Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves

investigation, or even that there would necessarily be one, considering the fact that the wiring in the old place was probably ancient.
    Wade surveyed the remnants of our meal. “That Will Bonnet’s quite a chef.”
    “I guess.” The remains of a brilliantly seasoned fish dinner were ready to be removed to the kitchen; Will had delivered it for no reason other than that he’d felt like cooking and thought we would like it. Unfortunately I’d run into some bones.
    “Never know,” Wade commented, “maybe he could make a restaurant go, here.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “The numbers are iffy.”
    It was the thing I’d never been able to get through to my clients: maybe they
could
run a restaurant but without customers, so what? Summer people flooded into Eastport but on Labor Day, they flooded right back out again. As a result we barely had the year-round population to support the eateries we had, never mind diluting the mixture with any more.
    Still, Eastport had put stars in the eyes of harder-headed men than Will Bonnet, and I had worse things to worry about than him pouring money into a nonstarter.
    Upstairs a blare of guitar music exploded from Sam’s room, got turned down hastily. Sam and Tommy had gone up there so Tommy could guide Sam deeper into the mysteries of the quadratic equation, Sam looking anxious as if he feared he might never emerge.
    “Wade,” I asked, “couldn’t you try talking to Tommy? Get him to consider maybe just getting his feet wet in college?”
    Wade looked regretful. “That’s something he’ll have to work out himself. For one thing, his mom needs the money he’s earning. And as long as George is doing okay without extra schooling . . .”
    “Right,” I said, discouraged. I’d never seen anyone idolize anyone the way Tommy did George.
    Except maybe me, in the old days when I was hanging out with Jemmy Wechsler. But this thought I pushed determinedly away.
    “You heard Tommy’s latest plan?” Wade asked.
    “The alpacas?” I began picking up plates and silverware.
    “Nope. That lasted twenty minutes.” Wade started on the wine- glasses and napkins. “Now he thinks he might go north, days off, pan for gold. He heard what gold is worth an ounce nowadays.”
    “Somebody should tell him how much per hour,” I replied. “Of hard labor . . . what is it, maybe a couple dollars a day?”
    We’d done it once for a lark. If you can call freezing your tail off, getting wet and muddy and coming up with a teensy speck of gold dust anything like a lark.
    “I wonder if George could,” I persisted. “Talk with him.”
    “And say what?” Wade dropped napkins in the washing machine. “ ‘Go to school so you won’t be a loser like me’?”
    I turned, my hands still full of silverware. “George is no loser, we all know that. But Wade, he’s not like you, either, he doesn’t have a . . .”
    Wade hadn’t gone to college, but folks paid very well to get their antique guns restored. And in Eastport if you made a living on only two jobs, you were doing just fine.
    “. . . special skill,” I went on. “He just cobbles it together, makes it work, but it’s so hard. And now with the baby coming . . .”
    “Yeah,” Wade relented. He knew as well as I did how worried George had been lately, even though George would rather stick his hand in a fire than discuss it.
    “George has already been asked to account for himself,” Wade said.
    “Really? By the police? And what happened?”
    Nothing good, if Wade had been procrastinating about telling me. “Everyone else they asked cooperated or promised to, soon’s they could get time, sit down and place themselves.”
    Because of the storm, I translated, and the hundred and one things they had to do to protect their livelihoods from it. But once the boats, engines and lines, bilge pumps and nets, lobster traps and dragging gear were all safe and accounted for, people who’d had run-ins with Hector would put some time aside, relate