Maggie shook her head. “No one has. Top secret, she says. Won’t even rehearse with the other girls. But she says she’s pulling out all the stops. From the rumors going around town, she’s got a presentation guaranteed to have you rolling in the aisles.”
“Or win that crown for herself.”
“Don’t even think that,” Maggie said, nearly seething. She tilted her head toward the oncoming woman in red. “You know what she’s doing, don’t you?”
“No, what?”
“She’s campaigning.”
It took Candy a moment to realize what Maggie was saying. “You mean she’s trying to influence the judges?”
“Wouldn’t put it past her. She’s been following that poet character around all morning.” Maggie’s gaze narrowed. “Just look at her. You’d think she was a teenager instead of a thirty-seven-year-old woman.”
“I thought she was thirty-two.”
“Thirty-seven if she’s a day. I guarantee it.”
“Well, anyone can run for Blueberry Queen. She sure proved that.”
“Yes, but just because you
But she broke off as Sapphire Vine walked up to Candy’s booth and happily slapped the display counter to announce her arrival.
“Good afternoon, ladies!” she chirped with barely contained glee, then reached into a large basket she carried on one arm. “You ladies are looking so pretty today. You deserve something special!” She pulled out two pale blue silk roses on long wire stems
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” she asked, handing one to each of them. “I found them on eBay. Got them for a song. That color is called ice blue. And if I do say so, Candy, it brings out the color of your eyes. Though we have to do something about your hair. There’s a wonderful color rinse you should try. Honey Sunrise. Isn’t that a lovely name? It’ll add a little shine to your hair and hide some of that gray.”
Candy took the proffered rose, uncertain how to respond. “Um, well, er, okay, I might give that a try. Thank you... I think.” She held up the rose. “That’s... that’s very nice of you.”
“Just my way of spreading a little joy in our wonderful little town!” Sapphire Vine bubbled as she cast a wary glance at Maggie. When she saw nothing but a scowl, she turned her attention back to Candy. “And would you tell Amanda I wish her the best of luck. I saw her here at the booth earlier, but I didn’t get a chance to stop by and chat with her. I’m sure she’ll do wonderfully. She’s such a sturdy girl, and I hear she’s been working so hard on her talent — once she found one, of course.”
Candy almost had to hold Maggie back, but Sapphire had already turned away, her gaze searching. “You haven’t seen that nice poet fellow, have you?” she asked, glancing back.
Candy pointed down the street with the rose. “He went that-a-way.”
Sapphire beamed at them. “Then I must be off. I’ll call next week to see how things are going on the farm.” Her eyes shifted quickly to Maggie. “I’d ask how the diet’s going, but I guess you’re off it already,” she said without a hint of meanness. “Toodles!”
As she scurried away, Maggie clenched a fist and muttered with amazement, “Did she just call me fat?”
“Did she just say
“That woman knows no shame.”
“She’s out of control.”
“She’s more than that. She’s a menace to society.” Maggie’s glare nearly burned a hole in the disappearing back of Sapphire Vine. “I swear,” she said quietly, “if she wins that pageant tonight, I’ll kill her. I mean I’ll kill her.” She shot a dark glance at Candy. “You’re with me on this one, right?”
Candy fingered a few strands of her hair, pulling them in front of her face so she could check them for gray. There was none that she could see, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Her brow lowered. “I can’t let you do it alone and have all the fun, can I? Tell you what — if she wins, you hold the gun and I’ll pull the trigger.”
Seven
Cape Willington’s most famous landmark, aside from the twin lighthouses at Pruitt Point and Kimball Point, was the Pruitt Opera House, which occupied a prime spot on Ocean Avenue, just a half block from the rocky shoreline. Completed in 1881, it was one of the first such facilities in Downeast Maine, and its patrons agreed it was one of the most impressive built in the state before or since. Horace Roberts Pruitt, the building’s namesake and primary benefactor, had brought a team of architects up from Boston to design the structure, because he knew they were experienced in the emerging Colonial Revival style, with which Horace was particularly enamored, given his love of Georgian architecture that had been popular a century earlier. The result was an instantly classic building, with a symmetry and elegance that, in its earliest years, had seemed wildly out of place among the surrounding ramshackle buildings that tumbled down the wide, dusty street to the waterfront.
In the intervening years, those ramshackle wooden buildings had been replaced with more sturdy brick-and- stone affairs. Though in their early years some had been summer residences for the town’s wealthier citizens, most by now had been converted into storefronts (with apartments on the upper floors). The street had been paved, first with cobblestones and then with asphalt, and oil lamps had given way to electric streetlights. But despite all the changes that had taken place on Ocean Avenue over the past century, the Pruitt Opera House remained, a testimony to one man’s cultural vision, a Georgian queen among architectural commoners.
Visitors to the Pruitt (as it was called around town) were particularly enamored with its two most prominent architectural features: the stately columned portico that fronted the building and the elaborate widow’s walk that sat atop the structure “like a crown,” as Horace noted at the building’s dedication on July 4, 1881. That latter feature had been a point of great contention during the building’s construction. The architects had specified a copper-capped cupola to grace the building’s roof, but Horace, who dabbled in architecture, made some adjustments to the design, insisting on a domed, open-sided, octagonal stone structure accessed from below by a simple steel ladder. It was an homage, he insisted, to all the long-suffering sea widows who had stood for countless hours, days, weeks, and years, gazing out to the sea for the first sight of sails on the horizon, searching earnestly for any sign of the return of their loved ones.
Horace’s own grandmother had paced just such a widow’s walk for years upon end at the family’s primary home in nearby Searsport, awaiting her husband, an esteemed sea captain, who had set off on a three-year voyage and never returned, lost somewhere at sea on a journey that was to have taken him and his crew to Africa and the Far East. It was told that she had fretted away and eventually died there on her widow’s walk, wrapped in a frayed black shawl, grieving ’til death for her beloved husband.
Unable to persuade Horace otherwise, the Boston architects had relented, and the widow’s walk atop the Pruitt was still the tallest point in Cape Willington, affording a spectacular panoramic view of the town and the far- reaching sea for those privileged enough to see it.
The Pruitt had a third unique feature: In the late 1970s, when the aged Town Hall on Main Street had burned down due to faulty wiring, the town offices had been temporarily relocated to a series of rooms in the Pruitt’s basement. These rooms had once been rehearsal halls and storage rooms, but once properly renovated and lighted, they served their new purpose so well that the town never moved out. It had proved to be a mutually beneficial relationship, for the town had the entire building at its disposal for whatever purpose presented itself, and the Pruitt’s operating committee had a continual flow of income from the town that proved immensely useful with repairs and upkeep. So the Pruitt Opera House now served as not only the cultural and social center of the town but also its governmental center.
Over the years, the stage of the Pruitt had been graced by performers of nearly every ilk, some truly gifted, but for the past twenty years or so it had been taken over annually for one night a year in mid-summer by a different troupe of performers — the young contestants in the town’s Blueberry Queen Pageant.
This year, like every other in recent memory, a full house was expected for this greatly anticipated event, and
