Unauthorized Lights

Boatswain's Mate First Class Teresa Alvarado counted the stairs under her breath, and when she reached the top she said, "Ninety-one," as though she'd caught them trying to cheat.

She had arrived at 8:15 on Tuesday in a white Coast Guard pickup with a ladder rack and a toolbox the size of a carry-on, and she'd stood in the kitchen doorway with her cover tucked under one arm while Maren hunted for a mug that didn't have a chip in it. Mid-thirties, compact, dark hair scraped into a bun so tight it looked load-bearing. Her boots were cleaner than anything Maren owned. She declined the coffee. Then she accepted it, black, after looking at the pot for a while.

"Your dad always had it on," she said. "Every quarter. I figured it was a rule."

In the lantern room the morning was the flat pewter of a bay that hadn't decided anything yet. The old Fresnel lens was long gone, shipped off to a museum in Rockland in 1993 according to a brass plaque downstairs. In its place sat the thing the Coast Guard actually cared about, a squat LED unit on a pedestal that looked, to Maren's eye, like a very expensive kitchen canister. Alvarado unlatched a panel, plugged a ruggedized tablet into a port, and frowned at it with professional affection.

"Battery bank's tired," she said. "I'll swap two cells. Solar controller's fine. You get much salt on the glass?"

"I don't know. Should I?"

"Everybody gets salt on the glass." She wiped a pane with a microfiber cloth from her back pocket and held it up, gray. "There. Salt."

Maren had spent fourteen years watching people open a meeting with ten minutes of weather. She recognized a warm-up when she was standing inside one. Alvarado asked about the fog signal (fine, loud, two notes like a cow with opinions), about the generator in the shed (Maren had no idea), about whether the gallery railing had been loose all winter or just since March. She wrote everything down in a green notebook that made Maren's stomach drop for half a second before she saw it was the government kind, spiral-bound, with a cutting-edge Coast Guard logo on the cover.

Then Alvarado closed the panel and didn't open another one.

"So," she said. "Something I'm supposed to mention."

She looked out at the water while she said it. Off the point the Hogsback was showing at half tide, a long brown back with weed on it, gulls standing around on top like they owned the deed.

"Sector got a report. Somebody saying they observed non-standard lights displayed from private property at this location." She said it slowly, the way you'd read a label off a medicine bottle to someone hard of hearing. "Within the last couple weeks."

Maren's hands found the cold rail behind her. The Aldis lamp was in the oil house, under a towel. The battery for it was on the kitchen counter, charging next to the toaster, about twenty feet from where Alvarado had stood drinking her coffee.

"Non-standard," Maren said.

"Anything that could be mistaken for an aid to navigation. Flashing, colored, rhythmic." Alvarado tucked the cloth back into her pocket. "Title thirty-three. It's a federal matter. Doesn't have to be anything. Kids with a flashlight. Somebody's porch light on a timer." She shrugged, a small one, almost apologetic. "I'm just letting you know it's on the record."

On the record. Maren knew exactly what that meant; she'd written enough incident tickets to know a ticket wasn't a verdict. It was a timestamp somebody could point at later.

"Who reported it?"

"I couldn't tell you that."

Which was not, Maren noticed, the same thing as I don't know.

Alvarado picked up her tablet, then set it down again on the pedestal and looked at Maren properly for the first time since the stairs. Her eyes went to the gallery door, to the place on the iron deck where, four nights ago, Maren had knelt with the lamp and blinked nonsense into the fog until her thumb cramped.

"Your dad," Alvarado said, "used to tell me the fog here was the worst on the bay." She tilted her head. "He said a lot of things, though."

Maren opened the gallery door because the lantern room had suddenly gotten too small for two people and a federal regulation. The air outside was wet and smelled of rockweed and somebody's diesel a long way off. She stepped onto the iron deck. After a moment Alvarado followed, tablet tucked against her ribs, and stood with her boots planted a careful foot back from the railing she had just written down as loose.

Below them the keeper's house looked smaller than it did from the kitchen. The oil house looked like what it was: a brick box with a fresh padlock Maren had bought at Coombs Hardware for $18.99, because she hadn't been able to think what else to do.

"It was Dennis Farrow," Maren said.

Alvarado didn't answer. A gull lifted off the Hogsback, circled once, and landed in exactly the same spot.

"Portland. Quarter-zip. Teeth like a dental brochure." Maren heard her own voice getting faster and couldn't seem to stop it. "He wants to buy this place for a boutique inn. He gave me a number in the Harbor Lunch and said it was good till the end of June, and then a week later the Coast Guard turns up with a report about my porch light. I'm not asking you to say it. I'm just telling you I know."

