Town in a Wild Moose Chase Read Free Page A

in late January when the morning sun hit the blueberry fields behind the house just right, reflecting off the layer of ice and snow that had settled across the fields like a winter patchwork quilt, sending off sparkles and shoots of light, turning everything magic. If you stepped out on the porch this morning (which you could do for a few minutes without putting on a coat), you could actually hear the ice cracking as it loosened its grip on rooftops and tree branches. You might even hear a few distinctive drip-drops here and there.
    The January thaw had arrived.
    Candy loved this time of year. The frantic pace of the holidays was behind them, all traces of it carefully packed away for another year, and the days were growing noticeablylonger. They’d have nearly forty-five more minutes of daylight at the end of January than they’d had at the beginning of the month. That in itself was a cause for celebration.
    So Candy had set aside just an hour or two this morning to plan for spring, designing her gardens and ordering seeds. She’d slept in a little late (until eight thirty) and shuffled her father, Henry “Doc” Holliday, off to his daily ritual breakfast and jawing session at Duffy’s Main Street Diner. Doc’s crew was at winter staffing levels, since Finn Woodbury, a retired cop who ran several local summer theater productions as well as the annual American Legion flea market on Memorial Day, had headed south to sunny Florida with his wife, Marti.
    But despite the absence of a key crew member, as well as the numerous travel difficulties caused by the vagaries of the winter season, Doc still made a beeline for the diner practically every weekday morning to drink coffee, eat doughnuts, complain about the weather (there was always something to complain about, even with the January thaw), and chew over the latest tasty tidbits of local news with his friends William “Bumpy” Brigham and Artie Groves.
    Candy enjoyed having mornings like this to herself. She’d lit a fire to take the chill off the house and heated a kettle of water for tea. Then she’d settled in at the kitchen table for some serious, pleasurable work. She’d do all the ordering online later in the day, but first she wanted to take her time perusing the catalogs, drawing diagrams of her garden plots, making notes on which seeds to order, and deciding where to plant what.
    It was a wonderful way to spend a quiet winter morning.
    As she sipped her tea she read over descriptions of yellow crookneck squash, red burgermaster onions, Royal Mountie tomatoes, and sweet King Arthur peppers (a favorite of Doc’s). She was particularly engrossed in a description of Boothby’s Blonde heirloom cucumbers when, distracted by the barest movement at the far edge of her peripheral vision, she looked up and out the window—and that’s whenshe saw the figure.
    It spooked her at first, since it was such an unusual and unexpected sight, and she heard herself gasp in surprise. Unaware of what she was doing, she set the mug of tea down with a
thunk
and rose quickly from her chair, never taking her eyes from the figure and the line of trees.
    She wasn’t used to seeing people back there. The farm’s blueberry fields extended several hundred feet behind the house, more than an eighth of a mile in some directions, and the back acres were still choked with dense stands of midsized trees and underbrush. Beyond that were undeveloped woods. The nearest houses in that direction, off toward the coast, lay perhaps three-quarters of a mile away, maybe more. It was walkable, but no one ever came that way.
    In the other direction, toward the northwest, her woods linked up with conservation land, and beyond that, private property stretching for miles. Mostly farms and fields occupied that upper region of the Cape. It was even more unlikely someone had come that way.
    So who was this figure stumbling out of the woods and onto the downward slope at the edge of her blueberry