Town in a Wild Moose Chase chm-3

by B. B. Haywood

  Though what she might be guilty of, she had absolutely no idea.

  She made a show of glancing down at her watch, but she wasn’t focusing on the time.

  Her mind was racing. Why is he following me around? And what is he writing down in that notebook of his?

  A wave of irritation rippled through her, and for a moment she thought of walking up to the officer and confronting him about his apparent obsession with her. But she lost her resolve when her cell phone buzzed again, breaking into her thoughts.

  It was another text from Ben.

  Apologies I can’t make it tonite see you tomorrow luv b

  Candy read the message twice before she sighed, flipped her phone closed, and slipped it back into her pocket. “My love life sucks,” she said to no one in particular.

  But, she knew, it just proved that Maggie was right about Ben. He was devoting more and more time to this mysterious project of his, but what could it be? He’d become so open with her over the past six months or so, talking about his life and loves and family and travels, and even occasionally his dreams. Now he was closing up again.

  What had happened?

  After she thought about it, she realized there might be a way to find out.

  As surreptitiously as possible, she glanced back down the street in the direction of Officer McCroy. But he’d retreated to the shelter of the inn, where he hovered by the door, talking to one of the inn’s security people. He was angled away from her, intent on the conversation.

  Candy turned to look behind her, and saw she was standing near the door to the second-floor offices of the Cape Crier.

  Moving quickly, she fished her keys out of her pocket and unlocked the glass door, which led to a wooden staircase. Scooting inside before Officer McCroy spotted her, she relocked the door and hurried up the stairs. A dim wall light at the top pushed back the oncoming shadows. She checked the door to the newspaper’s offices and, finding it locked, used a second key to open it. Inside, she disarmed the motion-detector security system and again made sure the door was locked behind her, before she paused to catch her breath and survey her surroundings.

  The place was empty.

  She checked her watch again. It was still early—just after six. But the offices were all dark.

  She slipped her keys back into her pocket and considered turning on the hallway lights, but decided against it, opting for a more surreptitious approach. She wasn’t doing anything illegal, but with Officer McCroy wandering around outside, keeping a wary eye on her, she felt it best to remain discreet.

  She still had her tote bag with her, so she felt around inside for a flashlight. When she flicked it on, she kept it aimed low so no one could see it from outside.

  She walked about halfway along the hall to where two doors opened on her right. One led to a small office used for storage. The space also held a couple of desks used by volunteers and interns when they worked at the newspaper.

  The second door opened into Ben’s office.

  The room was dark except for the red, green, and amber glows of indicator lights on computer equipment, power strips, the printer, a charger, a digital clock, and the phone. Ben’s beat-up brown leather chair was pushed under the desk. The flat computer screen glowed with a dim gray light. In hurrying out of the office at the end of the day, he sometimes forgot to turn off his computer, though Candy suspected he sometimes left it on overnight on purpose so in the morning all his open files, applications, and browser tabs would be right where he’d left them the night before, and he’d already be logged on to the production server. That way he could start right in, his ideas as fresh as the day. He often kept unfinished articles, notes, and layouts open on his desktop, though minimized into the dock at the bottom of the screen. Candy thought she might find a few clues there. Or she could check his e-mails or the computer files open on the desktop to see if anything interesting jumped out at her. She could also check the hard-copy files in the lower right drawer of his desk or in the old metal two-door filing cabinet pushed into one corner, with stacks of research books piled on top, many of them spewing numerous colored bookmarks and sticky tabs.

  She could search in all those areas, if she wanted to. She was alone here. No one would ever know.

  But she would know.

  She hesitated by the door. Even though there might be answers here, she was reluctant to betray Ben’s trust by rummaging through his office.

  So she postponed the decision and instead headed to her own office. It was an interior room with no windows, so she closed the door and flicked on the overhead light.

  She dropped her coat and scarf in a chair, turned on her computer, and while she waited for it to power up, fished Preston Smith’s ice blue business card out of her tote bag. He’d mentioned an assistant but had failed to give Candy the person’s name. Nevertheless, she dashed off a quick message to the generic e-mail address listed on the front of the card, then turned to other matters.

