At five-fifteen, full dark settled over Gannet Rock. The rain began to lash the salt-crusted panes in horizontal sheets.
At five-thirty, Nell stood up in front of the window, made a show of stretching her back, picked up a heavy rubber flashlight and the ledger, and walked out of the kitchen toward the front parlor, turning off the kitchen lamp as she went. Anyone watching from the rocks outside would think she had gone upstairs to the keeper’s bedrooms for the night, leaving the tower search for later.
Instead, in the dark parlor, Nell stepped silently back through the kitchen and into the unlit breezeway, where Deputy Amari stood waiting in the blackness behind the wash-tubs.
They didn’t speak. The wind howled around the brick cylinder of the tower, drowning out the sea.
Twenty minutes passed in the freezing dark of the breezeway. Nell counted the seconds. One thousand one hundred. One thousand two hundred.
At twelve hundred and forty, a key turned in the exterior lock of the breezeway storm door.
A shadow slipped inside, dripping rain. Dell Haskins didn’t use a flashlight. He knew every board of this passage by heart. He pulled the storm door shut, opened the iron tower door, and did not touch the light switch on the wall.
A narrow red beam flicked on, a fisherman’s night-vision penlight,, aimed only at his boots as he began to climb the sixty-four iron steps.
Nell waited until the soft clang of his rubber boots reached the upper half of the cylinder. Then she nodded to Amari.
They climbed together in the dark, stepping on the outside edges of the iron treads where the metal was thickest and didn’t ring. Twenty steps. Forty steps.
Above them, a metallic scrape echoed from the lantern room: the sound of the iron floor grate over the old weight shaft being pried up with a crowbar.
At step fifty-eight, just below the circular opening of the lantern room deck, Nell reached out to the secondary three-way switch bolted to the upper landing strut.
She flipped it.
Far below, the bare 60-watt bulb on the lower landing blazed on, throwing long bars of shadow up through the iron treads and across the glass cage above.
Dell Haskins froze on his knees beside the pried-up floor plate, a short iron pry bar in his right hand. His red penlight rolled across the iron floor and stopped against the empty blue biscuit tin.
Nell climbed the final six steps until her head and shoulders were above the deck level, with Deputy Amari one step behind her, her hand resting on her holstered sidearm.
“It isn’t under the floor plate, Mr. Haskins,” Nell said, her voice steady over the drumming of the rain on the sixteen storm panes. “It never was. You took it out of that tin the night Amos died.”
Dell stayed on his knees for a long beat. Then, slowly, he used the pry bar to push himself to his feet. The genial neighbor was gone; in the harsh yellow glare from below, his face looked carved out of gray granite.
“You said Amos must have hidden it in the shaft,” Dell said.
“I lied,” Nell said. “If an innocent man hears that an appraiser thinks a five-thousand-dollar prism is hidden in the counterweight shaft, he eats his chowder and waits to hear if she finds it. Only the man who already stole it out of the biscuit tin comes back in the dark with a pry bar to figure out what the appraiser really found up here, or to make sure he didn’t drop something the first time.”
“I’ve got a key, Ruth,” Dell said, a thin smile touching his mouth. “Amos gave me a key to this house ten years ago in case of medical emergencies, Ruth. You know that. Coming up here to help look for Curtis’s glass isn’t a crime.”
“No,” Deputy Amari said, stepping up onto the deck beside Nell. “It isn’t. Why don’t you set that pry bar down on the stool, Dell.”
Dell looked at the stool, then tossed the iron bar onto it with a dull clatter, wiping his wet palms on his oilskins. “You let this mainland woman wind you up, Ruth. Amos was seventy-nine. He came up here at dusk like he always did…”
“Amos hadn’t climbed these stairs since November 12, 2024,” Nell interrupted. She held up the green watch-room logbook and the heavy ledger. “He wrote down everything, Dell. Two years ago his knees gave out. He moved his bird and weather log down to the kitchen window. Look at the stool where you just threw that bar. The dust on it is a quarter-inch thick, except where your iron just scarred it. Look at the brass latch on the gallery door.”
Dell didn’t look at the door.
“Down in the kitchen today,” Nell said, “you told us the gallery door was latched tight when Amos died. Deputy Amari never came up here on Wednesday, and you claimed you didn’t either. You can’t see that inside drop-latch from the ground. The stone parapet hides it. The only way you knew the gallery door was latched was because you were standing in this room on Tuesday evening before you ever went down to the dock to fetch the mail.”
The wind threw a fistful of sleet against the dark glass behind Dell’s head.
“I came up Tuesday to check the glass after the Monday squall,” Dell said, his voice tightening. “Amos asked me to.”
“If Amos had asked you to, it would be in the ledger,” Nell said simply. “He logged when you brought him haddock on October 19th. He logged when you borrowed his pipe wrench on November 3rd, and when you returned it four days late. He never asked you to climb this tower. And he never, in forty years, turned off the stair light.”
She pointed down through the grated floor at the glowing bulb on the landing below.
“He replaced that bulb on the first of every single month so the stairs would never be dark,” Nell said. “You told me the light was switched off when you found him. Why would an old man with ruined knees climb sixty-four iron steps in pitch blackness? He wouldn’t. He climbed them with the light on, one painful step at a time, because he heard someone moving around above his head when the whole island was supposed to be empty.”
Dell’s eyes shifted to the top of the iron staircase, where the diamond-patterned top tread met the deck.
