We didn’t have any strict organization on Pelican Key. By common consent, old Cap’n Ludberry sort of managed things. We pooled our catch, and he bargained with the run-boats that brought us ice down from Miami and bought our fish.
We fished beyond the outer reef in the edge of the Gulf Stream, and generally stayed in sight of each other. In the afternoon we’d all come in together. If Jesse’s motor quit on him—which it usually did—he’d be left behind and get in after dark.
When that happened, especially if the weather was squally, Anabelle would cross the mangroves to the beach on the ocean side of the island, and swing a lantern to guide Jesse in! It wasn’t at all necessary, but she liked to do it and he got a big kick out of it. Of course we kidded him a lot, and got to calling her the “Lantern Girl.”
Then came that hurricane of two summers ago. We knew about it several days before, but the fish were running and the price was right, so we went out every day. It certainly seemed safe enough! The radio reported on the storm every three hours. We could follow its path on the chart and were ready to run if it turned our way.
The morning of the day that the strange thing happened that nobody could explain—though they saw them with their own eyes—the weather looked fine and the barometer stood at 29.90. The hurricane had worked up through the Bahamas to a point east of us. Everybody predicted it would keep on going northward and miss us entirely. We felt as safe as we’d ever felt when we left Pelican Key that morning.
The fishing was the best I’ve ever seen and we were making a real haul. We kept following the schools farther and farther out into the Stream. About noon, the wind dropped, but by the middle of the afternoon it began to blow a little out of the northwest.
I stopped hauling in fish long enough to look around me, and saw Cap’n Ludberry’s boat high-tailing it for shore with the old man’s shirt flying from the masthead. One glance at the sky was enough! I pulled my lines and followed him with my six cylinders wide-open.
We rounded Pelican Key and ran into the lagoon just as it began to blow in dead earnest. For the next half-hour everybody worked like mad putting out hurricane moorings and tightening down everything aboard. At last my boat was snug, and I crawled into my cabin. Not until then did I have time to wonder about Jesse, and if he’d made it to the key with the Kingfisher.
That’s all I could do—wonder. For after a hurricane strikes there’s nothing much you can do but stay put. That is, if the thing you’re holding onto doesn’t get up and leave you! So I rode it out aboard my boat.
The hurricane had suddenly moved shoreward. The center passed to the north of us, so we caught the west wind in the southern half of it, blowing straight out to sea.…
Not until the wind died the next morning could we get out to check up on the damage. It was plenty!
Then we discovered that Jesse hadn’t made it! He and the Kingfisher were missing—had never reached the lagoon!
When I went ashore, Anabelle’s folks were carrying her in from the beach. They’d forbidden her to go out in such weather, but she slipped from the house after dark. With the wind behind her she had crossed the Key to the beach on the ocean side, in an effort to show her lantern and guide Jesse in! An impossible job!
The lantern got smashed and she lost it. She couldn’t get back home against that wind, and got pretty badly banged up! How she managed to live through it, out there all night in the open with tree limbs flying through the air, is by me!
Well, we notified the Coast Guard about Jesse. They searched the area with planes and asked ships in the vicinity to look for him. It seemed almost useless for us to go looking for him, too, but we did. That offshore wind might have blown him clear to the Bahamas, if the Kingfisher hadn’t gone down, so we covered the sea as best we could all the way to Andros Island. All we found was part of a cabin roof which we thought belonged to the Kingfisher!
As time went on, hope for Jesse died. A fishing ketch can ride out most any squall, but a hurricane’s a different thing! There wasn’t a chance in a hundred that his boat hadn’t swamped. Still, he might have been picked up by some ship without radio, bound for the Lord knows where.
By the time Anabelle recovered from that night on the beach, people began saying her mind was affected. A lot of gossip among the women, I thought. But it wasn’t! She knew Jesse was dead, yet wouldn’t admit it even to herself!
She would talk to you about Jesse like he’d come back any day, and tell you all the things they were going to do. Then if you mentioned any other subject she would just stare off into space and didn’t even hear you.
As soon as she was able, she started going back to the beach every evening with a lantern. Her folks tried to talk her out of it, but it wasn’t any use. I tell you it was pitiful—her waiting and longing, and waving that lantern for Jesse, dead sure he would come back to her.
Whenever we’d come in after dark we’d see her lantern swinging along the beach. It got to be right spooky! Gave you kind of a creepy feeling! Boats from other keys saw it, too, and pretty soon everybody knew about the “Lantern Girl.” The name we had given her in that laughing way wasn’t funny anymore.
It was so pitiful it kind of squeezed your heart. Then one night Anabelle didn’t come home.
They found her sitting on the beach leaning against a palm stump, her new lantern beside her. Her hands were folded in her lap, and her eyes were wide-open staring out to sea—where Jesse had gone! She was stone dead! She’d been dead quite a while.… But her lantern still burned!
They buried Anabelle on the mainland. Maybe I oughtn’t say it, but I found it quite a relief not to see her lantern swinging to and fro on the black shoreline every time you brought your boat in after dark!
That was in the late fall. Winter tourists began to arrive. The Keys are pretty busy in tourist season, what with sports fishermen coming down and millionaires’ luxury yachts basking in our winter sunshine. As usual, some of us painted up our boats and left Pelican Key. We shaved every day, put on yacht uniforms and went into charterboat service for the winter months.
In the spring, as tourist business went slack we drifted back to commercial fishing, and old Cap’n Ludberry welcomed us again to Pelican Key.
By then, Anabelle had become just a legend to most of us.
That was a trying summer. Hot and still, with lots of nasty weather between times. And then something happened that was eerie enough in itself, even if you wasn’t squeamish. But it wasn’t a patch on what was coming.
I forget now who first saw the thing but it happened on an afternoon when we ran in ahead of a stiff squall. One of the fellows had motor trouble, and came in after dark, looking kind of pale around the gills. He was pretty mad, too, of two minds whether to have the shivers about what he’d seen, or to jump whoever had been playing a pretty gruesome joke on him.
“Who waved that lantern down on the beach?” was the first thing he asked.
Nobody, as far as we knew, and it was some time before he would believe it. Then finally he admitted it looked awfully like Anabelle’s lantern.
Well, sir, we kidded him high about that. Told him a lightning bug had scared him. But if we’d had any slightest idea of what was coming our laughs might have been more like the soundless ones of grinning skulls.
The same thing happened again several times that summer. Always to different people, and always during bad weather. A few of us still laughed about it, and the rest just tried to. Things like that have a way of sticking in your mind, and a man doesn’t spend his life on the open sea where he’s pretty close to the stars and the wide ocean that just seems to go on and on without coming to think a lot of things might happen that plenty of folks would never believe could happen.