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do you?”
    “What are we going to do about the teenagers drinking on our beach at night?” an elderly woman interjected, getting down to business. “It’s disgusting what you find when you go down there in the mornings.”
    “Condoms?” Franny asked, looking up at the ceiling.
    “Same thing we’re going to do about the beach vehicles that are causing all the disturbance to the beach grass. Write a letter to the town supervisor and the trustees asking them to restrict beach vehicle access. And we’re going to ask for a ban on Jet Skis in the bay. I’ve got a draft right here if anyone wants to read it.”
    Louis waved it in the air. Nobody took it from him.
    “What’s the point? They’ll say the same thing they always do,”
    said Abe. “The fishermen need to be able to launch their boats from there and if someone has a heart attack, or gets eaten by a shark, they need to be able to drive the ambulance along the sand.”
    “And they’ll be right,” said Franny. “So there are people launching Jet Skis and racing SUVs and disturbing your peace.
    That’s the price you pay for turning Stone Landing into a vacation

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    spot. It wasn’t like this when my dad was growing up. Now it’s a weekender’s paradise. I know, I get to watch their homes all winter. Seventy-five percent of the homeowners are from the city.
    They’re the ones who bring the SUVs and the Jet Skis.”
    “And they’re the ones who’ll keep you in work,” said Abe sharply as Franny towered over him in such a rage that for one second I thought she was going to strike him, but then she wandered back to the cash register.
    “Oh God,” whispered Rufus, “when will Franny learn not to bite the hand that feeds her.”
    “Lou, I think you’ll have a hard time getting us to vote her in,”
    I heard Abe say. “She’s not one of us, now is she?”
    I wanted to tell him to keep his voice down but too late—
    Franny had turned on her heel and was marching back.
    “What do you mean, not one of you? I’ve never heard such a crock. I’m a Stone Landing resident, I pay my taxes. I’m—”
    A cell phone started ringing. Everyone fumbled in their pockets until I suddenly realized the sound was coming from Rufus who was standing right beside me. He turned away and began to walk out of the store, his phone clamped to his ear. Franny had abandoned her tirade to go back to the cash register yet again and I followed Rufus, worried he would leave without me. But we almost collided as he came back in again, the screen door banging behind him.
    “They’ve found another one,” he yelled. “Another body. A woman and they found her on his property.”
    “Whose property?” Franny leaned across the counter.
    “Shotgun Marriott’s,” said Rufus and my blood ran cold. “First his son is washed up on the beach and now there’s a woman lying facedown in his woods and they’re saying someone shot her in the back with a bow and arrow.”

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    SHOTGUN MARRIOTT HAD ONCE BEEN HUGE!
    You couldn’t write him off as just another aging British rocker. He’d been a superior bluesman in his time and a leg-endary womanizer.What’s more, they were classy women, by all accounts. A Shakespearean actress, a lawyer, a prize-winning photojournalist who spent more time in war zones than with him.
    I’d always wondered whether they actually called him Shotgun in moments of intimacy. Of course there were plenty of scrubbers crawling all over him in nightclubs and his band, the Suits, were rumored to have trashed hotel rooms the world over but even so, Shotgun Marriott had always had more style than your average rock ’n’ roll artist.
    It was a woman who had brought him down, ended his career and dispatched him to oblivion where he’d been for almost fifteen years. A groupie, found dead in his bed after a concert. He wasn’t charged with anything, but he had never revealed what had happened that night. It had become