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four-year term, he had collected more money from the memberships of local businesses than any of his last three predecessors combined. A record for which Mr. Price was very, very proud.
    But amid his successful membership campaign, Mr. Price also had the reputation of determining whether the businesses in town met his own personal criteria of what it meant to be “upstanding.” The word can mean different things to different people, you know, but to Sullen Price, it meant something very specific. What that was, only he knew for certain, and the rest of us could only guess.
    But here’s one thing you should know: The businessmen who had the misfortune of falling short of Mr. Price’s criteria, let’s just say, weren’t businessmen for much longer.
    A few years before, for example, a young man named George Robertson had opened a music shop on Potomac Avenue. It was a small, quaint store, on a single floor, the kind of shop where youcould spend a day browsing sheet music if you could spend an hour. Mr. Robertson, a native of Chicago, had hopes of creating a Tin Pan Alley in town, a place where local musicians and performers could be discovered. After the shop opened for business, Mr. Robertson completed an application to become a member of the Chamber of Commerce, and promptly turned over his membership dues. But upon an interview with Mr. Price, who thought it his business to ask a number of things about Mr. Robertson’s personal life—such things that had nothing at all to do with his music business, by the way—Mr. Price’s opinion started to sour. Like spoiled cream.
    Mr. Robertson endeavored to answer the questions truthfully, but even so, Mr. Price must not have liked what he heard, because two weeks later, his application to become a member of the Chamber of Commerce was denied. Three months after that, Mr. Robertson’s music shop was out of business. Out of business!
    How, you might ask, can one person in town have that much power? Well—Mr. Price might have asked,
How can one person get even
more
power?
In fact, that’s exactly what he did ask. And now that his four-year term as president of the chamber was coming to an end just as the current mayor of Hagerstown, Lloyd Mitchell, announced plans to retire, he had his answer.
    But it wasn’t going to be as easy as all get-out. Because little did he know that George Robertson—yes,
that
George Robertson—would decide to oppose him in the race for mayor.
    Oh, to have seen Mr. Price’s face on that day. What a sight!

7
    AFTER MORE THAN A week without Joan, Frankie was a sight to see as well. She felt her sister’s absence in every room of their apartment. Everywhere she looked there were things that belonged to Joan, proof that she had lived there and was part of Frankie’s life—her skate key, her Patsy doll with eyes that blinked, her jump rope—but no one to claim them as her own or to tell Frankie to be careful when she went to play with them. Joan was there, but she wasn’t. To Frankie, it was like living with just the shadow of her sister.
    And not hearing a word from Joan since she’d left certainly wasn’t helping.
    Frankie missed Joan no more so than in the evenings when they would huddle in front of the Philco radio in the living room and listen to their favorite program. This evening, though, while Elizabeth was reading on the porch and Mother and Daddy were in the kitchen, Grandma Engel joined Frankie just as the set was warming up. Frankie turned the dial until the familiar voice of the announcer crackled through the speakers, advertising Blue Coal.
“Ask for Blue Coal by name,”
he declared.
“It’s the solid fuel for solid comfort.”
    Indeed, solid comfort. It was eighty-nine degrees outside. Comfort would be swimming in an ice pond.
    â€œThe Shadow, a mysterious character who aids those in distress and helps the forces of law and order, is in