Thirty-Three Volumes

Nothing got read until everything was backed up. That was the rule, and Maren had made it at 9:40 p.m., standing in the oil house with volume nine still open in her hands and the radio hissing at her like a kettle somebody had forgotten.

She carried the ledgers up to the house in four trips, eight or nine at a time, hugged against her fleece the way she'd once carried server blades down a cold aisle in a data center in Santa Clara. Then she lined them up on the kitchen table in numbered order, spines out, two rows. Thirty-three. The table was oak, scarred white in rings where a hot mug had been set down without a coaster roughly ten thousand times. Her father's mug, presumably. She moved volume one so it didn't sit on a ring, then felt stupid and moved it back.

The setup was simple. Desk lamp angled low to kill the glare. Phone propped on a box of Morton salt, camera locked, focus tapped to the center of the page. Open, shoot, check the frame, turn. Open, shoot, check, turn. She did not let her eyes settle on the words. She looked at the edges of the paper and the corners of the frame and the little thumbnail that slid into the bottom of the screen, and if a line of blocky capitals swam up at her she let it go out of focus, the way you let a stranger's conversation on a train stay noise.

It was procedure. Any engineer would tell you the same thing: you don't start poking at a system before you've imaged the disk. You make the copy first, and you make it complete, and then whatever you break, you can get back.

The beam came through the window over the sink every six seconds and laid a pale bar across the ledgers and was gone. She stopped counting it after a while.

By volume eleven she had a rhythm. By volume fourteen the phone said 2,086 photos and her storage warning came up, and she paused to start the upload to the cloud, and that was when she saw her hands.

They were shaking. Not much. A fine tremor, the kind you get after the third espresso, except she hadn't had coffee since the airport. She set the phone down and held her right hand flat above the table and watched it. The fingers wouldn't sit still.

She thought about the padlock she'd cut, new, bought within two years at Coombs Hardware. She thought about the thermos, half full, and a radio that somebody had left on. Somebody had a reason to keep that room exactly as it was. Somebody could come back for it.

That was what the shaking was. She was afraid that if she went to bed, she would come down in the morning and the table would be empty, just oak and white rings, and there would be nothing left of him but a pair of reading glasses on a hook and a check that would never come at Christmas again.

The upload bar crawled to eleven percent. Maren pulled her chair closer and opened volume fifteen.

---

By Saturday the spreadsheet had seven columns. Date, time, vessel, skipper, position, conditions, notes. She'd started with five and added two when the data asked for them, which was how it was supposed to go, and she took a small, private satisfaction in that, sitting at the oak table with a mug of Maxwell House she'd found in the cupboard behind a can of Dinty Moore that expired in 2019.

The handwriting was the first problem. Her father wrote in capitals when he was tired and in a cramped, forward-leaning script when he wasn't, and the script was worse. His sevens had bars through them. His fours were closed triangles. A smear on page 31 of volume six turned out, after twenty minutes at maximum zoom, to be a coffee ring with the word FOG under it.

The shorthand was the second problem. It was private, and it hadn't been built for anybody else to read. TP came up forty times before she was sure it meant talked past. HB was the Hogsback, obviously. SR2 was showed red twice, which she took from the entry in volume nine and then found everywhere, SR1, SR3, once SR5 with an underline. Positions were bearings and distances from the point, written in cables. 2 cbl SSE. She had to look up a cable. It was a tenth of a nautical mile, about 608 feet, and once she knew that she could see the boats on a map, small and lost and very close to the rocks.

0512. Fog. F/V Sea Hag, Lenny B., plotter dn. 3 cbl S of HB, heading in blind. TP on 68. SR2. Late for him. Toast.

She typed it in. Date, time, Sea Hag, Lenny B., 3 cbl S, fog/plotter. Then her cursor sat in the notes column, blinking, waiting for Toast.

That was the third problem, and it was hers, not his. Every entry ended with a word like that. Cold. Coffee. Rain. Gulls. Once, in March 2003, Knee. They weren't data. They were a man talking to himself at five in the morning, and every time she read one she heard it in a voice she hadn't heard in years, low and dry and slightly amused, the voice that used to say There she is when she came down to breakfast. She typed them in anyway, because a backup that drops fields is no backup. Then she hid column G.

On Monday she reached the end of volume thirty-three, ran a count, ran it again and sorted.

Four hundred and twelve entries.

