October 14, 1988

15 Oct 88. Starting this because I have to.

She had photographed that line on her first night, at the kitchen table, sometime after ten. She knew she had, because there it was on her laptop at 4:10 in the morning, image 0007 of 3,926, slightly blurred where her hand had shaken. She had photographed it and never read it. That was the rule she'd made: back up first, read later. Then later had turned into a Python script that went hunting for the letters F/V, and the first page of volume one had no F/V on it anywhere, so the script had stepped right over it like a cat over a puddle. Row 1 of her spreadsheet was a boat. Row 1 was the Lisette, E., March 21, 1989. She had never looked at what came before.

The chair was still wedged under the kitchen doorknob. She had slept, if that was the word, on the couch in her fleece with the bread knife on the coffee table, which in daylight would look ridiculous and at 3 a.m. had seemed like basic planning. The beam came around every six seconds and whitened the far wall. The laptop fan ticked.

She went back to image 0001. The cover: VOL. 1 in the blocky capitals, and under it, smaller, 1988–, with nothing after the dash. Then the flyleaf, blank. Then the inside cover, where somebody, him, had written the station's coordinates in pencil and then erased them hard enough to scuff the paper. Then the first entry.

15 Oct 88. Starting this because I have to. 2140. Fog in from SW. Started horn by hand, timer slow to catch. Light good. 2300. Checked gen. 0010. Checked gen. 0145. Checked gen. Backup turns over. Ran it 10 min. 0400. Light good. Nobody out.

No personal word at the end. She scrolled. The next night was the same, and the next, the generator checked four, five, seven times between dusk and dawn. Ran backup 10 min. Ran backup 15 min. On October 21 there was a line that said only Diesel delivery. Told Fogg to top off both, and on the twenty-third, Light good. Light good. Light good, three times down the margin at hourly intervals, the handwriting getting smaller.

Maren pulled the laptop closer.

The light had been automated in October 1989. She knew that the way she knew her own badge number, which was to say she'd typed it into a spreadsheet header and never thought about it again. In October 1988 her father had been the keeper. Not a man in a shed with a scavenged radar, but the actual government keeper, in uniform, with a government logbook that the government would have expected him to fill in every watch. There was no reason on earth for a Coast Guard keeper to keep a second, private log in a drugstore ledger. Unless the first one wasn't for him.

She checked. She went through every image from 0007 to 0140, all of autumn 1988 and the winter after, and there were no boats in it at all. Just the light, and the horn, and the generator, night after night, checked and checked again like a man going back to make sure he'd turned off the stove. In February he'd written Snow. Cold. In January, M's birthday, and nothing else that night.

She read that one twice. Then she shut the laptop, because it was 4:40 and her eyes had started doing the thing where the screen crawled.

Somebody had come into her kitchen with a flat bar and walked past a $2,400 MacBook to take a book that, as far as her spreadsheet was concerned, contained one boat.

---

The Port Ellery Public Library opened at ten on Wednesdays and occupied a white clapboard building on Elm Street that had been a Grange hall until 1971. The sign said so. It also said Please Wipe Your Feet, This Means You. Inside it smelled of radiator dust and the particular glue of plastic book jackets, and the woman at the desk, whose name tag said BEV, looked at Maren's fleece and her unwashed hair and said, "You're Walt's girl."

"I'm looking for old newspapers," Maren said.

"Which ones?"

"The Courier-Gazette. October 1988."

Bev did not ask why. She took off her glasses, which hung on a beaded cord, and let them drop against her cardigan, and Maren thought of the leash on its hook by her father's door and had to look at the card catalog for a second.

"Microfilm's in the back," Bev said. "Reader takes quarters for prints. Doesn't always give you the print." She opened a drawer and pushed a paper roll of quarters across the desk. "Ten dollars. You'll want them."

The reader was a beige Minolta the size of a dorm fridge, with a scratched glass plate and a coin slot that had been reinforced at some point with silver duct tape. The reels lived in small gray boxes in a wooden cabinet, labeled by hand: C-G JUL–SEP 1988, C-G OCT–DEC 1988. Maren threaded the film wrong twice. The third time it went, and the screen lit up with a grocery ad from Shop 'n Save, chuck roast $1.49 a pound, and she cranked forward through September with the little knob, the pages sliding past sideways like weather.

The Courier-Gazette came out Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. She had looked that up at five in the morning instead of sleeping. If something had happened on the night of October 14, a Friday, the Saturday paper would have gone to press too early to catch it.

