Town In a Lobster Stew (9 page)

“Fascinating. Just fascinating.” Candy propped her elbow on her knee and planted her chin in the palm of her hand. “I’d love to hear more about that—perhaps something about Wanda’s involvement in putting the program together?”

“Well, I can show you an outline of the program, and I’ll see if I can get Wanda’s input. I think I have that file right here.”

As Charlotte reached toward a short stack of papers in a mahogany wood tray on a corner of her desk, she looked up and past Candy’s shoulder. “Oh, well, better yet, you can talk to her yourself. Here she is.”

Charlotte rose and motioned to a woman standing in the office doorway.

“Candy, you know Wanda Boyle, don’t you?”

Candy felt a sudden knot in her stomach as she turned to face the woman behind her. This was the moment she’d been hoping to avoid for at least a while longer—well, forever, if truth be told. But this was a small town. It was next to impossible to avoid someone you wanted to avoid. Now she’d just have to make the best of it.

Tentatively she rose. “Oh, hi.”

She stood uneasily, not sure what to say or do next. She still held the notebook in one hand and the pen in the other, so she wiggled the pen rapidly between her fingers and forced a smile.

Wanda studied her with a disapproving expression pasted on her hard-edged face, as if she’d just discovered Candy doing something she shouldn’t. She was a tall woman, with broad shoulders and a big frame she carried fairly well. Her body flared around the bust, waist, and hips, but then narrowed to rather petite legs, which were ensconced in form-fitting dark gray slacks. She wore bright yellow pumps, open at the toes to show off her neatly clipped nails, painted bright red. They matched her flaming red shoulder-length hair, which was savagely tossed back, as if she had been swatting at it for hours. Her waist-length beige jacket, worn over a white blouse, looked somewhat rumpled, Candy noticed, with heavy creases at the elbows. The slacks were heavily creased around the upper thighs and knees as well.
She must have been sitting all morning and afternoon, doing . . . something or other
, Candy thought.

Wanda held a sheaf of papers in one hand and had tucked a folder under an arm. On her chest, she wore a large, bright blue button that read CAPE WILLINGTON WELCOMING COMMITTEE and WANDA BOYLE, CHAIRWOMAN around the edges, circling a big, bold-lettered WELCOME TO CAPE! in the center.

She looked very busy.

For several long moments she stood silently in the doorway. Obviously she’d been unaware that Charlotte had a visitor, and she didn’t seem at all pleased when that visitor turned out to be Candy Holliday.

Candy waited cautiously, letting out a breath, her gaze fixed on the other woman. She noticed that Wanda had a thin, barely visible scar on her upper lip. And puffy skin around her jowls. And big hands—
like sides of beef
, Candy thought.

For an instant an image raced through her mind of another pair of thick hands wrapped around her neck, attempting to crush the life from her as the storm raged around them. But she pushed that disturbing thought aside, knowing that was in the past, and this was the present, and Wanda would never attack her like that.

Finally Wanda spoke, her voice low and husky. “We’ve met. Haven’t we, Candy?” She sounded completely unemotional, as if she were ordering a hamburger and fries at a takeout window.

“Yes, well, that’s true, we have.”
Several times
, Candy recollected,
and most of them were not pleasant encounters.

Their first meeting, at a school-related bake sale shortly after Candy had become the community correspondent, was cordial enough, though she’d overheard Wanda taking some verbal potshots at her even then. Candy was “from away,” Wanda had none-too-discreetly told one of the members of her close-knit group of friends, a woman named Carol McKaskie. Wanda had drawn a few other women into their conversation and chattered in low tones, often glancing Candy’s way and often stifling laughter, making her feel uncomfortable. Candy had heard other words drifting her way that day from Wanda’s group—words like
unqualified
and
undeserving
. She had even heard one of them call her a nobody.

Candy had just been trying to do her job, to meet people in town and cover the event, and she had been hurt and confused until she told Maggie about it.

“Oh, they’re just jealous old biddies,” Maggie said that evening when Candy had cried on her shoulder. “Don’t listen to them, honey. They’re just frustrated with their small, boring lives. They think they run this town, but most people just ignore them.”

That had made Candy feel a little better, but the negative vibes from Wanda had not ceased. In the months since, they had run into each other a few more times, at public events around town, and the meetings had always been uncomfortable for Candy, as Wanda continued to throw evil looks and snarky comments her way.

Candy had had no real explanation for Wanda’s hostile behavior, until Ben finally explained it to her.

“She wanted your job,” he had told her just a few months ago, on a wintry day in late February when she was up in the office following her most recent disastrous encounter with Wanda at a town meeting. “She called me right after I offered the job to you last summer. She told me, quite seriously, that she thought she was the best-qualified person in town to take over for Sapphire, but I said I’d already made a decision.” He’d shaken his head and chuckled. “To be honest, she was pretty peeved. She thought I should have held an open call for the job, posted the opening, that sort of thing. She told me she thought I’d mishandled the whole situation. Well, of course, I disagreed with her and told her I’d hired the right person, which didn’t help the situation much. She was even more upset when she found out who got the job.”

“So that’s why she’s been so mad at me,” Candy had said dejectedly to Ben at the time.

“She’s mad at both of us. But I wouldn’t worry about her. She’s harmless.”

“Harmless?” Candy had felt a little peeved herself. “Why didn’t you tell me this before?”

“To be honest, it never came up—and you never asked.”

That was true. And at least she finally knew the reason behind Wanda’s rude and resentful behavior. “Just give it a little time,” Ben had told her that day. “She’ll eventually cool off.”

