The world, my dear Mary, is full of deceit
And friendships a jewell we seldome can meet
How strange does it seem that in searching around
The source of content is so rare to be found.

— Poem stitched by thirteen-year-old Lucy Ripley, Hartford, Connecticut, 1802

The simple folded leather packet looked old. Old, cracked, and very out of place, as it lay innocently on the bright red Fourth of July tablecloth. A mystery from the past had interrupted my first Haven Harbor dinner party.

Before I'd seen that packet and its contents I'd been feeling high on more than the Pouilly-FuissÃ(c) recommended by the owner of Haven Harbor's local wine and gourmet treats store. (Buying beer? No problem. Wine? That's a whole different world.)

I'd gotten up the courage to invite Sarah Byrne, Dave Percy, and Ruth Hopkins, the three other Mainely Needlepointers who were going to be alone on the holiday, to join me to celebrate the official start of the tourist season, and my first Maine Fourth of July in ten years. (Ob Winslow and Katie Titicomb were celebrating with family.) I figured all three of my guests would be understanding if my salmon was a little dry or my peas undercooked.

But until the packet arrived, everything had been perfect.

I'd pulled it off. My guests had made appropriate compliments and serious dents in the baked salmon, fresh green peas, and hot potato salad that made up my close-to-traditional New England Fourth of July menu. And I'd only had to interrupt Gram's Quebec honeymoon twice to ask for cooking advice and counsel.

As I looked around the table I couldn't help smiling. Two months ago I hadn't known these people. Today I counted them friends as well as colleagues.

Gram had brought us together. She'd gathered an eclectic and talented group of Mainers to do custom needlepoint for her business, and as the new director of Mainely Needlepoint I was reaping the benefits of her choices. Not only could everyone in the business do needlepoint, but they'd all brought their own personalities and talents to their work.

Anyone meeting us for the first time would never guess that middle- aged Dave, navy retiree and now high school biology teacher, also had an extensive garden of poisonous plants. Or that Sarah, whose pink-and- blue-striped white hair and Aussie accent made her noticeable in a small Maine town, was also a member of the staid Maine Antiques Dealers Association. Or that Ruth Hopkins, a sweet little old lady whose arthritis forced her to depend on her pink wheeling walker, wrote erotica.

And me, Angie Curtis. The most ordinary of the lot. As long as you understood that "ordinary" included ten years working for a private investigator in Arizona. I knew how to use the gun I now kept hidden under Gram's winter gloves and scarves in the front hall. I was also the youngest of the group — twenty-seven — a born Mainer, and a native of Haven Harbor. Most unusual in this crowd, I was just beginning to learn needlepoint.

I was also learning what it was like to live alone. Gram's wedding to Reverend Tom last weekend had been pronounced "a smashing success" by Sarah, and as soon as Gram returned from her honeymoon, she'd be moving to the rectory. True, I'd lived alone (nearly all of the time, anyway) in my Arizona apartment, but being alone in two rooms was different from being alone in a large creaking house built over two hundred years ago.

But I'd grown up here, as my mother and grandmother and great- grandmother had before me. I couldn't imagine another family in these rooms. I'd get used to living here by myself. In the meantime, my only full-time companion was Juno, Gram's large Maine coon cat.

Juno looked up expectantly when anyone came into the house and then curled up in Gram's favorite chair, sadly waiting. She didn't understand about honeymoons. To make up for Gram's absence, I'd been giving Juno more treats than I'm sure Gram would have approved.

I'd even slipped a piece of salmon into her dinner dish before I served my guests. And I suspected Dave had been passing her a few tidbits under the table during dinner.

The four of us had comfortably finished off two bottles of wine and were debating the virtues of strawberry-rhubarb pie now, or strawberry- rhubarb pie after the fireworks, when we heard a knock on the front door.

The young people standing there could have been any two Haven Harbor teenagers celebrating the Fourth.

But they weren't.

When gold and silver threads are used for Embroidery they are generally associated with coloured silks and filoselles [soft silk threads]. When used for Ecclesiastical purposes the work is called Church Work. The same kind of work is occasionally also used for secular purposes.

— Sophia Frances Anne Caulfeild and Blanche C. Saward, The Dictionary of Needlework: An Encyclopedia of Artistic, Plain and Fancy Needlework, London, 1882

The stocky young man standing on my front porch had his arm firmly around the girl's waist. I couldn't miss his red, white, and blue tank top emblazoned with New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" motto or the purple anchor tattooed on his left shoulder.

The girl looked even younger than he was — slight, with wispy blond hair that covered part of her face.

I didn't recognize them.

"Sorry to bother you," said the young man. "Angie Curtis?"

"Yes?" I answered. The silence in back of me said my guests were listening. Living in a small town offered little privacy. If you forgot what you'd done yesterday, you could always ask your neighbors. Deep secrets, on the other hand, might be hidden for years, especially from outsiders.

"My brother, Ethan, said you might be able to help us."

For a moment I didn't connect. "Ethan?"

"Ethan Trask. He said you knew each other in high school."

Blurred images flashed through my mind. Handsome Ethan, the boy I'd had a serious crush on in junior high school. Ethan and his friends, teasing the younger girl who'd followed him around. And, more recently, still handsome Ethan Trask, the Maine state trooper and homicide detective who'd helped me discover what happened to Mama years ago. The Ethan whose wife was serving in Afghanistan, leaving him unavailable, and a devoted single parent.

"I know Ethan. You're ..."

"His younger brother. Rob." He stuck his hand out to shake mine. His skin was rough; the skin of someone who worked outside, most likely in construction, or, based on his anchor tattoo, on the sea. "I'm eleven years younger than Ethan. You probably don't remember me."

"No, sorry. I don't." I did the math quickly. Rob must be about twenty- one. He would have been eleven when I'd left Haven Harbor to head west. No wonder I didn't remember him.

"And this is Mary," Rob said, pushing the young woman next to him toward me. She brushed her hair off her face and smiled shyly. "Mary Clough. My fiancée."

"Nice to meet you both," I said. Clough. The name was familiar, but I couldn't place it. I remembered a lot about growing up in Haven Harbor, but in those years I'd been focused on my own problems, and on my high school classmates, not on other families in town. Mary would have gone to Haven Harbor Elementary then. She looked barely sixteen. Probably still in high school.

Some Mainers married young. And divorced young.

Behind me, my guests were migrating from the dining room to the front hall. I turned to...