The trail zigzagged around defiles and outcroppings of rock, continued along a narrow stream for a while, and then turned west again, putting the sun slightly in front of him and sometimes to his left.
He moved as quickly as he could with his limp. He had on the light boots he wore around the farm, and they worked fine for this type of terrain. He stopped at one point to pick up a long, straight, dried-out branch that had broken off a tree long ago, and used it as a walking stick after stripping off a few thin, short offshoots that held shriveled brown leaves.
He checked his watch, so he’d have a good gauge of how long he’d been walking, then looked up as he heard the dog’s ruffs and growls again. The occasional sounds of digging were more pronounced. They appeared to be coming from his left, and the trail angled off in that direction, so he continued to follow it as best he could.
The terrain steepened and he struggled up the low slope, slowing his gait. He was also treading more carefully now, making sure he didn’t slip or lose his balance. The last thing he wanted to do was to fall and break a hip out here in the middle of nowhere.
He lost track of the trail as he came across an area where the ground had hardened and turned rocky, but he knew the dog was close now. He could hear the animal just ahead, through a low screen of shrubbery, in what looked like a clearing of sorts. He could almost feel the dog’s movements through the earth as it pawed at the ground.
He whistled softly and called out, since he didn’t want to startle the dog. “Hey, Random. It’s Doc. Remember me?” he said as he came through the trees. “What are you doing way out here?”
The sounds of the dog’s digging and growling continued and grew louder. Doc finally came around a last stand of trees and saw the animal, pawing away at the foot of what looked like an old weed-covered stone foundation, though it was obvious no building had stood here in a long time.
“What’d you find there?” Doc asked, approaching the dog cautiously. Random turned and looked at him with a dirt-covered snout and soulful eyes, then jerked his head around as something popped out of the hole he’d been digging at, darted left and right, and then took a long leap, dashing off into the underbrush to their right.
It was a young rabbit.
The dog snapped his head back, let out a gruff of disbelief, steeled his haunches, and dashed after his prey like a lightning bolt, crashing around the crumbling foundation and into the brush, quickly disappearing from sight.
Doc watched the whole scene with some amusement. The dog had simply cornered a bunny. Even now, he could still hear the two of them in their frenzy, a sonic record of their life-and-death chase resounding through the woods with snaps, rustles, and an occasional playful bark.
Taking a moment to catch his breath, Doc stuck his hands in his back pockets, leaned back, and looked up. There were thickening strings of clouds passing by. He wasn’t sure he liked the look of that. He knew there was a front coming through later in the afternoon, but he hoped the worst of the weather would clear out by the morning, so they’d have a good day for picking.
He looked down and surveyed the clearing, focusing in on the foundation around him for the first time.
It looked old, he thought—perhaps a hundred years, perhaps more. He wondered what kind of place had been built out there in the woods, so far from town. A hunter’s shed, possibly, or maybe even a maple sugaring shack, something like that. It hadn’t been a large place, but there’d been a wing off the back, possibly for a cookhouse or kitchen. There were naked foundations like this all over New England, the remnants of long-abandoned properties.
But when he took a closer look, something odd caught his eye.
He stepped to a nearby section of the foundation and used his walking stick to push away some of the leaves, pine needles, and loamy dirt that clung to the top of the stones. Then he leaned over and brushed away more with the flat of his hand.
Something poked up at him from the foundation. Nothing sharp. He pulled his hand away and looked at it. Part of a wood frame, blackened, as if it were a lump of charcoal.
Bits of charred wood were lodged into the foundation at various places, he noticed. He turned and spotted them in several locations now.
He knew what it meant. The place had burned down.
He paced around it and found a cornerstone at the northwest side. He kicked away a layer of dirt and grime that covered the lower face and bent over to get a look at it. There appeared to be engraving on the stone. But no, not an engraving. Nothing as professional as that. Just a few letters chipped out with a hammer and chisel, now smoothed by age but still clearly legible:
S. SYKES.
THIRTY-THREE
While Neil studied the coin, Candy examined the letters more carefully. There were perhaps two dozen of them, dating back several years. At first they’d come in only once or twice a year, but recently they’d become more frequent, arriving in the mailbox at the berry farm every few months. They were written on expensive watermarked paper in formal legal language, but all said the same thing. The firm—a legal, financial, and real estate investment company based in New York City—represented a client interested in purchasing Crawford’s Berry Farm in Cape Willington, Maine. The earliest letters made no specific mention of any financial offering, simply encouraging contact, but later letters referred to a sum “in the seven figures.”
“They can’t be serious,” Neil said at one point as he set the coin aside and read through the letters with Candy. “These sums are outrageous.”
“Maybe they know something we don’t,” she said, and indicated the coin. “Doc will know something about that, but it looks a couple hundred years old. My guess is it’s some sort of doubloon—something like that.”
“Pirate money?” Neil asked in disbelief.