  She’d convinced herself that Solomon had been truthful when he’d told her he’d found a body in the woods. 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 cape crusader into the search engine window and clicked the link to Wanda’s site. She’d been on it a few times before but hadn’t bookmarked it. For some reason she could never quite figure out, it always made her uncomfortable.

  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’s fast, Candy thought. And she’s good.

  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 not
e 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.

  Maybe I need to do some digging around myself, Candy thought.

  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 Whitefield, thought there was something much more sinister going on.

  That caught Candy’s attention. Disagreements among sculptors were one thing, but sinister? That seemed a little extreme.

  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 can help me tonight, Sapphire,” she said, addressing the bottom drawer with a melancholy smile, “but thanks for the offer.”

  She shrugged into her coat and slipped the scarf around her neck. Turning out the light in her office, she retraced her steps to the front door, walking past Ben’s office. But she didn’t go in. She’d decided she wasn’t about to start snooping on him, no matter what he might be up to.

  Back at the farm that night, after Doc had gone to bed and the world had quieted down under its winter blanket, Candy lay awake with the lights off, turned toward her bedroom window, which looked out over the blueberry fields behind the house. The nearly full moon had risen, casting its soft blue glow on the landscape. The Native Americans called this the Wolf Moon, Doc had told her a few days ago, though sometimes it was called the Snow Moon. Either would fit, she decided, pulling the top blanket off the bed and wrapping it around her as she rose and walked to the window.

  Few things in this world were more beautiful than a moonlit winter’s night, she mused as she gazed out through the frost-speckled glass. In the moon’s light, she could see every undulation of the landscape, every dip and swell, every shelled boulder and sugared bush.

  She could also see something moving.

  Startled, she took a step back into the shadows of the room, watching as… something… emerged from the woods at the top of the ridge. At first she thought it was Solomon Hatch again, until she realized it stood taller than a man, and had an elongated head.

  It turned and ambled along the edge of the woods at a leisurely pace, headed in a westerly direction, away from her. After a few moments it disappeared back into the woods.

  It was a white moose.

  Ten

  She woke in the early morning light, feeling unrested and off center. She knew she needed another hour of sleep, maybe two, but she was determined to be present in Town Park when the first chain saw bit into a block of ice. So she pulled herself out of bed and padded across the cold wood floor to the bathroom, where she struggled to force herself awake.

  After her bout of midnight restlessness and the unexpected moonlit moose sighting, she had returned to her bed and burrowed under the blankets, but instead of falling a
sleep, she lay for what seemed like hours as everything that had happened the day before played back in her head. Her mind seemed to be searching for something—clues, connections, relationships, secrets… something.

  When her thoughts had finally quieted down and she’d drifted into a light sleep, she’d dreamt of shadows and light and things in the woods—of Solomon Hatch and the white moose, and of something else, a presence she couldn’t quite identify.

  It all left her feeling unsettled, and as she dressed quietly, she cast a few wary glances out the bedroom window, at the woods and the fields behind the house. But she saw nothing unusual. It looked typically peaceful, a landscape intimately familiar to her, though she couldn’t help but feel it had somehow changed in subtle ways. Her sense of safety had been breached the moment Solomon Hatch stepped out of the woods nearly twenty-four hours ago. Her gaze drifted several times toward the line of trees on the far ridge, searching into the muted shadows that faded back into ghostlike infinity.

  Solomon was out there somewhere, but so was something else, deep in the woods. She knew it; she could feel it.

  If there were any answers to be found, that’s where she would have to look, out among the trees. But she had no time to investigate now. That would come later in the day.

  As she passed Doc’s half-opened bedroom door, she heard him rustling around inside, and downstairs he’d put on a pot of coffee for her. She poured a packet of sweetener into the bottom of a cup, splashed the coffee over it, took a few quick sips, and ate half a piece of buttered toast before she bundled up, grabbed her tote bag, and journeyed out into the clear, frosty morning.

  Her trusty old Jeep started on the third try, and she nimbly negotiated the snow-packed roads toward town. The Jeep’s four-wheel-drive system came in extra handy at this time of year, especially on the dirt road leading out to the farm, which gained a thick layer of snow and ice in mid-December that didn’t melt away entirely until late March, if they were lucky.