Mr. Peck’s crate smells like old paper and tea.

The scrapbook is two columns, whether he meant it or not. Left: The Answering Light. The Keeper Who Calls. Ghost Ship of East Cove. Horn of the Drowned. Right, in a smaller, kinder hand: fog / refraction / radio skip / echo off granite / seal / grate / jammed float.

Stories are maps of feelings. The right column is a map of weather. You need both if you want to be a person who is not rude to the past and not foolish in the present.

You copy the pairing into the station log. Tess, from the doorway, makes a noise like a laugh that got stuck in salt. “He said if kids ever ran the night, they’d either chase the rocks or invent this page.”

The gallery is a wet crown waiting for someone with facts on. The table is a dry island waiting for the same someone.

You do not laugh at 1911. Those keepers had fog without a radio ducting lecture. They needed a story heavy enough to pin a boy to a plank. Ghost ship is a pin. You sharpen the pin with a true mechanism so it still holds, only now it holds for the right reason. Peck’s tea-stain on the refraction page looks like a little map of the cove. You do not mention that. It would sound like omens. It is tea.