No one calls the Cliffside Inn in February. When the phone rings on a wet afternoon, Anya Bell writes the booking into the paper ledger the way she's written a thousand others: Room 14, August 17 through 20, three nights, Edward Marsh. Cash. No phone number.

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He said her name back to her. That's the part that wakes her up at night.

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Six months later, he checks in, carrying one duffel bag. Two days after that, housekeeping finds him dead in the same bed where Anya brought him ice, and there is no wallet, no identification, and no Edward Marsh anywhere on earth.

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Detective Margaret Voss has been in Longfellow Point long enough to know the town and not long enough to be from it. What she has is a body, a room with a view of the cliffs, a deputy who checked a pulse without gloves, and the slow certainty that the man in Room 14 spent six months arranging the scene of his own murder.