Laughter burst out from the throng of people.

"Who's that?" Doris asked, peering into the crowd. "Is that Tom? Yeah, well, mine was a stinker too, Tom, if you want to know the truth. I broke my hip falling down the stairs and my granddaughter was expelled from Miss Porter's. But thanks for asking."

"He didn't ask," yelled someone else.

Another ripple of laughter spread through the crowd.

Doris shook her head, trying not to laugh.

"If you don't let me get this thing started, we'll be here all day. Which means, odds are, I'll be dead."

"We'll miss you, Doris."

Doris laughed, shaking her head, along with the rest of the crowd. Finally, she raised her hand.

"Well, anyway, as you all know, today is the first Saturday of our beloved Castine summer, and thank God for that. I'm so goddam sick of winter I could kill someone."

"My wife would like to volunteer for that," yelled someone.

Laughter once again erupted from the crowd.

"I'd want to be dead too if I was married to you, Burt," said Doris. "Now, as I was saying, it being the first Saturday following the beginning of summer, it's time once again for the annual Wadsworth Cove Marathon."

Loud clapping and a chorus of enthusiastic cheers swept over the crowd.

Like many towns along the beautiful winding, rocky coast of Maine, Castine tolerated its summer visitors, the wealthy people from away, who came in June and left at Labor Day. But the long, hard, bitter-cold winter months were the province of the people who lived there year-round: the fishermen, teachers, nurses, construction workers, bus drivers, farmers, electricians, plumbers, police officers, doctors, a lawyer, and even a few artists.

Most towns in Maine had their own peculiar tradition to mark the end of winter, the season they'd all just suffered mightily through, mostly pent up inside their homes. In Castine, it was the Wadsworth Cove Marathon. The course was a punishing six and a half miles to the cove, then up a dirt path along Bog Brook to a large, well-known birch tree, then back to town. Running shoes were not allowed, only work boots, symbolic of the fact that the race was meant for working people, not city slickers, though technically anyone could run if they wanted to.

This year, an unusually large crowd was gathered to watch the race. A celebrity was in town. Not a celebrity in the traditional sense, just a kid from town whom everyone knew-the thirty-nine-year-old kid with the mess of brown hair.

"Now, as many of you know, this is the twenty-fifth running of the Wadsworth Cove Marathon," said Doris. "I can remember the very first race. It was that New York city slicker Jed Sewall's idea. Jed's son was the captain of the Harvard University cross-country team at the time."

"Yale," someone yelled.

"What?" asked Doris.

"Yale. He went to Yale."

"Oh, for chrissakes, Harvard, Yale, it doesn't make a goddam bit of difference as far as I'm concerned," said Doris, shaking her head. "They're both asshole factories. Give me a Maine Maritime Academy man and a glass of gin and I'll be perfectly happy. Anyway, the point of the story is, Jed concocted this cockamamie race so Jed Junior could beat everyone in town."

A low wave of hoots and hollers echoed from the back of the crowd.

Doris paused, smiling as she worked the crowd into a lather.

"Of course, Jed hadn't considered the fact that a certain fourteen-year-old Castine kid might decide to enter the race!" Doris yelled.

A chorus of cheers erupted from the crowd. A few people even shouted out his name: "Dewey! Dewey!"

"A kid who, I'm happy to say, is back here twenty-five years later, and, from what I've heard, is prepared to defend his title."

Doris raised her hand and pointed at the man leaning against the pickup truck. He didn't move, in fact, he didn't seem to be listening.

Dewey Andreas was Castine's son, as much a part of the town's fabric as the hard, wind-swept place was part of him.

He was born in the three-room Castine hospital, delivered by Doris Russell's late husband, Bob. He was raised on a pretty rambling farm called Margaret Hill, up a winding dirt road behind the golf course. He was a boy like any other boy in town until that one day everyone saw Dewey wasn't like every other boy in town. He was eight years old at the time. The occasion was the annual Independence Day picnic at the Castine Golf Club, attended by everyone in town along with all of the summer folks.

Dewey was playing tennis, barefoot, with his older brother, Hobey. At some point, one of the summer kids, a prep schooler named Hampton, told the Andreas brothers to get off the court. They weren't supposed to be playing in bare feet. When Hobey told the older boy to wait his turn, he'd called Hobey a "townie."

What happened next on the green-grassed #2 tennis court lives on in Castine infamy. Dewey charged over and slammed the fifteen-year-old in the chest, knocking the taller boy over. When Hampton stood up, he lurched at Dewey, taking a big swing at his head. But Dewey ducked. Then he punched Hampton in the nose. Hampton dropped to the court, screaming in agony, as blood gushed from his nostrils. But Dewey wasn't done with him. As horrified onlookers watched from the terrace, Dewey jumped on him, straddling him, then punched him over and over, beating the living crap out of him, stopping only when a combination of Hobey and their father, John Andreas, was able to pull him away from the bloody, bawling St. Paul's freshman.

