“Close it,” Felicia said.
Candy did as she was instructed.
“Now stand over there.”
Felicia indicated a dimly lit spot back toward the trees. “I don’t really want to do this,” she said as she raised the pistol. “I’m sorry.”
Candy squinted and turned her face away. Felicia wasn’t really going to shoot them, was she?
Just then a blast from a car horn tore through the air. Felicia, Gina, and Candy all turned toward Maggie’s car. Even through the trees, Candy could see that Maggie had jumped out of her car and was waving frantically in the opposite direction.
Candy heard another sound then, the piercing whine of a police car siren. A few seconds later, she saw the spinning red lights, and a squad car with the insignia of the Cape Willington Police Department came dashing up the parking lot, swerved into the short driveway, and skidded to a halt next to Felicia’s vehicle.
The driver’s-side door swung open and Officer Jody McCroy jumped out, assuming a defensive stance with his firearm in his hands. “Police!” he shouted. “Drop your weapon!”
A second police car raced into the driveway, and another officer climbed out. Candy could hear more sirens in the near distance.
Seeing the police officers, Felicia’s face grew as cold as ice, and she began to back away beyond her vehicle, toward the edge of the cabin. She started to raise her arm, as if to fire, but shouts from the police stayed her hand. Finally, reluctantly, she let go of the weapon. The police rushed forward to arrest her.
Candy let out a breath and looked gratefully at Officer McCroy as he approached her at a brisk pace, holstering his weapon, ever watchful as he nodded toward her. “Ms. Holliday, are you all right?” he asked, looking from her to Gina.
Candy nodded and was surprised to find she had tears in her eyes. “Felicia told us the whole thing. She killed Victor.”
“It was an accident,” Gina put in.
Officer McCroy nodded. “We’ll take it from here,” he said, giving Candy a quick pat on the shoulder.
He started off, but Candy called after him, “Hey, how did you know we were here?”
The young officer pointed toward Maggie. “Your friend called in and told us what was going on. We got here as quickly as we could. Fortunately it looks like no one was hurt.”
“Thank you!” Candy said, letting the words out in a great gush of relief. “Thank you for showing up when you did, Officer McCroy!”
He gave her a professional smile and tipped his hat. “You’re welcome, ma’am, but I was just doing my job.”
Forty-Four
“Something’s not right,” Candy said.
It was near midnight, and they were back at Maggie’s place, where they’d gone after spending hours at the Cape Willington Police Department. They were exhausted.
They sat on Maggie’s sofa with their boots off and stocking feet up on the coffee table. Foregoing wine at such a late hour, they’d opted for hot cocoa to warm themselves, and Maggie had lit a fire. They were sharing a flannel blanket Candy had made for Maggie a few years back as a Christmas present.
Maggie had been staring into the fire, her eyelids growing heavy, but at the comment from Candy, she blinked several times, took a sip of her cocoa, and looked over at her friend with a vaguely interested expression on her face. “What do you mean?”
Candy pulled the blanket up to her chin and settled further back into the sofa as she thought. “Well, there are just too many missing pieces—the most glaring being the issue with the hatchet.”
Maggie yawned. She looked bleary-eyed. “And what issue is that again?”
“Felicia and Gina wrapped Victor’s body up in a blanket and dumped it in the woods using the toboggan. But when Solomon found it, it had a hatchet in its back, and Solomon didn’t mention anything about a blanket. So where did the blanket go? And how did the hatchet get there? Did someone put it there after Victor died? If so, why? Then there’s the issue of their tracks—why didn’t the police find any when they searched the woods?”
“Easy,” Maggie said tiredly. “Someone erased them using a tree branch or something like that.”
“Right, but who? Solomon said he erased his own tracks but not the tracks around the body. So who did?”
“Maybe the wind,” Maggie said, stifling another yawn. “You know, snowdrifts, that sort of thing.”
“And what about Gina?”
“What about her?”
“Well, she said someone texted her and told her where Victor and Felicia were shacked up. Who did that?”
Maggie sighed and dropped sideways, her head falling to a pillow at the end of the sofa. “I’m too tired to worry about it tonight. Can we talk about this in the morning? You want to stay over?”
Candy seriously thought about it, but in the end decided her own bed would be best. “I don’t suppose I could borrow your car one more time—that is, unless you want to drive me home?
Yawning again, Maggie handed her the keys. “I’m not going anywhere tomorrow, honey. Just drop it off whenever you get a chance.”
Doc was asleep when she got home, so she locked up the house, turned out all the lights downstairs except for a night light, made sure the fire had burned down far enough, and went upstairs to her room.
The house was cold, since they kept the thermostat turned down at night to save on heating fuel. So Candy changed quickly into her flannel pajamas, turned out the light, and crawled into bed.
But a few minutes later she turned the light back on, put on her slippers and bathrobe, and padded downstairs to her desk in a corner of the living room.
She powered up her laptop, waited until it booted up, and logged on to Wanda Boyle’s site.
She couldn’t get all the unanswered mysteries out of her head, and one in particular bothered her. Preston Smith. What had become of him? Why had he been acting so strange lately? And what was his role in everything that had happened this weekend?
