Stone picked it up. “Hello?”

“It’s Lance. Put Holly on an extension.”

Stone paged Holly, and she picked up. “Okay, we’re both here.”

“I finally got an answer from Langley about the inquiry Don Brown made right before his death.”

“And?”

“He wanted to know if Caleb Stone’s twin sons, Eben and Enos, had criminal records.”

“Did he say why he wanted to know?”

“No. He just asked that they be checked. He stayed on the phone while they ran the search.”

“What did they come up with?”

“Zip. They checked in both Boston and in New Haven, since the twins are at Yale. They’re clean. Even the campus police didn’t have a bad word to say about them. They’re apparently upright lads.”

“One more dead end, then?”

“Looks that way.”

“Thanks, Lance.”

“Have you heard anything else since you got back?”

“A bunch of people have packed up and left for the summer; a bunch of others have bought guns.”

“Swell.”

“There’s a town meeting at five o’clock, and the state cops are supposed to be there. Maybe they’ll have something new.”

“Good luck,” Lance said, then hung up.

33

STONE WALKED OVER to the yacht club, passing a group of children playing in the parking lot watched over by two women. Nobody was taking any chances.

Inside, people were gathered in little groups, talking quietly but earnestly. Stone shook the hands of a few people he’d met before. He waved at Caleb Stone, sitting at a table with his twin sons. A moment later, Sergeant Young of the state police and another uniformed officer walked into the club, and the commodore rapped on a table with a beer bottle for quiet.

“Good afternoon,” he said. “Sergeant Young from the state police is here and would like to speak to us.” The commodore stepped aside, and Young replaced him.

“Hey, everybody,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of you, but I’d like to introduce my colleague, Corporal Tom Best. Tom and I are going to be living on the island for the rest of the summer, or until there’s an arrest for the crimes that have occurred here. We’ve had a telephone line installed.” He gave them the number, and many people wrote it down. “You can call us anytime, night or day, if you have anything important to report. Make that anything at all, whether it seems important or not; we need all the information we can get.