Candy shook her head, uncertain, and turned back to one of the letters. She pointed with a fingernail at the firm’s name, written in black block letters across the top the page:
WYBORNE WHITTLE KINGSBURY LLC.
“Ever hear of these guys?” she asked.
Neil shook his head. “No.”
An address line under the name listed a main address on Park Avenue in New York, with branch offices in Philadelphia, Montreal, Chicago, Miami, and London.
“I’ll check them out when we get back to Blueberry Acres,” Candy said.
Neil nodded, and sat down on the edge of the bed, thinking. “I don’t get it,” he said finally.
Candy began to fold and bundle up the letters. “Which part?”
“Well, if he was getting offers for that much money on this place, why not just take the offers? Why hire Lydia to find another buyer for him?”
“Another good question,” Candy admitted, “and if we can figure out the answer to that one, we might just figure out who killed your father.”
“You think it’s all tied together?” He held up the coin. “With this?”
“I think it could be, yes. The trickiest part of all these cases is figuring out the motivations behind the actions,” Candy said. “Money. The biggest motivator of all. Someone obviously wanted this property pretty bad. They were willing to pay a lot of money for it. And not just for the pretty view.”
“What are you saying?”
Candy shook her head. “I’m not sure yet. Just thinking out loud.” She ran the rubber band back around the bundle of envelopes and returned it to the metal box. Neil was about to place the gold coin back inside as well, but he changed his mind and slipped it into his pocket. He closed the box’s lid and locked it.
“You’re not going to leave that here, are you?” Candy asked.
Neil looked down at the box filled with letters and mementos, bundles of cash, and a mysterious gold coin. “No, I guess that wouldn’t be a good idea, would it? Especially with all the people we’ll have around here tomorrow morning—not that anyone would take anything from the house, of course.”
“Of course not,” Candy said, “but it’s best not to leave tempt
ation sitting around.” She glanced at her watch. “The bank is still open. I suggest we get that into a safe-deposit box.” She looked out the window, staring off toward the trees in the distance.
“I think it’s time we found my dad . . .”
THIRTY-FOUR
Doc straightened and leaned heavily on his walking stick as he stared at the cornerstone for several long moments. His brow furrowed and his mouth tightened to a long, straight line as he considered the implications of what he’d found.
It could be a major discovery, he thought.
S. Sykes.
This cabin must have been built by a member of the Sykes family, who had been in the area for generations. Surely someone must have documented the location of this foundation, especially given the history of the Sykes family in Cape Willington. But he’d dug around the historical society’s archives quite a bit over the past few years, and could recall no record that indicated this had ever been Sykes land.
That was what surprised him the most—the fact that this foundation seemed to have been forgotten. He’d never heard anyone talk about it. He’d never seen or read any references to it.
Almost as if it had simply slipped out of the historical record.
Yet here was hard evidence that, indeed, a Sykes had once lived on this property now owned by the late Miles Crawford and his heirs.
Which brought up another somewhat disturbing question: Had Miles known of this foundation’s existence, of its link to the Sykes family, and neglected to make it public knowledge?
If so, why had he kept it a secret?
This discovery confirmed an inkling Doc had had earlier in the day, a suspicion, when he’d been at the diner, listening to Artie’s theories about the motivations behind the murder of Miles Crawford.
The most important question we should ask, Artie had said, is not who murdered Miles, or how, but why?
And that’s because of the berry farm.
That had been Artie’s theory, and it made sense. It was why Doc had left the diner when he did, and made his way home to check his resources for the lecture he’d given a couple of years ago about the town’s founding families. He was certain he’d remember if he’d seen a reference to this place during his research. But there had been none, as far as he could recall, and he was a fairly thorough researcher. So how had it slipped by him? How had it slipped by all of them? It couldn’t have escaped the detection of researchers for all these years, could it?
Unless someone had purposely endeavored to keep it a secret. A cover-up.
But was that even possible? On the surface, it seemed ludicrous.
And again: Why would anyone go to such lengths?
Doc turned back to the foundation, studying the traces of black singes along the stone.
What happened here? he wondered.
He started off again, walking the outline of the foundation, all the way around once, and then twice, studying it with a more discerning eye. He poked at the hole Random had been digging, wondering if it might lead to something deeper. But it simply ended in a small hollow beneath the stones.
He looked up and around. The sounds of the dog-and-hare chase had died away, but he could still hear Random scuffling through the underbrush not too far away, still in frenzied pursuit.
Doc studied the woods around him, and then began a careful, systematic search of the area.
He found the graveyard fairly quickly. It was perhaps thirty paces beyond the house, in an area sheltered by trees, a small cemetery marked off by a black wrought iron fence, now rusted and leaning over in some places, but still standing. A gate remained as well, iron-hinged on a stone pillar, dark chocolate rust stains marking its face.
Doc didn’t enter. He didn’t have to. He could see everything he needed to from where he stood.
There were five gravestones, some tilted fore or aft, all black and streaked with age. But he could still make out the last names on the stones.
