So who had it been? She was determined to find out.
She spent the next forty-five minutes going back through recent issues of the newspaper, as well as her own e-mails and notes, searching for clues about anyone around town who might be missing. She paid particular attention to the community pages, including her own column. But nothing unusual caught her eye, other than a senior citizen who had wandered away from an assisted living facility and a couple of missing cats.
She pulled out her cell phone and scrolled down through her list of contacts, giving each name an opportunity to spark a memory or help her make a connection. But again, nothing stood out.
She listened to the voice messages on her phone next, with similar results, and finally turned back to her computer.
She’d searched through her own and the newspaper’s resources and found nothing about any missing persons, or anything that would give her a clue to the mystery Solomon Hatch had quite literally laid at her feet. But one resource remained—the one she was most reluctant to search, the one managed by the only other local news provider in town.
Wanda Boyle’s website.
She had started thinking about it earlier in the day, when she spotted Wanda at the center of the group of celebrating workers and sculptors. Wanda had been plenty busy around town the past few days and had probably talked to as many people as Candy had—maybe more. She’d probably posted several items in the past few days. Her blog might hold a clue or two.
Candy realized she was holding her breath as she keyed the words
The site loaded quickly. Candy leaned in closer for a better look.
It was a fairly simplistic yet eye-catching design, with flashy typefaces and bright lime green and fluorescent purple colors. In the upper left corner was a fairly large photo of Wanda, dressed as a pseudo-1940s reporter, wearing a rumpled trench coat and fedora, flashing a press badge, with a logo in a Superman-style typeface that read THE CAPE CRUSADER superimposed over the image.
Other than that it was a typical blog, with daily postings down the middle, a link to other local resource sites on the left side, and a calendar of events and archive on the right, as well as a series of photo albums with digital images Wanda had taken around town.
The most recent postings—three or four, just a few paragraphs each—concerned today’s ice-sculpting activities and the upcoming Winter Moose Fest. Wanda had posted snippets of several interviews with sculptors, as well as the images she’d taken just a couple of hours earlier.
She’d caught Liam Yates complaining about the speed of the ice-block unloading process. Apparently, two of the hired temporary workers had failed to show; Candy made a note to check into it. Gina Templeton promised that her husband, Victor, who had been delayed, would arrive on Friday or by Saturday morning at the latest. Preston Smith told Wanda he was charmed by the event, mentioned a special sponsorship program he was promoting, and extended warm and congratulatory words for everyone who had anything even remotely to do with the event, which he was anxiously awaiting to see when it came to fruition on Saturday. Oliver LaForce was pleased to be involved in local efforts to bring the art of ice sculpting to Cape Willington, and his new executive chef, Colin Trevor Jones, expressed his enthusiasm for this great event and, flashing a charming smile (according to Wanda), added his hope for its continued growth and success.
Candy made a noise of disgust in her throat and scrolled on down.
Wanda had also interviewed a few of the folks who would be driving sleighs in the parade tomorrow, including an eighty-five-year-old farmer from New Hampshire who had been tending horses since he was three, and was driving a sleigh that had been owned by his grandparents, who had homesteaded in the state in the eighteen hundreds. Wanda included a photo of the farmer, who went by the name of Mason Parker. He stood angularly next to his horse, Jack, and both animal and master had similar disinterested expressions. Mason’s family owned a maple sugar shack and pancake house between Nashua and Keene in the southern part of the state. He and Jack gave hay-wagon rides in the fall and sleigh rides in the winter through the family’s property. He usually traveled with his wife, he said in the article, but she hadn’t come with him this time, as she’d been feeling poorly lately.
Wanda had compiled a complete listing of all the sleighs and drivers who were scheduled to appear in the parade, and Candy skimmed through the list, searching for anything unusual, but nothing jumped out at her. It was all routine stuff. A father-and-daughter team, named the Summerfields, minus the mother, who had apparently stayed home. A teenage boy, his grandfather, and his uncle—where were the parents? But most were older couples from surrounding towns and villages—places like Ellsworth and Bucksport and Winter Harbor. Two of the entries were from Mount Desert Island, while a few had come from farther away, from the west toward Fryeburg or south toward Portland.
Wanda had done a competent, thorough job, Candy thought as she read through the blog post. She’d even kept track of those who had already arrived in town and those who had yet to arrive. The Schmidts, Carvers, Frosts, Bonvieves, and Dockenses were checked in at local hotels and inns, while the Cobbs, Franks, Hawthornes, Delamains, and Tuckers were scheduled to arrive by Friday afternoon. The stragglers would just make it for the twilight-timed parade. There were also a few other ice sculptors still due in, including Duncan Leggmeyer and Baxter Bryant, along with Baxter’s wife, Bernadette.
In the next post, Wanda passed along some last-minute tips from two of the town’s snowplow operators, Francis Robichaud and Tom Farmington, who described the conditions of the town’s streets and sidewalks, and advised on parking for the weekend’s events.
It wasn’t Pulitzer Prize–winning journalism, but it was decent enough for a community blog, Candy had to admit.
In that moment she couldn’t help but feel a tinge of jealousy. She, Ben, and a few volunteer correspondents had already covered much the same ground in the previous issue of the paper, but Wanda had done it all on her own, in a matter of hours. She was tenacious and driven in a way Candy couldn’t completely understand. She’d seen it quite often in metropolitan Boston and New York, but it seemed out of place here in quiet, slow-paced Maine, where business suits and cold competitiveness were generally left at the border, and life was more off the beaten path, even in cities like Portland, Augusta, and Bangor. Then again, cold competitiveness in particular could rear its head anywhere—even here in Cape Willington, Maine.
Candy scanned the rest of the posts, and about halfway down found one that drew her attention. It concerned two of the sculptors, Liam Yates from Vermont and Victor Templeton, Gina’s husband.
Wanda had apparently dug up some old newspaper clippings and online postings, which detailed a fairly intense feud between the two sculptors. Tempers had flared and words had been exchanged between the two as recently as a few weeks ago. The feud seemed to stretch back several years. Candy remembered that, earlier in the day, Felicia Gaspar had alluded to animosity between the two sculptors.
Wanda also noted a year-old battle between Liam Yates and Duncan Leggmeyer, which centered on some sort of trophy for a hatchet-throwing contest, but details were sketchy. Candy scanned through it all with mild interest. Wanda promised her readers that she’d continued to dig and post more revelations as she unearthed them.
A long list of comments to Wanda’s posts had generally expressed interest in her revelations and curiosity about future findings, though a few posters had defended the sculptors and called the disagreements overblown. And one comment in particular, posted by someone identified only as
That caught Candy’s attention. Disagreements among sculptors were one thing, but
Candy read through the rest of the comments, and finding nothing else of interest, decided to give up for the night. As she logged off, she pondered the animosity between Liam Yates and some of the other sculptors. It was something she’d have to keep an eye out for the following day. She’d also try to figure out who, if anyone, was missing around town, and find out, one way or the other, what had happened to Solomon Hatch.
As her computer powered down, she glanced toward the filing cabinet against the opposite wall. She’d been in the bottom drawer only once in the past two years. It held the writings and research of a ghost. “I don’t think you
