Town in a Strawberry Swirl (Candy Holliday Mystery) by B.B. Haywood Page A

finally answered. He was out on a job, he told her, down at the docks along the English River, working on a motor for a boat crane. It took Candy several attempts to try to explain why she was calling, since he was distracted by his present job and anxious to get back to it. But he finally focused in on what she was saying and recalled the incident. “Oh, that’s right, the shovel. I remember it now. I found it out at Sally Ann’s house. I offered to return it to you.”
    “We never got it back, Ray,” Candy said in a nonaccusatory tone. “We’re just trying to figure out what happened to it. We thought you could help us out.”
    Ray sounded surprised by this revelation, and the story quickly came out. He’d been planning to head out to Blueberry Acres with the shovel, he told her, but before he could swing by, he got a call from Judicious F. P. Bosworth, another villager who was a bit of a recluse. Judicious lived in an isolated log cabin on the outskirts of town, on family-owned property along the river. The place had once belonged to his father, and his father before him, both judges, so it had a fairly extensive library, with a heavy focus on law and politics. But Judicious had avoided the family profession, choosing instead to travel to Europe and Asia, where he sought enlightenment. Decades later he returned to Cape Willington as a quiet man in his forties, with the fervent belief that he could turn himself invisible. It was an outlandish claim, and no one really believed he had such a skill, but over the past few years he had convinced at least a few people around town that he could, indeed, disappear at will.
    Despite his unique ability, however, Judicious still apparently faced real-world problems around the house. One day while walking home, so the story went, Judicious flagged down Ray and asked for his help getting an old tree stump out of the ground at his place by the river. With Ray on a long-handled pickax and Judicious on a shovel, they’d managed to get the stump out of the ground, but the effort had cost Judicious his tool. The handle of the shovel cracked down near the blade. As Judicious had more work he needed to finish up, Ray loaned him the shovel from Blueberry Acres, with the promise that Judicious would return it to Doc and Candy when he’d finished with it. And that’s what Ray assumed had happened.
    Like Sally Ann, he was apologetic for not following up. But they all trusted one another, as those in a close-knit community do, and assumed their neighbors could be counted on to follow through on a promise.
    It all made sense, in a Cape Willington sort of way, Candy thought as she keyed off the phone—and even thought it a little amusing that their shovel had turned into a hot potato, making its way from hand to hand. Good thing Doc marked their tools.
    Her father caught the gist of the conversation with Ray and furrowed his brow. “So Judicious had it next, right?”
    “Sounds like it got passed around quite a bit.” Candy slipped the phone back into her pocket and snapped on her seat belt. “Up for one more stop?”
    She had no phone number for Judicious, and honestly didn’t know if he even owned a phone. Neither did she know his address, since he rarely shared personal information. Like others in town, he kept to himself, but he could be social when he wanted to. It just didn’t happen very often.
    Candy knew where he lived, though, so they drove out Edgewood Road to the Coastal Loop and turned left, heading northward.
    A five-minute drive brought them to a single-lane dirt turnoff on the right, which led down toward the river. The lane was tight, with low trees and shrubbery pressing in on either side, and at times thin limbs and branches reached out to rake the sides of the vehicle. The lane twisted first one direction, then the other, and passed under a thick canopy before emerging into a clearing. A small log cabin, half-hidden by foliage, was nestled back among the trees.