All were members of the Sykes family.
Doc turned and looked toward the foundation, now hidden behind a screen of trees.
Had these people died of natural causes? Or had they been killed by the fire?
As he pondered this question, he noticed something else—something more recent than gravestones that were a hundred and fifty years old.
It looked like another grave, yet this one was freshly dug into the dark, loamy earth, just beyond the back side of the wrought iron fence. It was as if someone else had died and there hadn’t been enough room inside the cemetery’s iron fence for another grave, so they’d dug it outside in an open patch of land among the trees.
It also looked like it had been a haphazard affair. Doc noticed several other shallower pits in the immediate vicinity, as if someone had started digging those before focusing on the largest one, which looked fairly deep. And the dirt removed from the hole had been flung around all the sides randomly, rather that dumped into a single pile to make infill easier.
But it had never been filled back in.
Doc circled the cemetery and approached the hole with caution. He had no idea what he’d find at the bottom. He only hoped it wouldn’t be another body—of either the fresh or the decomposed variety.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when he heard a crash of sound to his left, and a blur of shaggy white and gray fur charged out of the woods toward him. Doc let out a cry of surprise, fell back, and nearly lost his footing. If he hadn’t still been holding on to the walking stick, he might have tumbled to the ground.
But he saw almost at once it was only Random, back from his quest, sans rabbit. Doc gathered his footing and held a hand to his chest. His heart was thumping inside his rib cage.
“Random, goddammit!” he said forcefully. “You nearly scared me to death!”
At the sound of the harsh words the dog slowed, dropped his head, and looked up at Doc with mournful eyes. Slowly the dog paced to him and gave a soft gruff, apparently offering his apologies.
Doc took a moment to calm himself. “It’s all right,” he said finally in a softer tone. “You just startled me, that’s all.”
The dog sniffed around Doc’s feet, then lifted his head curiously and trotted over to the open pit in the ground, where he continued sniffing around its edges.
“Anything in there?” Doc asked. But he knew he wasn’t about to get an answer from the dog. He’d have to go look for himself.
The sides of the pit were fairly steep, and the dirt had dried to a crusty brown. It wasn’t as fresh as he had first thought. He guessed it had been dug a couple of weeks, or maybe even a couple of months, ago. There was no way to tell with any certainty.
And, he discovered when he finally sidled up to the edge of the pit and looked down, it was empty.
No bodies down there at the bottom, he thought, and for a strange moment he wasn’t sure whether he was relieved or disappointed.
But something else was odd about the pit. The sides and bottom had been smoothed and weathered a bit, but he could still see something down there. If it had been a dark, cloudy day, or if he’d come across the pit at twilight, or if he’d been standing in the thick of shadowy trees, he might not have noticed it. But he stood in a relative clearing with the trees pushed back, allowing in some daylight. He could clearly see a distinct indention at the bottom of the hole. A rectangular carved-out depression, cleanly squared off and deeper than the surrounding earth at the bottom, by about half a dozen inches.
It was as if some object—a box, perhaps—had been plucked from the dense earth at the bottom of the pit, like a tooth from the gum, leaving a cavity behind.
Doc looked at it for quite a while, tilting his head back and forth, muttering to himself under his breath, trying to make sense of it.
Finally it clicked in his brain.
Something had been buried at the bottom of the pit, he realized, and someone had gone looking for it, found it, and yanked it out, leaving the indention. The object had been a couple of feet in length and perh
aps a foot wide.
About the size of a small wooden box.
Or, Doc thought, a treasure chest.
Possibly a very old treasure chest.
Doc’s heart thumped inside his rib cage again, but this time it wasn’t fright that made it beat so loudly.
It was a spark of recognition.
He suddenly thought he knew what the box was, because he’d seen something like it—another old wooden box of the same general size—before.
“Random!” he called out sharply, and the dog, who had been wandering off again, stopped in his tracks and turned back around with a questioning look.
“We have to go! Now! Come on!”
And as fast as he could move, Doc headed back through the woods toward the berry farm, the dog on his heels.
THIRTY-FIVE
Candy stood at the edge of the woods, her blue eyes searching as she called out for her father. “Hey, Dad, where are you? I have to get back to town!”
“Maybe he’s in the hoophouse,” Neil said, looking off toward the fields and the farmhouse. They’d searched everywhere else for Doc, but so far they’d had no luck finding him.
They heard a dog bark then, from back among the trees, and the sounds of someone coming through the woods. Half a minute later Doc emerged at the edge of the field, a dozen yards from where they stood. He quickly surveyed the area, spotted them, and started in their direction.
Random appeared a few moments later, bursting out onto the open field with a stick held tightly in his mouth. He turned in a few quick circles before running over to greet his master.
“Where’ve you been?” Candy asked her father as he approached. “Out for a walk in the woods?”
Town in a Strawberry Swirl (Candy Holliday Mystery) Page 20