Town in a Pumpkin Bash (26 page)

“What’s that?” Maggie asked, pointing with her pinkie to the back of the photo.

“What’s what?” Candy flipped it around.

“That smudge up there in the corner—looks like some sort of scribbling.”

“Where?” Candy realized that, in her haste upon discovering the photo in the file,
she had neglected to turn it over and look at the back of it.

“There.” Maggie pointed again, jabbing her finger.

Candy squinted. She saw the spot on the back of the photo now, and studied it for
a few moments. “It
is
writing. It’s just faint.”

“What’s it say?” Maggie asked, leaning in closer.

“I don’t know, I think”—her mouth opened slightly as she continued to try to decipher
the writing—“I think it says,
sked in pru file
.”

“What in where?”

“Sked in pru file,” Candy repeated, her brow furrowing. “That doesn’t make any sense,
does it?”

“What’s a sked?” Maggie asked.

“What’s a pru?” Candy countered.

But a moment later it dawned on her. “Schedule,” she said. “Sapphire must have written
that message to herself! And she’s talking about a schedule!”

The rest of it came to her the next instant. “In the Pruitt folder.” She looked over
at her friend, amazed. “
Schedule in Pruitt file
. You know what this means?”

“No,” Maggie asked. “What?”

“It means you’ve found another clue!”

“I did!” Maggie said excitedly, but her jubilant expression changed a moment later.
“But what does it mean?”

“Exactly what it says. I think I remember seeing something that matches that description.”
She grabbed the Pruitt folder, flipped open the cover, and starting digging through
it. “I saw it a little while ago when I was going through it, but I mistook it.”

She found what she was looking for, a torn-out page from a magazine. “It’s an article
about the Pruitt Opera House—one of their plays a few years ago,” Candy said, pulling
the page out from the file. “But look.”

She turned the page over. “I glanced at it but it never registered with me.” Candy
pointed to a half-page ad on the other side.

“What is it?” Maggie asked, focusing her gaze on it.

“An ad for the Cranberry Isles ferry.

“The Cranberry Isles?”

“Don’t you see? That’s it! That’s the answer!”

“The answer to what?” Maggie asked.

In response, Candy flipped the black-and-white photo around again and jabbed at it
with her finger. “The location of Emma’s tombstone.”

It all made sense now, though Maggie looked at her quizzically as Candy dashed out
of the kitchen and up the stairs to the attic hideaway. A few minutes later, huffing
a little, she returned with a book in her hand.

“I found this earlier when I was going through some of Sapphire’s things upstairs,”
Candy said as she walked back into the kitchen. “It’s a guide to Maine’s islands.
Sapphire had a page bookmarked—a description of the Cranberry Isles. She actually
had this all figured out. She knew that Emma was one of the island people, just like
Mr. Gumm told me this morning. That’s where Emma’s from. One of the Cranberry Isles.
She was one of the island people. And that’s where she must be buried. On an island.”

“Yes, but which one?” Maggie asked as she looked back at the photos, her gaze zeroing
in on them. “How many of them are there in that group? Five or six?”

“I don’t know, something like that.” Candy studied the photos along with her friend
for several moments, her gaze
shifting back and forth, searching both for any clue. But the first photo showed only
the tombstone and a small section of the cemetery—nothing of the building or the surrounding
landscape—and the other showed only a small portion of the stone building and a glimpse
of the ocean through the trees.

“Can’t tell from those.” She laid the book out on the table beside the photos, open
to the spread Sapphire had bookmarked. Then she started paging forward and backward
through the book, searching for anything that caught her eye.

And she found it fairly quickly. “Here it is,” Candy said, her finger skimming halfway
down one of the pages. Sapphire had bracketed a paragraph in pencil. Candy read it
quickly. “It talks about Wren Island. Is that one of the Cranberries?”

Maggie picked up the ferry ad, which included a small map of the isles. “Yup, here
it is.” She pointed at the smallest of the islands, angling the map toward Candy so
she could see it.

The two largest islands—Grand Cranberry and Islesford, also known as Little Cranberry—were
on the southern side of the small group of islands, while several others, including
Bear and Wren, were to the north, closer to the southern tip of Mount Desert Island.

Candy took the ad from Maggie and studied it. The Cranberry Isles were served by both
a mail boat, which set out several times a day from Northeast Harbor, and by the Cranberry
Cove Ferry, which set out daily from Southwest Harbor. The mail boat from Northwest
Harbor was probably closer to them, Candy figured. Since it was off-season, there
were fewer trips per day. Other than an early-morning trip, the mail boat set out
for the isles at eleven
A.M
. and at two and four thirty in the afternoon.

“How far are we from Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island?” Candy wondered out
loud.

Maggie shrugged. “You have to go up to Ellsworth first, and then south. Maybe an hour
or so?”

Candy checked her watch. It was nearly four o’clock. There was no way she’d make the
last ferry today. “It’ll have to be the eleven
A.M
. trip tomorrow then.” She looked over at her friend. “Want to go on a boat ride?”

In response, Maggie held up her hand and waved it. “Thanks, but no. Like I said a
while ago, me and the ocean don’t get along well. Gives me the heaves. But you go—and
have a good time. I’ll keep an eye on the pumpkin patch for you.”