Some of the answers, she thought, might be online.
She’d intended to search back through Whitefield’s postings to see if Preston had left any other clues there. But she was surprised to find a new posting from him, dated only minutes earlier.
To Town Crier, it read. Well done. Whitefield at 10. Ben will know the way.
She read over the message several times. Again, it seemed obvious that it was meant for her. But what did it mean?
Whitefield at 10. Ben will know the way.
She thought of calling Ben but decided against it when she checked the clock on the fireplace mantel behind her. It was quarter to one. So, instead of calling him, she sent him an e-mail, explaining everything and telling him that she’d call him in the morning to discuss.
By the time she’d logged off, shut down the computer, and climbed back up the stairs to her bedroom, her cell phone was buzzing. She’d set it down on the top of her dresser and forgotten to turn it off or charge it.
It was a text message from Ben:
Meet me for breakfast at the diner at nine. Urgent. Dress warmly. I know what Whitefield is.
Forty-Five
Candy awoke in the morning with the odd feeling that the previous day had been nothing more than a bad dream—or, more accurately, a recurring nightmare—until she’d dressed and headed downstairs. Doc had left part of the Sunday paper sitting on the kitchen table. A quick scan of the headlines revealed that, yes, indeed, it had all been for real. Felicia Gaspar was under arrest for the murder of Victor Templeton, and Gina Templeton was in custody as an accomplice.
Candy just shook her head at the truth of it all. She found it very dismaying. Sometime during the night she’d come awake with the disturbing thought that, for the third time in less than two years, she’d had a gun pointed at her and been threatened with her life. For more than ten years, she’d lived and commuted in metro Boston, renting places just outside of the city in suburbs like Arlington and Watertown, and never once had anything remotely like this happened
to her. But here she was in safe, quiet, off-the-beaten-path Cape Willington, Maine, and she’d already stared death in the face three times too many.
What was happening to her beloved little town? What was happening to her? The realization that this staring-death-in-the-face sort of thing was starting to happen often, and that it might actually be turning into something of a habit, was enough to keep her awake during the deepest hours of the night, until she’d finally fallen asleep again right before daybreak.
Even now, as she stood next to the kitchen table, feeling off center and mentally drained after the intensity of the past few days, it was a troubling thought, causing a cold shudder to run through her bones.
Thoughtfully she dropped into a chair, taking a few minutes to scan the rest of the front-page story. It was a fairly accurate account of how Felicia had killed Victor, and of how she and Gina had dragged the body out to the woods on the toboggan and rolled it into a gully, where it had been discovered by a local hermit named Solomon Hatch, currently being sought by police for questioning.
Candy herself was not mentioned in the article, thankfully. Liam Yates was in the process of being released, it said. Chief Darryl Durr was quoted, singling out Officer Jody McCroy for special recognition in the investigation, specifically for following up an important lead, which Candy suspected was that phone call from Maggie.
There was no mention of a hatchet, or Preston Smith, or Duncan Leggmeyer and the award for the hatchet-throwing contest, or of the feud between Victor and Liam. And, of course, there was nothing about a white field, or Whitefield, or even whitefield, as Ben had referred to it in his text last night, though all his characters were lowercase, which he’d probably done for the sake of expediency.
So what, or who, was Whitefield?
Candy checked the clock on the kitchen wall. Quarter to nine.
It was time to find out.
On this particular morning, she and Doc reversed their typical roles. He was staying home, working his way through the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe while tuned into the morning national news commentary programs, and Candy was the one heading off to the diner for a morning breakfast rendezvous.
She found Ben, as promised, sitting in a booth by the window at Duffy’s Main Street Diner, waiting for her. He’d already ordered coffee for both of them and an English muffin for her—with homemade blueberry jam on the side, of course. For himself, he’d ordered up hash browns and a breakfast steak, doused heavily with Juanita’s special hot sauce.
When he looked up and saw her, he waved, half rose, and pointed to the seat opposite him. “Good morning,” he said. “Hope I didn’t get you out of bed too early on a Sunday.”
Candy pulled off her knit cap, shaking free her hair, and tugged off her gloves as she slid into the seat. She managed to smile for him. “How could I turn down a chance to have breakfast with you? Besides, I wasn’t sleeping very well anyway.”
He gave her a worried look. “You’ve had a rough couple of days, haven’t you, with Solomon, and the body, and now the whole thing with Gina and Felicia? You want me to order something else for you?”
“No, I—”
“Good morning, Candy!” said a voice to her side. Candy looked up at Juanita, the waitress.
“I brought you something, just out of the oven,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “A fresh-baked blueberry muffin.” She set a plate down in front of Candy and gave her a quick pat on the arm. “Nice job solving that murder, Candy! This is on the house. Let me know if you need anything else,” she said earnestly and dashed off.
Candy stared at the muffin and let out a sigh. “I think I’m developing a reputation around town.”
Ben shrugged. “People are grateful. You’ve done a lot of good things lately. People like to show their appreciation.”
