A little more than a week later, on a Monday morning, the last day of January, Candy Holliday sat at the kitchen table, paging through seed catalogs and sipping a cup of hot tea. Every once in a while, as she flipped a page or after she’d focused in on a particularly interesting description of a zucchini or a pumpkin, she’d shift her gaze out the window, toward the blueberry fields and the woods behind the house.
There had been no arrest of Porter Sykes—or someone known as Preston Smith, for that matter. There had been no word from him since she’d last seen him out at Whitefield. The Sykes mansion itself had been in the news this past week, however. Apparently some kids had broken in and started a fire to warm themselves, but things got out of hand. The fire spread to some rags and debris nearby, and soon the whole place was ablaze, quickly burning down to the ground. The fire department arrived too late to save the old mansion, but it wasn’t much of a loss, most around town agreed. The place had fallen into disrepair years ago. The following day, the Sykes family of Boston issued a statement saying they were putting the property up for sale.
Ben had shared some of his research of the Sykes and Pruitt families with her. She’d told Doc a little bit about it, and he’d done some digging in the historical society’s archives. He’d come up with an interesting old newspaper clipping from the Bangor paper, with a press date in the mid-1960s.
“It’s about a historian from Orono who was researching local family histories,” Doc told her as he handed it to her. “This historian, a man by the name of Decker, promoted the fact that Gideon Sykes, the father of Porter and his siblings, and the husband of Daisy Porter-Sykes, had committed suicide in that old mansion. His theory was that after Gideon had taken his own life, there had been a huge cover-up, and this Decker fellow suspected it had something to do with the old man’s insurance money—a sizable payout, by the way.”
Candy had read the rest of the clipping and handed it back to Doc. “Bury it somewhere,” she told him.
Toward the bottom of the article, she’d read that the historian named Decker had died a few weeks later, under mysterious, still-undetermined circumstances.
For now, she thought, it was best to keep that information under wraps.
For the past week she had struggled with the question of what to do about Porter and the information he’d told her. It had kept her awake nearly every night since, and had just about driven her crazy. She’d nearly spilled the beans to Doc several times, desperate for his advice. She’d avoided seeing Maggie, knowing it was next to impossible to keep anything from her friend. And she had resisted talking to Ben until she could sort out what to do and what to tell him.
The good news was that Doc barely noticed her internal agony. He was back at work on his book, and there were evenings when he brought home armloads of them from the library and historical society. He’d even made a trip to the university library up at Orono, which gave him a chance to catch up with some old friends, lifting his spirits.
Speaking of spirits, she had seen the white moose only one other time, a few nights ago from her bedroom window, as the moon drifted lazily in its arc across the sky, casting its white glow upon the frozen blueberry fields. The moose had stood in the shadows of the distant trees for the longest time, watching the house, and she had watched back, until finally her eyelids had grown heavy and she’d gone to bed.
Now she looked out at the fields and shrugged. In another few weeks winter would begin to loosen its grip on the landscape. They’d still have a storm or two in early March, usually sometime around the eighth of the month, but the cold season was coming to an end, and then the wondrous rebirth would begin.
Candy Holliday sighed deeply in anticipation and turned back to her catalogs. Spring was coming, and she had a garden to plan.