Town in a Pumpkin Bash (29 page)

Once she’d finished, she replaced everything in her daypack, zipped it up, and swung
the strap up on her shoulder. Then she walked around the back of Emma’s tombstone
and checked the stones nearby as well, but after a few minutes, she realized there
was nothing else she could learn here.

She left the cemetery and walked to the main house.

If someone was around, she wanted to talk to them.

She knocked politely on the back door, waited, knocked again. When no one answered
she walked around to the seaward side of the building, climbed up onto the porch,
and knocked again at the front door.

Again, no answer.

It appeared she’d been right. The place was deserted. No one was home.

She thought for a few moments, and quickly decided on her next course of action.

Since she’d been on the island she’d seen only one other person.

It was time to find Mrs. Trotter.

Candy made her way back along the dirt lane, through the small woods and out the other
side to the foot of the pier, where she turned right, following the footpath she’d
seen the elderly woman take. The path hugged the shore for a short while before angling
northeast and turning inland. It skirted a patch where the sea had carved its way
into the land, creating a rock-strewn inlet, then swerved back to the shoreline again.

After four or five minutes of walking, Candy could see around the north side of the
island. She spotted what looked like a small, steep-roofed cottage out near a point,
half hidden among the mists and foliage. It was not nearly as large as the gated estate
she’d found on the island’s eastern end, but it had similar architecture on a smaller
scale.

She could see no other buildings around, so this must be where Mrs. Trotter had been
headed.

Candy approached casually, as if she were simply a tourist out for a walk. She didn’t
want to appear threatening or spook anyone. She started humming a pop song as she
approached the house, just to make a little noise and perhaps alert the person inside
that a visitor was nearby.

She walked up the path that led to the front door, knocked, and waited.

It took a few moments, but finally the door creaked open. A wizened old eye set in
a thin face peered out. “Yes,” said an uncertain voice.

“Hello, Mrs. Trotter? I…um…I heard the deckhand
on the mail boat call you that. I hope I’m not being too much of a bother.” And in
a genial manner, Candy introduced herself and explained who she was.

“I’m afraid we don’t have any public bathrooms here,” Mrs. Trotter said in an apologetic
tone, apparently misunderstanding Candy’s reason for knocking.

“No, I’m…I’m not really looking for a bathroom. I’m a reporter. From the
Cape Crier
. In Cape Willington. I’m…I’m researching a story about some of the local families
and I have a question about the cemetery at the eastern end of the island. The one
by the big gated estate? I wonder if you know anything about it, and if you’d be willing
to answer a few questions for a story I’m writing?”

“A story?” The woman gave Candy a look up and down, her eyes showing sudden wariness.
“Where did you say you were from?”

“Cape Willington. I’m wondering about that cemetery over by the little chapel. Inside
the gated estate. Do you know which one I mean?”

“Yes.”

Candy waited for her to say more, but when that didn’t happen she plunged ahead. “There’s
a gravestone in the cemetery for a woman named Emma. There’s no last name, and no
dates for her birth and death. Would you happen to know anything about her?”

The elderly woman blinked rapidly several times, and her mouth seemed to physically
twist, as if she were actually chewing on her words. She looked at Candy with no small
amount of caution. “I’m not sure I can say much about that. It happened a while ago.
I’m afraid I can’t help you.”

She started to close the door but Candy persisted. “Mrs. Trotter, please, this is
important!” she blurted, realizing she had only seconds to explain what she was after
before the door shut in her face, and deciding in an instant that blunt honesty was
the best approach at this point. “I’m here because of a murder that took place in
Cape Willington a
few days ago. It’s possible Emma was somehow linked to the victim. Maybe you’ve heard
about him—he was a poet named Sebastian J. Quinn.”

The door stopped moving, and for the longest time, the elderly woman studied Candy
from the house’s shadows, her face frozen, saying nothing. But finally she coughed
very deep in her throat, backed away, and pulled the door open wider.

“So, you’ve traced her here, have you?”

“I have,” Candy said simply.

The elderly woman’s narrow shoulders sagged. “I was beginning to think—to hope—she’d
been forgotten by now. We’ve had a few visitors over the years asking about her, you
know, but they always went out to the big house, where no one has lived for years.
No one’s ever stopped here before—I’m too far off the main path, I guess. But I thought
sooner or later someone might come knocking at my door. And here you are.” She turned
and started off into the house. “You might as well come in,” she said over her shoulder.
“I’ll put on some tea.”

They sat in the kitchen, near a window that overlooked the sea to the north. “This
is the caretaker’s cottage,” Mrs. Trotter told Candy, after she’d put on a kettle
to boil. “My husband was the caretaker, of course—not me. His name was Ellis. Ellis
J. Trotter. He was a wonderful man. He passed away a few years back.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” Candy said. “What was he the caretaker of?”

“Why, Wren Estate, of course—the big place.” The elderly woman waved off toward the
far end of the island. “Where you saw the cemetery. By the way, that house was designed
by John Patrick Mulroy. You’ve heard his name, haven’t you?”

“I have, Mrs. Trotter,” Candy said, with a faint smile. “I’ve been inside a few of
the houses he designed in Cape Willington. A friend of mine lived in one of them for
many years.
She had an extensive collection of ketchup bottles. She showed me a hidden document
drawer in a built-in cabinet Mulroy had designed. He was a contemporary of John Calvin
Stevens.”