From then on, it wasn't considered a wise move to fuck with the younger Andreas brother, the one with the mop of uncut, unmanageable brown hair, the kid who liked to ride his horse to school, the handsome, quiet one with the blue eyes as cold as stone. It wasn't that people were embarrassed that day Dewey beat up Hampton. It was the opposite. Dewey had stood up for his brother and, by extension, his town.

They watched him grow up. By the time he was in sixth grade, he was six feet tall and had the gaunt, sinewy physique of an athlete. He had few friends, choosing mainly to hang out with his brother. Those friends he did have had been selected largely based on their interest in shooting things and by a shared dislike of talking, girls, and summer people.

By high school, he was six-four, two hundred pounds, and had the posture and gait of a prizefighter. After breaking every high school football scoring record in the state, Dewey ventured south to Boston College to carry the ball for the BC Eagles.

To say the town of Castine was proud of Dewey would've been an understatement. Every fall, twice a season, a bus was rented to ferry a crowd down to Chestnut Hill to watch BC's hard-nosed 225-pound tailback tear through every defensive line in the Big East.

After college, Dewey returned to Castine long enough to steal away the prettiest girl in town, Holly Bourne, daughter of a professor at Maine Maritime Academy. Everyone in town went to the wedding. By then, Dewey was getting ready to try out for the U.S. Army Rangers. His hair was short. That was when some people started to recognize that Dewey's aloofness, his standoffish demeanor, his confidence, the meanness in his eyes, the hint of savageness in his stride, that all of it had been given to him for a reason. No one was surprised when Dewey graduated first in his Ranger class out of 188 recruits.

There were tough people in Castine. There were tough people in Maine. And then there was Dewey.

When he left Rangers for Delta, people stopped gossiping altogether. It was no longer about pride. Dewey, they all knew, was being groomed to be one of America's most elite soldiers. Not only was he serving his country, he was being trained to be part of America's jagged front edge, the place where secrets were killed for, in cities no one had ever heard of, where nations clashed in the fog-shrouded dark of night. Dewey was in the middle of it all. He was in the maelstrom. A palpable sense of intrigue was always there, even when he wasn't anywhere near the town.

The few times he came home with Holly and their toddler, Robbie, what had been a quiet, laconic nature became distant. Dewey's silence told of a world the people in Castine would never know, a world Dewey didn't want them to know, not because he didn't like the people in town-because he loved them.

Where I'm going, you cannot come. I'm going there so you don't have to.

Castine's pride turned into something deeper then. Something quieter. When Dewey would return, on those rare occasions, back from an operation, his arrival was noted but not discussed. He was, they all knew, engaged in activities on behalf of the U.S. government that could never be talked of. Dewey, their Dewey, was at the bloodstained front edge of America's covert war on terror. He was the razor's edge, the tip of the spear, the hunter. It all made sense then, the toughness, the fierceness, the inability to be stopped, to feel pain.

And then, like a lightning bolt thrown from a cruel sky, it was all destroyed. Leukemia stole Robbie at age six. The town gathered at the cemetery, speechless and numb, to help Dewey and Holly bury their boy. A month later, Holly was found dead in an apartment near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and Dewey was accused of murdering her. The town's grief turned bitter. Its character was shaken to its core. Yet instead of destroying the town, the tragedy brought everyone together. There was never a moment of doubt. Dewey could never do such a thing. Every family in town donated money so that Dewey could hire a good lawyer, a gesture he appreciated but refused to accept. In fact, he didn't hire a lawyer, despite the fact that he faced the death penalty. He represented himself, standing alone against a well-heeled prosecution, and told the truth. He stood tall, just as he'd done so many years before, back on the tennis court.

When he was acquitted after only thirty-one minutes of deliberations, it was the coda to a terrible chain of events that had physically and emotionally exhausted the entire town. No one talked about Dewey after that. They all knew he fled the United States, but no one asked where he was going or what he was doing. They let him be. His parents, John and Margaret, aged. They left Margaret Hill only on rare occasions. Hobey moved to Blue Hill. A decade passed, with vague rumors about Dewey working on offshore oil platforms in faraway countries, and that was all.

And then he returned. It was a week after the greatest terror attack on American soil since 9/11, crafted by the Lebanese terrorist Alexander Fortuna. Maine's largest employer, Bath Iron Works, had been destroyed in the attack. But someone had stopped the terrorist, though no one knew who. Several news reports mentioned a roughneck-an oil worker-with a military background, though the government refused to comment. Yes, that was when Dewey came back, and no one dared ask him if he was the one. They didn't have to.

