Free The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Iain Lawrence

driftwood. It took him two days to work it free, patiently pulling the whole length clear of every snag. He dragged it home in a long and twisting line, all his weight leaning forward to keep it moving on the boardwalk. He came back as proud as a hunter, as though pulling a monstrous snake that he’d slain.
    “I’m going to make a mat,” he said, and set to the job with that infuriating patience, puzzling out a sense from a terrible snare of half-closed loops and the intricate patterns of his knot. “It’s basically a Turk’s head,” he told her, pushing up his glasses.
    She said, “It looks like a ball of giant lint.”
    “Well, now it might,” he said. “But when it’s finished it’ll be all flattened out.”
    She runs her fingers along the strands. They go over and under, around and around; she has no idea where he started, no idea where he stopped.
    What a knotty little problem.
    “Tat!” she says, jumping up. “Tat, wake up!” she shouts.
    Tatiana, startled from her sleep, struggles on the mat. Squid hauls her up, laughing, and turns in a circle with the child in her arms. “Oh, Tat, you found it,” she says, and sets her on the floor again. “You found it. You showed me right where it is.”
    She grabs the edge of the mat. The rope bunches in her fist. She lifts and shakes, and a shower of grit and sand goes tumbling down. The mat is heavy, and the edges fold under themselves as she drags it aside. Strands of the rope stretch and pop, and an oval of pale, dull floor appears, where the head of one nail stands like a stud, catching a long white thread.
    Squid lets the mat fall with a whoosh of air. She stamps her heel on the bare patch of floor, on one board and then another, on a third and a fourth, until one of them chatters under her foot. She drops to her knees. She pries it up, her red-painted nails scratching at the wood. It lifts and falls back, then lifts again, and flips onto the floor with a smack. She hunches forward and peers into the space. There’s not the one book she’d imagined, but eight. They disappear into the hole as far as her fingers can reach, all identical, bindings of red tape on dark blue covers. Tatiana crawls quietly beside her and stops at the edge of the hole.
    “Listen,” says Squid. “This is a secret, okay? We won’t tell anyone about it. Not your grandpa. Not anyone.”
    Tatiana shakes her head.
    “It’s our little secret, just yours and mine.”
    She lifts four books at once. The edges are sticky with spiderwebs, the pages a deep yellow down at the bottom, nearly white at the top. They have a curious odor of dryness and age.
    She puts them down at the edge of the oval left by the mat. She starts to put the floorboard back in place. But again the books have a power, and she leaves the hole gaping as she takes up one of the diaries.
    February 10.
The
Darby
came. It brought books. Southward’s
Grazing in Terrestrial and Marine Environments
. Elton’s
The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
. No sign of
Ecological Monographs
. Dad said it might come next week on
the
Sikorsky.
I think he forgot to ask for it.
    Elton is fascinating. I think now that limpets are like herds
of buffalo. They just wander along grazing all day. I think they
have a sense of where they want to go and they seem to know
the best places. I saw them come across the empty shell of a
dead one and they seemed to gather round it and nudge at it.
Dad says they were probably eating algae off the shell but I
think they maybe know what death is and were trying to recognize an individual that used to travel with them.
    February 11.
I tried to get Squid interested in limpets but she
only laughed and went away. There’s something wrong with my
eyes. Things get blurry and out of focus, and my glasses don’t
seem to help. Dad says not to worry. He says I’m just a bit tired.
    Squid flips through the pages, forward and back.
    February 12.
Dear God, please don’t let me go blind. I know