Town in a Cinnamon Toast

by B. B. Haywood

  ENGAGEMENTS

  Little Kimmy Whitebridge is all grown up and planning to marry D. Douglas Douglass III of Cape Willington. Both are graduates of CWHS. Kimmy is currently working in hotel management at the Motel 6 up on Route 1. Douglas is employed at D. D. Douglass & Son Realtors. (I wonder how he got that job?) A September wedding is planned. Happy honeymoon, kids! Do they have heart-shaped beds at the Motel 6?

  KUDOS

  Once again we have to thank the amazing (and seemingly tireless) Wanda Boyle for her committee work at our local schools. In the last year, Wanda planned the teacher luncheons, the Soccer Extravaganza, and the Music Club Money-Makers Fair; worked on the planning committee for reading evaluation of our gifted children; made costumes for the third-grade play; baked cookies for the Halloween and Valentine’s Day parties; chaired the PTO— and didn’t miss a single meeting. (I think she even cleaned the classrooms a few times.) Wow! Have you seen your own kids lately, Wanda? Ha! Just kidding!

  ATTENTION ALL GARDENERS!

  Get out your trowels and dig your way to the Cape Garden Club’s First Annual Flower Festival, to be held at the Cove Inn on Sunday, August 2. The theme of this very merry special event will be “Tea in the Garden.” (Make mine Earl Grey, please!) You can call Lily Verte for all the flowery details. We hope this turns out to be a blossoming event for them.

  THE THEATRE

  Apparently Lyra Graveton can carry more than buckets of ice cream. She can carry a tune as well! We normally see Lyra at the Ice Cream Shack scooping up gobs of delicious homemade ice cream. (Have you seen those ice cream cones? They’re humongous!) Starting next weekend, you can see (and hear) Lyra belting out tunes in Cape Summer Theatre’s musical version of everyone’s favorite cowboy show, Oklahoma! Tickets are still available at the box office (though they’re sure to go fast with Lyra up there on stage!). The show runs through August 12 at the Pruitt Opera House. See it, and Oh! we guarantee you’ll have a beautiful, beautiful morning!

  TASTY TIDBITS

  Rumors that Town Council Chairwoman Bertha Grayfire will wear her outrageous Dolly Parton costume (a favorite with the kids at Halloween) when she emcees the annual Blueberry Queen Pageant Saturday night are completely FALSE! (We have heard, however, that the costume has fallen into disrepair lately. You should take better care of your assets, Bertha!). . . . My spy tells me that Melody’s Café, that new restaurant up on River Road, is doing a booming business. The lobster rolls are supposed to be absolutely scrumptious! (Don’t tell the tourists, though, or I’ll never be able to get a seat!) My spy’s only request—better desserts, please! . . . Official Judicious F. P. Bosworth sightings for the first two weeks of July—Visible: 9 days—Invisible: 5 days. Sounds like Judicious has been out enjoying this glorious Maine summer weather! Be sure to pass on Judicious sightings to the Grapevine for future publication!

  ONE

  Candy Holliday was standing at the kitchen sink, cleaning up after making another batch of blueberry pies, when she looked out the window and saw Doc’s old pickup truck rattling up the dirt driveway way too early. Curious, she glanced at the clock on the wall over the kitchen table. Usually he wasn’t back home until ten thirty or eleven, preferring to linger over his coffee cup as long as possible. But here he was at a little past nine.

  She knew right away something was up.

  The kitchen wasn’t Candy’s favorite place to be; she had never considered herself much of a domestic sort. She would rather be outside, tending to her chickens, fiddling around in the barn, taking care of the gardens, or walking the fields behind the house. But when you had a blueberry festival to prepare for, you did what you had to do.

  So to stay out of her way (or perhaps just to avoid the chores that always seemed to need doing around the farm), her father, Henry “Doc” Holliday, had gone into town that morning for coffee and donuts with “the boys”—William “Bumpy” Brigham, a barrel-chested semiretired attorney with a deep passion for antique cars; Artie Groves, a retired civil engineer who now ran a bustling eBay business out of a cluttered office over his garage; and Finn Woodbury, a former big-city cop who had segued into small-town show business, serving as producer for three or four community theater projects each year, including the annual musical staged at the Pruitt Opera House on Ocean Avenue. They were golfin’ and jawin’ buddies, all in their mid- to late sixties, who spent their Friday nights playing poker as though it were a religion and could be found most weekday mornings holding court in the corner booth at Duffy’s Main Street Diner. These freewheeling breakfast gatherings, where the latest headlines, rumors, gossip, and sports stories were chewed over like well-cooked bacon, were as addictive as coffee and salt air to Doc, who, despite his retirement, still had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge of any kind and liked to keep his finger tight to the pulse of his adopted village.

