The Darkest Evening of the Year

each time, and then swam down again into brooding silence.
    Forced by his introspection into some self-analysis of her own, she admitted to herself that skepticism had not been the real reason she hesitated to tell Brian about the telephone call from Sister Jacinta. Her dismissal of the visitation as just a dream had been insincere.
    The truth was that relating the content of her conversation with the nun would require her to tell Brian the rest of the story she had been too exhausted and too emotionally drained—too gnawed by guilt—to finish the previous night. She had broken off that narrative with the death of Nickie at Mater Misericordiæ she tried to summon the courage to tell the rest of it.
    After they parked in a lay-by to stretch their legs and to give Nickie a potty break, Amy drove the last two hours to Monterey. She had to keep her eyes on the road now. She had reason not to look at him directly while she talked, and this gave her confidence to return to the past.
    Nevertheless, she could still only approach the monstrous event obliquely, and in steps. She began with the lighthouse.
    “Did I ever tell you, I lived in a lighthouse for a few years?”
    “Wonderful architecture in most lighthouses,” he said. “I would have remembered your lighthouse years.”
    His tone implied that he knew she also would have remembered having told him, and that he recognized the false casualness of her revelation.
    “With satellite navigation, many lighthouses aren’t in service anymore. Others have been automated—electricity instead of an oil brazier.”
    “Some are bed-and-breakfast inns.”
    “Yeah. They renovate the caretaker’s house. Some even offer a room or two in the lighthouse itself.”
    This lighthouse had stood on a rocky promontory in Connecticut. She had been twenty when she moved there, twenty-four when she left.
    She did not explain what brought her to that place or mention whether she had been there alone or with others.
    Brian seemed to sense that questions would inhibit her and that the wrong question, asked too soon, would halt her altogether.
    She spoke of the rugged shore and the thrilling seascapes, of the spectacular views from the lantern room at the top of the tower, and of the charming details of the lightkeeper’s house.
    She dwelt at length on the beauty of the lighthouse itself, the walnut paneling of the round vestibule, the ornate fretwork of the circular iron staircase. At the summit, in the lantern room, waited the marvelous Fresnel lens, oval in shape, with integrated series of prismatic rings at bottom and top, which reflected the rays of a one-thousand-watt halogen bulb to the center of the lens, amplifying them. Thus concentrated, the light was beamed outward, across the dark Atlantic.
    They arrived at the restaurant in Monterey as she finished telling him that, in the early nineteenth century, Fresnel lenses were so heavy, the only way to turn them—and make the beam sweep the coast—was to float them in pools of mercury. Extremely dense, mercury will support great weight and reduce friction to a minimum.
    Mercury is highly toxic. Gradually, mercury flotation was phased out in favor of clockworks and counterweights, which were subsequently replaced by electric motors.
    Before then, however, some lightkeepers were driven insane by mercury poisoning.

 
    Chapter
52
    B illy Pilgrim flew as the lone passenger in a chartered Learjet from Santa Barbara to Monterey.
    The steward wore black slacks, a white coat, a white shirt, and a black bowtie. He had a British accent.
    Airborne at ten o’clock, Billy was served a late breakfast of strawberries in clotted cream, a lobster omelet, and toasted brioche with raisin butter.
    He’d left his suitcase of clothes at the hotel in Santa Barbara because, sometime in the evening, when everyone who needed to be dead was dead, he intended to resume his vacation as Tyrone Slothrop.
    He had brought the second suitcase containing the guns. The first was a Glock 18 with thirty-three rounds in its magazine. The second was a disassembled sniper rifle.
    Before leaving Santa Barbara, he had taken the tabloid newspaper for gun aficionados out of the suitcase and had left it on the living-room coffee table. He was not concerned that the publication would once more transform itself into Brian McCarthy’s drawings of the dog. That had been a hallucination born of weariness. Billy was rested and past all that. He merely wanted to save the paper