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long she’d been living in this town, but people like me didn’t run for selectman. Businessmen, professionals, developers: always older, often retired, and until only recently, very connected to Johnny Lynch. “I don’t think so.”
    “Why not? You know a lot of people and everybody knows you. You’re the closest this town ever had to a hero, David Greene.” I liked hearing her say my name, I liked the attention; her attention. As I was about to respond, she touched her finger to my lip. “Remember, you promised,” she said. “You can’t say no until you think about it.”
    Saltash was a town built on a hill. From High Street in town center, every road sloped down to the harbor, a deepwater basin with a sizable fishing fleet and some of the best yachting on the Cape. The Tamar flowed into the bay just east of town. Once a swift moving river with a vast floodplain, it was now a muddy stream, bounded by a marsh of cattail and bramble where Johnny had been slowly filling it in. Separating the harbor from the river was Johnny Lynch’s dike—maybe ten feet high, fifty long—and whether you favored tearing it down or keeping it determined who your friends were and who ignored you on the street.
    Little Saltash was a town at war. Economics was a part of it, but not the core. Retired bankers linked arms with shellfish scratchers; electricians and roofers attended meetings with the president of the golf course; on both sides were rich and poor. At the heart was a tall and courtly man who wore bow ties and a gray felt fedora; who had read stories to the kindergarten children on the fourth Friday of every month and saw to it that no one born in this town went without shelter or a meal. Johnny Lynch had discovered Saltash on a fishing trip the summer of his last year at Suffolk University Law School. He set up an office on High Street and attracted clients by writing their wills for free. Nor did he ever send a bill for helping people fill out their tax forms. They received nothing in the mail but a postcard, asking that they remember him at the polls. John Mosley Lynch won his first seat on the Board of Selectmen by two votes and ran unopposed for the next twenty-four years. He made sure widows kept their houses and residents received building permits while he quietly searched the tax collector’s files after the Town Hall closed. Over time he bought hundreds of properties lost to back taxes. He was elected chairman of the Board of Selectmen and moderator of town meetings. He created a rescue squad. He lobbied his State House friends for the funds to construct a pier and dredge a basin for yachts—and filled in a productive salt marsh with the muck that was removed, building a hundred vacation homes in a development he called Neptune’s Garden. Johnny Lynch drifted into a dying fishing village and created a new economy based on tourism and a thriving tax base of second home owners.
    But the people who bought those homes had a different agenda. They liked Johnny—most of them had been to his house for drinks—but they didn’t think he should handpick the police chief, the fire chief and the Board of Health. They said the builders he had chosen for the new grade school had worked so badly the roof leaked and the walls were cracking. They were opposed to men on the town payroll laying out roads on Johnny’s subdivisions on town time, using town equipment. They hated him for the concrete dike he’d forced through a town meeting to replace the old wooden bridge washed away in a hurricane. They remembered the acres of dead shellfish after the dike was completed, the stench that carried for miles, the shellfishermen who wandered around their ruined beds in a state of shock, kicking mounds of dried-up oysters they’d raised from tiny seed. They resented the loss of the most productive estuary in the region, which had once given the town hundreds of species of finfish and mollusks. They mourned the loss of habitat for