  So it wasn’t surprising he heard the latest shocker before Candy did.

  The story had been on the front page of the morning paper, of course, but Doc always took that with him to the diner. Candy only got it around lunchtime, after it had been well pored over and thumbed through, and smartly decorated with coffee rings and swaths of smeared donut icing. And she could have switched on the TV and gotten the story that way, but for the past few days she had been too busy to waste time sitting in front of the tube. Anyway, TV watching was a winter activity around Cape Willington, Maine, where the Downeast summers were short and glorious, and so had to be enjoyed to their fullest. That meant being outside as much as possible, letting the sensual warmth squeeze the chill completely out of one’s bones before winter set in again with its unrelenting timeliness.

  Candy wasn’t outside today, though. It was the day before Cape Willington’s much-anticipated Forty-First Annual Blueberry Festival, and she had been in the kitchen since six thirty that morning, making last-minute preparations. She still had way too much to do, and now here was Doc, distracting her when she had no time for distractions.

  He pulled the truck to a stop in a cloud of roiling dust; it had been a wet spring but a dry summer so far, causing them both to worry, what with the crop and all. But the upper atmosphere patterns were changing, according to the weatherman, who promised rain in the next week or so, possibly as early as next Tuesday, which could salvage this season’s harvest. But she guessed Doc wasn’t here to talk about the weather.

  He jumped out of the truck, slamming the door hard behind him, and walked with a determined gait into the house, his limp barely slowing him down. He managed to find his way into the kitchen without tripping over any of the baskets and boxes that littered the floor. With a dramatic flourish he laid the paper out on the countertop, front page up. “Have you heard?”

  She gave him a confused look and shook her head. “Heard what?”

  Doc jabbed with a crooked finger at the paper’s front page. “They announced it this morning. It’s all over the TV and newspapers.” He paused, then said in a low breath, “It’s Jock Larson. He’s dead.”

  TWO

  “Dead?” At first Candy wasn’t sure she had heard what she thought she had heard. Maybe her ears weren’t working right. She almost smiled, thinking Doc was just playing with her, as he sometimes did. “You’re kidding.”

  He shook his head. “’Fraid not, pumpkin.” His face was stern; there was no trace of a smile to indicate a joke. “Jock’s gone, that’s for sure.”

  Candy felt a chill go through her that made her think of winter’s coldest day. Suddenly hushed, she asked, “What happened?”

  Doc started to speak, but his voice was low and hoarse. He paused, took a moment to clear his throat. Obviously the conversation at the diner that morning had been more spirited than usual. It must have been quite an event. The boys are probably in a frenzy, Candy thought. The whole town probably is.

  Her next thought was, This is big news. I’ve got to call Maggie.

  Gathering himself, his voic
e grave, Doc said, “Well, the information’s still pretty sketchy. But what’s clear is that sometime late last night, Jock took a nosedive off a cliff up on Mount Desert Island—”

  “Oh my God.” Candy’s hand went to her mouth.

  “—and fell to the rocks below, or at least that’s the official version. He must have landed hard. Probably killed him instantly.” Doc paused. “I’ve seen those rocks. I was up there just a few weeks ago.” He took a deep breath. “Anyway, at some point during the night, his body must have rolled into the water and drifted out to sea. But the tides brought it back in this morning. He washed up on Sand Beach sometime around daybreak. Some elderly tourist up from Maryland found the body. Gave her quite a shock, too, or so I’ve heard.”

  “Dad, that’s awful.”

  Doc Holliday nodded. “Yeah it is.” He shook his gray-haired head. “This whole thing seems so unreal. I guess it’s just hard to believe he’s really gone. It sure is going to shake up this town, though.”

