Town in a Pumpkin Bash (35 page)

The office door at the top of the stairs was locked, and after fishing out her keys,
Candy unlocked it, stepped inside, and disarmed the security alarm before she ushered
Maggie in and locked the door after them. “I thought someone might be up here today,
but I guess they’re all out covering the
Pumpkin Bash,” Candy observed as they walked past the unoccupied offices—including
Ben’s, still shadowed and deserted like the rest. He’d texted her earlier that morning
from the San Francisco airport and told her he was on his way home, but he wasn’t
expected to arrive back in Cape Willington until later in the evening.

Candy led Maggie through the rabbit warren of offices to her own. But as soon as she
walked in the door, she stopped abruptly and scanned the room. “Someone’s been in
here,” she said to her friend, who came up short behind her.

“What?”

“Someone’s been riffling through my stuff.”

Maggie was suddenly sharp-eyed, her gaze sweeping the room as well. “How do you know?”

“Things have been moved.”

“Has anything been taken?”

“I don’t know,” Candy said, “but someone’s been riffling through my filing cabinet.”

“And someone left a note for you.”

“What?”

Candy turned around. Maggie was pointing at something that had been left in the center
of her desk, right in front of the computer terminal and keyboard. A white envelope,
with her name on it.

She eyed it suspiciously, hesitant to approach it. “Do you think we should call the
police?”

“Because of a letter?”

“Well, what if it’s…you know, toxic or something?”

Maggie studied the envelope carefully for a few moments, then took several steps toward
the desk, snatched it up, opened it, and looked inside. After a moment, she reached
in and withdrew a folded letter. “There’s just this old letter inside. Doesn’t look
toxic to me.” She unfolded it, scanned it, made a face, and handed it to Candy with
a frown.

“But you might want to think twice before you call the police.”

The letter was a typical computer printout, on nondescript white paper, in an average
font. She doubted it was traceable. Too generic.

The message was short and to the point:

That was it. Candy read it again, and then a third time, shocked.

She finally looked up at Maggie with worried eyes. “What are we going to do?”

Maggie made a gesture with her hands. “I suggest you take the key to Pruitt Manor
at nine
P.M
.”

“But I don’t have it. I think it’s hidden in some binding somewhere.”

“What did that note say again?” Maggie asked, trying to recall what Candy had told
her in the pumpkin patch that morning. “The one you found in the history book?”

“It said,
To find the key, search that which binds
.”

“So we just have to search that which binds, right?”

“Right.”

“Any ideas?”

“I think it could be referring to the binding of Abigail’s missing diary.”

“Okay, good, that makes sense. So then we just have to find this diary, right?”

“Right. But that’s what we’ve been trying to do for the past few days. We’ve spent
hours looking and still haven’t found it.”

“Yes.” Maggie paused. “But we haven’t searched the basement of Sapphire’s house yet.”

“No, but there’s nothing down there. We cleaned it out, right?”

“There are a few boxes of old stuff left, I think—things we were going to take to
the thrift store but never did. But maybe it’s something else. Maybe there’s a secret
hiding spot down there, or some back cubby where Sapphire hid things away, or something
like that.”

“Hmm, maybe,” Candy said, “but basements aren’t the best places to hide books. They’re
dark and musty and filled with spiderwebs.”

“And dead bodies.”

“Right, there’s that too. So if Sapphire went to all the trouble of stealing the diary,
why would she hide it in a musty old basement where it could get ruined?”

For a few moments they thought in silence as Candy began reequipping herself. In her
excitement that morning, she’d left her main tote bag at home, but she found her old
one in a corner of the office, and it still had some old pens and small notebooks
in it, as well as assorted paper clips, loose change, some old folded-up tissues,
stray makeup
cases, a few stamps and sticks of gum, and lots of scribbled reminders to herself
on numerous small pieces of paper, mostly receipts and old grocery lists. She cleaned
out some of it before she began to refill it. “Isn’t it funny what we leave behind
in our old bags?” she said as she worked. “It’s like an archaeological dig, except
it’s usually from just a year or two ago, rather than a few millennium. But in some
ways that makes it even more interesting. You know, I’ve found stuff zipped into hidden
pouches or buried in pockets of bags I abandoned years ago. Something will suddenly
just disappear, and years later I discover it in an old bag somewhere, zipped away,
almost lost forever. Has that ever happened to you?”

She looked over at Maggie, who had a frozen expression on her face.

“Hey, what’s wrong? You look ill.”

When Maggie didn’t immediately speak up, Candy squinted at her. “Are you okay?”

Maggie blinked several times. “Yes, it’s just…I just…It’s what you just said.”

“What?”

“About the bags.”

“What bags?”

“Old handbags and tote bags and things like that. About how you’re always leaving
stuff in old bags you’ve used.”

