Town in a Pumpkin Bash (33 page)

She blinked several times and sat up. Her brain protested at the abrupt movement,
fogging her thoughts, and for a few moments, she was tempted to turn out the light,
lay her head
back down on the pillow, and go right back to sleep. But she couldn’t—not quite yet.
There was something she needed to do.

Experimentally, she sneaked a foot out from under the blanket to test the air. The
room was chilly, since this early in the season they set the thermostat at sixty-five
to conserve fuel. She was tempted to pad downstairs and notch it up a couple of degrees,
but she didn’t want to wake up Doc.

So instead she climbed quickly out of bed, grabbed her laptop from where it sat on
a dresser nearby, and jumped back into bed. She sat cross-legged and pulled the blanket
tightly around her again as she set the computer down in front of her and booted it
up.

She knew what had awoken her—the nagging thought, even while asleep, bubbling up from
deep in her subconscious mind, that there were unanswered questions she needed to
resolve.

As she waited for the computer programs to load up, she glanced at the clock again.

It’s after midnight,
she realized.
That means it’s Wednesday, the thirty-first of October.

“Happy birthday, girl,” she said softly to herself. “You’re forty years old now.”

She smiled wryly. It didn’t feel too bad, actually.

She let out a deep breath as she moved her index finger over the computer’s touch
pad and opened the browser window.

She had stopped at Maggie’s house the previous evening with every intention of discussing
all the information she’d learned on the island. She’d wanted to tell Maggie about
the Wren Estate, and the lost tombstone she’d finally found, and about her conversation
with Nettie Trotter, and how she’d found the volume of Pruitt history. She wanted
to talk about the thief who had stolen her daypack—and everything in it—and describe
her wild chase up the two-lane island road, on the trail of the unidentified culprit.
And she’d wanted to
see what she could find out about the second Latin phrase inscribed on Emma’s tombstone.

But Maggie had been so excited about the Blueberry Queen costume she’d designed for
Candy, and had seemed so resolved in making sure Candy enjoyed her final night in
her thirties, that there’d never been a good time to start a discussion about the
island, or Emma, or the inscription, or the murder of Sebastian J. Quinn, or tombstones,
or books, or whatever. Candy had tried a couple of times to bring up the subject of
her island adventure, first over pizza, and then later on in the evening when they
were talking about their final day at the pumpkin patch. But in the end, she’d decided
against ruining the increasingly jovial tone of the evening, especially after they’d
both had a few glasses of wine and were giggling about something or other. She’d never
found an appropriate time to disturb the evening’s lighthearted mood.

And, she realized now, it was probably for the best. She wasn’t sure anyone else could
help her at this point. She had all the puzzle pieces she needed. Now she just had
to fit them together.

So she moved the cursor to the browser’s search box and keyed in the English translation
of the second Latin phrase she’d found on Emma’s tombstone:

He is wise who is industrious
.

She hit the return key and leaned in for a closer look as the results came up on the
screen.

The first few search results were for Biblical phrases that contained the words
wise
and
industrious
: one a passage from Ecclesiastes and another from Proverbs.

Candy scanned those quickly but dismissed them just as quickly. She knew that wasn’t
what she was looking for.

But a little farther down the page she saw a search result that was a better fit—and
one that didn’t totally surprise her.

It was a link to a website that specialized in family names and crests.

The underscored link was titled,
Sykes Family History and Crest
.

The Sykes family.

So that’s it,
Candy thought as she felt a small twist in her stomach.

The motto in question was part of the Sykes family crest.

She clicked on the link. On the resulting page, her eyes were instantly drawn to the
right, where she saw an image of the crest with the Latin inscription
SAPIENS QUI ASSIDUOS
in a wavy banner above it.

Candy leaned back a little, her brow furrowed and her mouth a tight line as she considered
the ramifications of what she had just learned.

The two Latin inscriptions engraved on Emma’s tombstone were the mottos for two prominent
New England families who had long histories in Maine and Cape Willington—the Pruitts
and the Sykes.

So why were those two mottos on the tombstone?

Candy leaned in again and focused in on the web page. The Sykeses were an Old English
family, she read, just as the Pruitts were Welsh.
Sykes
was an old Anglo-Saxon name, and had had a variety of spellings going back to the
Middle Ages—Sikes, Syks, Sikkes, and the like. Members of the Sykes family had first
settled on the North American continent during the late sixteen hundreds in places
like Virginia and Maryland.

And, she knew, at least a few of them had put down roots in Down East Maine, and specifically
in Cape Willington, sometime in the seventeen hundreds—around the same time the Pruitts
first arrived in the area.

During a historical presentation at the annual Moose Fest celebration last January,
Doc had discussed Cape Willington’s famous families, and she’d sat in and listened
to some of it. He had described, among other things, how the Sykes family had come
to the cape, and some of the difficulties
they had early on. One of them, Captain Josiah Sykes, had fallen on hard times and
reportedly gone mad.

Several members of the Sykes family still lived in New England. If she remembered
correctly, the main family home was in Marblehead, Massachusetts. But a nearby, abandoned
mansion that had also belonged to the Sykes family had burned down back at the beginning
of the year. And Candy had already had run-ins with several members of the current
family, including Porter Sykes, a Boston developer, and his brother Roger, a restaurateur—both
of whom also just happened to be old college friends of Candy’s sort-of boyfriend,
Ben Clayton.

But as Candy pondered all these apparently coincidental connections, other parts of
the puzzle began to click into place.

The Pruitts. And the Sykeses
.

Mottos for the two wealthy families listed side by side on Emma’s tombstone.

But why?