  Falling into silence, he leaned back against the counter, arms crossed and head bowed, and for the first time in a while Candy took a good look at her father. The crags on his face seemed deeper, his dark brown eyes more guarded. His clothes were as rumpled as ever, though, hanging loosely on his frame. He had never been a burly man, but he seemed thinner these days, though not frail. He was getting stronger again, she realized, after years when it seemed he would never fully recover. Despite his efforts to conceal the truth with his humor, the death a few years ago of Holly, Doc’s wife and Candy’s mother, had hit him hard, and it had taken him a good while to recover from the loss. In the end it had taken a major change—retirement from the university and the purchase of a blueberry farm in a small Maine coastal village, at the strong urging of his daughter—to help him start his recovery. The farm, his life’s dream, had become his raison d’etre, keeping him busy and giving him purpose. He started writing again, beginning to fill the hollowness inside him with books and research and activity and friends. And he had quickly adopted this community as his own, taken its people into his heart, its history into his bones.

  Now the town’s loss was his loss. And it seemed to draw him back just a little into the funk he had worked so hard to pull himself out of.

  Still, Candy thought, he and Jock had never been good friends. Come to think of it, they had disliked each other. A lot.

  It was all because of that parking spot, Candy recalled. She hadn’t lived here then, hadn’t yet pulled herself out of the downward spiral in which she had, for a time, floundered herself. But she had heard the story from Maggie Tremont, her best friend in town.

  Jock (Maggie had told her) was like a god around Cape Willington. That might have been an overstatement, but it was hard to deny that Jock had put the place on the map, given it a face to the rest of the world. If nothing else, he had been for decades the town’s adventurous soul, its favorite son—though a somewhat immoral and often arrogant one, filled with the juice of life. He was not shy to claim his privilege, whatever that might be. For the past few years, that privilege extended to a primo parking spot in front of Duffy’s Diner every weekday morning and at around noontime, when Jock stopped in for a cheeseburger and a bowl of homemade chicken noodle soup. New in town and unaware of the etiquette that followed Jock around, Doc parked in that spot one morning and had promptly been warned by both Dolores, the waitress, and Juanita, who worked the counter. Doc listened but hadn’t moved his car; he wasn’t about to play that game.

  When Jock walked in, stomping about and complaining loudly that his parking spot had been taken by some blasted out-of-towner, and that he had been forced to park almost a half block away—an inconceivable affront to his quasi-celebrity status—Doc calmly assumed responsibility and then proceeded to tell Jock, to the horror of all in listening range, that the parking spots in town were for the general public, available on a first-come-first-served basis, and that it was foolish and downright undemocratic to assume they could be reserved for any one individual. With that, he paid his check and left, leaving stunned diners and a sputtering, disbelieving Jock in his wake.

  Once they got off on the wrong foot, it had never been set right. Jock took to getting up extra early so he could get to the diner before anyone else to claim his spot, and Doc let him have it, ambling in at his usual time, around eight. Jock usually sat at the counter, so Doc opted for the corner booth. Jock had his friends, so Doc found others. After that first meeting there had been few words between the two, and there had never been any overt confrontation, but it was clear they rubbed each other the wrong way.

  So why was Doc so upset now?

  With a start, Candy realized there was more to the story, something he hadn’t told her yet. She could see it in his eyes now; somehow she had missed it earlier, or misinterpreted it. Her mind lurched off in a different direction as she thought back over what Doc had said. . . .

  He took a nosedive off a cliff and fell to the rocks below . . . or at least that’s the official version. . . .

  She shuddered as she was struck by a horrendous thought.

  “Dad . . . was it an accident or . . . did he jump?”

  Doc’s gaze shifted toward her. “Suicide?”

  Candy had the impression he was ready for the question but still held something back. She pressed on. “Well, it’s possible, isn’t it? Unless he was just trying to dive in. You know—doing something crazy. Maybe he had a few drinks in him and took it as a challenge.”

  Doc shook his head. “Jock pushed the limits, but he wasn’t crazy.”

  “Well, then he either fell by accident . . . or he jumped.”

  But Doc wasn’t buying it. “That doesn’t make any sense. Jock was treated like a god around here. He never had a care in the world—got everything he wanted. No, pumpkin, I don’t think he jumped. I think the real question is, did he fall . . . or was he pushed?”

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