Free Repair to Her Grave by Sarah Graves

house was well stocked with emergency storm supplies; after all, this was downeast Maine, where a three-day blow is referred to by the natives as “a little weather.” But candles in the bedrooms were forbidden as fire hazards and reading by oil lamp has never been a habit of mine, since the lamp wicks must be trimmed with near-microscopic precison or they stink.
    And since Raines was tired, he said, from traveling, and Sam was planning to go out early the next morning, by ten o’clock I thought everybody in the house was asleep.
    Except for me. I just lay there with my eyes open, half of me cursing Jonathan Raines for disrupting my summer and the other half still wondering curiously what the heck he was up to. Even with Monday taking up most of it, the big bed felt empty, as it always did with Wade still out on the water. I wished he would get home early, but I knew he was still several hours from shore, on a boat in the dark.
    Somewhere out there a man's body was floating, too: a man whose whole story I felt certain we hadn’t heard yet. The Coast Guard search for the fallen stranger would start again in the morning, but as Sam said, strong tides and currents could have taken the body anywhere, as they took everything that floated, sooner or later.
    Around midnight the phone rang shrilly and I jumped, but it was only Ellie. “You all right?”
    “Fine,” I said. “You?”
    “Okay. Working on the quilt. The stitching is in two colors, red and blue, so you can’t see the pattern until all the quilting is finished. But it's going to be great when it's done.”
    I waited, imagining her with the quilting frame in her lap, her hands moving patiently.
    “George went out again,” she said.
    “That fire at Pirate's Cove?”
    “Uh-huh. It was arson. He just didn’t want to say so at the table.”
    “Oh,” I said, understanding immediately. Not too many topics could make George Valentine lose his temper. Arson, though …
    “So the guys are taking turns on night patrol in Eastport, and over on the mainland, too,” she said resignedly. “They are carrying,” she added, “guns.”
    Which anywhere else might have seemed like an over-reaction, but on the rural mainland, especially, night patrol could be scary duty. The midnights there were unbroken by streetlights, so dark and deep that even familiar places felt like another country. And many of the inhabited structures were miles off-road, so it was essential not to let an arsonist's habit get established.
    “George says the gun rack in his truck's not a decoration,” Ellie said, and I could see it: George's face wearing the closed, purposeful look Eastport men's faces get when they mean business.
    “He’ll be all right,” I said, thinking of Wade. When he was home he had a small business appraising and repairing firearms out of a workshop in the ell of my house.
    “I know,” she replied quickly. George was nearly as handy with a shotgun or rifle as Wade was. “It's silly, isn’t it? How we worry about them.”
    I agreed that was true, and after a while we hung up, knowing it wasn’t. Because out there in the dark, on the back roads or on the water, anything could happen.
    Anything at all: a few months earlier, three men had gone out fishing like they always did. Solid, experienced men, and the boat was fine, too. But without any warning an aft compartment filled with water: gone fishing. That time, one of the men came back and two didn’t.
    So one way and another I didn’t feel the least bit sleepy. Still, I must have dozed, because several hours later when I came downstairs, flashlight in hand, to go down to the breakwater and meet Wade when he arrived home on the tugboat, I found that the hole in the dining room wall had been vastly enlarged.
    A hammer lay on the hardwood floor beneath it. Another flashlight lay there, too, still switched on, its battery dying and its bulb emitting a weak yellow glow. Pried chunks of plaster littered the floor around