How the case begins
In the footsteps of Maud Callender
Gull Point light stands at the end of a two-mile sand road outside Alder Bay, Michigan, where Lake Huron meets the bay. Luther Brigham has kept it since 1922. Stanley Nowak has been his assistant since 1925. On Saturday night, September 21, 1929, the equinox gale came down the lake. Across the harbor mouth, the Coast Guard lookout watched the light flash all night. At six on Sunday morning, Stanley went up to put the lamp out. It was still burning, and the keeper was gone. The log lay open on the watch-room desk, and its last line stopped in the middle of a sentence. Within the hour the Coast Guard sent for Maud Callender to keep the light until Detroit could send a new man. She kept Gull Point for three years after her husband died, and nobody in Alder Bay knows a lighthouse log better. Maud wants to know what Luther went down to see.
- 1Still Burning
- 2The Last Page
- 3Two Short, One Long
- 4Saturday's Mail
- 5No Square Rocks
- 6Letters from Port Huron
- 7All Night Normal
- 8The Net Shed
- 9Red Pencil, 1919
- 10Winter Storesbring your clues
Each chapter is a short scene and a puzzle, and each puzzle leaves you one clue. Keep all nine. The finale needs every one.
Prefer pen and paper?
The whole case as one large-print booklet: every chapter and its puzzle, a clue ledger to fill in, and the ending sealed on the last page.
The people of the case
- Maud Callender. Kept Gull Point light from 1919 to 1922, after her husband died. Runs a boarding house on Front Street now.
- Luther Brigham. Keeper of Gull Point light since 1922. Came up from a light on Lake Erie, in Ohio.
- Stanley Nowak. Assistant keeper at Gull Point since 1925. Grew up in Alder Bay and plays second base for the town team.
- Fergus Keogh. Runs the general store and post office in Alder Bay. A widower, with one grown daughter.
- Effie Keogh. Fergus's daughter. Works the store counter and sings alto in the Methodist choir.
- Abe Elkins. Chief of the Coast Guard station across the harbor mouth since 1926. Came from a station on the Atlantic.
- Dr. Orville Mapes. Alder Bay's doctor for thirty years. Examines every death on this shore for the county coroner.
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