the Palestrina more like a butchered slab of pork than a knight in shining armor. He was not sure he had strength for what was next; the longer Ben waited, the weaker he felt. Over and over since yesterday morning he believed his reserves were completely tapped out. Then he would reach deeper within himself one more time and find just a little bit more strength to go on. Now he had nothing left. Breathing was hard labor, his flexing diaphragm bashed his ribs. Every kick to tread water, every heartbeat left him closer to total systemic failure. LuAnna was up there. He felt it. He had to press on until he finished this, or died trying.
Mustering himself, Ben unzipped the wetsuit jacket. Pulled out the short crowbar he had stowed there. He let go of the Palestrina’s gunwale, and sank into dark gray water. It was suddenly quiet now, out of the wind. A few kicks, and the barnacled caisson loomed out of the darkness before him.
Treading water, he scanned its curved wall. No hatch. He thought he had pegged exactly where it was positioned, ten feet counterclockwise from the metal ladder. There was nothing. He surfaced. Gulped for air. Down again. Had barnacles completely covered the hatch since he was last here?
After searching nearly a quarter of the caisson’s circumference, Ben turned back toward the Palestrina. Then it hit him. This was not just a spring tide. It was a perigean tide. Extra high, with the new moon at its closest to earth. With the storm surge stacking the water even higher in the bay, Ben had not dived deep enough. He had wasted precious time and strength. He was running out of both.
Back where he started, Ben bent at the waist, and jackknifed for the bottom. He stayed close to the caisson, but still found nothing. All the air burned out of his lungs fast. And then he saw it, a full fifteen feet below. There, occulted in that zone where the marine gray-greens rotted to blackness, lay the hatch. Its corners were rounded off by swaying dead algae, barnacles, and weeds.
Ben tore at the slimy vegetation. At the hatch’s bottom right-hand corner he found the one dog he had failed to wrench open when he was there years before. Before the war, and before the faces behind the wall in his skull. Before his father had come home in a sodden, gilded fatal triumph.
He slipped the crowbar between the dog and the jam, planted his feet on the hatchway sill. And he pulled. With all his heart and might he pulled. No movement. The dog did not budge. He shredded his fingers clawing his way up the barnacled caisson wall back to the surface, back to air.
Ben sounded again after three deep breaths. He replaced the crowbar, but tried a different angle. He coiled his body and hauled hard. No movement. Then in his mind’s eye, he saw a gravestone with LuAnna’s name. And then her face joined the many others in his head. The ones he had killed. The silent accusers. She stood with them. With all his strength Ben pulled on the crowbar one last time. His ears rang. He tasted blood. Muscles and tendons sheared in his shoulders, back, and legs. He was close to blacking out, and Ellis wasn’t there to reel him back into the world.
Ben’s left foot, which was planted on the hatch itself, pushed inward an inch. The movement was so small that if the hinges had not complained out loud, he would not have been sure he had made any progress. He quickly jammed both feet on the hatch, grabbed the side of the opening, and pulled straight out as if yanking the very caisson apart. The hatch swung grudgingly open nearly two feet now. Though faint from lack of oxygen, Ben did not rush back to the surface. His lungs ached, his diaphragm spasmed to open his throat, to inhale something, anything; even if all he got was bay water. Ben swam into the caisson’s dark maw.