Page 24 of The Glass Dolphin

Fine, so they’d been through a lot together. That should’ve comforted Kristen, but somehow, it only made her dread what she might find inside City Hall.

“El says she’s on the plaza,” Clara said. “Alice and Ginny are walking, like us.” She kept Kristen up to date, so all she had to focus on was walking. Her phone chimed, and it alerted her to the fact that Theo wasn’t on her girls’ text.

She checked her device and read his message out loud. “I’m coming up on the south side of City Hall. I should be there in about five minutes.”

“There’s time,” Clara said. “We’re going to be early, even with the walk.”

Kristen wanted to seek reassurance from her daughter, but she didn’t. She didn’t want to know what Clara thought they might find. She hoped it would be something simple and classically Five Island Cove, like a recipe booklet of the time, or black and white photographs, perhaps a diary, or artwork, or an article of clothing portraying the time period.

She didn’t really know what people from over half a century ago would find valuable enough to bury in the earth for a future generation. She let her mind go down the road of what she might want her posterity to glimpse about her life. If Kristen Shields made a time capsule for her grandchildren and great-grandchildren to open in forty or fifty or sixty years, long after she’d gone, what would she want them to have? And why?

Cookie recipes, she thought with a smile. Perhaps her logs of the time she’d helped her husband in the lighthouse. Those were unique and certainly portrayed what she’d spent a lot of her life doing.

Her Seafaring Girls manuals. The old, yellowed and curled photographs she had from her time as their leader, from their activities. All of the things she’d kept when she’d cleaned out the tiny cottage she’d shared with Joel after his death.

There isn’t much, she thought, and her curiosity piqued at how big this “barrel” of items had been. “Do you think we’ll get to see the time capsule itself?” she asked Clara.

“I don’t know, Mom.” Clara had been saying that a lot since the broadcast last night. Kristen hadn’t really expected another answer.

She’d already walked that morning, so her feet ached by the time they arrived on the plaza outside City Hall. The line of people had been marked off, and several cops were keeping un-ticketed people behind another roped-off barrier.

“Clara,” El called. “Kristen.” She waved her hand, and Kristen detoured over to her. Within a few minutes, the ten of them had congregated, and Kristen pulled up the tickets on her phone. At her age, not much really got her heartbeat revving, but joining the queue of people who would be admitted for the two-thirty time slot definitely did.

“You’ll have thirty minutes to view the contents of the time capsule,” Paul said into a megaphone. “There are some items preserved behind glass. Please do not touch them. Do not touch anything. Stay behind the barriers. Photographs are not allowed. If you take a photo, we’ll have to confiscate your device.”

He repeated the information as the line started to inch forward. Kristen estimated that they’d joined it about halfway through, and she reached for Laurel’s hand and squeezed it as they walked past her husband. He met her eyes and nodded from where he stood above the crowd, no smile in sight, and then the entrance loomed only steps away.

Kristen’s pulse raced now, and she wasn’t even sure why. She walked at the front of their group, showed the tickets to another cop, and entered the building. The queue went right, and she followed it. Most people spoke in a whisper, though they hadn’t instructed them to do so. A sense of reverence hung in the air, and Kristen hardly dared to breathe lest the sound be too loud.

She turned left, the items ahead of her now. The tall arms of an easel stretched above the crowd, but otherwise, she couldn’t see much. Another ten feet, then five, and the first item on display was the “barrel” itself.

Kristen had expected it to be made of metal. Something hardy that would last the test of time, at the very least. What stared back at her really was a barrel, like the kind that Kristen had played with as a small child.

It was nothing more than wood, and while sturdy, it had definitely started to rot slightly. It looked like something she’d seen at the lighthouse as a little girl, and then thrown away after she and Joel had taken over the care and keeping of the lighthouse.

Her heartbeat throbbed against the back of her tongue, but she didn’t dare speak. She didn’t even know what she’d say. The couple in front of her whispered to each other, breaking Kristen’s attention on the barrel. She didn’t know why, but it felt like she’d seen it before.

Of course, there were a lot of barrels around Five Island Cove. Everything they used, everything they built, everything that came here had to be shipped in. A lot of those shipments came in crates, buckets, or barrels.

The next display was a felt board with several photographs dotting it. Kristen sucked in a breath and came to a complete stop. Most people were quietly shuffling, moving an inch or two at a time but never stopping.

Not her.

She froze, her eyes blitzing from one familiar face to another.

“These are my grandparents,” she whispered. The words lashed through her head, increasing in volume until she turned toward Clara and said right out loud, “These are my grandparents.”

Clara frowned at her and then looked at the photographs for several long moments. Long enough that the other women they’d come with had piled around Kristen, all of them examining the photos. “Mom, are you sure?”

She had photos of Grandmother Rose and Grandfather Clancy. Pre-WWII, when they’d first purchased the lighthouse. Then her grandfather had been called off to war, and he’d never returned.

Her favorite photograph, one she’d taken from the walls of the cottage at the lighthouse after her husband had died, and one she still owned, was her grandmother, standing on the rocks at the lighthouse which she had lovingly and painstakingly taken care of—alone—for many years.

She knew her face. She had parts of her grandmother’s features. As she stood there, she reached up and touched her cheek, almost expecting something to happen. What, she didn’t know.

“Keep moving, please,” someone said in a quiet voice, and Kristen jolted into action.

The next display held two leather-bound books. To the casual observer, they might be perceived as diaries. Kristen knew instantly that they were logbooks from the lighthouse. She’d written in many of these over the years, creating a record of every day, every swell, every ship, and every supply it took to keep the sailors and others safe on an island community.

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