The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Iain Lawrence

her own style, more like a beetle than anything else. She could swim backward as fast as she could going ahead, squirting along under the surface with punches and kicks. “We’ve got ourselves a squid,” said Murray. And the name stuck like glue.
    “Maybe you should teach her how to really swim,” Hannah said. But Murray saw no point in that.
    “You might as well let her do what she wants,” he said. “It’s what she’ll do at any rate.”
    Murray opens the legs of the Barbie like a pair of scissors. He sits it in the sand, its arms reaching stiffly forward. To Hannah, it looks like a ridiculous shrunken woman asking to be picked up. Murray stoops again, and folds its arms to its sides.
    “She looks like you,” he says. “Don’t you think? A little bit?”
    Hannah knows right away he’s not comparing her to the Barbie doll. He’s talking about Tatiana. This is his way; he analyzes conversations.
    “Squid seems angry with me,” he says. “I don’t know why.” Then again he bends the doll, stretching it flat in the sand. Finally he’s satisfied, and he stands up. “Why is that, Hannah?”
    She touches his arm. “I think her plans aren’t working out.”
    “What plans are those, then?”
    Hannah doesn’t know; she can only guess. “I think she’s having troubles with Tatiana.” The child is like a moon snail, sealed up in a hard and shuffling shell. Hannah can’t imagine Tatiana having friends. She can’t see her lasting a single day in any sort of school. “I think that Squid might want our help.”
    “A first time for everything,” says Murray. But he dwells on this, too, as they walk toward the big house. The sun has moved behind the tower; a shadowy finger lies stretched on the grass. In a few hours the beacon will be stronger than the sun, and the top of the shadow, the lantern, will flicker in the flashing of the light.
    “Och, I still don’t see it,” says Murray. “If she wants our help why doesn’t she ask?”
    “Maybe she’s waiting to be told.”
    “And who’ll do that, then?” Murray grimaces. “Who’ll take the first poke at the tiger?”
    “Oh, Murray.”
    “Och, I suppose she’s only upset. She comes home and everything’s changed.”
    Changed?
Hannah nearly laughs.
What can change?
she wants to ask, but doesn’t. The island never will; Murray never will. As far as Squid could possibly know, not a single thing has changed.
    She lays her scarf across her shoulders and sways against Murray as they walk along. He’s still thinking, still brooding, but he surprises her with what he asks next.
    “Do you ever wonder,” he says, “if the old keeper had any children?”
    Murray didn’t tell her that first day that the old keeper had hanged himself. For eight days or more his body dangled from the tower, swaying in autumn winds with a bit of rope around his neck. The sun rose on him and set again; it rose and set as he twirled slowly round in a big old oil-skin coat as black as death. And she’d sat there with Murray in the very same place.
    It was Squid who saw the keeper first. She was only five years old. On a night of electrical storms, she looked up and saw him there. “There’s a man on the tower,” she said, matter-of-fact, and Murray went terribly pale.
    And then Hannah saw him too, on a misty, sultry morning. He stood staring out to sea, and then he turned to look at her. And he vanished in a swirl of fog.
    “So you’re one of those,” said Murray.
    “One of what?” she asked.
    “A ghost seer. Not everyone sees ghosts, you know.”
    Murray doesn’t walk with her all the way to the house. He veers off instead toward his favorite place. He’ll change the oil in the number three engine, the one that never runs. Then he’ll sit for a while in the warm, diesely rumble of the powerhouse. Hannah thinks of it as his little womb, a place for him to think.
    He leaves her by the steps. The wind is easing off, the sea is dropping. She can still hear the