Town in a Wild Moose Chase

With Diagrams and an Introduction by Jeremiah Sykes.

Jeremiah Sykes.

Candy shivered, and wondered if there was a connection.

She’d had a frightening encounter with a contemporary member of the Sykes family just last summer, one that had left her shaken and anxious. It had taken her months to recover mentally and emotionally from the encounter, given what she’d learned when she thought the episode was all over.

Again, she recalled an inscription she’d seen printed in the upper left corner of that set of blueprints, laid out early last summer on a table in Doc’s office at home.

The inscription, written in cursive, and apparently scribbled quickly, had read: Here are the plans. PS Make sure no one else sees this.

PS. At first she had thought the letters referred to postscript, which made perfect sense. But she soon realized they meant something else.

They were initials.

She’d figured it out while reading a newspaper article about a developer named Porter Sykes, who was in the process of building a hotel and convention complex along Portland’s waterfront. The project had stalled up over the past couple of years because of the economy, but she’d seen Porter Sykes’s name in the papers a few times over the past nine months, assuring the citizens of Portland that he planned to make good on his promise to give the city everything it deserved.

But why would Ben have a book about the Sykes family?

Then it came to her.

The Sykes brothers had been Ben’s best friends in college. They had betrayed him—or, at least, one of them had—and even tried to frame him for murder. So now he was researching their family tree, probably trying to learn more about them.

But why?

She put the book back where she’d found it and left his office with more questions than answers.

Across the street, the dry cleaner’s was surprisingly busy, with an elderly couple talking to Maggie at the counter and another five or six other people standing in line, talking softly to one another or shuffling restlessly. Candy made her apologies as she hurried past them and leaned across the counter.

“I’m sorry, but this is an emergency,” she said as pleasantly as possible to the elderly couple. To Maggie, she added, “I’m desperate, and I need your help. I have to find a dress for the Moose Fest Ball this evening. Everything I have is either out of date, decades old, or the wrong size. You wouldn’t happen to have a little number at home you could lend me, would you?”

Maggie was about to answer when she stopped herself. “Wait a minute—you’re going to the ball? When did this happen? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Just now, and I am. Ben bought tickets for us a couple of weeks ago but he forgot to tell me about it until a few minutes ago.” She waved a hand impatiently. “Anyway, that’s not important. What’s important right now is, I need a dress! Can you help?”

“Let me think,” Maggie said, regaining her composure and speaking quickly as she punched a bunch of keys on an old cash register. “To answer your question, yes, I happen to have a whole lot of cute little numbers in my closet, including that red spaghetti-strap cocktail dress I bought went we went shopping at the outlet malls. Remember? But the problem is, they’re all about three or four sizes too big for you. Too bad we didn’t know about this a few weeks ago. We could have picked something up.”

“I know but that doesn’t help me now. Isn’t there something hanging in the back of your closet, or an evening dress Amanda left behind?” Candy gave her friend a pleading look.

The cash drawer rang and slid open. Maggie handed the elderly couple their change and their dry cleaning. She thanked them for their patronage before looking back over at Candy. “We’ll figure something out. I close here in an hour. Stop by my place this afternoon and we’ll dig through everything I have. We’ll make it work.”

Candy flashed her a grateful smile. “You’re the best,” she said, and flicked her scarf back around her neck as she dashed out of the store.

Doc was just getting started as she slipped into the small conference room at the Lightkeeper’s Inn. She gave him a quick, supportive wave when he flicked his gaze toward her, took a seat by the door, and looked around. The place, with its aged oak wainscotting and dark green walls, sat about twenty or twenty-five people. A majority of the seats were filled, which obviously thrilled Doc, though he didn’t show it. He looked good, dressed in a white shirt and sport jacket—the same outfit he’d worn through all his years of teaching. He stood at a podium with his notes in front of him, though he rarely glanced at them as he spoke.

“The French, led by Samuel de Champlain, were credited with the so-called European discovery of Maine and many parts of New England,” Doc was telling his audience, which consisted of a good mix of generations. “They tried to establish an early settlement on Mount Desert Island but were driven off by the British. And although the British were the earliest landholders in this region, the Scotch-Irish and Germans were among the earliest European settlers here. The Scotch-Irish in particular founded a number of villages along the coast in the early to mid- seventeen hundreds, including Boothbay, which was originally called Townsend, and Belfast, named after the town in Ireland. The Germans followed and settled places like Waldoboro, which was originally called Broad Bay and initially populated by fifteen hundred German immigrant families from the Rhineland. Cape Willington, of course, started as an early British settlement, and saw activity before and during the Revolutionary War, after which it became a small fishing village for most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.…”

He continued on like that for the better part of an hour, as Candy politely listened, though her mind began to drift after a while, picking apart all the little factoids she’d gathered over the past day or two.

A few things stuck in her mind.

One of the most prominent was a recent development: Why was Preston Smith avoiding certain people in town—like the police… and Ben?

She’d seen it happen right in front of her, on the first day she met Preston, but she hadn’t suspected it was a deliberate move until recently.

Two: Why the hush-hush about the sponsorship program and the naming of a new spokesperson?

The point of anything like that was to promote a specific product or company. She knew. She’d worked in marketing for more than ten years in Boston. So why bury a press release about a high-priced spokesperson you’re about to spend tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to promote your product or organization?

Third point: What was up with Liam?

The other ice sculptors seemed to be avoiding him and were reluctant to talk about him. Why?

There were other questions on her mind as well, but she was startled when she felt her phone buzz in her pocket. She’d put it on vibrate during the lecture (um, presentation, she reminded herself), and it was going off.

As surreptitiously as possible, she slipped it out of her pocket and glanced down at the phone number on the screen.

It was a text message. When she flipped open her phone, she saw it was from an unknown sender: Important an-nouncement coming soon, it read. Please stand by your cell phones.

Candy tilted her head as she read the message again. Obviously it was some sort of mistake—an ill-directed text meant for someone else, more than likely.

“…the Sykes family originally came here as seafarers,” Doc was saying. “Captain Josiah Sykes managed to purchase his own ship, a one-hundred-fifty-ton merchantman, which he called, ironically enough, The Tempest. It would become a metaphor for his life, and if you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s play, you’ll see the parallels. Josiah ran timber and salted fish from New England, cloth and fine whiskey from Britain, and sugar and molasses from the West Indies, which was turned into rum in the colonies. Unfortunately, when times got tough, he also followed the Middle Passage, running slaves from Africa. It was on one of these runs that he lost his ship, breaking it on the rocky point just south of Shipwreck Cove, after dropping off his human cargo in the West Indies, and loading up on other goods in Boston. His wife, Annie, was killed during the wreck, and he thought he’d