“Yes? And?”

Maggie looked pale. “One of the boxes in the basement of Sapphire’s house—the ones
we were going to give to the thrift store? One of them had her old purses and bags
in it.”

“We thought they were worthless,” Maggie said as they hurried out of the office. They’d
made a quick search of the place to determine if anything was missing—and as far as
Candy could tell, nothing was—and they’d swung by Jesse’s office to pick up the loaner
digital camera. Candy now carried her backup tote bag, having replaced most of the
items she’d lost when her daypack was stolen.

“We checked them all,” Maggie continued as they headed back along the hallway, “and
cleaned them all out but…”

“But we could have missed something,” Candy said as she set the alarm and locked the
office door behind them. “Like in a hidden zipped pocket.”

“Or a little slip-in side pocket or something like that.”

Because of the Pumpkin Bash celebration, they’d had to park in the lot behind the
buildings on Main Street, and it took them several minutes to make their way up the
street. The pumpkin displays were beginning to fill, and the carving stations were
still churning out more jack-o’-lanterns.
Downtown Cape Willington had taken on a festive feel for the afternoon. Candy was
tempted to stop and shoot a few candid photos with Jesse’s camera, but she knew a
life might be hanging in the balance, so they hurried along—though Candy wasn’t sure
what else they could do at the moment other than follow up on their hunch. The meeting
with the kidnapper of Olivia March wasn’t until nine. Would Olivia even still be alive
by then? Should they call the police and report what was happening, and risk Olivia’s
life? Or should they keep their mouths shut, as the kidnapper had told them to do?

For the moment, Candy decided, all they could do was follow up on the current clue
and see where it led.

Less than ten minutes later, they pulled up in front of Sapphire Vine’s old place,
and again they went around to the back door. Maggie hadn’t brought the house keys
with her, so they used the one hidden above the window frame to get inside.

The house was dark and gloomy. “No wonder people think this place is haunted when
it looks like this,” Candy said as she stepped into the kitchen and flicked on the
light.

The stairs to the basement led down from the hallway, through a door lined with shelves
so it could double as a pantry. After Sapphire’s death, they’d cleaned out all the
cans of peaches and sauerkraut and tomato paste, and old boxes of macaroni and potato
flakes. The shelves were empty now.

“You go down first,” Candy said as she pulled open the basement door and stood aside
so Maggie could go through.

“Why me? You always go first.”

“Because I don’t like basements.”

“Well, neither do I.”

“But it was your idea to go down there in the first place.”

“Yes, but it’s your investigation.”

“Hmm. Okay,” Candy said after a moment. “Then we’ll just have to go down together.”

“Great idea,” Maggie said, and she flicked on the basement light.

But it didn’t go on.

“Bulb’s probably burned out,” Candy observed grimly as she looked down the dark wooden
staircase. “Got a flashlight? I think I left mine in my other bag.”

Maggie kept one under the kitchen sink, and with their arms linked and the flashlight
lighting their way, they descended the stairs into the basement.

They found no dead bodies this time, but they did find several cardboard boxes sitting
on a side shelf, filled with odd bric-a-brac, mostly yard sale and thrift shop material.

At the far end of the shelf, they found a box filled with Sapphire Vine’s old tote
bags and pocketbooks.

And once they had the box back upstairs, after an exacting search, they found Abigail
Pruitt’s diary, smelling a little damp and musty, hidden in a side pocket of a large
red purse.

Tristan Pruitt arrived in the Jaguar just after eight to whisk her off to the masquerade
ball.

It had taken her more than an hour to get ready, and the entire time she’d wondered
what she should tell Tristan—and what she should keep secret.

Should she tell him that they’d found Abigail’s diary? Or that apparently the item
sought by Sebastian J. Quinn—as well as by the person who had murdered him—was a key
that Candy believed had been wedged into the diary’s binding by Abigail Pruitt?

And should she tell him that she suspected the key hidden in the book’s binding would
open the small document drawer in Abigail’s writing desk—a drawer no one had been
able to open since her death?

Should she tell him that she’d found the missing volume of Pruitt history, only to
lose it again within an hour? And that the thief who had taken it had apparently also
taken a hostage, and was now threatening that hostage’s life?

Should she tell him she was to meet that same thief and kidnapper—and possible murderer—this
very night, in an upstairs room at Pruitt Manor?

And should she tell him the rest of it, the hardest part: that in her mind, at this
point, everyone—including Mrs. Pruitt, Hobbins the butler, and even Tristan himself—was
a suspect?

But that just confused her even more. Why would Mrs. Pruitt hire her, Candy, to find
a missing diary in the first place, if Mrs. Pruitt herself was implicated in the crime?
Or her butler? Or her nephew?