of the underbrush and scurried off toward the beach.
“I thought you said this island was uninhabited,” I said.
Cleopatra didn’t answer.
While I stood in the rubble looking around, I began to have serious doubts. Then a banging noise caught my attention, and I turned around to see Cleopatra hammering away at a padlock with the butt end of her machete. It was chained to a large iron door at the base of the lighthouse. Walking over, I waded through a toxic dump of decaying lead acid batteries that encircled the light tower. The people who’d been in charge of maintaining the automated light had simply tossed the dead batteries from the tower when they replaced them, adding to the bombed-out look of the cottages and grounds of the keeper’s residence.
I looked from the rubble up to the lines of the giant lighthouse and the blue sky above it. On the voyage over to the Bahamas, Cleopatra had told me the story of where the lighthouse came from and how it had gotten here. Even though the lighthouse had seen better days, the sheer strength of it was still very much apparent. I just stood there and stared up, wondering how in the hell they’d built it.
“This goddamn salt air will eat anything. I just put this lock on here last month.”
I went over to lend a hand. After a few more direct hits with a big rock, the padlock sprang, and I pried the iron door open. It creaked and squeaked and let out a thud as it banged against the wall.
Inside, it was dark and hot and smelled like shit.
“Here,” Cleopatra said, handing me a flashlight.
I followed her with the beam of my flashlight, trying to keep pace as she bounced ahead of me like Becky Thatcher while I cautiously navigated the winding staircase.
Our movements echoed off the iron cylindrical walls as we climbed through musty, humid air that had been trapped inside the lighthouse for God knows how long. Several furry little fruit bats scanned us with their radar as they fluttered around my head.
“Don’t worry,” Cleopatra called out. “I know a way to get the bats out of here when you move in.”
Up and up we circled, until small beams of light appeared at the top. Cleopatra stopped on the stairs below the source of the light—a rusty hatch cover just above us. “I always like this part,” she said. “It reminds me of the time I met Thomas Edison—the night he threw the switch that lit up the Brooklyn Bridge at the three hundredth celebration of the founding of the city of New York.”
“You knew Thomas Edison?” I asked.
“No, my father did. We were in New York on our way to France and boarding school, and we just happened to be at the right place at the right time.”
I followed the beam of Cleopatra’s flashlight as we inched up slowly.
“Electricity ain’t a bad contribution to the betterment of mankind in general, but it sure as hell wreaked havoc on the lighthouse keepers of the world. The record player would have to go on the top of my list of Edison inventions, way ahead of movies and lightbulbs.”
Cleopatra took a marlinespike out of the case on her belt and jabbed away at the hinges of the hatch. The hatch gave way with a creak.
“Ready?” Cleopatra asked.
Sunlight flooded down around us. We lifted ourselves through the hole in the sky, and I stood there bathed in the morning light of the glass room. Below us, the Lucretia looked like a toy boat sitting at anchor on the smooth surface of crystal clear water that seemed to be only inches deep. But in fact it was in nearly thirty feet of water.
I could see several members of the crew diving up conch from the bottom. The view from the light tower encompassed the whole island, against a backdrop of turquoise shallows and the deep blue ocean beyond. Cleopatra pointed out the landmarks of Whale Cut, Boo Hoo Hill, and Osprey Point that I would come to know as well as my horse.
“Unbelievable” was all I could muster.
“And well worth saving, don’t you think?”
“I get the picture.”
“Except for that,” she added, pointing to the bizarre tangle of frayed wires, makeshift junction boxes, and a strobe light resting atop a long, skinny shaft. “That has to go. The original lens that came with this light was not only a piece of engineering genius but a work of art. The lenses, circular prisms,