“Yes,” Candy said, folding her hands on the table and leaning forward toward him so she could speak in softer tones, “but why are these things happening to me at all? Why have we had five murders in less than two years—and why have I been involved in all of them? I’m beginning to get a little”—she leaned her head even closer to his—“paranoid.”
Ben held her eyes for the longest time, and she wondered what was going on inside his head. Finally, he said, with all seriousness, “So you think there’s a connection between all these murders.”
It was a statement, not a question, and it caught Candy off-guard. “What? No, I… you think there’s a connection?” she asked, trying hard to hold back her astonishment.
He calmly sliced off a thin piece of breakfast steak, swathed it across a puddle of hot sauce, and plopped it into his mouth. “Maybe not between all of them, but between some of them, yes.” He set down his knife and fork and, as he chewed, turned and reached into his briefcase, which sat on the seat beside him. He pulled out a manila folder and placed it before her. He tapped lightly at the folder’s label before he went back to eating.
Her brow fell. After giving him a questioning look, she dropped her gaze so she could read the name of the file, hand-printed on the small tab.
WHITEFIELD.
She looked up at him incredulously. “You’ve kept a file on him?”
“It’s not a him,” Ben said, allowing himself a mysterious smile. “It’s an it.”
“A what?”
He nodded again toward the file. “Take a look.”
So she did. She opened it and looked at its contents. She reacted with surprise, then dug down through the top pages to an aged black-and-white photograph buried inside. She pulled it out and laid it on top of the other pages. “You’re kidding me,” she said in surprise as she studied the old image.
Ben shook his head. “Nope, it’s true. This is part of what I’ve been doing for the past few months—looking into all this research about the town’s history, and its two wealthiest families in particular. And that’s part of it.”
He pointed with his chin at the old photograph sitting in front of Candy.
It was an image of a massive iron front gate and a long winding road beyond it, which led to a white pillared mansion in the distance.
Across the top of the black gate, painted in faded white capital letters, in an elaborate script, was the word Whitefield.
Forty-Six
They started out forty-five minutes later, taking Ben’s Range Rover. Designed as a capable off-road vehicle, it sometimes had a harsher ride over payment, but on winter roads it excelled.
They headed up the northern leg of the Coastal Loop, Route 192, just as Candy and Maggie had traveled the night before. Shortly after leaving the outskirts of town, they passed the Shangri-La Motel on the left, where Victor Templeton had met his fate.
It looked like the area around the back motel rooms had been roped off, and Candy caught a glimpse of a warning sign, probably posted by the police department, before the place disappeared from view behind a screen of trees and shrubbery, and she turned her attention once more to the road ahead.
As he drove, Ben explained.
“This goes back a hundred, a hundred fifty years. Longer, really, to the earliest settlers in this area. Among them were the Sykes and the Pruitts.”
Candy shivered. She’d met members of both clans, which had been scary enough, but who knew what might happen when the two families collided?
It had happened before, Candy remembered. Last year she’d heard a story about a clash between Cornelius Roberts Pruitt, the then-patriarch of the Pruitt clan, and Daisy Porter-Sykes, his soon-to-be ex-mistress. They’d had a falling out at the Lodge at Moosehead Lake back in the late 1940s, with dire consequences for at least two people in present-day Cape Willington.
The person behind the murders last year had been a member of the Sykes family, a descendant of Daisy Porter-Sykes. But there had been someone else. An older brother.
P.S.
Porter Sykes.
It was a mystery that still plagued her. What had been his involvement in the deaths that had occurred in Cape Wil
lington last May?
Candy had hesitated to tell Ben the full story, but he had known enough about what had happened to be totally shocked by the betrayal of the Sykes brothers—which probably explained his interest now in the Sykes family history. And the reason she’d found that volume detailing the early history of the Sykes family on his desk yesterday morning.
“This all goes back to the original patriarch in the area, Ferdinand Sykes, the lost son of Josiah, who built Whitefield in the late 1850s, right before the war,” Ben told her. “Like his father, Ferdinand was a sailor and tradesman, and by his thirties he’d amassed a fleet of ships. He’d intended Whitefield as a summer cottage, much like the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers had in New York, Maine, and Rhode Island, though the Sykeses were nowhere near those big leagues. They thought they deserved to be, though, and aspired to high society, which brought them into conflict with the far wealthier Pruitts.”
Ben explained some of the highlights of the conflicts between the Sykeses and the Pruitts across the generations, providing details about bad blood between commanders in the Civil War, the race for wealth in the era of the robber barons, and the families’ entwinement through the first and second world wars, including the dalliance between Cornelius Roberts Pruitt and his mistress, Daisy Porter-Sykes, at a bucolic resort in the north of Maine.
“Throughout all those years, Whitefield remained a retreat for the Sykes family. But then sometime in the early 1960s they stopped coming. They boarded up the place. A few months later it was discreetly announced that Daisy’s husband, Gideon Sykes, had passed away. Whether there was a connection or not, they’ve never said, and I haven’t been able to find one. Neither the Sykes nor the Pruitt families have released many papers, and they’re both fairly proprietary with their family records. I’ve checked available accounts at the historical society and news clippings from the period, of course, but I’ve hit a dead end.”
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