Town in a Pumpkin Bash (31 page)

Candy was intrigued. “You say you found some books in the box? What kinds of books?”

“Well, that’s the interesting thing,” Nettie answered, suddenly animated. “One was
a volume of Pruitt history, and on an inside page there’s an image of the Pruitt family
crest. You’ll understand once you see it. Here, I’ll show you.”

Again, the elderly woman crossed the room, but this time she climbed a steep set of
wooden stairs to the second floor, where Candy assumed the bedrooms were located.
Candy could hear her moving around up there. Nettie was gone for several minutes before
she came back down and into the kitchen.

“Here it is,” she said, cradling a box perhaps two feet square. “I had to look for
it. It was in the back of a closet. I almost thought I’d lost it there for a few minutes.”

As she set the box down on the table, Candy rose from her seat. She watched as Nettie
delicately opened the box’s four flaps, folding them back one at a time.

As Nettie had said, inside were a girl’s mementoes—a mirror and hairbrush, a small
doll, ribbons and necklaces, as well as two old hardcover books and a few faded color
photographs. The photos showed a young, pale woman with a painfully solemn expression,
though in one of the images, in which she held an infant, she smiled wistfully. The
photos were perhaps twenty or thirty years old, Candy guessed.

“That’s Emma, I presume,” she said, pointing to the young woman in the photos. With
her pinky she indicated the infant. “And who’s this?”

Nettie shrugged and shook her head. “We don’t know.”

Candy hesitated. “May I?” she asked, and when Nettie nodded, she reached inside the
box and took out the photos. She studied them closely for a few moments, and then
flipped each one over to check the back. But she found no writing, nothing to identify
the date or the people in the images.

She placed the photos back in the box and retrieved the two hardcover books.

The smaller one was a well-read copy of
Walden
by Thoreau. Candy opened it gently to peer through the pages, and as she thumbed
through, she found several small wildflowers pressed and dried between thin slips
of colored paper.

Candy smiled. She’d done much the same thing when she’d been younger.

The other volume was larger. She hefted it in her hand. It had some weight to it.

“Now I wonder what this could be,” she said.

She checked the spine, and then the title page.

It was, indeed, Volume XXIII of a larger collection with
the overall title,
A History of the Pruitt Family in Maine, 1789–1975.

This particular volume encompassed the years 1940 to 1949.

It was the book stolen from the Pruitt Public Library in 1972.

“The family crest is near the front,” Nettie told her, indicating with a wiggle of
her finger for Candy to turn a few pages.

Candy nodded and complied.

And there it was, a two-color crest with a red shield at the center, showing a prancing
lion, and above it, surrounded by filigree, was a steel helmet, as if from a suit
of armor.

And in an elaborate ruffled banner across the bottom, in Old English script, was the
phrase
DEUS PASCIT CORVOS
.

God feeds the ravens
.

It was, Candy realized, the Pruitt family motto.

By two fifteen, Candy was out on the pier, watching the sea to the north. Five minutes
later she was back on the mail boat heading home—though they were going the long way
around, since the boat first had to make stops at Grand Cranberry Island and Islesford,
also known as Little Cranberry, before heading back to Northeast Harbor.

Candy settled herself on a bench inside the cabin, as she’d done before. It was more
crowded now than on the last trip, and she had to wedge herself in between a teenager
and a fisherman. But most of the passengers disembarked at Grand Cranberry, and on
the final leg back to the mainland, there were half as many people on board, so Candy
had a chance to stretch out a little, and to finally take a look at her treasure.

She’d tucked away the volume of Pruitt history in her daypack. After she’d explained
to Nettie that the book had been taken—perhaps stolen—from the Pruitt Public Library
in the summer of ’72, and that the rest of the volumes subsequently had been returned
to Pruitt Manor, the elderly
woman had placed it in her hands and insisted that she return it to its rightful place.

And that’s exactly what Candy intended to do.

But first she planned to have a look through it, in an attempt to answer at least
two questions that were buzzing around her brain.

First, why had Emma stolen the book from the library—what was in it that she sought?

And second, why had the Pruitt family motto been engraved into Emma’s tombstone?

Was Emma a Pruitt? And if so, which of them was she descended from?

There were several scenarios Candy could think of right off the bat. For instance,
Emma could have been Cornelia’s child—or, more likely, Abigail’s.

That, at least, would explain all the secrecy.

But if that were true, who had the father been? She guessed the second Latin phrase
engraved on the tombstone—the one that read, when translated,
he is wise who is industrious
—might answer that particular question.

Was it another family motto? And if so, for whom?

There were any number of possibilities.

Candy could think of several herself.

Or perhaps she was all wrong about it. Perhaps Emma had simply been a long-lost Wren
heir—a cousin or a distant relation.

But then why make a mystery of her burial? And why neglect to put the dates of her
birth and death on the tombstone?

That was the real clue, Candy realized—the tombstone itself, and specifically the
second engraving. Whatever it meant, she’d be able to get to the bottom of it once
she got back on the mainland and had a signal on her smart phone, so she could search
the Internet.

