Old Tim's Estate

Life is hard for a small boy, Edward Temperance (Eddie) Devlin, nine going on ten, growing up in Stiles, a tiny unincorporated village adrift on the Minnesota prairie, where his dad runs the garage and his mother worries about him, in the final year of the Roaring Twenties - though that lifestyle (bathtub gin and flappers) did not wash over Stiles. It grows harder still when his Uncle Tim Heaney, a wealthy insurance man and the executor of his grandfather Old Tim Heaney's estate, disappears following the 1929 stock Market CRASH - disappears it turns out after losing the estate and the Devlins' house in Stiles to boot in the CRASH. Tim reappears, however, some days later and what he did, it also turns out, though he almost goes to jail for it (and eventually says he's "sorry), is in fact as they say, a blessing in disguise. Or so Eddie sees it anyway. the Devlins pick up and move, have to move, to Winatchee Falls, a nearby metropolis, population 20,000, full of bright lights and temptations, and Eddie soon has a new best friend -- a bad companion.