"Ms. Brannock."

"Maren."

"Maren." Alvarado looked at the horizon, where the fog was sitting in a gray bar like it was waiting for a bus. "When Sector gets a complaint, somebody has to follow it up. That's the job. Doesn't matter who calls. Lobsterman, summer person, guy from Portland, guy from Mars. It goes in the system and somebody drives out." She paused. "This quarter, that's me."

It wasn't a no. Maren had sat through a hundred postmortems where the person who'd pushed the bad config said the process worked as designed, and it had never once meant they hadn't pushed it.

She thought about Farrow sliding his card across the Formica, his thumb resting on it a second longer than necessary, the way you'd hold a door you wanted credit for. She'd been right about him being slick and wrong about him being patient. He didn't need her to say yes. He needed the price to drop. And a property with a federal complaint against it, a lighthouse whose owner might be flashing illegal signals at fishing boats, was worth less to anyone who wasn't Dennis Farrow. He hadn't even had to get his loafers wet. One phone call, and the United States government was standing on her deck in clean boots.

"So what happens now," Maren said.

"Now? Nothing, probably." Alvarado finally turned to face her. "I write that I came out, I talked to the owner, I didn't observe any non-standard lights. Which I didn't." She let that sit. "If there's a second report, it's a different conversation. Somebody with more stripes than me. Maybe a letter."

"And if there's a third?"

"Don't let there be a third." Alvarado glanced down at the oil house, then back. Her face didn't change, but something behind it did, as if she'd decided to spend a little of whatever she'd been saving. "Whatever old equipment your dad had lying around out there, I'd keep it dark. I mean the lamp especially. Radio's a different animal. Anybody can talk on a radio."

Maren opened her mouth and found nothing in it.

Alvarado held out the empty mug. Maren took it. The handle was still warm.

"Thanks for the coffee," Alvarado said. "He made it stronger."

She went back through the gallery door and started down. Maren listened to her boots on the iron treads, steady, unhurried, and somewhere around the fortieth step the counting started again, low, under her breath. At the bottom the kitchen door opened and closed. A minute later the white pickup backed around in the gravel, and before it pulled away Alvarado leaned forward over the wheel and looked up at the tower, straight at Maren. She held it longer than a person looks at someone she's just written up. Then she lifted two fingers off the wheel, the way people around here waved at oncoming trucks, and drove out past the spruce toward the road.

---

The papers at Paul Grindle's office on Union Street took forty minutes to sign and two hours to wait for, because the notary had gone to her granddaughter's dance recital and nobody had thought to mention it. Maren spent the gap in the Hannaford on Route 1 buying things she didn't need: a second box of steel wool for the mouse holes, a bag of Cape Cod chips, a rotisserie chicken she ate a wing of in the parking lot with the engine running. By the time she turned off the shore road onto the gravel it was a quarter past eight, and the light was going the color of weak tea.

The beam had already started. She saw it come around over the spruce, six seconds, and go again.

She parked where she always parked, nose to the woodpile, and got out with the chicken in one hand and her keys in the other. Halfway to the kitchen steps she stopped.

The door was shut. That was the first thing. It was shut, but wrong, sitting a quarter inch proud of the frame the way a door does when it's been closed by someone who didn't know it had to be lifted. Then she saw the jamb. A long pale tongue of wood had split away beside the strike plate, fresh enough to be yellow inside, and there were two dents in the paint at hip height, side by side, about the width of a flat bar.

Maren stood on the bottom step and listened. Gulls. The tide working at the rocks below the point. Her own breathing, which was louder than she liked.

She pushed the door with one knuckle. It swung in.

She went through the house the way she'd once gone through a production outage at two in the morning, room by room, expecting the worst in every one. The kitchen was the kitchen. Her mug in the sink, Alvarado's beside it. The front room, with Walt's recliner and its afghan the color of canned salmon, untouched. She climbed the stairs with the chicken still in her hand because putting it down felt like admitting something. Her bedroom. His bedroom, which she still hadn't slept in. The bathroom with the historical plumbing. Every drawer shut. Nothing tipped. Nothing kicked over. The reading glasses hung on their hook by the back door with the chain looped twice, the way she'd found them in April.

She came back down feeling almost foolish. Then she looked out the kitchen window.

Across the yard the oil house door stood wide open, a black rectangle in the brick.

