Murder With Puffins by Donna Andrews

male, I didn't plan to argue. It was one thing to talk about corpses and autopsies around the dinner table when Dad went off on one of his true-crime tangents and quite another to haul a body out of the briny deep.
    Michael frowned down at the corpse.
    "Michael, I'm--" I stopped myself. He looked up and raised an eyebrow. I couldn't help smiling; I loved the way he did that.
    "Having promised that I wouldn't apologize for anything that went wrong," I said, "I'm trying very hard to think of anything else to say right now."
    He chuckled.
    "I was just thinking what great research material this is for my acting," he said. "I had a part in a TV show once where I had to discover a murder victim. Had a tough time making it authentic, given the fact I'd never even seen a dead body. But since I've met you, I've seen more stiffs than a mafioso in training."
    "Is that a good thing?" I asked.
    "Well, it's useful."
    With that, he bent down and began pulling at Resnick's body. I coiled the rope over my shoulder, replaced the pack on my back, and headed toward the cliff.
    As I reached for the first rock in my climb, I saw a piece of paper fluttering on the ground at my feet. I stooped to pick it up. Force of habit--growing up with Dad, you tended to think the eleventh and twelfth commandments were "Thou shalt not litter" and "I don't care if you didn't put it there; pick it up anyway; it won't kill you to bend over."
    I found myself staring at a familiar piece of paper; the map on which Dad had scoped out the best place on the island to watch the hurricane. It was soggy and some of the ink had smeared, but I recognized Dad's printing instantly. His handwriting achieved a degree of artistic illegibility that made him the envy of less accomplished physicians, but his printing was precise, elegant, more readable than most typefaces--and absolutely distinctive. I'd figured out the real scoop on Santa Claus one year when I realized that the note thanking me for the milk and cookies was in Dad's inimitable printing.
    Oh damn, I thought. If anyone else found this, and figured out it belonged to Dad--and anyone who'd ever seen his printing would figure it out in a heartbeat…
    "Meg?" Michael called.
    "Sorry. I'm going," I said, stuffing the map in my knapsack and reaching again for the cliff.
    "Hang on a second. Do you think we should take this, too?"
    I glanced back. Michael had laid Resnick's body on a flat rock and was pointing down at something floating in the pool. I scrambled back down to see what it was.
    A no trespassing sign, minus its post, bobbed just below the surface.
    "It was under the body," he said.
    "We'd better take it, I suppose," I said. "It could be evidence."
    I tried a couple of times to snag it, using the rope so as not to touch it and leave fingerprints. But in the end, the only way we could manage to reach it without wading into the icy water was for Michael to hold on to my waist while I reached out and grabbed it, and even then both of us got half-soaked by the waves.
    "Definitely time to make tracks," Michael said as I secured the sign to my backpack and he turned back to deal with Resnick.
    Hauling the body up the slope took forever, and then we decided to put Resnick someplace out of the rain, since we'd moved him so far already. We picked him up---I took the feet, which seemed less personal somehow--and lugged him down the path to his house.
    I didn't like the glass and steel monstrosity, but I couldn't help thinking it looked a little forlorn already. The wind had plastered the glass with wet leaves and mud, and the way the windows rattled made me glad I wouldn't be inside the house when the storm really broke.
    We found room in the woodshed, put the body out of the storm, pulled a canvas tarpaulin over it, and stashed the sign in a corner.
    Now that we were out of the rain, we paused for a moment. I took my flashlight out of the knapsack and played it over Resnick's face. In the struggle to get his body up above