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mentally rolling their eyes. “You saw Cabe Stone kill someone and put the body in the clambake fire?” Binder’s voice was forceful.
    “Well, no. I didn’t see that, exactly.” Bunnie backed down. “But I saw him run away. Why would he run if he wasn’t guilty?”
    Binder gathered their paper plates and plastic utensils. “Mrs. Getts, running away isn’t a crime per se.”
    Which is a good thing, I thought as I watched Binder and Flynn fast walk out of the tent, because running away is exactly what they are doing.

Chapter 7
    I walked away from the tent thinking about Stevie Noyes. I’d met him the same day I’d met the rest of the Founder’s Weekend committee. It was all Livvie’s fault.
    I’d moved back to Busman’s Harbor to run the Snowden Family Clambake in early March. In a terrible economy, my mother and brother-in-law had taken out an unwise loan and we stood to lose it all—our island, the business, and my mother’s house in town. I’d given up my life in Manhattan and my work in venture capital for one summer season in an attempt to turn the business around.
    When I’d been back in town a little less than a month, Livvie decided I needed to get out more. It was true. Living with my mother and working with my brother-in-law had been claustrophobic, to put it mildly, but I hadn’t thought a town committee was the kind of diversion I needed.
    March
     
    “Livvie, I don’t have time.”
    “You do. Dad ran the business for twenty-five years and he was always active on town committees.”
    “I’m not Dad.” How often, as I struggled to map a plan forward for the business, had I been aware of that?
    “Julia, you need to get out of this house. You need to see people other than Sonny and Mom. You need to talk to people other than seafood vendors and bank loan officers. It isn’t healthy.”
    I knew in my heart she was right. After eighth grade, I’d gone away for school and kept going. I had no group of old friends in town to fall back on. But still I resisted. “I’m not a joiner. You’re like Dad, the life of the party. I’m like Mom. I don’t fit in here.”
    Livvie looked me up and down. “You are ridiculous.”
    My parents always presented the story of their romance and marriage as a great love story, and it was. But my mother had paid a steep price. She’d never fit in. My outgoing father had his sisters and brother, his friends around town and the employees at the clambake. My mother had always been From Away. She’d lived apart, outside the circle.
    As a result, I’ve always felt a little apart, too. Neither a true townie, nor a summer person, I didn’t fit in anywhere. I went to elementary school and junior high in the harbor, but I always knew I’d go away for high school. And summers, when the other kids were at Y camp so their parents could work the long tourist hours, I lived on Morrow Island. It wasn’t a financial thing. During my childhood there was good money to be made from lobstering, fishing, and construction. I was separated by a mother From Away and my parents’ expectations for me.
    Livvie had no such qualms. She fought my parents until they allowed her to attend Busman’s Harbor High, married a lobsterman’s son at eighteen, had Page shortly afterward, and never left town. I envied how sure of herself Livvie felt, but I wasn’t certain I envied her life.
    Despite my protests, Livvie signed me up. When Bunnie Getts called, effusive in her thanks for joining the committee, I didn’t clear up the confusion. I jotted down the date and time for the first meeting, and went.
    The Tourism Bureau office was a one-room cottage up the peninsula at the town line, built at the dawn of the automobile age as a place for motorists to stop and get recommendations for lodging and food. In the last decade, thanks to the World Wide Web and GPS, the little cottage had fallen into a deep slumber, like the palace in Sleeping Beauty . Running the Tourism Bureau office became the