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gets home, I’ll talk to him about your request. I’m sure he won’t mind passing it along to Linc. The lobstermen can use a positive story in the press. The paper covers our dirty laundry fast enough.”
    I thought about what Mary had told me as I rode my bicycle home. The lobstermen were a community within a community. They were like a closed club, with their own rules and punishments for those who broke them. But they were quick to take care of their own when someone needed help. And they prided themselves on contributing to the wider community as well. Cabot Cove was counting on that. The lobstermen were represented on every charitable and civic organization in town. I hoped their goodwill would prevail when it came to the lobster festival. We would be sunk without them.

Chapter Three
    “It was the days of Prohibition, see. And the rumrunners’ud bring down the whiskey from Canada and drop anchor just beyond the three-mile limit.”
    Spencer Durkee sat on a folding metal chair outside Nudd’s Bait & Tackle, his fishing cap pushed up high on his forehead and his gnarled fingers working to loosen a knot in a length of twine. A half dozen children lingered nearby, the braver ones crowding close, the more timid hanging back. But all eyes, and certainly all ears, were focused on the old man, who entertained the youngsters while their fathers milled about inside Nudd’s, waiting for the meeting to start.
    Seth Hazlitt had given me a lift into town. He was on his way to the hospital; one of his patients had stepped on the blade of a hoe, opening a sizable gash in her head when the handle rose up to smite her. Seth had dropped me at the dock, extracting a promise that I would call him if I couldn’t find a ride home from among the fishermen attending the meeting. I’d walked down to Nudd’s to find Spencer regaling the youngsters with stories of the days of rumrunners off the Maine coast.
    “Why’d they call them ‘rumrunners’ if they was carrying whiskey? Why wasn’t it ‘whiskey runners’?” The speaker was Levi and Mary’s daughter Anna, her dark, curly hair shoved under a Red Sox cap with the peak turned to the back. Attired in a green T-shirt and faded overalls with one shoulder strap hanging loose, she bounced on the toes of her untied sneakers, the laces gray and spotted from having been dragged along the ground.
    “You know the answer to that, girl.”
    “I don’t remember.”
    Spencer leaned forward and lowered his voice to just above a whisper, drawing the children closer. “The smugglers started out in the Caribbean, see. That’s where they make rum. They’d sail north along the coast from Florida all the way up heah, sellin’ crates of rum. When the cargo bay was empty, they’d take a run up to Saint John’s, pick up a supply of Canadian whiskey, an’ sell it on the way back south.”
    “But they still could’ve been called ‘whiskey runners.’ ”
    Spencer frowned at Anna. “Mebbe. But ‘rumrunner’ had a nice ring to it, so it stuck,” he said.
    “Why’d they anchor so far out?” asked a boy of about ten who had kept his distance from the storyteller.
    “Well, see, that was so the coast guard couldn’t come fer them. At that time, if you went beyond three miles from shore, you’da been in international waters. Later they made it twelve miles, but the distance didn’t stop the rum-runnin’. The guard only had jurisdiction in U.S. territory, and they had a lot of water to cover.”
    “But they knew the rumrunners were there, didn’t they?” asked Anna.
    “Sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t,” Spencer said, freeing the knot, rolling the twine into a ball, and tucking it in his shirt pocket. “But even when they did, they had a hard time catching the little boats that went out to pick up the bottles.”
    “Why?”
    “Why? Well, because a good many of them were lobstermen, and lobstermen are the cleverest breed of fishermen there are.”
    Anna grinned at