Threads of Evidence (25 page)

2½ cups light cream
4 eggs, separated
¾ cup pure maple syrup
Pinch of salt
Pinch of nutmeg
5–6 cups day-old French or Italian bread cut into cubes
Whipping cream (optional)

Chapter 1

 

—Poem stitched by Lucy Ripley,
age thirteen, Hartford, Connecticut, 1802

 

 

 

The simple folded leather packet looked old. Old, cracked, and very out of place, as it lay innocently on the bright red Fourth of July tablecloth. A mystery from the past had interrupted my first Haven Harbor dinner party.

Before I'd seen that packet and its contents, I'd been feeling high on more than the Pouilly-Fuissé recommended by the owner of Haven Harbor's local wine and gourmet treats store. (Buying beer? No problem. Wine? That's a whole different world.)

I'd gotten up the courage to invite Sarah Byrne, Dave Percy, and Ruth Hopkins, three other Mainely Needlepointers who were going to be alone on the holiday, to join me to celebrate the official start of the tourist season, and my first Maine Fourth of July in ten years. I figured all three of my guests would be understanding if my salmon was a little dry or my peas undercooked.

But until the packet arrived, everything had been perfect.

I'd pulled it off. My guests had made appropriate compliments and serious dents in the baked salmon, fresh green peas, and hot potato salad that made up my close-to-traditional New England Fourth of July menu. And I'd only had to interrupt Gram's Quebec honeymoon twice to ask for cooking advice and counsel.

As I looked around the table, I couldn't help smiling. Two months ago I hadn't known these people. Today I counted them friends as well as colleagues.

Gram had brought us together. She'd managed to gather an eclectic and talented group of Mainers to do custom needlepoint for her business, and as the new director of Mainely Needlepoint I was reaping the benefits of her choices. Not only could everyone in the business do needlepoint, but they'd all brought their own personalities and talents to their work.

Anyone meeting us for the first time would never guess that middle-aged Dave, navy retiree and now a high-school biology teacher, also had an extensive garden of poisonous plants. Or that Sarah, whose pink-and-blue-striped blonde hair and Aussie accent made her very noticeable in a small Maine town, was also a member of the staid Maine Antiques Dealers Association. Or that Ruth Hopkins, a sweet little old lady whose arthritis forced her to depend on her pink wheeling walker, wrote erotica.

And me, Angie Curtis. The most ordinary of the lot. As long as you understood that “ordinary” included ten years working for a private investigator in Arizona. I knew how to use the gun I now kept hidden under Gram's winter gloves and scarves in the front hall. I was also the youngest of the group—twenty-seven, a born Mainer, and a native of Haven Harbor. Most unusual in this crowd, I was just beginning to learn needlepoint.

I was also learning what it was like to live alone. Gram's wedding to Reverend Tom last weekend had been pronounced “a smashing success” by Sarah, and as soon as Gram returned from her honeymoon, she'd be moving to the rectory. True, I'd lived alone (nearly all of the time, anyway) in my Arizona apartment, but being alone in two rooms was different from being alone in a large, creaking house built over two hundred years ago.

But I'd grown up here, as my mother and grandmother and great-grandmother had before me. I couldn't imagine another family in these rooms. I'd get used to living here by myself. In the meantime my only full-time companion was Juno, Gram's large yellow Maine coon cat.

Juno looked up expectantly when anyone came into the house and then curled up in Gram's favorite chair, sadly waiting. She didn't understand about honeymoons. To make up for Gram's absence, I'd been giving Juno more treats than I'm sure Gram would have approved.

I'll admit I even slipped a piece of salmon into her dinner dish before I served my guests. And I suspected Dave had been passing her a few tidbits under the table during dinner.

The four of us had comfortably finished off two bottles of wine and were debating the virtues of strawberry-rhubarb pie now, or strawberry-rhubarb pie after the fireworks, when we heard a knock on the front door.

The young people standing there could have been any two Haven Harbor teenagers celebrating the Fourth.

But they weren't.