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forty-eight hundred jobs in March of that year alone, which contributed to making Maine the nation’s leader in lost jobs. They’d both read about the arguments between the Maine Department of Labor and the Maine Center for Economic Policy, the latter basing its figures on higher Bureau of Labor Statistics job loss figures that the former refuted. As far as the Dixons were concerned, that was just the state’s Department of Labor trying to sweep the mess under the carpet. It was like telling a man that his feet are dry when he can feel the water lapping at his chin.
    Now Harry’s company was little more than a one-man operation, with Harry quoting for small jobs that he could complete with cheap labor, and bringing in skilled contractors by the hour as he needed them. They could still pay their mortgage, just about, but they’d cut back on a lot of luxuries, and they did more and more of their buying outside Prosperous.
    Erin’s half sister, Dianne, and her surgeon husband had helped them out with a small lump sum. They were both hospital consultants, and were doing okay. They could afford to lend a hand, but it had hurt the couple’s pride to approach them for a loan—a loan, what’s more, that was unlikely to be repaid anytime soon.
    They had also tapped the town’s discretionary fund, which was used to support townsfolk who found themselves in temporary financial trouble. Ben Pearson, who was regarded as one of the board’s more approachable members, had taken care of the details, and the money—just over two thousand dollars—had helped the Dixons out a little, but Ben had made it clear that it would have to be paid back, in cash or in kind. If it wasn’t, the board would start delving more deeplyinto their situation, and if the board started snooping it might well find out about Dianne. That was why the Dixons had agreed, however reluctantly, to keep the girl. It would serve as repayment of the loan, and keep their relationship with Dianne a secret.
    Erin had only discovered her half sister’s existence some three years earlier. Erin’s father had left Prosperous when she was little more than an infant, and her mother had subsequently remarried—to a cousin of Thomas Souleby’s, as it happened. Her father hadn’t been heard from again, and then, at the end of 2009, Dianne had somehow tracked Erin down, and a tentative if genuine affection had sprung up between them. It seemed that their father had created a whole new identity for himself after he left Prosperous, and he never mentioned the town to his new wife or to their child. It was only following his death, and the death of her mother, that Dianne had come across documents among her father’s possessions that explained the truth about his background. By then she was on her second marriage—to a man who, coincidentally or through the actions of fate, lived in the same state that had spawned her father, and not too far from the town and the life that he had fled.
    Erin had professed complete ignorance of the reasons that their father might have gone to such lengths to hide his identity, but when Dianne persisted she hinted at some affair with a woman from Lewiston, and her father’s fear of retribution from his wife’s family. None of it was true, of course—well, none of the stuff about the affair. Her father’s fear of retribution was another matter. Nevertheless, she made it clear to Dianne that it would be for the best if she kept her distance from Prosperous and didn’t go delving into the past of their shared father.
    “Old towns have long memories,” Erin told Dianne. “They don’t forget slights.”
    And Dianne, though bemused, had consented to leaving Prosperous to its own business, aided in part by her half sister’s willingness to share with her what she knew of their father’s past, even if, unbeknownst to Dianne, Erin had carefully purged all the information she offered of any but the most innocuous details.
    So Erin and