Now he was back again. Everyone knew why. It had been in the news for weeks. Dewey's fiancee, Jessica Tanzer, the national security advisor to the president of the United States, had been killed in Argentina. Dewey had returned that fall, shell-shocked and broken. Most people assumed he'd leave after a few days, but days turned into weeks, then months, and it was then when people in Castine started to comprehend the fact that perhaps Dewey wasn't ever leaving again. Perhaps this time, something had finally gotten to him. He'd survived the death of Robbie, then Holly, but Jessica's killing had struck a blow that he didn't seem to be able to recover from. The proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back.

As Doris pointed to Dewey, a cacophony of clapping and cheers came from the crowd.

"Hey, Dewey, you gonna win it this year?" yelled someone.

From the front of the pickup, Dewey turned but didn't answer.

"Talkative as ever, eh, Dewey?" someone else yelled.

A few laughs rippled out from the crowd. Dewey glanced in the direction of the remark, remaining silent.

"Hey, Dewey, how's that new talk show of yours coming along?" someone shouted from the back.

At this, Dewey's lips spread into a smile. He glanced in the direction of the remark.

"I got him to smile!"

Dewey started laughing.

"I wasn't smiling at you, Uncle Bill," said Dewey.

"What were you smiling at, then?"

"I was thinking about the time we went duck hunting and you shot yourself in the foot."

More laughter erupted.

"That was an accident, goddammit."

"Sure it was," said Dewey.

"No hurtin' anyone if you don't win, Dewey!" came another voice.

More laughter this time.

"Now, leave the boy alone," said Doris, holding up her hand. "Was that Dickie? I don't see your fat ass out there, Dickie."

"That ain't fat, that's one hundred percent muscle, and stop staring at it."

"Richard Pye, the only muscle you got left is the one you use to keep your money hidden at the bottom of those Grand Canyon pockets of yours."

"I got five dollars right here for whoever wins this here race, Mayor," said Pye, holding up a five-dollar bill for the crowd to see.

"Look at that," said Doris. "Abe Lincoln is squinting because he hasn't seen the sun in so long."

As Dewey listened to the banter, he leaned forward, off the bumper of the truck, then walked to his niece, Reagan, who was standing next to her boyfriend.

"Can you beat her, Will?"

Will smiled and shook his head.

"No way," he said. "She's the fastest runner at Andover, boy or girl."

"Prettiest too, right?" added Dewey, smiling and patting Reagan's shoulder.

"That goes without saying," said Will.

Reagan scowled and looked at Dewey, then her boyfriend.

"I know what you two jerks are trying to do, and it's not going to work," she said. "I'm not going to be distracted. Will, I will definitely destroy you. You're the one I'm worried about, Uncle Dewey."

"What's your best mile?" asked Dewey.

"Four fifty-five."

"You'll beat me," said Dewey. "I won't even get to State Street by four fifty-five."

"It's not going to work. You can't hustle me. I see through you."

"Then again, running in boots is a little different," said Dewey, ignoring her. "Starts to hurt a little. It's the skin on the back of your foot that goes first. Scrapes right off. Then comes blood. Gets a little muddy in there."

"Ewww," said Reagan.

"Yeah, it's nasty," continued Dewey. "Like pea soup. Only it ain't pea soup, know what I mean?"

Reagan glanced down unconsciously at her feet.

"I bandaged them."

"Oh, then you should be fine," said Dewey. "Bandages never fall off."

"You should also point out the extra weight, Dewey," said Will, smiling as he pitched in. "These boots are heavy."

"Excellent point, William," said Dewey, nodding. "That extra weight'll make your legs get all muscly and big, like an Amazon lady. Will, what do you think, are guys into girls with big, thick tree trunk legs these days?"

Dewey and Will were now doubled over in laughter. Reagan seethed with a mixture of anger and annoyance, though a small grin did manage to sneak through.

"Look, I usually don't talk like this, so please forgive me in advance," said Reagan, "but fuck off, both of you. I hope the dust I kick up will settle down by the time your lame asses come crawling along behind me."

She stormed off, shaking her head.

Just then, Doris Russell let out a loud whistle.

"Let's get this shindig going," Doris said loudly. "It's time for this race to start. I got eleven people coming for dinner and I don't even know what the hell I'm going to make."

"Trust me, Doris, no one comes to your house for the food," yelled someone from the back.

"Good luck getting that lobster license, Lincoln," said Doris, grabbing the police tape and preparing to yank it out of the way. "Now, on your mark..."

The runners crowded up toward the tape, except for Dewey, who remained a few feet behind everyone else.

"Get set..." she continued.