Read Online The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Iain Lawrence - Free Book Online Page B

windows and the walls as Alastair, with a hammering and a screeching of nails, hid his book in a new place, one she would never find in all the hours that she looked.
    Night after night she lay awake, reliving that moment when she fumbled through the shelves and found his book behind the others. She was haunted by his secret, but couldn’t ask him what it was. And she wasn’t fully sure that she didn’t already know it.
    I’m afraid to tell her that I think I’m
    In her imaginings, a parade of nightmares passed before her.
    I think I’m going to run away.
    I think I’m going to murder them.
    I think I’m going to kill myself.
    Even now, more than four years later, Squid regrets what she did. She’s sorry that she ever looked at the diary, but she’s more sorry that she didn’t read what her brother had written. She can’t help thinking that she might have saved him if she had.
    Oh, she tried to get it out of him. She asked him, “Alastair, dear. Is there something you’d like to tell me?”
    “Like what?” he said. “What sort of thing?”
    “I don’t know.” She shrugged. They were painting—on the house or tower, she can’t remember which. Whatever it was, she was dangling in a bosun’s chair as Alastair peered down from the top; he liked heights even less than his mother. Whatever it was, it was red or white, the only colors they ever saw inside a can of paint, and it was one of the last jobs they ever did together.
    “Well, give me a clue,” he said.
    “Anything.” She skittered sideways with her feet. She loved to hang in the bosun’s chair. “You know. Stuff. Anything you’d like to say.”
    “Not really,” he said. “Nothing you don’t already know.”
    She pushed herself out and bounced back to the wall. Her shadow bounded beside her, meeting at her feet.
    “Don’t do that,” said Alastair. “You’re making me dizzy.”
    She did it all the harder. Her legs for springs, she shot herself back and forth, out so far that she twirled around before swinging in again. She felt the air rush against her back, then against her chest, against her bare legs, brown as hemlocks in their sawed-off denim shorts. The rocks and sky and grass went spinning past, and she laughed at the freedom she felt. But Alastair was horrified. “I can’t watch,” he said. “Oh, Jiminy, Squid. You’re scaring me sick up here.”
    She pushed with her feet. She spun in the air. And she saw Murray below her, his head tilted up, his hands on his hips.
    “Are you daft?” he shouted. “Stop that, before you break your damned neck.”
    She hit the wall with one foot and bounced off at an angle. Her back slammed against the wall.
    “I’ve got hooligans for children,” said Murray. “Alastair, I’m ashamed of you. Jiminy! Is your head full of sand?”
    Squid stared at him, down between her legs. “It wasn’t Alastair,” she said. “Don’t shout at Alastair.”
    “And why not?” he said. He crossed his arms. “You put the reins on the head of a horse, not on its arse.”
    And he wandered away. She saw the sun glinting in his hair as he shook his head again and again.
    “You see?” said Alastair. “
Now
do you see what I mean?”
    “What?” she asked.
    “Why I feel like I’m drowning?”
    Tatiana never closes her eyes when she sleeps. There’s always a crack at the bottom, wider than the lashes, where the white shows through. Squid has sometimes seen the eyes moving, rapidly back and forth. She finds it a little spooky.
    The child is using a hand for a pillow, her body curved along the whorls of the rope mat. Squid moves beside her; she slips her finger into Tatiana’s fist. It pleases her to think that Alastair would like this, to see the girl asleep on his treasured creation.
    It’s soft rope, almost woolly, that once worked a fishing net in Dixon Entrance. Alastair found it cast up on the beach after a northerly gale, fifty fathoms of it nearly, tangled round the rocks and in among the