The Ferryman’s Ledger
The island ferry keeps a paper log of every passenger. One page is missing.
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Every crossing to Hatch Island is written by hand in the ferryman’s ledger: name, time, vehicle, weather. When a summer resident vanishes after Labor Day, the page for that afternoon has been razored out. Nora Tibbetts takes the ferry over to ask questions an island of two hundred people does not want to answer. The second Cape Ellis mystery.
Earl Haskell had kept the ledger for the Hatch Island ferry since 1988, one line per passenger, in blue ballpoint. He showed it to Nora on the bench in the wheelhouse, open to the middle, where a single page had been cut out so cleanly she could barely see the edge. “September third,” Earl said. “The afternoon run. That’s the day the Whitcomb woman went over and didn’t come back.” He had not noticed the page was missing until the sheriff called. He kept the ledger in the wheelhouse. Anybody coul
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J. R. Caldwell
For twenty years I investigated insurance claims up and down the coast of Maine: boat fires, warehouse floods, one very suspicious lobster pound. Most people told me the truth. The ones who did not taught me how a story falls apart when you pull the right thread. My Cape Ellis books follow Nora Tibbetts, a harbormaster who keeps finding things the tide was supposed to take. I write early in the morning before the ferries start, in a kitchen that looks out on Casco Bay. I have a wife, two grown kids and a dory I keep meaning to paint.
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