It must have something to do with the missing volume of Pruitt history,
Candy thought. Why had Emma taken that book, covering those years in the family’s
history? What significant events had occurred during the 1940s?

Certainly much must have happened during the war years—as well as the prosperous years
that followed.

Candy felt a spark of realization, and recalled a story she’d heard once that provided
a link between the Pruitts and the Sykeses.

And one specific individual from each family.

Cornelius Pruitt.

And Daisy Porter-Sykes
.

Candy felt a jolt as a thought swept through her:

They’d been together at a resort in Maine during the late 1940s
.

It was a story she’d heard from Wilma Mae Wendell, an elderly former resident of Cape
Willington. Wilma Mae had
been the keeper of a valuable lobster stew recipe, given to her by a friend and admirer,
James Sedley. When Mr. Sedley was murdered and the recipe stolen from a secret document
drawer in Wilma Mae’s house, she’d commissioned Candy to find it for her—and along
the way solve the mystery of Mr. Sedley’s death.

Wilma Mae had also been an avid collector of ketchup bottles. Her collection numbered
in the hundreds. She’d kept them throughout her house on Rose Hip Lane, on shelves
and in cabinets, in boxes and drawers—and one day she had shown Candy the bottle that
had started it all.

It was an empty bottle of ketchup that had once been used at the Lodge at Moosehead
Lake sometime in the summer of 1947—and when it was still filled with ketchup, it
had been used by Cornelius Pruitt, the husband of Abigail Pruitt and father of Helen
Ross Pruitt, one morning when he’d been having breakfast with his mistress, Daisy
Porter-Sykes.

Candy remembered Wilma Mae telling her that, during the late 1940s, Cornelius had
taken to spending a week or two every summer at the lodge, ostensibly to be alone
so he could “cleanse his soul and commune with nature,” as Wilma Mae had put it. But
that was all a smoke screen so he could arrange for some personal time to dally in
illicit affairs.

On that certain summer morning at Moosehead Lodge in 1947, Cornelius had tipped a
ketchup bottle—the very one in Wilma Mae’s collection—over a plate of steak and eggs,
and slapped the bottom so firmly that ketchup had squirted all over the tablecloth,
and right onto the morning dress of his current paramour, the very married and very
attractive Mrs. Porter-Sykes. Daisy had been so upset at Cornelius for ruining her
dress that she’d broken up with him on the spot and stormed out of the room.

But what if, Candy wondered, she had been pregnant at the time?

And what if the child had been Cornelius Pruitt’s?

What if, months after breaking up with Cornelius, Daisy Porter-Sykes had given birth
to a child in secret?

And what if Emma had been that child?

Candy shivered, and it had nothing to do with the chill in the room.

What would Daisy have done with the child?

Given it up for adoption?

Sent it to an orphanage in Lewiston?

That’s how unwanted pregnancies were often dealt with in those days, Candy knew. Daisy
had been a relatively young woman, wife of wealthy Gideon Sykes of Marblehead. If
she’d become pregnant by Cornelius Pruitt, it would have been scandalous, and she’d
more than likely have lost everything, disavowed by both men. So what would have been
the sensible thing for her to do? Keep the pregnancy a secret from both men? Take
an extended “vacation” before she started showing? Have the child in secrecy, and
afterward give it away? Or arrange for an orphanage to take the child?

That had to be it!

It would explain so much, Candy realized—including the lack of a last name on the
tombstone.

Was Emma Smith, alias Emma Wren, actually Emma Pruitt?

But how, Candy wondered, did Abigail Pruitt fit into all this? If Emma had been Cornelius’s
illegitimate child, how had Abigail found out about it? Had Cornelius even known he’d
borne a child? And why did they keep Emma out at Wren Island…and bury her there?

And, perhaps most importantly, how was it all connected to the death of Sebastian
J. Quinn, and the theft of Abigail’s diary by Sapphire Vine?

And what about the note Candy had found hidden between the pages of the book on Pruitt
history, before it had been stolen from her?

To find the key, search that which binds.

The key to what?

Candy’s head was spinning, and her brain was feeling foggy again. So much to think
about, so much to sort out—and so much still unknown.

She felt she was making progress though. She was onto something. But as she powered
down her laptop, set it on the floor beside the bed, and settled back down under the
flannel blanket, too tired to change into her pajamas, she knew she still had work
to do.

She also knew that, step-by-step, she was getting closer to finding the killer.

Doc was waiting for her downstairs in the morning with coffee made and a beaming smile
on his face. He gave her a hug and a kiss on the cheek. “Happy birthday, pumpkin,”
he said warmly, and held out her chair for her as she settled at the kitchen table,
which was decorated with a bouquet of autumn flowers. In the middle of the place mat
in front of her sat a small, wrapped jewelry box with a card beside it.

“Did you sleep well?” Doc asked, walking back to the counter to fill mugs of coffee
for them.

Candy studied the jewelry box with interest. “Pretty good, I guess. I slept in my
clothes.”

Doc gave her a curious look. “Why did you do that?”

Candy shook her head. “I don’t know, really. I just never put on my pajamas. Too tired,
I guess.”

“Well, I can see why. A lot’s been going on around town lately, that’s for sure,”
Doc said knowingly as he set a mug of coffee down in front of her, and a plate of
something that looked perfectly scrumptious.

Candy’s eyes widened at this unexpected treat, and she inhaled its rich, fruity aroma.
“Is that what I think it is?”

“Yup, probably is,” Doc said with a smile. “Sent over by special messenger this morning.”

Now it was Candy’s turn to give him a curious look. “Special messenger?”