Ed Rawls was taking out his trash early the next morning when he heard what, to his ear, sounded like a column of armored vehicles approaching his gate, from the direction of the village. Instinctively, he took cover behind the structure that held his refuse cans, and to his surprise, the column turned out to be vehicles of the building trades. First was a dump truck, apparently empty, followed by a backhoe on a trailer, three large vans, emblazoned with the name of a Camden builder, then the vans of an electrician and a plumber, then a small bus, which seemed to hold about a dozen men. They passed by and disappeared down the road to the point. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said, when the noise had melted away.

—

After breakfast, he and Sally took his boat out and cruised slowly down the bay toward the southern tip of the island. Eventually, the old house came into view. It had the appearance of a beehive, crawling with worker bees. The roof looked good, he thought. Somebody had put a new one on three or four years ago, he remembered. He got out his binoculars and let the boat drift.

The dump truck was being filled with chunks of plaster, but he didn’t see any stacks of drywall waiting, so, he reasoned, they must intend to replaster the interior. To confirm his notion, he saw a plasterer’s truck pull up to the house, a little late to the party.

“Ed,” Sally said, peering through her own binoculars, “if you were doing up this house, how would you go about it?”

“I think,” he said, “just about the same way they’re doing it, if I had the money. I’d rip out the old plaster, then set the plumber replumbing and the electrician rewiring. And when they finished, I’d replaster. The roof’s okay, the floorboards are sturdy, I imagine.”

“How long will they take?”

“How long a house takes is a function of how many warm bodies are working on it. If you’ve got five, it’ll take forever. If you’ve got two dozen, things will move along quickly. They won’t hold still long enough for me to count ’em.”

“Is there anything sinister in the way they’re doing it?”

“Expensive, yes. Sinister, no—unless you’ve got a house down in Camden that needs renovation, and you’re trying to find the people to do it. Looks like the Stone boys have pretty much dried up the local labor pool. They seem to be building the same way Tracey Hotchkiss decorates interiors. At lunchtime folks’ll be talking of nothing else over at the yacht club.”

—

Stone was halfway through his morning when his cell phone rang.

“Good morning,” Lance Cabot said. “I’m in the neighborhood. Could I camp out in your guesthouse for a few days?”

“Of course, Lance. You’re always welcome.”