But his prediction had not come true, and the situation actually worsened, due to an oversight on Candy’s part. In one of her articles about a local fishing tournament for kids, written hastily to meet a tight deadline, Candy had inadvertently left out the name of Wanda’s son, Bryan. On the day the paper came out, all hell had broken loose around the office, and Candy found herself at the middle of a firestorm, accused of purposely leaving out Bryan’s name and publicly embarrassing the Boyle family. Wanda had called her personally to complain and then had called Ben, asking him to fire Candy, destroy all remaining copies of the paper, and reprint the issue with the corrected text.

Ben had told her, quite politely, that he’d consider her recommendations, and then completely ignored them. Instead, he had run a correction in the next issue, but Wanda had not been appeased. From then on, she had taken it as her patriotic and community duty to scrutinize every word in the paper, particularly in Candy’s columns, and proceeded to let everyone know when she found even the slightest error. An e-mail or letter to the editor arrived at the
Cape Crier
’s office just about every week now, taking the paper to task for one issue or another, many of them unfounded, in Ben’s opinion. “She’s just picking at us. Don’t worry about it. Just ignore her,” was Ben’s simple solution.

But Candy found it unnerving and soon feared to look through her mail and messages, worried that she’d find another accusing missive from Wanda. There had been some nights, after she’d received a particularly barbed message, when Candy lost sleep over it. But she was more concerned for the paper’s reputation than her own job.

Ben, however, just shrugged off Candy’s concerns and Wanda’s rantings. “It comes with the territory,” he told her in his laid-back, somewhat disinterested tone. “If you’re a writer, sooner or later you’re gonna piss someone off. That’s just the way it is. You just have to get used to it. Don’t let it bother you so much.” He had laughed a little to himself. “Well, it helps to have a thick skin, I guess. And I’ve probably developed a pretty thick one over the years. But just remember this: mistakes happen. Our job is to do the best we can, minimize the errors, correct the ones we make, and move on to the next story.”

And Candy had resolved to do just that. She worked hard to make sure the columns and feature articles she wrote were as accurate and as comprehensive as possible. At the same time, she began to realize that she was taking Wanda much too seriously. Finally, she decided to follow Ben’s advice, and simply started ignoring her.

But it appeared she couldn’t ignore Wanda forever—not when the woman was standing right in front of her.

“Well, isn’t that nice?” Charlotte said into the silence, seemingly unaware of the tension between the two. “Wanda, I was just telling Candy about your art and architecture educational project for middle schoolers this summer. She’s interested in writing about it for the paper. Perhaps you could take her upstairs and show her some of your research. It would be a wonderful way to promote the program—and be sure to give yourself some credit for all the hard work you’ve been doing.”

“Yes,” Candy added, seeing an opportunity to offer a peace flag, and perhaps still get what she came for. “Charlotte was just telling me about some of the architects who’ve designed houses in town. It’d make a great story. I’d love to hear more about what you’ve been up to—if you’re not too busy, that is.” Her smile was more genuine this time.

Wanda cast a dark look at Charlotte and an even more venomous one at Candy. Her lips were moving strangely, as if she wanted to spit a particularly caustic remark in Candy’s direction—perhaps something along the lines of,
Not over my dead body, you cheap imitation of a community columnist!
But she held back, apparently with great effort, for her face began to flush red, approaching the shade of her hair. She squared her shoulders as she straightened and took a long, deep breath, calming herself.

“I’m not ready to show it to anyone just yet,” she said finally in an oddly hushed tone. “I still have a lot of work to do on it.”

Charlotte’s gaze focused in on her. “Oh, well, Wanda, you’ll forgive me if I’m a little confused, because I was under the impression you were making good progress,” she said with a noticeable edge in her voice. “Didn’t you tell me just the other day you were nearly finished with it?”

The museum director turned toward Candy, with an odd glint in her eyes. “Wanda is such a perfectionist,” she said in an attempt to be pleasant. “I don’t know how she does it! She has to have everything just perfectly right. I guess that’s why she’s put
so
much time into this latest project of hers. She’s been up in those archives for
weeks
!”

There was no mistaking the veiled sarcasm in her words.

“Really?” Candy eyed Wanda, intrigued.
And just what have you been doing up in those archives for weeks, Wanda?
she wanted to ask. Instead, she said, “I don’t mean to intrude on your work, but perhaps you could just show me . . . some of the preliminary research you’ve been doing. I’m particularly interested in any information you might have on John Patrick Mulroy. I’ve heard he’s designed several houses in town—and that he built secret hiding compartments in many of the homes he created.”

She watched Wanda closely for any sign of a reaction, but Wanda stood stone-faced, giving nothing away. Her eyes, however, shifted back and forth after a few moments, as if she were contemplating her next move. Candy could practically hear the gears in her head whirring.

The scowl that eventually emerged onto Wanda’s face was not a pleasant thing to behold. She apparently knew she’d been backed into a corner, and she seemed none too pleased about it. “If it’s that important, I guess I can show you. It’s the least I can do to help you get your facts straight.”

“That’s very generous of you, Wanda,” Candy said with a mild air of triumph.

Charlotte looked from one to the other, then to her watch. “Well, this is very exciting, isn’t it? I’m glad you two have a chance to talk, since it appears you’re both interested in the same thing. Candy, let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with. And I know Wanda will be a wonderful guide for you here at the historical society. She’s one of our most knowledgeable volunteers.”

“I’m sure she is,” Candy said without a hint of sarcasm.

Wanda gave her a nasty look, then, sensing she was being dismissed, stepped into the room, around Candy, and approached Charlotte’s desk. “Before we get to that,” she said, “I wanted to show you a couple of things.”