When they’d finished, Candy leaned back in her chair, wondering what it all meant—if anything. “That’s quite a long list of characters,” she said, thinking out loud, “but it makes sense that Julius would have crossed paths with most or all of those folks over the past few years.”
“It does,” Doc agreed.
“So the next question is, which one or ones did he talk to recently? And did someone from one of those families have a reason to cause Julius any harm?”
“Right.”
“What about you? Can you think of someone who might have wanted to attack Julius?”
Doc rubbed his fingers across his chin. “I’ve thought about that, pumpkin. It’s what kept me awake all night. But I honestly can’t think of anyone. As far as I know, he didn’t have any enemies.”
“Everyone has enemies,” Candy said. “We just have to figure out who they were.”
Doc closed up the final file on his desk. “Well, you have plenty of places to start. I’ll keep digging around and let you know if I come across anything of interest.”
“And Foul Mouth?” Candy asked before they broke up. “Find out anything about that?”
Doc shook his head. “Nothing so far. Of course, for something like this, the first person I’d go talk to would be Julius. He used to have all kinds of tidbits about stuff like that floating around in his head. But now that he’s gone, we’ll have to figure it out on our own. We still have his books we can go through, of course, and the archives over at the museum might provide something useful, though I doubt we can get into those right now.”
Candy agreed with him. “I’m sure the police have that whole upstairs area blocked off, but I’m going to head over there anyway and see if I can talk to Owen. Go over what happened last night with him. See if anything jumps out.”
Doc checked his watch. “It’s about time to adjourn to the diner for breakfast. The boys will be gathering. I’m sure we’ll have plenty to talk about. You going to join us?”
“I might stop by,” Candy said, her gaze growing distant as her mind focused on her next move, “but first, duty calls.”
ELEVEN
Outside, the day was sunny and a little windy, with the temperatures rising slightly above normal, headed into the high sixties. It was glorious, Candy thought as she headed back between the house and barn, past the recently tilled but yet to be planted vegetable garden, to the chicken coop. As she went, she relished the warmth of the sun on her skin. She just hoped the good weather would last a few more days, until the wedding was over. So far the forecast seemed promising, with no rain and a slight warming trend expected into the weekend. With any luck, the temperatures would climb into the low seventies by Saturday, the day of the wedding.
Good news, indeed.
The fortunate stretch of spring weather—which was also good for the blueberry fields, a week or two into bloom—was better than Candy dared hope, especially after another long, harsh winter, when temperatures plunged far below the freezing mark for several consecutive weeks in late January and into early February.
Candy and Maggie had fretted for much of that time, and well into March and April, wondering if the weather would turn in their favor in time for an outdoor wedding in Maine in May. They both knew they were playing the odds, and remembered many years past when clouds, rain, fog, and cool temperatures lingered along the Down East coast well into June and even longer, making it seem as if summer would never arrive. This year, thankfully, warmer weather had made an early appearance, and would stick around for at least a little while longer.
With the warmer temperatures, the bees had also arrived at the farm, trucked in “from away”—places like Florida and Texas. The hives were now arranged in “beeyards” around the blueberry barrens, which were literally buzzing today. Trucking in the honeybees was an expensive proposition, one Candy and her father debated and planned for each year. It certainly stretched their budget, but the productive little insects would increase the wild blueberry yield by as much as a thousand pounds per acre, and would pay for their cost five or six times over come harvest time.
Making ends meet until then was always the challenge.
The bees would be around for several more weeks, since the fields were only about 30 percent into bloom. They tended to stay to themselves when left undisturbed, but they could become defensive around their colonies, which is why the beeyards were positioned away from the house and barn, around the center of the barrens and farther back, along the top of the southeast ridge.
During their early years on the farm, Candy and Doc had relied on native bees to pollinate the fields, but they’d decided to try a more commercial process in recent years in an effort to boost their yield and revenue. They’d considered becoming beekeepers themselves, but had decided to postpone that decision for another few years. They had enough to do as it was.
Just the sight of the honeybees working the sunny barrens made Candy herself buzz with activity as she went about her chores. They’d have a profitable year indeed and, at least for the moment, she felt relatively upbeat about their future prospects.
The bees, black flies, and other spring insects, she thought, were a good reason to hold the wedding inside the barn, rather than out in the fields, something they’d toyed with early on. Heaven forbid a wedding guest—or, worse, the bride or groom—became the target of some aggressive stinging insect. However, the closest beehive was more than two hundred feet away, and the black flies and mosquitoes weren’t too bad yet, since the weather had been relatively dry lately, so she didn’t anticipate too many problems.
With the chickens fed and watered, and carrying a wire basket of freshly laid eggs on her arm, Candy turned to survey their two newest structures at the farm. One was temporary, while the other was semipermanent.
