Town in a Pumpkin Bash (25 page)

She went on to explain how she had found the old histories wedged behind several books
on a back shelf, misplaced and forgotten years earlier. “I’m afraid I have to report
that this sort of thing has happened several times up in the archives at the Keeper’s
Quarters,” she told her passengers. “We’re still in the process of getting everything
organized. But because I’ve been digging around so much, I’ve made a number of interesting
discoveries, which you can always read about by visiting my community blog, the
Cape Crusader
,” she added, giving herself a plug. “It’s your best source for local news and events.”

Sitting near the back of the bus, Candy knew some parts of Wanda’s speech were intended
as digs at her, but she let them pass. The idea of finally tracking down Emma’s grave
made her temporarily immune to minor slings and arrows.

But in the end, the whole side trip turned out to be just another wild-goose chase,
as the cemetery in question—a small plot of land surrounded by a rusted vine-covered
iron fence, containing no more than a dozen gravestones in the midst of a few worn-down
foundations—was not the one she sought.

Wanda parked nearby and gave the passengers a few
pointers before turning them loose to look around. She and Candy found a gate into
the cemetery, and Wanda pointed to a tombstone in the corner. “If it’s any one of
them, it’ll be that one.”

It was certainly the right size and shape, with an arched top, and it looked to be
even the right color—a dark smoky gray (though it was difficult to be certain of the
tombstone’s color in the black-and-white photo). “I remembered seeing it on an exploratory
trip out here a few weeks ago,” Wanda told her, “but I don’t recall the name on it.”

The engraved name, as it turned out, read,
ALBERT TILSBURY, B. 1857, D. 1925. BELOVED BY FAMILY AND FRIENDS
.

Candy turned away, disappointed. “It’s not the one.”

“Then there’s nowhere else it can be,” Wanda told her, “at least not that I’ve seen.
And I’ve been to every known cemetery on the cape. If it’s not that tombstone in the
corner there, then I haven’t seen it, because no place else looks like that graveyard
in the photo you showed me. Which leads me to think it’s not around here. You’re looking
in the wrong place.”

You’re looking in the wrong place
.

Those words echoed in Candy’s mind as they drove back toward town. Along the way,
she stared out the window, lost in her thoughts, watching the late October scenery
slide past her in all its fading glory.

If Emma’s not buried in Cape Willington, then where is she?

The answer, Candy thought dismally as the minibus pulled up in front of Sapphire Vine’s
house on Gleason Street, was a simple yet discouraging one:

The tombstone could be anywhere. Anywhere else in the state.

Or anywhere else in the country.

She was following a dead end.

Wanda parked along the curb and, out of respect for the neighbors, didn’t let the
passengers roam around at this stop.
But she told the story of how Sapphire Vine, a former community columnist for the
local newspaper and a onetime reigning Blueberry Queen, had been murdered in the front
living room of her home, struck down in fury by an assailant wielding a red-handled
hammer.

Something about the story struck a nerve in Candy, and she rose suddenly from her
seat, grabbed her tote bag, and made her way up the aisle, excusing herself to the
passengers she bumped along the way. At the front, Wanda scowled and waved her back.
“No passengers off at this stop. You’ll have to return to your seat.”

“Wanda, I’m getting off. Open the door.”

“The tour’s not over.”

“It is for me.”

They locked gazes for a few moments, but Wanda finally relented, after she realized
that all the passengers were staring at them. “Oh, all right,” she said reluctantly,
flipping the handle that opened the folding door. “But no reentry! Once you’re off,
you’re off.”

“Fair enough,” Candy said, and with a good-bye nod of her head, she walked down the
step and around the back of the bus. Wanda closed the door with a quick slap behind
her.

A few moments later, as Candy walked up onto the porch of Sapphire Vine’s old house,
the minibus drove off with a snort of sound.

Candy waited until it was around the corner and out of sight before she made her way
down off the porch and around to the back of the house. When Sapphire was alive and
living here, she always left a key outside, hidden on top of one of the rear window
frames. A few years ago, Candy and Maggie had used that key to “break in” to Sapphire’s
house to help solve the mystery of her death. They’d put it back when they’d locked
the place up, and as far as Candy knew, no one had disturbed it since.

So she wasn’t surprised to find it still there.

Maggie had a key to the place, of course, but she was out
at the pumpkin patch, and Candy had decided on an impulse, while listening to Wanda
tell Sapphire’s story, that the clues she sought
had
to be here, hidden somewhere within the house that had once belonged to the former
Blueberry Queen.

She resolved to search it from top to bottom until she found what she sought.

After unlocking the back door and replacing the key, she dropped her tote bag on the
kitchen table and glanced at her watch. It was a little past one in the afternoon.
She figured she’d take a couple of hours and dig around, and then give Maggie a call,
asking her to swing by in the Jeep to pick her up.

She started back at the very top of the house, in the secret hideaway Sapphire had
established for herself beneath the home’s peaked roof, and retraced the steps she
and Maggie had made two days earlier, searching back through all the boxes, shelves,
drawers, cubbies, files, and anywhere else she could think to look for the missing
diary. She double-checked each book, flipping through its pages to make sure Sapphire
hadn’t cut out a hiding spot inside one of them.

She also paid attention to the book titles, looking for any clues there. She found
a lot of romances and mysteries, in both hardback and paperback, as well as a decent
collection of historical novels by popular authors.

Most of the nonfiction consisted of biographies of celebrities and royalty. But, Candy
noticed, Sapphire also had a number of books on local travel and history, including
several guides to hiking and biking trails.