“You have a shed full of maritime antiques, you told me at the slip,” Nell said quietly. “You knew Curtis was going to inherit this place the moment Amos died, and you knew Curtis would sell everything to the first buyer from Boston to pay his debts. You’d lived next to that first-order Fresnel prism for thirty years. You probably thought it belonged on Gannet Rock, with you, more than it belonged with a nephew who didn’t care about the light.”
“Curt didn’t even know what a first-order lens was,” Dell muttered, the words breaking out of him like water through a cracked seam. “Came out here once a year to ask the old man for money, looking at the house like a butcher looks at a steer. And that prism... Amos and I took that prism out of the brass spider frame ourselves in ninety-four when the Coast Guard crew went down for lunch. It was eleven pounds of French flint glass. Caught the sun even when the lamp was dead.”
“Don’t say anything else, Dell,” Amari warned, her voice heavy with a quiet grief as she reached for her handcuffs. “Not until we’re in Portland.”
“What does it matter, Ruth?” Dell looked past them, out through the dark panes where the white foam of the reef glowed faintly in the night. His shoulders sagged inside the yellow oilskins, making him look suddenly older than Amos Pell ever had. “I didn’t come up here to hurt him. I thought he was asleep in his chair by the stove. The front door was unlocked, like always, and the kitchen was empty. He must’ve been out back in the wood-shed. I slipped up the stairs to take the prism out of the tin. Figured he’d never climb up here again to notice it was gone, and after he passed on, Curt wouldn’t know the difference.”
Dell looked down at his own broad, weathered hands.
“I had the prism out of the chamois. I had just checked the gallery latch because the wind was rising. And then I heard him breathing behind me.” Dell closed his eyes. “He’d pulled himself up all sixty-four steps with both hands on the rail. Didn’t yell. Just stood there on the top step and said, ‘Put it back in the tin, Dell. That’s Item 404.’ Like I was a thief off a summer yacht.”
The silence in the lantern room held between two gusts of wind.
“I tried to brush past him on the landing to get down,” Dell whispered. “He grabbed my coat sleeve. Held on with both hands. You remember how strong his wrists were, Ruth, even at the end. I jerked my arm back to get free of him, and my elbow took him in the chest. He just... went backwards. All the way down. And when I got to the bottom and saw how his head was turned, I panicked. I took the prism down to my shed, waited twenty minutes for the mail boat to drop the bag at the slip, and came back up the path calling his name. I switched the stair light off before I called you, Ruth, so you’d think he just missed his footing in the dark.”
Amari stepped forward and clicked the steel cuffs around Dell’s wrists. The sound was sharp and final, like a lock falling into place.
* * *
The storm blew itself out by dawn, leaving the November sky washed pale and cloudless, and the rocks coated in a glaze of salt rime that glittered in the early sun.
At eight o’clock, after Deputy Amari had escorted Dell Haskins down to the slip to meet the Sheriff’s Department launch from Portland, she walked back up to the keeper’s cottage and set a heavy object wrapped in yellow chamois on the scrubbed pine table.
Nell unwrapped it.
The eleven-inch triangular prism of dense French flint glass caught the weak morning sunlight coming through the east kitchen window and split it instantly, throwing a brilliant, three-inch band of violet, green, and gold across the whitewashed wall above the stove.
“Found it behind a stack of cedar lobster buoys in his rafters,” Amari said. “I’ll need to photograph it here for the evidence file, since Curtis is the legal custodian of the estate, and then I can leave it on bond until the hearing.”
Curtis Pell stood by the stove. He looked hollowed out, his city coat hanging open, a mug of black coffee cooling in his hands. He hadn’t looked away from the band of colored light on the wall since Nell had folded back the leather.
“He climbed sixty-four steps on broken knees for a piece of glass,” Curtis said quietly.
“No,” Nell said, picking up one of Amos’s sharpened cedar pencils from the table. “He climbed them because it was his watch. Every object here was under his care.”
When the deputy went out to radio the launch, Curtis walked over to the table and looked down at the open ledger.
“What did you say that prism was worth, Ms. Okafor? Five thousand?”
“At auction, yes,” Nell said. “And the rest of the household contents, the ship’s bell clock, the ship models, the brass instruments, the furniture, comes to twenty-one thousand, four hundred dollars. If you sell the furniture and the clocks at the maritime auction in Bath next Thursday, you’ll have enough to clear your twenty-thousand-dollar debt without selling the house or the tower to the buyer in Boston.”
Curtis stared at her. “You heard that on the phone.”
“I appraise things,” Nell said. “A man selling a piece of headland real estate in forty-eight hours is getting fifty cents on the dollar because someone is twisting his arm. Sell the clocks and the pewter to pay your shark, Mr. Pell. Keep the rock.”
Curtis reached out and touched the chipped lower corner of the heavy glass prism. On the wall, the band of rainbow light wavered slightly and held steady.
“My uncle left the stair light on for me when I stayed here as a kid,” Curtis said, so softly she almost missed it. “Every night. Said a keeper’s house doesn’t go dark.” Something in his shoulders let go, ten years of it. “Sell the clocks, Ms. Okafor. Tell me where to sign for them. The house stays.”
Nell nodded once. She opened the ledger to Section VII: Breezeway and Tower, lined up her ruler beneath Item 404, and wrote in a neat, square hand that matched the dead keeper’s own:
Nov 20, 2026: Returned to blue biscuit tin, lantern room shelf. Accounted for. Complete.