Ninety-seven distinct vessels, give or take the Mary Beth and the Marybeth, which she decided after some argument with herself were the same boat with an owner who couldn't spell. Some came up once. The Sea Hag came up eleven times, and Lenny B. was late for six of them.

She sorted by the conditions column, expecting a long tail of noise, the miscellaneous rescues any coastline throws up: an engine fire, a man overboard, a kid in a kayak. There wasn't one. Every row said fog, or said something had died on a boat, a radar, a plotter, a compass light, a GPS, and most said both. She filtered by position. Every one of them sat within half a mile of the Hogsback.

She scrolled from the top to the bottom and back again, thirty-four years of it, and not one row broke the rule.

Outside the window the beam came around and went, came around and went, over water nobody was on.

Which proved nothing, and she knew it. She had sat through enough postmortems to know what a man could do with a pattern once he'd decided it was there. Somebody always had a dashboard that lined up beautifully with the outage, right up until you asked where the data came from and it turned out they'd picked the window themselves. Her father had written these books. He could have written down only the nights that fit. He could have been a lonely old man with a radio scanner and a habit, filling ledgers with other people's trouble and calling it a job.

So she checked.

NOAA kept hourly observations from the airport at Owls Head going back further than she'd hoped, through a federal website that looked like it had been designed in 2004 and never touched since. She downloaded the files year by year, CSVs with column headers like HourlyVisibility and HourlyPresentWeatherType, and wrote a short Python script on the kitchen table to join them to her spreadsheet by date and hour. It took forty minutes, most of it spent fighting the date formats. Her father wrote 14 MAR 03. The government wrote 2003-03-14T05:53:00. Neither one was going to give an inch.

She ran it. Then she sat back with her arms folded and watched the output scroll, waiting for it to break.

It didn't. Row after row, the airport eight miles away had reported visibility of a quarter mile or less within an hour of the time in the log. Fog, mist, fog. The Sea Hag's toast morning came back at an eighth of a mile. The handful of clear nights all had a dead plotter or a radar fault in column F, and she checked every one of them by hand anyway. Out of 412 rows, three didn't match, and when she pulled up the raw data for those three, the station had been down for maintenance. Missing values. Not contradictions.

Maren got up and filled the kettle and didn't turn it on.

There was a second thing, and she'd been half seeing it for days without letting it surface. She went back to the photos. Her father never named himself. Not once in thirty-three volumes did he write I when he could leave it out, and he never signed an entry, never initialed a page, never put W.B. on a cover. The ledgers had been written by nobody. But in maybe a third of the entries he'd copied down the radio traffic word for word, in quotes, the way you'd paste an error message rather than describe it, and the boats on the other end of those calls knew exactly who they were talking to.

"Lightkeeper, Lightkeeper, Sea Hag, you up?"

"Lightkeeper, it's Harold. Radar's out again, sorry."

"Thanks, Lightkeeper. Owe you."

She did a search on the transcribed text she'd typed into column G. Lightkeeper: 131 times. Walt: zero. Brannock: zero. Ninety-seven boats over thirty-four years, and none of them had ever used his name, or else he'd never once written it down when they did.

She thought of the man she remembered, who answered the phone at Christmas with "Yup" and passed it to nobody because there was nobody else in the house. Who said "Well," and then "Well," again, and then asked about the weather in California as if it were a long-standing concern of his.

On the screen, the cursor blinked in the search box. Lightkeeper. 131 results.

The kettle sat cold on the burner.

She shut the laptop at a little after eleven and carried the ledgers back out to the oil house in two trips, a stack of seventeen and a stack of sixteen, held against her fleece like library books. The fog had come in while she wasn't looking. It sat on the point the way it always seemed to here, not drifting in so much as turning out to have been there all along, and the fog signal let go its two-tone groan just as she got the door open, which she was still not used to and which made her say something she'd have been fired for in Tamalpais.

The shelf was a plank of pine on two iron brackets, painted the same institutional green as everything else the Coast Guard had once owned. She'd taken the books down without much ceremony on the first day. Now she put them back in order, one through thirty-three, spines out, the numbers in her father's capitals on white tape. She pressed the last one flush with her palm.

There was room left over.

Not a lot. A strip of bare plank between volume thirty-three and the bracket, about an inch and a half wide. She slid volume thirty-three to the right until it touched the iron, and the gap opened on its left instead, and she slid it back. Then she took volume twelve off the shelf and set it in the space, and it fit the way a key fits. Not snug. Exact.

