“Okay, let me tell you about it. The summer after I graduated from high school my parents sat me down and told me I was going to spend the summer in Maine with some relatives of hers. This came as a surprise, because my mother’s relatives had stopped speaking to her years before I was born, because she had married my father, who had been disowned by his family, because he was a Communist. He didn’t seem too happy about my spending the summer with a bunch of Stones.”

MALON BARRINGTON WAS, indeed, unhappy. “Why would you want your son to spend ten minutes with those plutocratic sons of bitches, let alone a whole summer?” he asked his wife.

“Because Richard was my brother, and Caleb and Dick Jr. are Stone’s cousins, and he ought to take advantage of the opportunity to get to know them,” Matilda Stone replied. “They have that very nice place on Islesboro, in Penobscot Bay, and it’s a wonderful place to spend a summer.”

“Stone was going to work for me in the shop,” Malon said. Malon was a maker of fine furniture and cabinets.

“You’re going to have to hire somebody when Stone goes to NYU in the fall anyway,” Matilda said, “so it might as well be now as then.”

Malon made a disgruntled noise.

Matilda got down an atlas and found Maine. “Here,” she said, tapping her finger on a large body of water. “This is Penobscot Bay, the largest bay in Maine, and this long, skinny island is Islesboro. The Stones live here, in the village of Dark Harbor. I spent a couple of summers there in their big, drafty old house, which isn’t insulated. It’s one of those rambling summer ‘cottages’ that’s unusable before June or after Labor Day.”

“Sounds swell,” Stone said dryly.

“AND THAT WAS IT,” Stone said to Lance. “I took a train to Bangor, where I was met by a retainer in a 1938 Ford station wagon. We drove to Lincolnville, then took a twenty-minute ferry ride to Islesboro.”

“Dick had a brother named Caleb?”

“Yes. He was two years older than Dick, who was my age, and Caleb was a pain in the ass; he was a bully and a general all-round shit. Dick was a nice guy: smart, good in school, good athlete. All Caleb ever did in school was wrestle, and he liked nothing better than to grab Dick or me and get us in some sort of stranglehold. This went on until the day I kicked him in the balls and broke his nose with an uppercut. His mother almost sent me back to New York. When I left after Labor Day, she made it pretty clear that I wouldn’t be invited back, and I wasn’t.”

“What did you do that summer?” Lance asked.