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your average battleship. But over the years Harriet Hollingsworth’s house hadn’t gotten any at all.
    “Pressure hose?” Harry Markle tossed the suggestion out and looked around the table for comment. Ellie had kindly invited our new neighbor to dinner, and the conversation had turned to the repairs he meant to do around Harriet’s old place.
    “Uh-uh.” Ellie’s husband, George Valentine, shook his head at the notion of removing paint with a high-powered stream of water. “Soaks the wood.”
    George was a compactly built man in his thirties, with dark hair, the milky-white skin that runs in some old Maine families, and grease-stained knuckles. In Eastport, George was the man to call if your plumbing failed, your lights flickered, or your car began unexpectedly trailing a banner of blue smoke.
    Which reminded me: “George, can I borrow your circuit-alert tester? There’s a ceiling light fixture out upstairs.”
    He rubbed the bluish five o’clock shadow that was always on his jaw. “Dunno. You aren’t going to be climbin’ any ladders with it, are you?”
    He unclipped it from his belt: a dandy device that looked like a pen, but if you got it near a live wire it buzzed and flashed red warning lights at you.
    I tucked it in my sweater pocket, wishing again that the fuses in my old house correlated a bit less whimsically with its actual physical areas. Some wiring was new, some the old knob-and-tube variety, all installed piecemeal over the years after the waning of the gaslight era. The only way to be sure you’d shut off all power in a room was to shut down the whole fuse box, wreaking havoc on the activities of everyone else: Wade in his workshop, Sam at the computer, me with my power tools, and the animals in the TV room watching cartoons.
    But with George’s gadget you could test the wiring itself, avoiding the fuss, bother, and mess of accidental electrocution. “You pressure-hose an old house, you’ll never keep any paint on again,” George added to Harry Markle.
    George’s quick, sharp glance always seemed to be expressing some smoldering resentment, so that despite his diminutive size, George was a fearsome figure until you got to know him. He was getting along with Harry, though.
    “Better use a grinder,” he offered, taking a potato from the platter being sent around. The platter matched the plates and cups Ellie had bought at a yard sale the summer before; in blue and white they depicted stylized scenes of life in China, where a century ago the plates had been loaded on a schooner, ballast for the return voyage to Eastport.
    “Paint’ll crumble off,” George added, “you put friction on it with a paint grinder.”
    “Great,” Wyatt Evert commented sourly. “Put a little more of the old lead paint into the environment, too. Just what we need.”
    George speared himself a piece of baked salmon stuffed with bay leaves, lemon slices, onions, and peppercorns, served with new peas and buttered potatoes sprinkled with parsley. Ellie and Maggie had done themselves proud.
    Seated across from George, Wyatt was a fortyish, balding beanpole of a man with leathered skin, thin liver-colored lips, and a facial expression that suggested he had just bitten into one of those lemon slices. He was the leader of the other group currently visiting Eastport, nature buffs here to see the eagles nesting at the Moosehorn Refuge thirty miles to our north.
    “You had your way,” George said to Wyatt, “folks’d live in mud huts. That is, the folks you decided were fit to go on living at all.”
    I glanced up curiously but Wyatt didn’t react to the odd comment. “People resent the inconvenience I cause,” he sniffed, “when I talk about their environmentally incorrect activities.”
    “Ayuh,” George agreed again. “There’s that, too.”
    This time Wyatt did open his mouth to retort, displaying the biscuit he was chewing. Beside him at the table sat his assistant Fran Hanson, a polished young woman