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crissake.”
    â€œYeah.” Scooter found a sudden interest in the Range Rover’s instrument panel. I inspected my steering wheel, wishing I had stuck a little closer to Reg during what was by all accounts a particularly sad and destructive divorce.
    Scooter said, “We asked him to dinner last month. He cancelled last minute.”
    I said, “Yeah, we had coffee a couple weeks ago.” Actually, more like a month.
    Back in Newbury I found Vicky at the Drover, sitting with a sullen crowd watching the Red Sox get pounded by the last-place Milwaukee Brewers. I ordered a Bloody Mary and hid in a booth. Vicky hurried over. I told her the little I knew.
    â€œOh, Ben. I’m sorry. He was a sweet guy…” There was nothing more she could say. She hadn’t grown up in Newbury, so the connection wasn’t deep. In fact, she and Reg had gone head to head on land-use battles. Battles Vicky had won.
    We sat silently awhile. Vicky worried her lip. I said, “Relax. It’s a damned shame. But it’s got nothing to do with the election.” I patted her hand and made the kind of joke you can only make with friends: “Reg wouldn’t have voted for you anyhow.”
    And there it would have ended, for me at least, if Janey Hopkins hadn’t showed up at my office the day after the funeral.

Chapter 3
    Abbotts from Stratford cut the first deal with the Indians in this neck of the woods and bought what is now the central borough of Newbury for a dozen broadcloth coats, some ruffled shirts, seven guns, and forty pounds of lead. We were farmers and merchants and ministers.
    Aunt Connie’s branch of the family were more adventurous: Led by the piratical Constantine Abbott, they flourished in the China trade and plowed their profits into canals, whaleships, and railroads; but my people stuck close to Newbury.
    Around 1900 Great-grandfather Benjamin—a minister with doubts—observed the farmers fleeing to the cities at the same time that wealthy city people were seeking bucolic retreats. He opened a real estate agency. His son led the town to write zoning regulations and his son, my father, got himself elected first selectman to enforce them. They never got rich out of it, but their legacy was Newbury’s pristine Main Street, a historic medley of Colonial houses and Federal mansions, unblemished by Seven-Elevens, gas stations, or McDonalds.
    Hidden down Church Hill are the Grand Union, a liquor store, biker bar, and similar amenities. But on Main Street the only visible commerce is the Newbury Savings Bank, where a flash advertising concept is a fresh coat of white paint; the Newbury General Store, so quaint that last year when I had it on the market I had to discourage a guy who wanted to truck it to Florida; the Yankee Drover, a white clapboard inn as respectable looking as the churches with which it shares the flagpole corner; and, of course, my “Benjamin Abbott Realty” shingle, and a few of my competitors.
    The morning after Reg’s funeral, Janey drove past all of them and knocked on my door.
    â€œI have to talk to you about Reg.”
    â€œI’m real sorry, Janey.” I offered her a chair beside my desk and whisked the current issue of the weekly Clarion off the coffee table. As Scooter MacKay couldn’t very well publish the rumors that Fisks and friends were screwing each other’s brains out Saturday night, Reg’s death was page one in the Clarion , if not in the General Store.
    Photos of the covered bridge, Reg’s Blazer, the Newbury ambulance working morgue duty, and Doctor Steve puttering around the death scene illustrated interviews with Oliver Moody and Sergeant Marian Boyce.
    Scooter had composed a somber editorial, likening the death of a friend to an interrupted dream. The only laugh in the entire paper that week was a murky story about a ginmill brawl up north, where a logger who’d been refused service had chainsawed