McMansion Read Free Page B

reporting even more than rapacious developers.”
    â€œShoddy?” Scooter bellowed. “Who are you calling shoddy? You write letters complaining about McMansions, I print them. You write letters grumbling that new rich people are driving middle-class citizens out of town, I print them. You write grouching about gas guzzling SUVs, I print it. Did it ever occur to you to buy an ad?”
    â€œYou should pay me for filling all that space in your newspaper.”
    Scooter yelled that I would be better off if I took change in stride. “You’re too young to be a curmudgeon. Stop mourning youth passing by. Turn your anger into something productive.”
    â€œAnyone with a half a brain should be angry,” I bellowed back.
    â€œLighten up!” Scooter suggested in a voice that echoed to Frenchtown. “The first cave couple lived in the biggest cave they could afford. Soon as they had reason to hope they might nail a mastodon in the near future, they moved to a bigger cave. People like space. You don’t live in a small house. Why should they?”
    The noise attracted the neighbors, led by my Great Aunt Constance Abbott, who emerged briskly from her front gate and crossed Main Street with the aid of a silver-headed cane. Well into her nineties, Aunt Connie was not as tall as she had once been, while a lifetime of abstemious habits had left her with so little appetite that she had grown too thin. But she still had a crown of thick white hair and she stood Miss-Porter’s-School straight as she listened, briefly, to both sides of the argument.
    â€œChange,” Connie pronounced, “is the only constant in our lives.”
    â€œYes, but—” Scooter started to agree and I started to dispute.
    Connie withered us both with a fiery blue-eyed glance. “Everything changes. For instance, believe it or not I can remember as if it were yesterday a much quieter time in Newbury, before Main Street was paved, when next-door neighbors could conduct a civilized conversation without raising their voices.”
    Everyone went home and Scooter, who is an honest man, published my letter.
    To the Editor,
    I’m trying to understand why, in your recent article about the state police investigation of the gunning down of Billy Tiller, the Clarion provides a list of Connecticut state agencies currently investigating the Newbury businessman. I don’t understand what state probes conducted from Hartford have to do with the subject of Newburians getting shot on Main Street.
    Or is the Clarion subtly speculating that the shooters were actually a gang of frustrated investigators for the departments of Revenue Services, Environmental Protection, Consumer Protection, Motor Vehicles, and Labor? Perhaps the Clarion ’s Hartford correspondent spotted them piling into a car and driving down to Newbury to rake the subject of their inquiries with large caliber bullets in the interest of saving taxpayers the expense of a trial?
    Benjamin Abbott III
    Main Street
    Not so enormous caliber, it turned out. Mere twenty-twos. And not even the hollowtips used for shooting woodchucks, though it did tear up enough muscle to leave Billy Tiller with a limp.
    Was the murderer the same person who shot him last year and figured to use a bulldozer this time just to be on the safe side? If so, why had he waited a whole year to try again?
    I took a final look around Newbury Common and snapped some more photos of a self-propelled construction hoist used for lifting plywood and drywall to second floors, and a backhoe beside a utility trench, and the pounded roadbed. I did not harbor CSI fantasies that I would unearth some startling piece of crime-scene evidence the state police investigators had overlooked. But I did want to get some idea of their case, intending to bow out on a helpful note.

Chapter Three
    â€œI don’t want to do this,” I told the ELF kid’s defense attorney, when we met that afternoon at