loosen up, I wouldn’t feel quite so put off. She led me through the front door; the two rooms on the left-hand side of the hall were devoted to office space. The central hall held a small ticket area and a display of postcards and books on local history for sale; the rest of the rooms on this floor and the second were open to the public. The addition held an education space downstairs and a hall/auditorium upstairs. The education room was set up like a kitchen for demonstrations in colonial cookery and dyeing and other household activities, complete with period utensils like a mortar and pestle, earthenware bowls of various sizes, and big wooden spoons. There were herbs hanging from the rafters, and a string of dusty dried apple slices over a working fireplace, thankfully unlit during the summer. Fee Prowse led me into the central hall, and up the front staircase.

Fee was a tall, big-boned woman with old-fashioned posture that spoke of determination or at least a capacity for endurance. She had a round face with cheeks going a little soft and sagging and her mouth was hard but not quite pursed, her jaw always set behind her smiles. Her hair was a carefully molded bunch of short, dark mahogany curls that in the back brushed her collar; maybe her hair had been close to that color in her youth—darker red than mine now—but at this moment, the gray in her eyebrows seemed much more authentic and I reckoned that both the curls and the color had come out of a box. She was the kind of woman who never lost an argument, at least not in her own mind. All of the dresses I’d ever seen her in were below the knee, short-sleeved, sensible professional prints. Low heels, because a lady didn’t wear anything else to work, but not too high, because that would give people the wrong idea and besides, they were so bad for your feet. Practical and thrifty and singleminded, Fee had good qualities for someone in charge of the account books.

She gestured to a chair outside the meeting room. “If you just have a seat here, we should be ready in just a minute.”

“Thanks.”

I sat outside the room, which had been converted from the big upstairs room in the addition, and pushed my seat back so that it was leaning against the wall on two feet, evidence that I really was in a bad-girl mood. The door didn’t catch closed all the way, and I could hear the conversation as clearly as if I’d been in the room myself. Always good to get a feel for what was going on, I rationalized.

“—the police haven’t been able to do much. Though, honestly, what are they supposed to do?” I recognized that voice: It was Aden Fiske, who was the head of the Stone Harbor Historical Society and manager of the Chandler House site. “They can’t exactly do anything with a brick and a pile of rocks, or analyze the handwriting from a spray-painted wall.”

“The question isn’t what they can do now, the question is, where were they at the time the vandalism took place?” a cross-sounding man’s voice groused. I thought it might be Bradley Chandler, who was the manager of the Historical Society’s other property across town, the Tapley House. “As homeowners, we pay a lot of tax money and then this—”

I’d heard about the vandalism but didn’t know any of the details; I’d have to ask my husband, Brian, if he’d seen anything in the paper when I got home. There certainly seemed to be something about the historical district in Stone Harbor lately, I thought, and it wasn’t doing anything to dispel the notion of a place under siege.

“Now, Bray, I understand your frustration, but they can’t be everywhere at once. They got there as soon as the neighbors called.” That voice was a younger man’s, quite arresting.

“And I suppose we should be grateful that anyone bothered to call in, the way things are going now. I thought that Perry was supposed to—” That was Bradley Chandler again, grousing.

“She is very late, isn’t she, Bray?” said Aden Fiske. “Has anyone tried her house?”

Fee spoke up then. “There was no answer. I think that we should just continue on so we can all get home.”

“All right then, if you would call in our guest, then.”

That was my signal to stop eavesdropping and straighten out my chair as quietly as I could. By