The engine was still running

The skiff came in on the last of the ebb, turning slow circles in the channel with its outboard idling. Nora Tibbetts saw it from the harbormaster’s shack at twenty past five and knew before she reached the float that nobody was aboard.

She tied it off to the town dock and killed the engine. The tank was half full. There was a thermos in the bow, still warm, and a pair of rubber gloves folded on the seat the way a careful man folds them. There was no blood, no damage, no sign of anything at all.

The skiff belonged to Warren Pike, who had fished out of Cape Ellis for forty years and had never once in Nora’s memory left his gloves folded.