Town in a Lobster Stew

Again, Candy looked down. Nothing there but a cement floor. She looked left and right, along the floor on either side, her eyes shifting all the way to the walls.

Something in the far corner caught her eye.

It looked familiar.

Squinting, she took a few steps toward it, never taking her eyes off it.

It was a blue tarpaulin, just like the one Mr. Sedley had been wrapped in.

She took a few more steps toward it, crouching down as she reached out to touch it with her hand, testing its texture and thickness.

It seemed like the exact same material. In fact, it was exactly the same type of tarp.

Could this be where the first one came from — the one used to wrap up Mr. Sedley’s body?

Quickly she straightened. Her gaze shifted.

There, on the workbench nearby, she saw something else she hadn’t noticed before.

Fishing line.

The panic surged through her again. Here was the evidence she’d been looking for. Here were the clues to Mr. Sedley’s murder — and Charlotte’s.

And she was locked in!

It was time to get out.

She found Maggie’s phone number again and texted five words to her: Need help at the lighthouse. Then she flipped the phone closed, slipped it into her pocket, and looked around.

She could sure use a crowbar.

Her eyes scanned the workbenches and shelves, searching for the right tool. She finally spotted it hanging from a pegboard above the workbench. She started toward it, her gaze focused on it and on the tools hanging around it: awl, block plane, bow saw, caulking gun, crowbar...

Candy shook her head again in disbelief. Bob had alphabetized his tools.

The only problem was, since it came early in the alphabet, the crowbar had been hung at the top of the pegboard, out of her reach. She wondered idly how Bob, who was not a tall man, managed to get to it. He probably just climbed up on something like she’d have to, she guessed. She looked around, then bent down and noticed a wooden stool tucked underneath the workbench.

Candy pulled it out, tested it for sturdiness, and gingerly stepped up on it, reaching toward the crowbar. But it was still beyond her grasp, so she stepped right up onto the workbench itself. To steady herself, she held on to one of the side shelves as she reached toward the pegboard... and froze.

As she had taken hold of the shelf, she’d glanced to her left. Something thin and long, with a battered gray and red cover, had caught her eye.

It couldn’t be.

She looked down. Positioned neatly on one of the higher shelves was a black wire tray, containing a stack of neatly arranged papers. And sitting right on top of the stack of papers was an old ledger with a gray and red cover.

Right under your nose...

Candy felt a chill go through her.

Somehow, Wilma Mae had been right.

Hesitantly, as if in slow motion, she reached out for the ledger, half-afraid it would suddenly disappear before she could touch it. Her fingers stretched out toward it as the fog outside parted, allowing a stray beam of the late afternoon sun to stream in through the window, illuminating the shed’s interior in a beatific glow.

She closed her fingers on it, thumb on top, the rest of them on the back of the ledger, and lifted it toward her. Still standing on the workbench, feet slightly apart so she could maintain her balance, she held the ledger up and delicately opened the cover.

The Journal of James Edward Sedley, read the first line at the top of the first page. The words were written in a neat, ornate script. And underneath that, on subsequent lines, he’d written in an equally neat yet slightly less ornamented hand, Begun at Kettle Cove in Maine, on the northern coast of Saco Bay, within sight of Richmond Island and Piney Point, on this 25th day of January, in the Year of our Lord Nineteen Hundred and Forty-Six, on the cusp of a great adventure.

Candy let out a quick breath. She felt her eyes begin to water.

She’d finally found what she’d been looking for all this time.

It was Mr. Sedley’s ledger, hidden away here in Bob Bridges’s maintenance shed.

She looked up in sudden shock. Her heart thumped again in her chest, more powerfully than before. She felt her blood turn cold. She teetered unsteadily, almost tumbling from the workbench.

Someone was at the door. She could hear the padlock rattling outside. The click of the key in the lock sounded as clearly as if it’d been positioned just inches from her ear. She heard the lock slipping away from the metal door handles, heard the hinges creak as the doors were pulled open. “Who left the lights on in here?” a voice muttered as a dark figure strode into the shed.

Candy gasped.

Bob Bridges stopped in his tracks, his head swiveling toward her.

A look of complete confusion clouded his face for a few moments as he studied her, trying to figure out what he was looking at. His gaze shifted briefly to the ledger, which she still held in her hand, and then upward again as their eyes locked.

A scowl came to his face. “What are you doing in here?”

Candy couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t speak.

She’d been caught red-handed!

Thirty-Seven

Bob Bridges took a few steps toward her, his face flush, his eyes hardened and accusing. “You shouldn’t be in here. What do you think you’re doing up there?” He leveled a finger at her. “Get down from there right now,” he said angrily.

Candy instinctively jumped and let out a yelp, but she had no intention of doing as he asked. “Stay away from me, Bob,” she said, holding out one hand toward him. Her heart thumped in her chest as she twisted her head back and forth, searching desperately for an escape. But there was only one way out — the shed’s double doors.

And right now, Bob Bridges stood between her and freedom.

As he came toward her another few steps, she moved away from him, along the top of the workbench to her left, slipping sideways like a crab, toward a back corner of the shed. She kept her eyes on Bob, not on her footing. As she moved, she knocked over a neat stack of illustrated workbooks and nearly tripped. One of the books slid off the workbench onto the floor, landing with a slam.

Bob gave her a distressed look. “Hey, don’t mess anything up!”

“Just stay away!” she yelled back at him with all the force she could muster. “Don’t come any closer. I know what you’ve been up to.”

He gave her a quizzical look. “Now what the hell does that mean?”

“You know exactly what it means.” Candy glanced back over her shoulders, looking for a weapon. She’d reached an area of the long workbench where he kept woodworking tools. She spotted a variety of blue-handled chisels, arranged according to size, hanging on the pegboard against the wall. She grabbed the longest one and brandished it like a knife. “Just back away and no one will get hurt!”

Bob stopped dead in his tracks. He held up two hands. “Hey, hey, calm down.”

Candy looked around frantically. Her gaze settled on the double doors again. If I could just get there before he does...

Bob had shifted his position, shadowing her as she moved along the bench toward the back of the shed. There might be a chance, she thought, if I can just slip past him.