Behind the barn, occupying a flat, cleared spot of land—which in a few weeks would become the back half of their vegetable garden, nearly doubling it in size—stood a recently erected twenty-by-thirty-foot framed white tent, closed in by flaps on three sides to minimize intrusions from both flying and four-footed creatures. The open side faced the barn’s back door, which would make it easy for wedding guests to move between the two.
The tent had arrived a day earlier on a flatbed truck, and a team of two assemblers set it up in short order. It would provide a place for the reception following the wedding.
That had been an almost endless debate as well, with alternatives such as the Lightkeeper’s Inn and Melody’s Cafe considered as possible reception sites, until they’d decided to keep everything associated with the ceremony out at the farm, for the ease of everyone involved. But they’d found ways to incorporate the other two venues, with the pre-wedding dinner party held at the inn, and the upcoming rehearsal dinner tomorrow night scheduled to take place at the café on River Road.
Farther on, around the barn on the other side, was the farm’s other new structure, the semipermanent one. It was their new hoophouse, which they’d finished putting up just a month or so ago. It was a big improvement on the farm, and they were still getting it up and running. But over the next few years it would help them greatly expand their crops, and their revenue stream as well—or, at least, that was the plan.
She was proud of what she saw. They’d done a lot of work around the place recently, and it showed. As she surveyed her surroundings, she thought about Julius, remembering the last time he’d visited out here the previous fall. They’d had a wonderful time together. He and Doc had talked for quite a while about their writing projects, and they had even tossed around the idea of collaborating on a project at some point in the future.
That brought her back to the problem at hand.
Why was he murdered? Who would do such a thing?
She thought back over the conversation she’d just had with her father, pondering all the names they’d discussed. It was a curious list, she thought,
and knew something must link all the names together. But whether a member of any of those families was tied to Julius’s death, she had no idea.
A better exercise, she thought, would be to try to reconstruct Julius’s activities over the past few days. Where had he gone? Who had he talked to? Who saw him last? That would give her better information, she thought, and might help her get a grasp on who killed him, and why.
Although she was still working on the who part, she thought she had a possible motivation for the why. Owen Peabody had given her a clue last night.
Julius has been researching old historical books about local land deeds.
Deeds.
She’d heard that word before in connection with the cape’s history, from a few different people around town. And here it was again, leaving another murder in its wake.
What was so important about land deeds? More important, why would anyone care enough to murder someone over them—if that, in fact, was what had happened?
But she already knew the answer to that question: It was all about property. It was about the land, about Cape Willington itself.
Was someone, she thought, really trying to gain control of the land around Cape Willington, as she’d come to suspect over the past few years? Trying to get hold of the original deeds—those that preceded and superseded all other existing deeds—to gain ownership of local properties? Could someone claim to own the land upon which the downtown area stood? Or Pruitt Manor?
Or Blueberry Acres?
It gave her a chill.
Could someone take their property—their land—away from them? Or someone else’s land?
It was, she thought, a very good motivation for murder.
She’d heard rumblings of this before, several times, in fact, over the past few years. She could recall a conversation she’d had a couple of years earlier with the late Rachel Fairweather, who was born a Sykes before she married Mr. Fairweather:
“Oh, yes, those famous deeds,” she’d told Candy one night in a whispery tone as the two of them sat in the kitchen of a chocolate-brown bungalow not too far from here. “Those are part of the legend as well.”
She’d been referring to the legend of Silas Sykes, the nineteenth-century scoundrel and thief whose treasure box had been discovered two years before at Crawford’s Berry Farm by Miles Crawford, then owner of the property. He’d been murdered because of it. The box had contained gold and jewels—which they’d found after Miles’s death—and also allegedly a set of old deeds, which they hadn’t found.
“Deeds to what?” Candy had inquired of Mrs. Fairweather at the time.
“To property, of course,” the elderly woman had said. “Here in Cape Willington.”
“What properties?”
“All of them.”
The deeds, Candy had been told, were allegedly written before all existing deeds for properties in the village, but had disappeared long ago, lost in the fog of time—until Miles had dug up the treasure box. If he’d found the deeds inside, he’d told no one about them before he died—at least as far as she knew. So far, no one had discovered what had become of them.
Mrs. Fairweather’s words echoed in her mind:
“. . . All the businesses, all the properties—all this land belonging to someone else . . .”
Had Miles really found the deeds? If so, what had he done with them? Had he destroyed them? Had he given them to someone? Had they even existed at all?
Miles’s son, Neil, who had inherited the berry farm from his father, had tried to find out, with Candy’s assistance, but they’d run into a dead end. The deeds were nowhere to be found.
And now here they were, popping up again, causing trouble.
Causing murder.
And it appeared Julius had somehow wound up right in the middle of it.
What had he found out? What secrets had he uncovered that led to his death?
Her father had said that Julius had researched the treasure box and its contents. Had his research been successful? Had he located the deeds? Was that why he’d been murdered?