She didn't remember crossing the grass. She remembered the padlock, her $18.99 padlock, lying in the wet clover still locked, and the hasp beside it with all four screws pulled out of the old mortar like teeth. Somebody had taken the easy route. Somebody had known the hasp was the weak part.

Inside it smelled like it always did, kerosene and old coffee. The radio sat dark on its shelf, exactly where she'd left it. The Aldis lamp was on the workbench with its battery cable coiled beside it, the way she'd coiled it four nights ago after climbing down with her thumb aching. The radar display. The thermos. The roll of Werther's, three gone, which was her fault.

The shelf.

She'd put the ledgers back in his order, one through thirty-three, left to right, spines out. Thirty-two green spines were still there. At the left end, where volume one should have been leaning against the bracket, there was a gap exactly one book wide, and in the dust on the board the faint clean rectangle where it had stood since 1988 or 1989 or whenever her father had first set it down.

Maren turned around slowly.

Through the open door she could see across the yard to the lit kitchen window, and on the table inside, plain as a display case, her MacBook. Open. Charging. Fourteen hundred dollars of aluminum with a sticker on the lid from a Lumentide hackathon in 2019, sitting six feet from a door anyone could walk through.

Nobody had touched it.

Nobody had touched the lamp, either, or the radio, or the thirty-two other books that would have fit in the same bag. Whoever had stood in this room had walked past all of it, taken one ledger off the left end of the shelf, and left.

The beam came around again and lit the open door, and went.

She called him from the kitchen with the door still hanging open behind her, because shutting it would have meant touching it, and some stubborn piece of her brain had filed the jamb under evidence.

The card was where she'd left it, tucked under the fruit bowl that had never held fruit. FARROW COASTAL HOSPITALITY. An office number in Portland and, under it in blue ballpoint, a cell he'd added at the Harbor Lunch with a little flourish, as if he were signing a cast. She dialed the office first. It was twenty to nine. She didn't care. Her thumb was shaking hard enough that she had to do it twice.

It rang four times and clicked over, and a different ring started, and then Dennis Farrow said, "Farrow," over the sound of a television and somebody laughing in another room.

"This is Maren Brannock."

"Maren. Hey." The television dropped away; she pictured him walking into a hallway, quarter-zip and all. "I didn't expect... Is this about the number? Because I can be flexible on the close."

"You filed a complaint with the Coast Guard."

A pause. Not a long one. "I raised a concern. That's a navigation issue, it's public safety, anybody would..."

"And then today, while I was in Rockland, somebody broke into my house." She heard her own voice go flat and fast, the voice she used to use on vendors who'd missed an SLA. "Pried the kitchen door. Pulled the hasp off the oil house. Took one book. One. The first volume of my father's log. So I'd like to know whether you sent somebody, or whether you drove up yourself, because I'm about to call the sheriff and I'd like to get the name right."

Nothing. The laughing in the other room went on without him.

"I'm sorry," Farrow said. "His what?"

"Don't."

"No, I'm... Maren, I genuinely don't know what you're talking about. A log? Like a ship's log?" He sounded like a man reading a menu in a language he'd taken one semester of. "I filed one form. One. A broker of mine drove past in May and said there'd been a light out there on a foggy night, a handheld or something, and I thought, okay, that's a liability, that's a thing I can mention. That's all. I don't break into houses. I have a bad back. I have a guy who changes my lightbulbs."

"You wanted the price down."

"Of course I wanted the price down. That's my whole job." He breathed out. "But what would I want with a book? I didn't know there was a book. I still don't know what's in it."

She opened her mouth and found she had nothing ready. The beam came around and laid its white bar across the linoleum, across her socks, across the split yellow wood of the jamb.

"Is anything else missing?" Farrow said. Quieter now. "Are you okay out there? Are you by yourself?"

That was the worst part. He sounded like he meant it.

"I'll call you back," she said, which wasn't true, and hung up.

She stood with the phone against her sternum. The chicken sat on the counter in its plastic dome, sweating. She had been so sure. She'd had it all mapped, complaint to Coast Guard to break-in, one clean line from cause to effect, Farrow at the top of the stack. And the man at the top of the stack had just asked her what a logbook was.

So somebody else. Somebody who knew there was a volume one, and knew which end of the shelf it lived on, and knew the hasp was soft and she'd be gone for the afternoon. Somebody who had wanted that book, and only that book, badly enough to bring a flat bar.

Maren went to the door and finally lifted it into the frame the way it liked, and it wouldn't latch. She dragged a kitchen chair over and wedged it under the knob.

Out past the point, the fog signal groaned once, low and then lower, though the night was clear.