When my grandmother was napping, Aunt Abigail and Aunt Martha were “showin’ ” the Front Street house to Realtors. “Them two aunts of yours don’t trouble themselves to introduce visitors to the hired help, but I’d know a Realtor in the dark, Adam—them Realtors smell the same as them morticians,” Dottie assured me.

I already knew from Nora that her mother and Aunt Martha were impatient to inherit the Front Street house—they intended to renovate the house for resale while they waited, if Nana didn’t die in a timely fashion, Nora had said. Uncle Martin had already retired, and Uncle Johan would be retiring soon. Those two old downhillers were looking for property up north, in ski country; my conniving aunts were scheming with Realtors on ways to make a killing on the Front Street house. My beer-drinking uncles were innocent of my aunts’ conspiracies to cheat my mom out of her share of the inheritance, but Nora and I knew Nana was deteriorating; Nana would soon require assisted living, beyond Dottie’s care.

The facility for old folks of means in the Exeter area was not in a safe location for the elderly who wandered off, or had otherwise lost their marbles. On the riverbank at a bend of the Squamscott River, the assisted-living facility overlooked the mudflats (at low tide) or the water (when the tide was in). River Bend, as the old folks’ home was unimaginatively called, was bordered by water or mud, and by the town golf course. The location was equally ill advised for a golf course; errant golf balls would be lost in the river, or the golfers would sink to their knees in the mudflats in a doomed effort to retrieve their badly hit balls. The addled patients at River Bend would wander into the water or get stuck in the mud; if the patients who’d lost their marbles roamed the other way, they risked being bonked by golf balls.

The dumb but oft-repeated joke among the Exeter townsfolk who could never afford River Bend was that many of the patients had already gone around the bend, or they soon would be going around it. When the tide was out, it was possible to wade across the Squamscott River, where one of the addled River Bend patients was once found wandering among the black Angus beef cattle, talking to them while they grazed. This had happened when I was at the academy, but it was still the talk of the town. Even my grandmother had heard of it, and somehow remembered it.