Street and Ocean Avenue, who saw their profits jump with the season. Everyone in town knew the value of this influx of revenue and pitched in wherever possible to help meet the demands of the town’s burgeoning population.
Maggie had certainly done her part. “Tell you what,” she’d told Candy over the phone late last night. “I’ll go in and work for you tomorrow.”
“You’re offering to work at the Black Forest Bakery for me?”
“Sure, what’s wrong with that?”
“I just want to make sure I heard you right. It’s the Tuesday morning after a holiday weekend, you know — and the first weekday of the first week of the tourist season. You’re aware of all that, right?”
“Well, yeah, I suppose. What’s your point?”
“The patrons will descend on you like a pack of zombies,” Candy said, greatly amused. “They’ll be totally out of control.”
“Really? They’re that bad?”
“You have no idea. They’ll try to eat you alive.”
Maggie blew a breath of air out between her lips. “Hey, you’ve never seen me at Macy’s on the day after Thanksgiving, have you? No zombie can compare to a woman clamoring for a cocktail dress on sale. They won’t bother me.”
Candy laughed. “You’re sure about this?”
“Absolutely!”
“You have no idea what you’re getting yourself into — but thanks,” Candy said, genuinely grateful. “You don’t know how much that would mean to me.”
“You deserve a day off,” Maggie told her. “After all, you worked all weekend, for both the newspaper and as a detective. You’ve got articles due to Ben. And you had to fight off a killer last night — without me, I might add! So it’s the least I can do. Besides, it’ll be fun. Maybe I’ll take Wilma Mae with me. She can help work the counter.”
“You know, that’s not a bad idea. Actually, I think you two will work great together. I’ll call Herr Georg and let him know you’re coming.”
The German baker had been gracious, as always, and concerned about Candy’s well-being, given her harrowing encounter with Roger Sykes at the lighthouse.
Ben had been equally concerned, and then some. He had called her shortly after the police arrived at the tower. Apparently the news about Roger had gotten back to him fast.
“I just can’t believe this,” he had told her, completely devastated. “Roger, of all people. I’ve known him for years. I never imagined anything like this could happen. I just don’t know what to say — except I’m glad you’re okay. You
For the most part, she’d told him, yes, she was okay. A little traumatized, a little bit in shock, still shaking, but generally okay.
But that had been last night. Today the shocks and the shakes were gone, and the intrusive memories of the night before were beginning to lose their sharpness, fading into something a little less terrifying. Despite her looming deadlines, she’d worked in the garden all morning, getting dirt on her knees and under her fingernails, which had helped. So had the trip to Hatch’s Garden Center after lunch, where she’d picked up a few bags of manure, a couple bales of hay, some chicken feed, a jar of fresh blueberry honey, and a few plants, all of which she piled in the back of the Jeep.
She’d been driving in circles around the Loop ever since, unable to head home yet.
She needed to take care of some unfinished business.
As Candy gazed out over the rooftops of Pruitt Manor, she wondered idly how Helen Ross Pruitt was doing, and if the family matriarch would show up in Cape this coming week to open up the mansion. And she wondered what Mrs. Pruitt would think about everything that had happened in town over the past week, and what she’d think if she knew it all had started more than sixty years ago with a single bottle of ketchup, improperly handled. And that Mrs. Pruitt’s own father, Cornelius, had used that bottle to set in motion a string of events that had led to the deaths of two people and the arrest of a murderer.
For Roger Sykes was indeed under lock and key. He’d still been sitting up on the watch deck, his back against the tower wall, clutching his arm, when the police found him. He’d been wounded in the shoulder — serious but not critical — and he’d lost some blood. But he’d live to stand trial.
Amidst all the chaos that had enveloped her last night on the lighthouse grounds, after she safely descended from the tower with Bob, Candy had eventually found out that it was one of Captain Mike’s friends, Francis Robichaud, who had fired the critical shot. An excellent marksman, he’d aimed to wound Roger only, to remove the threat. Still, it had been a tricky shot, Captain Mike assured her.
“The fog, you know,” he had told her. “We had to wait for a break.”
The first shot, behind Roger’s head, had been a miss on purpose, to reposition Roger and separate him from the other two. Only after Candy and Bob had backed away toward the railing, and he had a clear shot of the villain, had Francis fired again, this time hitting his mark.
Everyone in Captain Mike’s entourage had been armed last night, though their weapons had conveniently disappeared before the police arrived. Candy had thanked them all personally. She’d recognized several of the faces and recalled that some of them were snowplow drivers who worked for the town — Tom Farmington and Payne Webster and Pete Barkely, in addition to Francis Robichaud. They’d all been in the Rusty Moose Tavern yesterday when she met with Captain Mike in the back booth.
And they’d probably be there again today when she stopped in.
She was still fretting about what she had to do, but she could think of no alternative. All night she’d tossed and turned, her mind running over the clues and events again and again, trying to see some other resolution. But she could think of none.
So here she was, circling downtown Cape Willington, as she’d been doing for the better part of an hour, driving around the Coastal Loop, cutting across on Main Street or River Road, and back around the Loop again.
This was the seventh time she’d passed Pruitt Manor.
Out on the point, beyond the mansion, she could see the top of Kimball Light, one of the two lighthouses in Cape Willington. It had a different design than the English Point Lighthouse. It was a little more elegant, with a sleeker shape and a taller, more rounded glass-enclosed top. It must have been built a few decades after English Point, she surmised, probably sometime in the early nineteen hundreds. It was privately owned now, so she’d never been inside. But she thought it might be fun to take a tour of it someday, perhaps even climb to the top.
Someday. But not for a while.
She stopped at the red light at Ocean Avenue, glancing over at the lawn of the Lightkeeper’s Inn on her left. A little farther up the street, on the right-hand side, was the dark storefront of the Stone & Milbury Insurance Agency. The place was shut down — there’d be no more business transacted there, at least not in the near future.
When the light turned green, she continued up along the Loop, past Town Park and the cemetery, past the Unitarian church on the left and, on the opposite side of the road, the entrance to the parking lot for the English Point Lighthouse and Museum.
Not so strangely, she had no desire to stop in there today. She’d found out everything she’d needed to know last night.
Now, like Roger, she just had to wrap up a few loose ends.
She drove farther on up the Loop, past the docks on her right and the Rusty Moose Tavern on her left. She slowed, switching on her turn signal. This time, she pulled the Jeep into a parking space in front of the tavern, turned off the engine, and sat with her hands on the steering wheel as she peered up through the windshield at the wooden building’s dark brown facade and its weather-beaten sign, which swayed gently in the wind.
“Well, Candy,” she said to herself, “are you going to do this or not?”
She knew the answer. She was going to do it — whether she wanted to or not.
With a determined expression on her face, she tugged on the door handle, climbed out of the Jeep, and locked the doors, leaving her purse on the floor in front of the passenger seat. She didn’t expect to be staying long, and she didn’t plan on buying anything inside.
She just had to put the last piece of the puzzle into place.
