The Marginalia Murder

PROLOGUE

The storm came in off the water the way they always did in Cormorant Cove, announced first by the gulls, who went quiet and then vanished, and then by the buoy bell out past the breakwater, clanging faster and faster as if it, too, wanted to get somewhere safe.

At a quarter past eleven, the harbor walk was empty.

The shops along Wharf Street had gone dark hours before, their windows fogged with salt spray, and the few cars still parked along the curb rocked faintly on their springs with each gust. Rain came sideways under the streetlamps, turning the light to static.

A man stood near the end of the pier anyway, where the railing had rusted through in one spot and someone had tied an orange flag to warn people off.

He was not dressed for weather like this.

He held his hat against his head with one hand and, in the other, a canvas bag, the kind libraries used to give away, worn soft at the corners.

He was not alone.

There were words first — the wind tore most of them out to sea before they reached anyone who might have remembered them later — and then there was a silence that did not belong on a night like that, a silence with a shape to it, and then there was only the storm again, going about its business, indifferent, as storms are.

By morning the sky had scrubbed itself clean and pale, the way it does after a nor'easter, as though nothing at all had happened.

The gulls came back. The bell went quiet.

And on the flat gray stretch of sand below the pier, where the tide had pulled back to check its work and left again, something had washed up that did not belong there.

Cormorant Cove would spend a long time deciding what to call it.