“Yes, you will,” Abigail said, forcing a smile.
Sheriff Larner started to walk off, then turned back. “Hey, you should swing by bingo tonight.”
“Bingo?”
“Thursday is game night at the fire station.”
According to Abigail’s brochure, Chapel Isle was rife with must-see places and must-do activities, the verbiage emphatic. The fire station wasn’t at the top of the brochure’s list or Abigail’s. Neither was an evening of playing bingo.
“It’s fun. Most of the town’ll be there. Give you a chance to meet the natives.”
“I’ll try to stop in.”
“Hope to see you there,” he said, departing with a wave.
Despite his effort, the gesture wasn’t in sync with the sheriff’s inflection. Language was like water. It could carry meaning fluidly, be frozen solid by a change in cadence, or simmer into pure desire by a twist in tone. Abigail decided it wasn’t a coincidence that she and the sheriff had bumped into each other. He was sniffing around for something. The question was what.
On the ride home, Abigail mulled over her encounter with the law. Was it a pretense or should she take the meeting at face value? In lexicography, taking words at face value could amount to being shortchanged. Even the commonest of them could have multiple meanings, differing depending on usage. As a noun,
Returning to the caretaker’s cottage, she moved all the furniture on the first floor to the center of the living room and opened the windows in preparation for painting.
“You forgot to buy drop cloths. Then again, if you get paint on anything, it’ll be an improvement.”
Abigail turned the radio on and played with the tuner, locking in on the syrupy chords of a country ballad. Another spin of the dial snagged a snippet from a news station broadcasting from the mainland. Yearning for some contact with the outside world, she spent ten minutes dragging the radio around the room and adjusting the antenna until the station came in clearly. The reception was best with the radio positioned on the stairs, the antenna pointing straight up like a dagger. She made a mental note to move the radio once it got dark.
“God forbid you want a glass of water in the middle of the night. You could trip and get skewered. There’s a gory headline.”
Although she’d been racking up imaginary news captions, what Abigail was interested in were the real ones. While the broadcast recapped the important stories locally and across the world, the living room took its first casualty of the day. She removed the faded curtains from each window and stuffed them into a garbage bag.
“Buh-bye. Bon voyage. See ya.”
As she taped off the windowsills, she listened to details about gunfights, car wrecks, and court cases. So much trauma and tragedy; Abigail was totally out of touch. The reports were eventually replaced by a discussion program where pundits contested the merits of senatorial candidates. Abigail wasn’t paying close attention. Instead, she let the contributors’ voices fill the room with human sound as she cracked the first can of paint.
The political discourse began to get heated, but Abigail was happily going from wall to wall, rolling on the warm yellow hue she’d chosen. Another coat was a must. The walls were so thirsty for change that they sucked up the paint and the color dried too pale.
Abigail was considering a second pass around the room when the next radio program started. It was a topical phone-in chat show hosted by a gravelly-voiced man named Dr. Walter. What his degree was in wasn’t mentioned.
A woman phoned in to complain about the closing of a gun shop, saying, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people.”
To which Dr. Walter replied, “Thank you for your highly original comment. Please do call back as soon as you’ve mastered the obvious.”
That made Abigail laugh out loud, something she hadn’t done in a while. Feeling guilty, she shut her mouth and locked her teeth together to prevent it from happening again. She was supposed to be in mourning. People in mourning didn’t laugh. Or so Abigail presumed. Bereavement was her new job, a position for which she was unqualified and untrained. Whether this would be a lifelong career or temporary employment remained a mystery.
One after another, callers parried with Dr. Walter, who dismissed most of their comments as asinine and plowed onward with the show. Meanwhile, Abigail was reviving the windows and trim, care of a crisp coat of white, which she cut in with precision that would make her surgeon father proud. With the moldings painted, the dingy ceiling begged to be done as well. Because the chairs had proven unsteady, Abigail commandeered the table, rolling paint onto one section of ceiling at a time by standing on the table and pushing it from one side of the room to the other until she was finished.
“A first-rate job, if I do say so myself,” she pronounced, touring the space from corner to corner.
The living room had been rejuvenated. Abigail, on the other hand, was spent. She’d been painting for hours, and the smell was giving her a headache. Being cooped up inside made her long to be outdoors. She was also starving.
Choosing a picnic on the beach rather than a meal at the now footprint-splotched dining room table, Abigail packed a sandwich and grabbed her keys, which she’d placed on an end table beside the house’s old rotary-model telephone. Seeing the phone set off a spasm of guilt. Abigail had promised to contact her parents once she was settled. She’d been avoiding the call. The conversation would undoubtedly be fraught with staged questions about the island and the lighthouse, each intended to gauge her mental state, to determine if she was in immediate need of rescue. Abigail gave the big black rotary phone a final glance, opened the door, then locked it behind her.