Tuesday, October 18, 1988. Front page, above the fold.

TWO LOST AS DRAGGER STRIKES HOGSBACK

There was a photograph, gone gray and grainy in the transfer, taken from a boat at what must have been low water: a fishing vessel lying over on her side on a long hump of rock, stern up, her outriggers sticking out at angles like something that had been stepped on. Behind her, out of focus, was a white tower on a dark point. The caption said The F/V Constance Grey on the Hogsback ledge Friday morning. Gannet Head Light is visible in the background.

Maren read the story the way she'd read the first page of volume one. Slowly. Then again.

The Constance Grey, a 44-foot dragger out of Port Ellery, had struck the Hogsback at approximately 2:20 a.m. Friday in thick fog while returning from the grounds. Two of her three crew had drowned. Calvin "Cal" Pelletier, 34, the boat's owner and captain, of Port Ellery. Donald "Donny" Ames, 22, sternman, also of Port Ellery. The third man, Everett Thibodeau, 43, had climbed onto the ledge and held there through the tide until a Coast Guard boat out of Rockland took him off shortly after first light. He had been treated at Penobscot Bay Medical Center for hypothermia and a broken wrist.

Mr. Pelletier, the paper said, left his wife and a son, Samuel, 10.

She sat back. The chair creaked.

A broad man at the co-op counter, sunburned in April, with a knee he favored. Carol saying Sam and Sam setting down a full coffee and walking out the door when Maren said her own last name, and Maren standing there thinking, with real irritation, that people in small towns were strange about outsiders. She had actually thought that. She'd thought he was rude.

The fourth paragraph was the one she had come for, though she hadn't known it until she got there.

The Coast Guard has opened an investigation into reports that the light at Gannet Head was not operating at the time of the grounding. Lt. j.g. Mark Desrosiers of Group Southwest Harbor confirmed Monday that the station experienced "an equipment casualty" during the night and that the matter is under review. The keeper on duty, Boatswain's Mate First Class W. Brannock, declined to comment. Brannock has been keeper at Gannet Head since 1979 and lives at the station with his wife and young daughter.

Young daughter.

She pressed the PRINT button. The machine thought about it, made a noise like a toaster in pain and swallowed her quarter. She fed it another. It hummed and pushed out a warm gray sheet, the type faint and the photograph gone almost entirely black, and she held it in both hands and found that she was looking at the white smudge of the tower in the background, and the dark smudge of the house beside it, and trying to work out which window was the small end bedroom.

There was no way to tell. It was a smudge.

She'd been five. She had spent fourteen years at Lumentide being the person who remembered things, the person who could tell you which deploy had broken the payments service in 2017 and what the commit message had said, and she had nothing from October 1988. Not a siren, not a crying mother, not a strange car in the driveway. What she had from Gannet Head, if she was honest, was a handful of loose frames with no dates on them. A yellow raincoat. The smell of the oil house, maybe, though maybe she was supplying that now. Her father's hand, enormous, holding hers on the stairs and saying one at a time, Mare, the tower's not going anywhere. She'd been thinking about that one since April, every time she climbed the ninety-one steps, and she had never once wondered what year it came from.

She cranked forward.

Thursday's paper had a funeral notice for Donald Ames, services at St. Bernard's, and a photograph of a young man in a Bruins cap squinting into the sun, a baby face with an attempt at a mustache. Saturday's had a letter to the editor from someone named R. Coombs, Water Street, asking people to stop calling the Pelletier house. Maren read the letter three times. It was four sentences long and said nothing about the light, nothing about the keeper, only that a family deserved to grieve in peace and that anyone with something to say about that night could say it to the Coast Guard and leave a ten-year-old boy alone.

Ruthie had been forty-ish in 1988. She had owned the hardware store even then, apparently. She had written to the paper.

November was ordinary: a bean supper, a moose collision on Route 1, a zoning fight about a boatyard. Maren fed the machine a quarter every time she wanted a print and the machine kept about one in three. Bev came back once with a mug of coffee, set it on the cabinet without a word and went away again. The coffee was terrible and Maren drank all of it.

December 15, 1988. Page three, below a photo of a Christmas tree being hoisted onto the town wharf by a crane.

BOARD CITES GENERATOR IN GANNET HEAD OUTAGE

It was short. A Coast Guard board of inquiry had concluded that the light and fog signal at Gannet Head Light Station had been inoperative from approximately 1:50 a.m. to 3:15 a.m. on October 14 due to failure of the station's primary generator and subsequent failure of the backup unit to start. The keeper, BM1 Walter Brannock, had remained at the station throughout and had attempted repairs until power was restored. The station log, the article said, documented his efforts. No disciplinary action was recommended. The board noted that the station was scheduled for automation, and that automation would eliminate "the human element in power management."

