They were golfin’ and jawin’ buddies, all in their mid- to late sixties, who spent their Friday nights playing poker as though it were a religion and could be found most weekday mornings holding court in the corner booth at Duffy’s Main Street Diner. These freewheeling breakfast gatherings, where the latest headlines, rumors, gossip, and sports stories were chewed over like well-cooked bacon, were as addictive as coffee and salt air to Doc, who, despite his retirement, still had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of any kind and liked to keep his finger tight to the pulse of his adopted village.

So it wasn’t surprising he heard the latest shocker before Candy did.

The story had been on the front page of the morning paper, of course, but Doc always took that with him to the diner. Candy only got it around lunchtime, after it had been well pored over and thumbed through, and smartly decorated with coffee rings and swaths of smeared donut icing. And she could have switched on the TV and gotten the story that way, but for the past few days she had been too busy to waste time sitting in front of the tube. Anyway, TV watching was a winter activity around Cape Willington, Maine, where the Downeast summers were short and glorious, and so had to be enjoyed to their fullest. That meant being outside as much as possible, letting the sensual warmth squeeze the chill completely out of one’s bones before winter set in again with its unrelenting timeliness.

Candy wasn’t outside today, though. It was the day before Cape Willington ’s much-anticipated Forty-First Annual Blueberry Festival, and she had been in the kitchen since six thirty that morning, making last-minute preparations. She still had way too much to do, and now here was Doc, distracting her when she had no time for distractions.

He pulled the truck to a stop in a cloud of roiling dust; it had been a wet spring but a dry summer so far, causing them both to worry, what with the crop and all. But the upper atmosphere patterns were changing, according to the weatherman, who promised rain in the next week or so, possibly as early as next Tuesday, which could salvage this season’s harvest. But she guessed Doc wasn’t here to talk about the weather.