The fog arrived first.
Thick, white, and rolling in from the sea, it swallowed Greyharbor's coastline before the sun even had a chance to rise. Detective Mara Ellison stood at the edge of the rocky shore, boots planted in wet sand as the lighthouse beam swept across her face in slow, heavy arcs.
"Victim's over here," called Officer Ray Delgado, his voice muffled by the fog.
Mara approached the body with the calm professionalism she'd learned to wear like armor. The girl couldn't have been more than twenty. Her hair, dark and tangled with seaweed, fanned out around her head like a drowned halo. But it wasn't the drowning that made Mara's breath hitch.
It was the pose.
Arms crossed neatly over the chest. Head tilted toward the lighthouse. Shoes removed and placed side by side beside her. Exactly like—
"Detective…" Delgado held out a plastic evidence bag.
Inside was a torn book page, soggy at the edges.
Mara recognized the text instantly.
A line from Caleb Stone's The Widow's Drowning.
"This can't be real," she whispered.
"It gets stranger," Delgado said. "Witness says she saw someone standing up by the lighthouse railing an hour before the body was found. Tall. Wearing a dark coat."
Mara looked up at the lighthouse. Its white tower rose into the fog like a ghostly pillar, the railing barely visible.
She exhaled slowly.
"Get Caleb Stone brought in," she said.
Delgado blinked. "The writer? Why?"
"Because," Mara said, standing and brushing sand from her gloves, "this crime scene is an exact reenactment of a murder he invented. Down to the page number."
She stared at the lighthouse one last time.
"And if someone is rewriting his work in real life… we're nowhere near the final chapter."