A bandleader arrives to play a civic hero's funeral and finds another band rehearsing a different procession. When the wrong coffin reaches the cemetery, she must reconstruct who changed the route and why the town preferred its dead man uncomplicated.
In a fictional port in 1875, a marine illustrator discovers a death assigned to an hour the local tide-clock cannot show. A wrongly accused boatman needs her to establish whose version of the harbor everyone has agreed to believe.
