Town in a Strawberry Swirl (Candy Holliday Mystery) (20 page)

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 temptation 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 . . .”

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 perhaps 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.