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antiques-and-crafts fair was being set up: quilts, jellies and jams, and a variety of other homemade items covered the red-and-white-checked cloths.
    “Oh, dear,” Ellie murmured, “the quilt for the crafts fair.”
    In what she laughingly called her spare time, she and the other ladies of the Quilt Guild were completing a sampler quilt; the squares were finished, but the quilting—all hand stitching, in red and blue for the Fourth of July—was Ellie's job, as she has the finest quilting hand in all of Washington County.
    “I’ve got to buckle down,” she instructed herself firmly, at which I managed not to laugh out loud; Ellie is one of the most buckled-down persons on the planet. But I promised to remind her about it, meanwhile continuing to observe the activity across the street.
    Among the workers I spotted Lillian Frey, a tall, rangily constructed woman in her late forties, with wiry, pale blond hair and a deeply tanned face. She had a nail gun in her hand, a big stapler sort of device with the nails in a strip hanging down like ammo in an old-fashioned machine gun, and she was fastening lengths of two-by-four, bam-bant-bam one after the other, bracing the legs of the table in her booth.
    As I watched, a photographer from the local newspaper, the Quoddy Times, showed up; reflexively, Lillian backed away. From this distance the scar on her cheek didn’t show much, but it was common knowledge she didn’t like having her picture taken. When the photographer moved to another booth, she went back to work.
    Beside me, Ellie frowned. “Hey, who's that?” she wanted to know as a car swung into the lot and skidded to a halt.
    In her outfit of pencil-slim jeans and black sweater Lillian looked smashing as usual, like the country antique items she sold as a sideline to her main business: handmade musical instruments. The scar only added a rakish touch, though I was sure she didn’t feel that way about it.
    But her smile of satisfaction at finishing the nail job vanished as a girl slammed from the car Ellie was squinting at. “That's Jill. Lillian's daughter,” I said.
    She was built more like her mother, athletic but long-boned and with finer, more delicately-modeled features. The scowl on her face spoiled her attractiveness, though.
    “Wow,” Ellie said, “she looks tough.”
    “Right,” I sighed. “As usual.”
    Piled in the back of Lillian's station wagon were handsome old things—a banjo clock, a Thomas Moser chair, a wicker plant stand, and some very nice hooked floral rugs—along with several small musical-instrument cases that I supposed held violins: the hand-built instruments that were Lillian's specialty.
    Jill slammed her fist on the wagon's fender as she went by; the women began arguing about something.
    Which didn’t surprise me; the chip on the girl's shoulder was already legendary. “She's been hanging around Sam,” I said.
    I was not best pleased to see her. “She's been in town about a month. I keep hoping she’ll leave again any minute.”
    “She looks old enough to be out on her own,” Ellie appraised the girl, “that's for sure. And plenty older than Sam.”
    “Right,” I agreed sourly. I thought so, too: old enough to be on her own with a job and an apartment, preferably on the other side of the country.
    Or the world, even. The argument reached its peak, Lillian and Jill standing flat-footed, face-to-face. Then the girl turned, stalked to the car, and sped off. Lillian stood looking after her a moment, the nail gun still in her hand, then got into the station wagon and followed, her face grim.
    I had a moment to feel sorry for Lillian and to wonder why she didn’t let things cool off instead of going after Jill while they were both still so angry. But it was none of my business, and we’d started out to clear the way for Jonathan Raines, not snoop into Lillian Frey's obviously unhappy family matters.
    “He's probably gone over to the diner,” Ellie said, meaning Hecky, so