Town in a Wild Moose Chase by B. B. Haywood

She hoped she wasn’t seeing a repeat of those events.
    What bothered her at a deeper level, though, was a secret she’d uncovered last May, hinting at an ominous forcebehind the murders eight months ago. She had linked initials written in the corner of a set of blueprints to a Boston developer named Porter Sykes. Though she couldn’t prove it, she felt he had been responsible, at least in some way, for the deaths in town last year. Over the summer she’d quietly made a few inquiries and conducted what research she could, but she hadn’t been able to put all the pieces together, to figure out what it all meant. Wanda Boyle still held a piece of that puzzle, in the form of the blueprints in question, but, naturally, she had refused to cooperate. So Candy had eventually let it go. And as the months passed and summer faded into fall, which slipped into winter, she’d let her concerns retreat to the back of her mind, where they’d become overshadowed by more pressing demands, like paying for the oil bill and bringing in a few more armloads of wood.
    Now, those earlier concerns were again coming to the fore.
    She did her best to squash her rising sense of dread and turned to face Ben.
    Instantly she felt her worries ease. If anything, he was more reassuring, and more handsome, than when they’d first met. His face had aged just slightly, altering the angles and emphasizing the lines of his jaw. With the shorter, overcast days of winter, he’d lost some of his summer color, but he’d grown out his hair, giving him a shaggier, earthier appearance that fit him well. He’d kept active by cross-country skiing most weekends, and had even tested his ruggedness by camping out once or twice during the winter.
    But something else had changed in him—something less tangible. She first noticed it last summer, when his demeanor had subtly shifted. Before that, he’d been guarded, cautious, at times distracted, and overall unattached. He had joked with her and been friendly enough, but their relationship had remained mostly on the surface. He’d rarely talked about his past, his beliefs, his goals, his wishes. But he’d been fun and charming and good company for her, and she’d beenhappy enough with that. Still, she’d often felt he was holding something back.
    Then, last summer, it was as if he’d suddenly discovered a part of himself he hadn’t known existed. He began to talk about his concerns and reveal details he’d only brushed over before—about his childhood in Rhode Island, his engineer father, his younger sister, and his mother, who had been a social studies teacher and nourished his interest in current affairs, politics, and geography. She’d been the one who’d encouraged him to travel, to seek his destiny in the world’s great spaces, and to think and write. After attending Boston University, where he studied journalism, he’d traveled to India, Sri Lanka, and Singapore before eventually landing a job with an international news organization, which took him to other countries in Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.
    Much of this Candy already knew, but on one of their dates, at an Italian restaurant up on Route 1, over plates of spaghetti
mare e monti
, slices of toasted garlic bread, and glasses of a robust Chianti, he began to open up. He talked about his two marriages, and why he felt he needed to spend time on his own after his second divorce, devoting himself to the pursuit of books, knowledge, and nature in a fit of self-discovery. It was as if he was giving her an insight into his thinking over the past two years, and the reasons he’d behaved in the ways he had. And for the first time that night, he started talking about the two of them, and where they might be headed as a couple. By the end of the evening, they’d both agreed they weren’t quite ready for a serious relationship (yet), but they also both admitted they were fond of each other and liked spending time together. Whether their