But what about the champagne bottle? Why would someone hit him over the head with that?
Could his murder have anything to do with the upcoming wedding? With Maggie or Herr Georg?
What about the unconscious waiter? What did he have to do with all of this?
And what about the list Owen had found, with names of some of the village’s founding families?
L. B.?
Foul Mouth?
It was a lot to think about, and Candy pondered the ramifications as she turned back toward the house. Doc had already left for the diner, his old Ford pickup truck gone from its parking spot next to the barn. So she grabbed her trusty old tote bag from the kitchen, locked the door behind her, climbed into her Jeep, and headed off to find some answers.
TWELVE
The parking lot for the lighthouse and museum was relatively empty today. But she spotted a couple of squad cars parked at the opposite end of the lot, near the top of the wide walkway that led down toward the lighthouse, and, sitting nearby, a white oversized van with the words MOBILE INVESTIGATION UNIT stenciled on its side panels in bright blue letters.
Candy cautiously avoided them, circling around the outer edges of the lot before parking in a far corner, some distance from the squad cars and van. Despite the presence of the vehicles, she could see no police officers or other official-looking people in the lot or down toward the lighthouse and museum buildings, so there was no one to prevent her from leaving the Jeep parked there and having a quick look around.
Before she locked up, she pulled her tote bag from the front seat. Inside, she’d placed the signed copy of Julius’s book she’d brought from her father’s office. She hoped it might help her out later.
She thought it best to keep a low profile, so rather than march straight down the main walkway to the cluster of buildings at water’s edge, right in full view of anyone who might be looking out a window of the Keeper’s Quarters, she decided to take a smarter path. She headed in the opposite direction, toward a narrow dirt track that led off the back side of the parking lot, away from the buildings, down a steep bank to a narrow stretch of rock-strewn coastline.
But before she left the parking area, a sudden thought stopped her. She twisted around, her eyes sweeping the lot.
Yes, there it was, still parked right where he’d left it yesterday.
Julius’s red station wagon.
From what she could see, there was nothing to indicate the car had been searched by the police or examined in any way. It hadn’t moved. The windows were all rolled up. It looked totally undisturbed, as if it had sat there for years.
Subtly, Candy flicked her gaze left and right, and left again.
No one around. No one to notice if she took a little peek inside. She wouldn’t bother anything . . . just look. No harm in that, right?
Moving as nonchalantly but as quickly as possible, she crossed the lot and sidled up beside the wagon.
Not surprisingly for a busy man’s transportation, it was a bit of a mess inside. In the trunk area she saw a few opened boxes of Julius’s books, a long-handled window scraper, an empty bag of rock salt, a few empty burlap bags, and a couple of snow tires.
She took a few steps forward along the car, still peering in the windows. In the backseat were a jacket, a pair of gloves, an old but apparently functional umbrella, papers, half-read magazines and newspapers, a battered yellow industrial-sized flashlight, and a few old books. History books, they looked like to Candy, though she couldn’t quite make out the titles.
On the front passenger seat were a half-used box of Kleenex, sunglasses, a map, binoculars, and a fairly new digital camera with a long lens.
An interesting collection, she thought—functional for a historical researcher who drove in Maine’s tough winters, an
d who no doubt ran down a lot of his stories in person, no matter the time or season. A camera for taking photos of interviewees and buildings. A flashlight to explore those dark places he no doubt had sometimes wandered into. A pair of binoculars to . . . what, watch birds?
But, overall, nothing really out of the norm, nor anything that might help her uncover a murderer.
She moved on, back across the parking lot to the dirt path and down the bank to the waterfront.
She’d explored this section of the coastline before, and knew the shale and rocks eventually gave way to a coarse sand beach, possibly flecked with small shiny bits of sea glass, where Julius might have wandered prior to his death, picking up that sand on the bottoms of his shoes. It was not a place for ocean swimming, since the water was too cold and the undercurrents too treacherous in this area near the mouth of the English River. But it was a picturesque and somewhat secluded spot and might yield a clue or two.
As she walked, the ocean shimmered to the east, and waves lapped gently on the shoreline. She skipped carefully over black, wet rocks, doing her best to stay to the dry patches of land so she didn’t get her shoes too soggy. She was all alone in this part of the cape, except for the gulls floating overhead. Even they were quiet right now.
The rocks soon gave way to the narrow beach, only a few yards deep from shore to slope. Here she slowed, looking down and studying the ground as she walked, focusing in on the mix at her feet. She saw a few stray footprints, some made by shoes, others by bare feet. Paw prints and bird tracks as well, meandering across the sand. An occasional discarded paper cup, some larger bits of sea glass, strewn brownish-green seaweed, broken bits of shell, even a few nice pieces of driftwood. But nothing that caught her eye.
Town in a Cinnamon Toast Page 8
