The Letter in the Door

Margot wound the clockwork at six minutes past four in the morning, same as she had every morning for seven years. The brass handle turned smooth against her palm, the gears meshing with a sound like teeth settling into a familiar bite. One hundred and forty-seven iron steps spiraled down from the lantern room to the kitchen, and she climbed them twice before breakfast: once to wind the mechanism, once to polish the Fresnel lens. The lighthouse demanded repetition. She had learned to give it what it wanted.

The March wind came through the vents in sheets. Cape Abenaki stood on a granite tooth two hundred yards from the Maine coast, connected to the mainland by a causeway that flooded twice daily and vanished completely in bad weather. The lighthouse had stood since 1847. Margot's father had kept it for thirty years. She had kept it for seven. The Coast Guard radioed once a week, the supply boat came once a month, and the rest was silence, routine, and the turning of the light.

She finished polishing the lens and stepped onto the narrow gallery that ringed the lantern room. The sea spread gray and restless below her, flecked with white where the wind tore the tops off the swell. March was the cruel month. The sea remembered winter. The sky remembered nothing. She watched the horizon for three minutes, a habit her father had instilled, though she had long ago forgotten why. Then she turned to go back inside and saw it.

A corner of white paper, wedged in the gap between the lantern room door and the frame.

She stopped. The door faced east, away from the wind. Nothing stuck there. Nothing stayed. She had found dead gulls on the gallery, broken lobster traps, once a ship's bell engraved with a name she did not recognize. But never paper. Paper did not last on Cape Abenaki.

She pried it loose with two fingers. A single folded sheet, no envelope, no stamp. The paper was dry, which was impossible. The fog had been thick enough to cut yesterday. Every surface on the gallery should have been beaded with moisture. But the paper was dry, and when she unfolded it, the handwriting stopped her breath.

It was hers.

She knew her own hand the way she knew the sound of the clockwork. The cramped lowercase, the way she crossed her t's with a short horizontal line, the slight lift at the end of each y. She had filled thirty-seven journals with that hand. She had written the lighthouse log in it every morning for seven years. There was no mistaking it.

The letter was dated March 15, 1990. Three years from now.

*Do not trust the man who arrives with the spring tide.*

That was the first line. Margot read it three times. The ink was black, not blue. She had used black ink once, in college, before her father died and she returned to the lighthouse. She had not owned a bottle of black ink in years.

*The supply boat will be three hours late. Do not wait on the dock. The ice on the causeway will not hold past noon.*

She turned the paper over. The back was blank. No signature. No explanation of who had written it, or why, or how it had arrived in her own hand on a date that had not happened. She held it up to the light. The paper was cheap, the kind sold in packets of fifty at the general store in Port Abenaki. The sort she bought herself, when she remembered to put it on the list.

The clockwork clicked behind her. She folded the letter and put it in her pocket, pressing it flat against her thigh. Her fingers were steady. Her hands, she noticed, were not.

She checked the locks on the lantern room door. The brass slide bolt had been installed in 1962, never used because no one came to Cape Abenaki who was not invited. The bolt was loose. She had not left it that way. She slid it home and checked the gallery railing, walking the full circumference, running her palm along the cold iron. The fog was thinning. The sun, a pale smear behind cloud, lifted itself above the waterline.

By seven, she was in the kitchen, staring at the stove. The letter sat on the table beside her coffee cup. She had not shown it to anyone because there was no one to show. She had not called the Coast Guard because what would she say: I have received a letter from 1990. Please send someone who believes in time.

The coffee was bitter. She drank it anyway.

At nine, she went down to the dock. The supply boat was due at ten. The tide was high, the causeway submerged to within three inches of the planks. She stood at the waterline and watched the chop. The sky had cleared to a thin, washed blue. The cold found the gap between her collar and her neck and settled there.

Ten o'clock came. No boat.

She did not go inside. She stood on the dock and watched the horizon, her hands in her pockets, the letter a folded weight against her ribs. At eleven, she climbed the causeway to the lighthouse and made a sandwich she did not eat. At twelve, she returned. The ice along the causeway had begun to melt, the salt water seeping through the cracks in the planks. She tested it with her boot and found it soft. By twelve-thirty, it would have been impassable.

The supply boat appeared at one-thirteen, three hours late, chugging through the chop with a load of flour, kerosene, and a crate of oranges that had frozen solid in transit. The captain, a man named Halloway who had been delivering to Cape Abenaki for twenty years, tossed her the lines and said nothing about the delay. The engine had seized. They had spent three hours patching it with marine tape and prayer.

Margot unloaded the crate of oranges. She signed the manifest. She did not mention the letter. She did not mention the ice. She watched Halloway guide the boat back into the channel, and she stood on the dock until the smoke from his exhaust disappeared below the horizon.

Then she walked back to the lighthouse, climbed the 147 steps, and read the letter again.

*Do not trust the man who arrives with the spring tide.*

The spring tide was two weeks away. The supply boat would not come again until April. There was no one on Cape Abenaki but Margot, and there would be no one until then. No one came unannounced. The causeway was treacherous, and the lighthouse had nothing to offer but solitude and a view of the Atlantic.

She sat on the floor of the lantern room with her back against the wall and her knees drawn up. The light turned above her, a steady sweep of white across the water. Every four seconds. She had counted. She had counted for seven years, and before that she had watched her father count, and before that she had been too young to count and had only listened to the rhythm in her sleep.

The letter was real. The handwriting was hers. The prediction about the supply boat had come true. She could not pretend she had not seen it, could not fold it away and forget. Someone had written it, and that someone had known the boat would be late, and the only someone who knew what Margot Vane's handwriting looked like was Margot Vane.

Or someone pretending to be her.

She stood and checked the locks again. The brass slide bolt was still home. She unlocked it, locked it again, tested it with her shoulder. It held. She walked the gallery, looking down at the empty rocks, the empty sea, the empty sky. Nothing moved that she could see. Nothing came. Nothing left.

When the sun began to set, she was still there, the letter in her pocket and the light turning above her. The horizon darkened to a line of ink. The first stars appeared, cold and indifferent. She thought of the spring tide, two weeks away, and of the man the letter had warned her about, and of her own hand writing words she had not yet thought.

The light swept across the water. Four seconds. Again. She listened to the clockwork tick and tried to remember if she had locked the kitchen door.