Candy nodded and returned her attention to the photos. “It shouldn’t be too hard to
find a cemetery on an island that small. How many can there be?”

“Maybe the captain would know,” Maggie said, waving toward the photographs, “if you
show him those.”

Candy nodded and sighed. “I just hope this isn’t another wild-goose chase, because
I’d sure like to figure out what’s going on. But whatever happens, tomorrow will certainly
be an interesting day.”

Finn called the following morning at eight, waking her. “Got some news,” he said without
introduction.

Groggy-eyed and dry-mouthed, Candy inelegantly swiped a hand across her face. She
and Maggie had downed a bottle of wine with their dinner of spaghetti, salad, and
fresh-baked garlic bread the night before as they’d discussed the events of the day,
and Ben had called her, and then Tristan had called, and she’d fallen into bed later
than she’d planned.

She pressed the phone to her ear, still under the covers. “Finn? What is it?”

He hesitated, uncertain. “Are you sure you’re awake? I thought farmers got up early.”

“I’m up, I’m up,” she said, throwing aside the covers and swinging her legs over the
side of the bed. The floor was cold. Her toes searched for her slippers. “I have to
get moving anyway. What’s up?”

Reassured, he plunged ahead. “Well, remember that file you
asked me about a couple of days ago? The one you said you saw on the front seat of
Sebastian’s car?”

“Yeah, I remember.” If she hadn’t been fully awake before, she was instantly alert
now. “What have you heard about it?”

“Well, according to my source, the police investigators have taken a look at it, but
all they found inside was a bunch of documents—paperwork for some woman named Emma
Smith. Most of it dated back in the early nineties. It listed her home address as
some place in Lewiston—an orphanage run by the Sisters of Charity—nuns. I wrote down
the name of it somewhere if you want it. Anyway, most of the paperwork consisted of
files from a mental institution in Portland. It appears this Emma person was a resident
there. The local authorities are checking into it. Just thought I’d let you know.”

“A resident in a mental institution? Why would Sebastian be interested in that?”

“Good question.”

And then, in an instant, something clicked in Candy’s brain, as a piece of the puzzle
dropped into place.

Sapphire Vine.

Hadn’t Sapphire been in a mental institution in Portland? When had that been?

“Finn, can you give me the exact dates on that paperwork. I want to check something.”

“You think there’s a connection to the murder?”

“I don’t know,” Candy said. “It’s just a hunch.”

“You get those too?”

“All the time,” Candy admitted.

He told her he’d call her back as soon as he had the information, and she dashed off
to grab her computer.

She logged on remotely to the newspaper’s server, which gave access to back issues,
as well as her own password-protected personal folders and files, stored on the server’s
hard drive. After conducting a global search, she found what she was looking for.

Sapphire Vine’s obituary.

Candy had written it herself for the newspaper, a week after Sapphire’s passing, but
she couldn’t remember exactly what she’d written, so she scanned the final version
of the obituary first. Almost at once she knew that the specific information she sought
was not there, since she’d avoided writing about certain aspects of Sapphire’s life—certain
aspects that even now were unknown by the general public, due to Sapphire’s dark past.
But she’d kept her notes for the obituary in a separate document in the same folder,
and searched that next.

She finally found what she wanted.

About two-thirds of the way down through her notes were the dates that Sapphire Vine,
as a young woman, had spent in an institution in Portland.

This information had first come to her from Cameron Zimmerman, in the days after Sapphire’s
murder. During a tense encounter at a cabin by the sea, he had filled them in on this
particular part of Sapphire’s background—unknown to any of them except Cameron until
that moment. Days later, after they’d unmasked Sapphire’s killer, Candy had taken
it upon herself to follow up on Sapphire’s past, contacting the institution in Portland
and gathering the information, which she had dutifully recorded—and then filed away.

And it was still there: Sapphire had been in the institution in Portland from the
summer to the late fall of 1991.

A few minutes later, when Finn texted her, she had a match:
Dates of Emma’s stay at the mental institution: April ’91–Jan ’92
, read his message.

Bingo.

Sapphire Vine and the woman previously known only as Jane Doe, and now almost certain
to be Emma Smith, had been in the same place at the same time in the early nineties.

Candy pondered what she’d learned as she jumped into the shower, got dressed, checked
the chickens, and made herself a toasted bagel for breakfast.

Then she packed for her journey. She’d switched out her tote bag for a dark green
daypack, and checked it carefully to make sure she had everything she needed, including
a small digital camera, her recorder, notebooks, phone, and other gear. She threw
in a banana, a sleeve of wheat crackers, and some hard cheese, in case she couldn’t
find a place to eat. She also dropped in a map she’d found in Doc’s office, hidden
among the clutter; it gave her a fairly detailed look at the Maine coastline. And
finally, she slid in a color printout of Wren Island, which she’d studied from the
air on Google maps. The resolution wasn’t great, and the quality of her printer made
it look even worse, but she could make out eight or ten houses on the island, and
several docks. One or two of the buildings could have a cemetery attached—she’d have
to check when she got there to make certain. It looked like there were no roads on
the island because there were no cars—only footpaths for people and bicycles. She’d
be walking, so she wore her sneakers, and took along a Windbreaker, hat, and gloves,
since she knew it would be cooler out on the open water.