Chapter Two: The Logbooks

The logbooks went back to the year her grandfather had taken the job. Each page recorded the weather, the ships that passed the point, and the hours when the light had been lit and put out. Most entries were only a line or two long, written in the same careful handwriting.

But near the end of the last book, the entries changed. Her grandfather began to write about lights he had seen out on the water late at night, far beyond the shipping lanes, where no boat should have been. He wrote about them again and again over the course of a single autumn.

Nora read until the kitchen grew dark. When she finally looked up, she realized that she had forgotten to eat and that the wind had picked up outside. She lit the old oil lamp on the table because the electricity had not yet been turned back on.

The next morning she walked down to the general store to buy groceries. The woman behind the counter recognized her at once. "You're Walter's granddaughter," she said. "We were all sorry when he passed. He was the last real keeper this island had."

Her grandfather had kept that light for thirty-two years. As a child she had climbed its spiral stairs a hundred times, counting the steps out loud, and she still remembered that there were one hundred and twelve of them from the bottom to the top.

Nora asked the woman whether anyone else had ever mentioned strange lights on the water. The woman stopped stacking cans and looked at her for a long moment before she answered.
