“Miranda is fine,” Will said. “I keep asking her to make an honest man out of me but she keeps postponing the date.”

“Hey, if you were engaged to marry you, how much of a hurry would you be in?”

“You have a point.” Will paused. “What are the chances we’ll be seeing you back in the office sometime soon?”

“Unlikely.” Grady hated having these discussions, and he hoped Will wouldn’t press. To his relief, he didn’t.

“Well, anytime you’re in the neighborhood and just want to hang out, give us a call, hear?”

“I will, thanks.”

“So, back to Eugene Medford.”

Grady heard some papers rustling on Will’s end of the line.

“I ran a check, traced him to a prison in Wisconsin, where he was sent to serve a seven-year term for assault.”

“I know that part,” Grady told him. “I need to know if he’s still in there now.”

“Well, he was, up until three weeks ago.”

“He was paroled?” Grady asked.

“No,” Will told him. “He was in a fight with another inmate and his neck was broken.”

Grady hesitated before asking, “Are you telling me…”

“Yeah,” Will told him. “The guy is dead.”

Diary-

When I said the wedding would be one people would be talking about for a long time, I never dreamed… Well, where to begin? I’m fanning myself with the program from the ceremony and hoping that my poor old heart holds out! The day ran the gamut from the sublime to the scandalous to the… well, I hardly have words for what happened here!

First-the wedding. It was, in a word, perfect. The bride was as beautiful as a fairy tale princess, the groom her story-book prince. The Inn looked fabulous-if I do say so myself-the flowers glorious, the food divine. The weather was warm and balmy. What more could one have asked for on their wedding day?

Next-the scandal. The mother of the groom showed up uninvited! Yes, that woman who to the best of my knowledge hasn’t laid eyes on that boy of hers since she dumped him-yes, I said dumped-on the front doorstep of his unsuspecting father. She had the gall to show up at the wedding, and unless my hearing is going, she was put out because Beck wouldn’t speak to her! Can you imagine? What in the name of decency was that woman thinking? There will be more on this, I feel certain!

Finally-the unthinkable. Vanessa’s sweet little boutique, Bling, was broken into and robbed! Right there on Charles Street, while her brother’s wedding reception was taking place, someone broke into the shop and-from what I heard at the day-after-the-wedding brunch-the burglars trashed the shop before they left! Yes, that’s what I said-as if it wasn’t enough to rob the poor girl, they tossed her lovely merchandise on the floor and broke the glass in some of her cases!

Now, I ask you: What kind of person would do something like that? Obviously, it’s someone from out of town. No one in St. Dennis would stoop so low! And then… just moments later, the car that nice young Grady Shields rented and which he left parked in the lower town lot while he took Vanessa to inspect the damages at Bling… didn’t someone come along and smash out every window? I hear through the grape vine that Hal believes both acts were committed by the same criminally-minded individual.

Breaking into shops! Smashing car windows! What kind of riff-raff are we allowing into our fair town? What has this world come to?!

I must work on an editorial for this week’s paper…

– Grace

HAL did his best to talk Vanessa out of taking a walk through town that afternoon.

“Honey, I agree with Grady that something’s afoot, that someone here has got it in for you. I don’t think you ought to be putting yourself out there.”

“There are tons of walkers out today,” she pointed out. “We’ll be on the main street, and you can have an armed guard follow me if it makes you feel better, but I need to focus on something besides the fact that I’m afraid and confused right now. All this conjecture is making me nuts.” She softened. “Grady will be with me. He won’t let anything happen to me.”

“Then just do the short tour.” Hal knew when to compromise. “Just up to the square and back. Leave the side streets for another day.”

There isn’t going to be another day, she wanted to remind him. Grady would be gone in a few hours, and chances were good he wouldn’t be back anytime soon.

Playing tour guide actually did relax her, in spite of the fact that patrol cars seemed to be constantly driving by, circling the block like black-and-white sharks.

“The town was under siege during the War of 1812, but no buildings were destroyed. The townspeople had a plan, you see,” she told Grady as they walked along. “The British approached the harbor at night, but as soon as they started firing, all the candles in town were snuffed out so that the entire town was dark. Some houses closest to the water took direct shots-a couple even still have cannonballs lodged in their walls-but none came down.”

“If I remember my American history, that was the war when the British attacked the city of Baltimore and Francis Scott Key saw the flag flying above Fort McHenry the next morning and was inspired to write ‘The Star-Spangled Banner.’”

“Well, here’s a little did-you-know. The commanding officer wanted a really huge flag to fly over the fort, so he commissioned a woman from Baltimore to make one. And it was huge, like thirty feet high and forty-two feet long. That was the flag that Key saw the next morning.”

“I did pay attention in my American history class. Major George Armistead was the commander. He wanted to make sure that the British could see the flag from their ships.” Grady added, “I suppose it was the 1814 equivalent of getting in someone’s face.”

“Do you know the name of the flag maker?” she countered.

“No. Do you?”

“You betcha. Mary Pickersgill. There’s a book in the Historical Society library that talks about how she was asked to make that flag and she only had a very limited time to do it. The flag is in the Smithsonian now.”

Grady had made a move to take her hand but she walked with both hands linked behind her back so they were out of reach. When her arms grew tired, she switched her shoulder bag to her left side and looped her hand through the strap to occupy it. It wasn’t that she didn’t want that casual contact with him-she did. In fact, she’d been aching to touch him all day. But he’d be leaving town in a matter of hours, and a public display would only invite questions. She was under constant scrutiny by the police department, and all day long, people she knew had been driving past and waving. She couldn’t bear the looks of pity she knew she’d get when she walked into Cuppachino in the morning. Or the questions that would inevitably come, the speculation that would be made. St. Dennis was still, after all, a small town, and there was little that could stop the gossip once it got rolling. There’d be enough attention on her in the coming days, with her shop having been the victim of the first burglary since the town started trying to attract tourists. To have that same light shining on her love life right now would be overkill.

“This area up here, we call the square,” she continued. “The houses on each corner were among the first built when the town was officially laid out in 1685. Before that, there were land grants, maybe around 1650 or so, that pretty much defined the village area. The brick was all locally made, and the wooden sections that you see were all from trees cut down to clear the area.” She smiled. “Sometimes I like to walk along here and try to picture the way it was back then, with only those few houses, and dirt paths between them. No roads, no cars… just horses and a wagon here and there.” She pointed beyond the square. “You see those woods off to the right? There are trees there that have been standing for more than three hundred years. It’s believed that’s the last of the forest that the early settlers found when they first came here.”