“That’s correct. You’ve done your homework.” Mrs. Trotter gave her guest an appraising
look. “And please, call me Nettie. I was born Annette, but everyone’s just called
me Nettie. No use for airs around here anymore. Anyway, Stevens designed a number
of summer cottages on some of the nearby islands, and over on the mainland, of course.
But the Wrens chose Mulroy to design that estate house you saw, and the outbuildings,
including this cottage. The chapel dates back decades earlier though. It was the first
building on the island, you know. Anyway, the family was up here quite a bit around
the turn of the century and up through the thirties and forties, or so I’ve heard.
But during the fifties, many of the older Wrens passed on, and they hadn’t produced
enough male heirs. It was quite a concern at the time. The line here on the island
almost died out, but a few held on. One of the daughters, Cornelia, lived out at the
estate for years. But she eventually passed on as well, and the place sat empty for
many years, so Ellis—that’s my husband, the caretaker—mostly looked after it himself,
and I helped him take care of it. In time the Wrens lost some of the property around
the west side of the island, but another daughter managed to keep control of the estate.
No one’s lived there much since Cornelia though. She rarely left the place, until
she fell ill in her later years. She kept a ward out here with her for a while, you
know—a young girl, during the late sixties and early seventies.”

“A ward?” Candy repeated, curious at the woman’s use of that specific word. “Was it
Emma?”

Nettie nodded and rose as the kettle began to whistle. Candy waited as she pinched
two tea bags from a glass jar on the counter, set out two mugs on the table, dropped
a tea bag into each one, and began to fill the mugs with hot water.

“Was Emma a Wren?” Candy asked, breaking the silence, hoping to finally attach a real
last name to the mysterious woman who had died in the pumpkin patch two decades earlier.

But Nettie shook her head. “No—not a Wren. Though I can see where you’d get that idea,
considering where she’s buried. But she was something else.”

“Who was she then? Why is she buried in that cemetery? And why no last name on the
tombstone?”

Again, there was silence for several moments as Nettie returned the kettle to the
stove and settled again in her seat at the table. She appeared to be thinking carefully
about what to say. Finally she pressed out a breath of air, as if she’d made up her
mind—or perhaps it was a deep sigh of resignation, an indication of the realization
that she could no longer keep the secrets she knew to herself.

“They tried to keep it hushed up,” she said in a voice barely above a whisper, “and
mostly it worked. That’s why they brought her out here when they found her, and it’s
why she’s buried here. They didn’t want anybody else to know about her. But Ellis
finally figured out what was going on, and he told me—though of course we never told
anyone else. We kept it to ourselves all those years. The Wrens were good to us. They
paid us well, and left us this piece of property, free and clear, so we couldn’t say
anything against them, could we?”

Candy leaned in closer to the elderly woman. “What did you find out? Who was Emma?”

In response, Nettie rose and walked to a cabinet that stood along one wall. She opened
a lower drawer and pulled out an old photo album.

“Here, let me show you.” She crossed the room, set down the photo album on the table
in front of Candy, and opened it. “There are some photos taken at the estate in here,
from back when the family was still around.”

With short, sturdy fingers roughened by decades of manual
labor, Nettie turned to a page near the back of the album. “Yes, here they are.” She
pointed to a small, square black-and-white photo, probably forty or fifty years old.
“Here she is. That’s Emma.”

Candy looked first to Nettie, and then down at the photo album. She focused in on
the image the elderly woman had indicated.

It showed a skinny girl of medium height, with pretty curled blonde hair, wearing
a crisply pressed white linen dress with a flowered belt, white socks, and shiny black
patent leather shoes, standing near the stone house on the point with the sea in the
background. Flanking her were three people—a handsome, rugged-looking man in work
clothes, probably in his early to mid-thirties, and two middle-aged women, of similar
build and features. One wore a dark skirt and shawl while the other—the taller of
the two—was in high-waisted khaki slacks, a navy blue jacket, and rubber-soled boat
shoes. She also wore sunglasses and a patterned scarf over her dark hair, though her
distinctive face was still recognizable.

“This is Ellis, a year or so after we came out here to the island,” said Nettie, pointing
to the man in the picture. “He was quite handsome, wasn’t he? And so good with his
hands.”

She then tapped at the image of the taller woman who stood next to the skinny young
girl. “I don’t suppose you know who this is?”

Candy did. It came to her in a rush.

It was the same woman whose portrait she’d seen hanging in the front hall at Pruitt
Manor.

“That’s Abigail Pruitt.”

There was no mistaking it. In the photograph, Abigail’s clothes were unadorned yet
well made, and her accessories looked expensive. She had the same firm set of the
mouth, the same long nose, the same high cheekbones and pointed chin.

The same stern, scary demeanor.

“But what was Abigail Pruitt doing out here on the island?” Candy asked, looking up
at Nettie. “And what did she have to do with Emma?”

In response, the caretaker’s wife sat back down in her chair, clasping her hands on
her lap, remembering. In a soft, even tone, she said, “I remember it was late spring—May,
I think. We cleaned the house for a week before she arrived. We didn’t know who she
was at first. We heard an important visitor was coming out to the estate for a visit.
There was to be some sort of celebration. We heard it had something to do with Emma,
but again, we didn’t know exactly what. So we worked our fingers to the bone to make
the place shine. Ellis
toiled on the yards until well after dark for several nights in a row to make sure
the place looked nice. And on a Tuesday morning, our important visitor arrived in
a private boat, spent most of her time in private talks with Cornelia, attended a
brief party—a dreary, low-key affair, from what I’ve heard—and left on the boat that
same afternoon, well before dinnertime. She was on the island for less than four hours,
and seemed to barely notice all the work we’d done. In fact, she said practically
nothing to us at all, and we were told not to speak to her unless she addressed us
first. So we didn’t. Mostly they kept us in the dark.”