The human element.

Maren did the subtraction without wanting to. 1:50 to 3:15. Eighty-five minutes. The Constance Grey had hit at 2:20, half an hour into the dark, with a crew of three steering for a light that wasn't there and listening for a horn that wasn't sounding. Cal Pelletier had been thirty-four. He'd been younger than she was now by seven years.

And then volume one, beginning the next night. Checked gen. Checked gen. Checked gen. A man going out every hour to put his hand on a machine that had already done the worst thing it could do.

She'd been treating that first page as a curiosity, a quirk in the data. Now she couldn't stop seeing his handwriting shrink down the margin on October 23. Light good. Light good. Light good.

There was something wrong with it, though, and she sat in the plastic chair with the gray prints in her lap and tried to find it, the way she would have hunted for the one line in a log file that didn't fit. The board said he'd stayed at the station. The board said the log documented it. It was all very tidy. Cause, effect, finding, closed. She had spent her whole adult life believing that was how the world worked when you were careful enough, and here was a tidy report, and she didn't trust it at all, and she could not have said why. Maybe only because the man in it had then spent thirty-four years in a cold brick room making sure it never happened to anybody else, and that seemed like a lot of penance for a generator.

Maybe she just wanted it to be something else. She knew that about herself. She wrote it on the back of a print in small letters, you want it to be something else, so she couldn't pretend later that she didn't.

And Ev.

She put her face in her hands for a moment, in the back room of a Grange hall, with the Minolta humming.

Ev Thibodeau, at the Harbor Lunch, with his cloudy eyes and his pie, telling her Walt had fixed his radar three times and then shutting his mouth like a door. Ev on channel 68 at one in the morning in June, asking for Walt out of habit. Ev, whom she had told to steer 041. She'd been reading the bearing off her father's sketch from the wrong end. 041 was the line from the tower to the Hogsback. She had sat in the oil house in her socks and very confidently given the only living survivor of the Constance Grey a course that would have put him back on the same rock, and he had said, mild as milk, That'd be the ledge, dear, and waited while she fixed it.

He had held on there until dawn. With a broken wrist. In October.

She thought about the Lisette, row 1 of her spreadsheet, March 21, 1989. Five months after. The very first boat. She had color-coded it green, the way she color-coded everything that resolved cleanly.

---

Bev was reshelving large-print Westerns when Maren brought the reel back.

"Find what you wanted?"

"I don't know," Maren said. Then, because that sounded like an evasion and Bev did not seem like a person who had much use for those: "Did you know my father?"

"Everybody knew your father." Bev slid a Louis L'Amour into place and squared it with one finger. "He came in Thursdays. Took out the tide tables every year even though they're free at Ruthie's. Said ours were easier on the eyes." She looked at the gray box in Maren's hands, at the label, and her face did not change, exactly. It just stopped moving. "Some people would tell you to leave that be."

"Are you some people?"

"I'm the librarian," Bev said. "I'm the one who gives you the quarters."

Outside, the fog had burned off to a white haze, and Elm Street was full of the ordinary noon business of Port Ellery: a pickup with a dog in the bed, a kid on a bike with a fishing rod across the handlebars, the one blinking light down at the corner of Water Street going yellow, yellow, yellow over nobody. Maren sat in Walt's truck with the prints on the passenger seat and the engine off.

Whoever had come with the flat bar had known what volume one was. Not that there were logbooks, which a few people might have guessed, but that the first one started on October 15, 1988, and what that date meant. She'd thought this morning she was looking for someone who wanted the book. Now she thought she was looking for someone who wanted it to say something.

The topmost print was the December one. The station log documented his efforts. Her quarter had paid for that sentence.

She took out her phone. Her mother's contact was where it always was, second from the top of her favorites, under the pharmacy. Her mother had lived in that house in October 1988. Her mother had been the wife in his wife and young daughter, and four years later her mother had packed two suitcases and a five-year-old's bedding into a rented Corsica and driven to California, and in thirty-two years had said nothing about Gannet Head except that it was cold and he was impossible.

Maren had always believed the second part. It had been one of her fixed facts.

She looked at the screen. In Sacramento it was 9:40 in the morning, and Linda would be doing the crossword on the back patio with Gary, in the good chair, with the sprinklers going.