Town In a Lobster Stew by B.B. Haywood

trepidation, scanned the messages Betty Lynn had left her, all decorated with little drawings of anchors, lighthouses, and life preservers.
    Nothing negative. Good.
    Mostly she saw the typical things—calls from a local historian, Julius Seabury, who was giving a presentation at the library the following week, and from a woman named Cassandra Rockwell, who had just opened a new consignment shop on Main Street. Margaritte Jordan called about a scrapbooking group she was organizing. A PR person from one of the coastal resorts had contacted Candy about a wellness weekend she was promoting. Finn Woodbury, one of Doc’s buddies, had called about the upcoming auditions for the Cape Summer Theater’s annual summer musical, which would be Brigadoon this year.
    The last message was from Oliver LaForce, the proprietor of the Lightkeeper’s Inn. Candy had met Oliver several times over the past few months. He was a humorless, fastidious man who ran the inn with cold precision. The message, as expected, was businesslike and to the point: Please call to confirm your attendance on Saturday. A press badge will be waiting for you. I have some news as well. We’ll discuss at the event.
    News? That piqued Candy’s interest. Could it have anything to do with the rumors she’d heard of a guest judge?
    She thought about picking up the phone and calling Oliver right then to find out what was going on. But she quickly decided to put it off until later.
    She had something more important to do right now.
    Inexorably, her gaze was drawn across the room, to the filing cabinet in the corner. She focused in on the bottom drawer, the one labeled with only two letters: SV .
    She’d avoided going into that drawer for a long time—but she knew she could avoid it no longer.
    It was time to have a look at Sapphire Vine’s old files.

SIX

    Sliding out of her chair, she crossed the room and fell into a cross-legged seating position in front of the filing cabinet’s bottom drawer.
    For the longest time she just sat there, staring at it. She knew she was dredging up old mysteries and unwanted problems. She knew she was delving into the twisted mind of a dead woman. She knew she should probably have followed an earlier instinct and just burned the files, committing them to ashes, which was where they truthfully belonged.
    But she hadn’t. They were still here, in her possession. And they were here for a reason.
    With a great force of will, she moved her hand to the drawer’s metal handle. Taking a deep breath, she slid the button aside with her thumb and pulled open the drawer.
    She hadn’t been in these files for ten months, since she’d inherited them from Sapphire Vine, the newspaper’s previous community columnist. Sapphire had been many other things as well, including a gossip, a blackmailer, the reigning Blueberry Queen, a keeper of dark secrets, and ultimately a murder victim. She’d been brutally struck down in her home with a red-handled hammer. Finding her killer and solving the mystery of her death had been Candy’s first true case—and it had almost gotten her killed.
    Last summer, when Ben had placed the files in Candy’s hands, they had helped her track down Sapphire’s murderer. But with the mystery solved and the murderer arrested, Candy had brought the files back here to the office, stuffed them in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, and left them there, secrets and all.
    Some of the folders Candy had opened and perused in an effort to find the murderer. She had not looked at the rest, however, and with good reason. Sapphire had been quietly assembling private, personal, and often damaging information about many of Cape Willington’s residents. And the former Blueberry Queen was not averse to using that information for her own gain. That’s what led to her death.
    So Candy had left the tainted files alone—and had overcome an instinct to burn them and bid them good riddance. She couldn’t help feeling, back then, that