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town job where no one expected much to be done. Its tiny stipend was used to supplement the income of some deserving senior who dozed in the cottage for eight hours a day, waiting for visitors who never came. This suited the citizens of Busman’s Harbor fine.
    Then two things arrived in town at once—the recession and Bunnie Getts. The causes of the recession had been thoroughly hashed and rehashed. The causes of Bunnie were unknown, at least to me. Bunnie was like so many generations of folks From Away who arrived in town “to get away from the rat race,” but who nonetheless seemed determined to bring as much of it as they could with them. She decided she wanted the job at the Tourism Bureau and went after it with a vengeance. Somewhere in her late fifties, Bunnie always looked put together, like she could be ready for a yacht club dinner at a moment’s notice. She had a limitless collection of the kind of resort wear—colorful shifts and matching shoes—that might have been purchased yesterday or thirty years ago. She was the kind of woman whose style never changed.
    “There you are!” She pounced as soon as I came through the door. Though her tone was reproachful, I wasn’t late for that first meeting. In fact, I was the only one there. I looked around and had to hand it to Bunnie. The old, dark wood paneling had been painted a gleaming white, there was a clean, attractive beige carpet on the floor and eight new computers sat on eight sleek workstations. “I got some of my friends to donate all this,” Bunnie informed me. “Tourists can come here and use the computers to book harbor tours, make hotel reservations, and so on.”
    I wasn’t sure this was a better method than the old one, which involved whoever was working in this office picking up the phone and yelling, “Myrna, do you have any rooms? Well, do you know if Vee does?” And on down the line until accommodations were found.
    “Busman’s Harbor needs to be on the Web,” Bunnie continued. “We need to be optimized in search engines. We need to harness the power of social media. That will bring the tourists in. That and some exciting new events.”
    She wasn’t wrong. As she spoke, I heard the slamming of car doors in the little parking lot outside and my fellow committee members trooped onto the cottage’s big deck and through the door, stomping snow and highway sand off their boots.
    “Do you all know one another?” Bunnie asked when we were seated in the semi-circle of crippling folding chairs she’d arranged around the comfortable desk chair she’d put out for herself. I nodded yes, playing along. I didn’t know everyone, but in the way of small towns, I knew who everyone was.
    “I think I’m the newbie, then,” she said. “I’m Bunnie Getts and I moved here from Chestnut Hill, outside Boston where I was involved in multiple volunteer efforts for the Boston Symphony, the Museum of Fine Arts, and so on. Busman’s Harbor was quite a change for me,” she added in case we didn’t get it.
    Of course, we got it. We’d seen the same movie hundreds of times, as anyone who lived full-time in a resort town had. Bunnie was rich. She didn’t really need to work, but she was bored. She needed a project, and we, God help us, were to be her accomplices.
    “I prefer Bunnie. My real name is Minerva, but I don’t use it. For obvious reasons.”
    “Okay, Nervie. Whatever you say,” Bud Barbour piped up.
    “And we’re off,” Dan Small muttered under his breath. He owned the town’s ice cream parlor and ran it with his beautiful wife and their four stunning teenage daughters. I couldn’t tell the leggy blond daughters apart, so they existed in my consciousness collectively as “The Smalls.” Dan was good-looking, too. Lean and sandy-haired.
    Bud’s dog, Morgan, a sleek black lab just past puppyhood, lay curled at his feet. You never saw Bud without Morgan or Morgan without Bud. She always wore a red bandanna around her neck and was