She held the flashlight low across the plank. Dust lay along the whole length of the shelf, gray and fine and even, a little thicker toward the wall. In front of the gap it stopped. There was a clean rectangle of green paint, with sharp edges and no film on it at all, the size of the bottom of a ledger.

Back in the kitchen she opened the laptop and didn't bother sitting down. Volume thirty-three, last photo. She'd typed it in on Sunday and gone straight on to the totals without reading it, which was the kind of thing she used to write up junior engineers for.

18 DEC 22. 0612. Fog, SE 10, snow later. F/V Wren, girl alone, plotter dropping out. New one. Talked her past the Hogsback on 68. Showed red once. Talks a lot. Cold.

She searched the spreadsheet for Wren. One result. She searched the transcribed radio traffic, in case he'd written it some other way, Wrenn, Ren, the girl's name instead of the boat's. Nothing. Ninety-six boats had come back to him, some of them over and over, Lenny B. late six times. The Wren had shown up once, on the last page of the last book Maren had, and then the books stopped.

Except they hadn't. Nobody buys a ledger in December and stops writing in it for good the same week, and nobody leaves an inch and a half of space at the end of a shelf by accident. Her father had been alive for fourteen months after that entry. He'd died two days after a night she had no record of. And the coffee in the thermos had still been warm.

She thought about the padlock. Brass, new, a Coombs Hardware sticker on the back. Twenty-three keys on her father's ring, and not one of them had fit it.

So somebody else had the key.

The workroom was a lean-to off the back of the kitchen, eight feet by ten, with a bench made from a solid-core door laid across two sawhorses and a pegboard where every tool had its outline drawn in black marker. Two outlines were empty. A hammer and something long and thin she couldn't name. Maren spent a minute on that before she made herself stop.

The radar display came out of the oil house on its bracket after she'd backed out four rusted lag bolts with a socket wrench from the pegboard. It was a Furuno, beige going on yellow, with a cracked bezel and a sticker on the side that said PROPERTY OF F/V DOROTHY ANN in someone else's handwriting. It weighed more than it looked. She carried it across the wet grass against her stomach, and by the time she set it on the bench the front of her fleece was soaked.

She had assumed she'd have to run cable from the scanner on the oil house roof. She didn't. In the corner of the workroom, coming through a hole in the clapboard stuffed with steel wool, was a coil of gray cable with a strip of white tape on the end. SCANNER, in her father's capitals. Somebody had already had this idea. Somebody had drilled the hole.

The first failure was the connector, which was a round twelve-pin thing that matched nothing in her backpack. The second was the adapter she made from a USB-to-serial dongle she'd bought for a conference demo in 2017, which Windows refused to recognize because the chip inside was a counterfeit Prolific and the driver knew it. She found an older driver on a forum for model railroaders, unsigned, dated 2009, and installed it with the specific dread of a woman who used to give talks about supply-chain security. It worked. The laptop said COM4.

COM4 said nothing.

She tried 4800 baud, which was the marine standard, and got a scroll of garbage, accented letters and box characters and once, unhelpfully, the word ÿÿÿOK. She tried 38400. Worse. She swapped the transmit and receive wires on the theory that whoever had spliced this harness had done it from the boat's point of view, and the garbage stopped, and the screen went blank, which felt like progress and wasn't. At one-fifteen she ate four of her father's Werther's in a row. At two she found the Furuno's manual as a scanned PDF, every page slightly crooked, and on page sixty-one a pinout diagram with a pencil-style annotation that some long-dead uploader had made in MS Paint: USE PINS 3 + 7 NOT 3 + 5!!

She moved one wire.

The terminal filled. Not garbage this time. Lines of numbers in tidy columns, bearing and range and a strength value, refreshing every two and a half seconds as the scanner on the roof swung around in the fog. She watched it scroll for a full minute before she trusted it. Then she wrote forty lines of Python, ugly ones, to turn each row into a dot on a black square.

The first sweep painted the shoreline in green, the curve of the point and the harbor mouth beyond it. The second filled in what she'd been waiting for: a hard, ragged cluster at bearing 041, a quarter of a mile out, bright as a thumbprint. Half tide, falling. The Hogsback, showing its back.

She sat with it while the sweeps came round. The fog signal groaned. On the screen the ledge pulsed and held, pulsed and held, and the water around it stayed black and empty, all the way to the edge of the square.

It was 0248. She pulled the legal pad toward her and wrote the time, the bearing and the range, and then, after a while, nothing else.