Free Mallets Aforethought by Sarah Graves Page A

some fool trouble or another.”
    “Hopley Yeaton,” Ellie informed the rest of us, “was the founder of the Coast Guard. His house,” she added to me, “is older than yours. 1812, I think. That red one across from the gas station. All its windows are broken out now,” she added sadly. “Too bad.”
    Then to Will: “Remember the broken windows on Water Street?”
    Will took the topic up unashamedly. “Yeah. Broken by me. I was headed for juvenile hall after that, till George promised to be responsible for me. Said he’d make sure I didn’t get into any more trouble.”
    He shook his head, recalling it. “Came down to the police station, George did, and swore to it, his right hand in the air. He wasn’t more’n what, thirteen years old? And the amazing thing was, that’s what he did. After that he was like my shadow.”
    There was a silence, all of us thinking about where George was now, until Will spoke up again.
    “Kept me out of fights, George did. He’d beat a guy up just so I didn’t have to, kids knew I had to stay out of trouble, they would do everything to try to make me mad.”
    Which probably accounted for some of the trouble George had been in back then, I thought, and Will confirmed this. “One time he took a kid down the street, smacked him till he blubbered, then stuffed a note in his pocket when he wasn’t lookin’ so his mom’d find it, when he got home. Bully, it said. Big, fat . . .”
    His voice trailed off as something in our faces must have alerted him. I’d told Ellie about the note in Gosling’s pocket and of course Wade knew, too.
    “What’d I say?” Will asked, looking around helplessly.
    “Nothing,” Ellie replied evenly. “It’s nothing, Will. I wish Clarissa would call.”
    We’d have gone down to the jail in Machias and held a sit-in but the roads were still messy, and besides, Will said Clarissa had sent a message for us to sit tight, let her try to find out what the situation was and if she could do anything about it tonight.
    I prayed she could. But the clock over the mantel ticked on relentlessly and no call came. “Does anyone know if the police’ve talked to Jan Jesperson yet?” I asked.
    Will shook his head. “I’m pretty sure she’s out of town. My Aunt Agnes was raising a big fuss the other day, wanting to see her.”
    He sighed. “Not that I like the idea, but she sees so few people. And if I’m there with them I doubt it could do any harm. Jan hasn’t been answering her phone, though, and her car’s gone.”
    Which was interesting. “But you were saying, Ellie, about your uncle,” he turned the conversation back neatly.
    “Right.” With an effort, she gathered herself. I’d never seen her so exhausted-looking, so pale and nearly defeated. But even at Victor’s suggestion she wouldn’t lie down, and none of us wanted to try making her.
    “Uncle Chet enjoyed nice things,” she continued her story. “More than a big house, good furniture and so on, all of which he had. No, he wanted things he couldn’t get just by being a country doctor. Big fish in a small pond, which is what it was here then. Busy still, but the boomtown days were over.”
    The days, she meant, of the early 1800s, when my old house and others as fine were built by men with so much money that they could hire architects and put up virtual palaces, homes as solid and beautifully proportioned as anything in Boston.
    “And,” she added, “he liked his cocktails, too. Chester was a good doctor, but what he was famous for—so famous that even today the old Eastport folks still tell stories about him—was money and parties. So it was no miracle he knew some of the men doing the whiskey-smuggling.”
    She paused, sipped from the cup Will had brought her. “Well, it wouldn’t have been a miracle anyway. Everyone knew everyone in Eastport then, just like they do today. And those men knew other men, the ones running the smuggling, and the word got around, up the chain of