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price for it.”
    He looked at her, shaking his head sadly. I knew he was thinking of his son, Josh, and his stepdaughter, Shannon—Kate’s daughter—both Barnham College students.
    Our corpse would have to be one of the older students if she came from the college; she looked closer to twenty-five than twenty. Barnham was a four-year college, so barring the odd exception, the oldest students there were around twenty-three or so.
    “If there were others involved, she probably scared them witless when she went in the water and disappeared,” Wayne added, “and they were too worried to report it. May be drugs or something involved, that would get them into big trouble if they called us. The ME will figure that out. Toxicology will take a few days, but meanwhile I’ll take a picture of her down to Barnham and see if anyone can identify her.”
    “ You will?” Derek was watching as the ambulance crew approached. The ambulance itself was parked at the end of the road; the two paramedics were maneuvering their gurney across the rough planks of the pier.
    Wayne grimaced, hands in the pockets of his tan uniform pants and shoulders hunched against the weather, his curly salt-and-pepper hair beaded with raindrops. “I talked to the coast guard. If there’s a chance she’s from Barnham, they want me to handle it. Even if she’s not, I’m better equipped to deal with her than Reece, given the glut of dead bodies we’ve had since Avery moved to town.”
    “It’s not my fault,” I said. Several of those bodies had been dead before I even got to Waterfield. And I certainly hadn’t had anything to do with killing the others.
    “Of course not,” Wayne agreed. “But you’ve gotten up to some trouble in the past year, Avery.”
    I shrugged, pouting. So what if I had? It still wasn’t my fault. And I’d helped him solve several of those murders, let’s not forget. Putting myself in grave personal danger along the way, too.
    Well, this time there was no danger of that, anyway. I had no idea who the dead girl was, and apart from the fact that we’d found her, she had no connection to us. I had no reason in the world to concern myself in her death. In fact, once the paramedics had taken charge of the body, I intended to wash my hands of the whole thing—I’d make sure Derek gave his hands a good scrubbing, too—and then I intended to get back in the boat and go back to Rowanberry Island and back to work on the house, and I wasn’t going to give the girl or her death a second thought. This time, it had nothing to do with me, and I was happy to keep it that way. It made for a nice change.
    The two paramedics wheeled their gurney up to where we stood, with the corpse at our feet, still covered by the blue tarp. Wayne had blocked off the entire pier, so the paramedics had had to duck under several lengths of yellow crime scene tape strung from post to post down by the road. A very few people were hanging out down there, looking our way, but there were no crowds, per se. Maybe it was simply the unpleasant weather that was keeping most of the crowds at bay. Whatever the reason, I wasn’t about to complain. I’d had my share of notoriety back in September, when news vans had been parked outside our house on Becklea Drive and Tony “the Tiger” Micelli from Portland’s Channel Eight News had been hoping for another case like Chicago’s John Wayne Gacy, with dozens of bodies buried in the yard and crawlspace. He hadn’t gotten his wish, thank God, and the media onslaught had only lasted a couple of days, but I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.
    It took only a few minutes for the paramedics to lift the drowning victim onto the gurney and confer with Wayne about where they were taking her and what they’d be doing once they got there. They were from the nearest fire department, doing chauffeur duty since it would have taken too long for a van to arrive from the medical examiner’s office in Portland, the nearest