Until then, she was going to have a look through the book on Pruitt history.

As she’d discovered before, when she’d paged through a volume in the library out at
Pruitt manor a few days ago, it was fairly dry stuff—names and dates, places and events
that meant little to her: extensive biographies, long explanations of legal affairs
and financial issues….

She considered the dates—the 1940s.

Why had Emma been interested in that decade?

Candy sighed and flipped toward the back—and that’s when she spotted the folded piece
of paper inserted between two pages. It looked as if it had been torn from the bottom
of a writing tablet—perhaps as a bookmark, Candy thought.

She lifted out the slip of paper and unfolded it.

There was a single sentence written on it, in a small, neat hand with an unsharpened
pencil:

To find the key, search that which binds.

That was all it said.

Candy stared at the note, wondering what it meant, when a passenger walked past—a
thick, hooded figure wearing a sweatshirt and sunglasses. He nipped the end of Candy’s
knee with his leg as he passed by, almost sending the book flying from her lap. He
reached out to grab it, evidently to keep it from falling to the floor. But Candy
was able to catch the book first and folded it into her arms.

“Sorry,” he said in a low voice, his face turned away from her.

She wanted to say, “Hey, buddy, watch where you’re going,” but held herself back.
No point in getting into an argument over something that had obviously been an accident.

“Don’t worry about it,” she told him.

“Sorry,” he said again gruffly, with a deep cough, as he straightened and moved off,
looking back only once.

She watched him as he walked out of the passenger cabin onto the stern deck, and then
turned her attention back to the handwritten note.

To find the key, search that which binds
.

Had Emma written it and slipped it between these pages? Or had it been there longer,
from before Emma had taken the book? Perhaps it had been put there by another library
patron. Perhaps it was simply what it looked like—a bookmark.

And perhaps not.

She still had the book open on her lap, to the place where the note had been inserted,
and was about to start reading that page, when the boat’s horn tooted. Looking up,
she saw they were approaching Northeast Harbor. She folded the note back into the
book and closed it, then slipped the volume snugly into her daypack and prepared to
disembark.

It was almost four by the time they were docked again. The clouds over the mainland
were dark and blowing quickly northeast along the coastline. For the most part the
rain had held off, she thought absently as she walked to the parking lot and climbed
into the Jeep, dropping the daypack into the passenger seat.

When she started the engine, she noticed she was low on gas and decided to fill the
tank before she left Mount Desert Island to drive back home. She remembered seeing
a gas station up the island road about ten minutes, in a little settlement called
Somesville, so she headed in that direction.

Fifteen minutes later, she pulled up beside an empty pump, jumped out of the cabin,
and dashed into the brick-sided convenience store to pay for the gas. It was rush
hour on the island, especially with the last of the tourists headed back to their
hotels or out for dinner, so she found herself standing in a long line.

As she waited, she glanced out the window toward the gas pumps.

Her brow fell, and she had to focus in on what she was seeing.

A strange person was lurking around the side of the Jeep.

What’s he doing there?
Candy thought, tensing.

He was looking in the side windows, moving toward the front of the vehicle.

With a quickening of her heart, she realized it was the same beefy guy in the hooded
sweatshirt who had bumped her on the boat, almost knocking the book from her lap.

Before she could register what she was seeing, he’d opened the passenger-side front
door, snatched the daypack out of the front seat, and dashed off toward the main road.

Candy’s eyes widened as her instincts took over. “Hey!” she yelled. “Hey! That guy
just stole my daypack!”

She ran out the front door in disbelief, only to see the hooded thief jump into a
late-model sedan and tear out onto the main road headed north.

Without hesitation, Candy dashed out to the Jeep, fishing the keys out of her pocket
as she ran. She slipped into the driver’s seat, started up the engine, and roared
after him.

The back end swung out, tires spinning on the damp, leaf-strewn pavement as she mashed
down on the gas pedal. The Jeep leapt out onto the two-lane road, its engine whining.
She heard someone beep a horn behind her as she cut into the traffic but she didn’t
care. She could feel the heat rising in her face and her hands were clamped tightly
on the steering wheel.

How dare the thief take her bag! she thought as she searched the twisty two-lane road
ahead, which wound through forested land. There were several cars in a tight line
before her, but none of them looked like the sedan she sought. She thought she might
have spotted it farther ahead, but she couldn’t be sure.

She gunned the Jeep and started passing cars one by one when she could, making sure
she had adequate room as she leapfrogged forward, though once or twice she cut things
a little too close. But she was upset. She wasn’t about to let some thief make off
with her bag.

As she drove, her mind assessed what exactly she had put in the daypack, and what
exactly he might have been after. Perhaps he’d thought there was money in it, or other
valuables. And, to Candy, it did contain her valuables—the tools of her trade, including
her notebooks, camera, and digital recorder. Items that were valuable to her but to
no one else. It’s possible the thief could have been after any one of those items.

But, no.

She was almost certain he’d been after the book. The Pruitt history. He must have
seen her paging through it on the boat and for some reason decided it was of some
value. He’d tried to knock it off her lap. He must have been trying to take it from
her then.