A bookmark was sticking out of one of them, a guide to Maine’s islands. Candy flipped
it open to the bookmarked page. It was a section on the Cranberry Isles, a group of
small islands, including Grand Cranberry, Little Cranberry, and several others off
the coast of Mount Desert Island. A black-and-white photo on the bookmarked page showed
one of the ferry boats that regularly shuttled passengers between the islands and
the mainland.

Mr. Gumm’s statement earlier in the day floated through her mind:
Someone told me she was one of the island people
.

Island people.

Could these be the islands he’d been talking about?

She closed the book, set it aside, and continued her search.

Working her way down to the second floor, she dug through closets and searched in
drawers, all the way to the back ends. She even took a few drawers completely out
and flipped them over, checking to see if Sapphire might have taped the diary to the
bottom of one. But she found nothing.

She searched under mattresses and in coat pockets and even tapped the floorboards
in several places, checking for a possible hiding spot. She emptied out boxes and
went through the contents item by item. An hour passed. Another. But she didn’t find
what she was looking for. So she went down one more level, to the first floor, where
she stood in the living room, surveying it.

This was where Sapphire had reached the end of her life, in the center of this room.
Candy and Maggie still tended to avoid it as much as possible. At one time there’d
been a masked-tape X on the floor where Sapphire’s body had fallen, but it had been
removed, and the floor scrubbed, years ago. Sapphire’s rust-colored mission-style
furniture set remained, but the bookshelf had been cleaned out, now holding only bric-a-brac.

They’d sold the old upright piano, and many other items, and given even more away,
though they’d held on to many of Sapphire’s more personal belongings, just in case—those
were the items they’d boxed away.

Candy made a cursory search, but they’d been through this room fairly extensively
in the past months and years. If there had been anything that resembled a diary here,
Candy or Maggie would have remembered it.

It was close to three thirty by the time she put on a kettle of water to heat and
pulled a mug out of the cupboard for
tea. She turned to her tote bag then and removed the files on the Pruitts and Hobbins,
which she’d brought with her. She decided to finish going through them first before
she gave up for the day.

Fifteen minutes later, she gave Maggie a call. “You have to come right over. I think
I’ve found something.”

She laid out the black-and-white photographs on the kitchen table before them. “Two
photos,” Candy said, “taken at different times. Both showing the same tombstone. And
found in two different files.”

Maggie was munching on a bag of trail mix she’d brought with her. “Which files?”

“This one,” Candy said, pointing to the first photo she’d found, “was in a file labeled
Emma
, which I found in the cabinet in my office at the newspaper.”

“Right, the bottom drawer labeled
SV
,” Maggie said, and raised an eyebrow. “The one you swore you’d never go into again.”

“I changed my mind after I saw a similarly labeled file on the front seat of Sebastian’s
car the morning after he was murdered. I figured this was an emergency, and made an
exception. Anyway,
this
one,” she continued, pointing to the second photo, “I found in a file labeled
Hobbins
.”

“And did that file come from the same place as the other one?”

“Same place.”

“So Sapphire put those two photos in those two files.”

“Correcto-mundo.”

“Why’d she do that?”

“That’s exactly what I asked myself,” Candy said. “Obviously Sapphire wanted to remind
herself of something she’d discovered—a link between Emma and Hobbins.”

Maggie looked uncertain. “Um, obviously.”

“But what about the Pruitts?” Candy continued, thinking out loud. “If Hobbins had
something to do with Emma’s death—and I’m assuming it was her body that was found
in the pumpkin patch twenty years ago—were the Pruitts also involved? And if so, how?”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said, thoughtfully chewing a few nuts and raisins. “You’re
the detective. You tell me.”

“I don’t know either,” Candy admitted, “but I think Abigail’s diary is linked to all
this, and the missing volume of Pruitt history as well. Exactly how all those pieces
fit together, I haven’t figured out yet. But I’m working on it.”

As if demonstrating that very fact, she leaned across the table so she could get a
better look at the two photos.

They were remarkably similar, though the second photo—the one she’d found at the very
back of the file labeled
Hobbins
—was taken from a little farther away. Unfortunately, that meant the writing on the
tombstone itself was still indecipherable, except for the name
Emma
engraved at the top. But it also meant a wider shot, so Candy could see a building
in it now—at least a small part of one, a stone structure, perhaps a house, with a
slate roof and white window frames.

And a small piece of ocean in the distance.

“It’s near the coast,” Candy said, leaning even closer to the photo, wishing she had
a magnifying glass, “so at least that narrows down our search a little.”

“Maine has about two hundred fifty miles of coastline, as the crow flies,” Maggie
said, squinting at the ceiling as if recalling the statistics from memory, “but around
thirty-five hundred miles of actual shoreline, if you count all the bays and inlets
and capes and such.”

When Candy gave her a questioning look, Maggie shrugged. “I just read it in a magazine
article a few days ago.”

“Thanks for sharing,” Candy said, looking back down at the photo.

“Well, we don’t have to search all thirty-five hundred miles,” Maggie said. “I mean,
we don’t have to search the heavily settled areas, like Kennebunkport or Old Orchard
Beach or Portland. So that rules out a few dozen miles.”

“You’re not helping,” Candy said, and she lifted the photo, holding it up and angling
it toward the light, so she could get a better look at it. “It’s definitely a rocky
coastline—but that doesn’t help narrow it down much either, does it? I suppose I could
jump on the Internet and do a quick search for coastal cemeteries. It might give me
a few ideas.”