And Mia was endlessly entertained by the born-and-raised Texan discovering the delights of winter in Maine.

“I didn’t pack right, did I?” Izzy asked as the channel into port created a particularly vicious wind tunnel. “I’m going to freeze this entire time, and you’re just going to sit there and laugh at me.”

“Go back inside.”

Again Izzy didn’t listen. “We’re meeting the coroner at the ferry landing?”

“Yes.” Although “coroner” was a generous term. St. Lucy’s was so small that it didn’t have basic emergency services like a police department or a dedicated medical examiner. Sammy Bowdoin, whom Mia still thought of as Stoner Sammy B., the island’s doctor/veterinarian/coroner, had been able to write up a basic report on the body the local fishermen had pulled from the bay, but it was rudimentary at best. From what Mia could tell, Sammy hadn’t even gotten dental records or fingerprints back yet to make an official ID, and if the vic had been carrying a driver’s license, it had been lost to the sea. They knew who he was only because Sammy had recognized him from the time he’d spent on the island.

Robert Twist. The name was one of the few concrete details they had in the case. Twist was a small-time journalist who had, according to Sammy, arrived on St. Lucy’s sometime before Christmas, then disappeared a few weeks later. No one on the island probably would have given him a second thought had his body not been dragged onto that fishing boat.

The rest of the information they had was bare bones, at best.

Mia had called the magazine Twist usually pitched to, and the editor there hadn’t been able to give them anything more than what they already knew. The man was a freelancer, and the place was small enough that they didn’t pay for expenses beforehand. Twist hadn’t even hinted at what he was working on or why he was going out of town.

“He’s pretty secretive,” the editor had told Mia. “Paranoid someone’s going to scoop him.”

But there was secretive, and then there was their vic.

Twist didn’t have an emergency contact on file with the company, and a search for a family member or friend turned up zilch. In fact, the man’s digital footprint was almost nonexistent, save for a website with a simple listing of his articles. None of the outlets he worked with even had a picture of the guy. The best they’d been able to find was a years-old pixelated snapshot. For what it was worth in the modern world, they might as well have been hunting a ghost.