Candy awoke in the morning with the odd feeling that the previous day had been nothing more than a bad dream—or, more accurately, a recurring nightmare—until she’d dressed and headed downstairs. Doc had left part of the Sunday paper sitting on the kitchen table. A quick scan of the headlines revealed that, yes, indeed, it had all been for real. Felicia Gaspar was under arrest for the murder of Victor Templeton, and Gina Templeton was in custody as an accomplice.
Candy just shook her head at the truth of it all. She found it very dismaying. Sometime during the night she’d come awake with the disturbing thought that, for the third time in less than two years, she’d had a gun pointed at her and been threatened with her life. For more than ten years, she’d lived and commuted in metro Boston, renting places just outside of the city in suburbs like Arlington and Watertown, and never once had anything remotely like this happened to her. But here she was in safe, quiet, off-the-beaten-path Cape Willington, Maine, and she’d already stared death in the face three times too many.
What was happening to her beloved little town? What was happening to her? The realization that this staring-death-in-the-face sort of thing was starting to happen often, and that it might actually be turning into something of a habit, was enough to keep her awake during the deepest hours of the night, until she’d finally fallen asleep again right before daybreak.
Even now, as she stood next to the kitchen table, feeling off center and mentally drained after the intensity of the past few days, it was a troubling thought, causing a cold shudder to run through her bones.
Thoughtfully she dropped into a chair, taking a few minutes to scan the rest of the front-page story. It was a fairly accurate account of how Felicia had killed Victor, and of how she and Gina had dragged the body out to the woods on the toboggan and rolled it into a gully, where it had been discovered by a local hermit named Solomon Hatch, currently being sought by police for questioning.
Candy herself was not mentioned in the article, thankfully. Liam Yates was in the process of being released, it said. Chief Darryl Durr was quoted, singling out Officer Jody McCroy for special recognition in the investigation, specifically for following up an important lead, which Candy suspected was that phone call from Maggie.
There was no mention of a hatchet, or Preston Smith, or Duncan Leggmeyer and the award for the hatchet-throwing contest, or of the feud between Victor and Liam. And, of course, there was nothing about a white field, or Whitefield, or even whitefield, as Ben had referred to it in his text last night, though all his characters were lowercase, which he’d probably done for the sake of expediency.
So what, or who, was Whitefield?
Candy checked the clock on the kitchen wall. Quarter to nine.
It was time to find out.
On this particular morning, she and Doc reversed their typical roles. He was staying home, working his way through the Sunday edition of the Boston Globe while tuned into the morning national news commentary programs, and Candy was the one heading off to the diner for a morning breakfast rendezvous.
She found Ben, as promised, sitting in a booth by the window at Duffy’s Main Street Diner, waiting for her. He’d already ordered coffee for both of them and an English muffin for her—with homemade blueberry jam on the side, of course. For himself, he’d ordered up hash browns and a breakfast steak, doused heavily with Juanita’s special hot sauce.
When he looked up and saw her, he waved, half rose, and pointed to the seat opposite him. “Good morning,” he said. “Hope I didn’t get you out of bed too early on a Sunday.”
Candy pulled off her knit cap, shaking free her hair, and tugged off her gloves as she slid into the seat. She managed to smile for him. “How could I turn down a chance to have breakfast with you? Besides, I wasn’t sleeping very well anyway.”
He gave her a worried look. “You’ve had a rough couple of days, haven’t you, with Solomon, and the body, and now the whole thing with Gina and Felicia? You want me to order something else for you?”
“No, I—”
“Good morning, Candy!” said a voice to her side. Candy looked up at Juanita, the waitress.
“I brought you something, just out of the oven,” she said in a conspiratorial tone. “A fresh-baked blueberry muffin.” She set a plate down in front of Candy and gave her a quick pat on the arm. “Nice job solving that murder, Candy! This is on the house. Let me know if you need anything else,” she said earnestly and dashed off.
Candy stared at the muffin and let out a sigh. “I think I’m developing a reputation around town.”
Ben shrugged. “People are grateful. You’ve done a lot of good things lately. People like to show their appreciation.”
“Yes,” Candy said, folding her hands on the table and leaning forward toward him so she could speak in softer tones, “but why are these things happening to me at all? Why have we had five murders in less than two years—and why have I been involved in all of them? I’m beginning to get a little”—she leaned her head even closer to his—“paranoid.”
Ben held her eyes for the longest time, and she wondered what was going on inside his head. Finally, he said, with all seriousness, “So you think there’s a connection between all these murders.”
It was a statement, not a question, and it caught Candy off-guard. “What? No, I… you think there’s a connection?” she asked, trying hard to hold back her astonishment.
He calmly sliced off a thin piece of breakfast steak, swathed it across a puddle of hot sauce, and plopped it into his mouth. “Maybe not between all of them, but between some of them, yes.” He set down his knife and fork and, as he chewed, turned and reached into his briefcase, which sat on the seat beside him. He pulled out a manila folder and placed it before her. He tapped lightly at the folder’s label before he went back to eating.
Her brow fell. After giving him a questioning look, she dropped her gaze so she could read the name of the file, hand-printed on the small tab.
WHITEFIELD.
She looked up at him incredulously. “You’ve kept a file on him?”
“It’s not a him,” Ben said, allowing himself a mysterious smile. “It’s an it.”
“A what?”
He nodded again toward the file. “Take a look.”
So she did. She opened it and looked at its contents. She reacted with surprise, then dug down through the top pages to an aged black-and-white photograph buried inside. She pulled it out and laid it on top of the other pages. “You’re kidding me,” she said in surprise as she studied the old image.
Ben shook his head. “Nope, it’s true. This is part of what I’ve been doing for the past few months—looking into all this research about the town’s history, and its two wealthiest families in particular. And that’s part of it.”
He pointed with his chin at the old photograph sitting in front of Candy.
It was an image of a massive iron front gate and a long winding road beyond it, which led to a white pillared mansion in the distance.
Across the top of the black gate, painted in faded white capital letters, in an elaborate script, was the word Whitefield.