Just when his heart was starting to race with anxiety, he rounded a bend and spotted the Morettis’ bait shop squatting at the top of a pier not far from the Blue Drake’s private dock. A stuffed and lacquered fish was mounted over the door. The building looked in need of a paint job, but he knew the Morettis usually spruced it up in the spring after the long winter had taken its toll.
A hundred yards behind the shop, nestled into a grove of gently swaying pines, stood the Moretti house. His haven during all of middle and high school. Painted white with deep green trim, it was clearly a house for boys. Its yard was a kind of junkyard of cast-off toys—an old jungle gym, a teetering basketball net, a sand pit for horseshoes, a target for archery practice, multiple deflated footballs, an old
