SEVEN

Cape Willington’s most famous landmark, aside from the twin lighthouses at Pruitt Point and Kimball Point, was the Pruitt Opera House, which occupied a prime spot on Ocean Avenue, just a half block from the rocky shoreline. Completed in 1881, it was one of the first such facilities in Downeast Maine, and its patrons agreed it was one of the most impressive built in the state before or since. Horace Roberts Pruitt, the building’s namesake and primary benefactor, had brought a team of architects up from Boston to design the structure, because he knew they were experienced in the emerging Colonial Revival style, with which Horace was particularly enamored, given his love of Georgian architecture that had been popular a century earlier. The result was an instantly classic building, with a symmetry and elegance that, in its earliest years, had seemed wildly out of place among the surrounding ramshackle buildings that tumbled down the wide, dusty street to the waterfront.

In the intervening years, those ramshackle wooden buildings had been replaced with more sturdy brick-and-stone affairs. Though in their early years some had been summer residences for the town’s wealthier citizens, most by now had been converted into storefronts (with apartments on the upper floors). The street had been paved, first with cobblestones and then with asphalt, and oil lamps had given way to electric streetlights. But despite all the changes that had taken place on Ocean Avenue over the past century, the Pruitt Opera House remained, a testimony to one man’s cultural vision, a Georgian queen among architectural commoners.

Visitors to the Pruitt (as it was called around town) were particularly enamored with its two most prominent architectural features: the stately columned portico that fronted the building and the elaborate widow’s walk that sat atop the structure “like a crown,” as Horace noted at the building’s dedication on July 4, 1881. That latter feature had been a point of great contention during the building’s construction. The architects had specified a copper-capped cupola to grace the building’s roof, but Horace, who dabbled in architecture, made some adjustments to the design, insisting on a domed, open-sided, octagonal stone structure accessed from below by a simple steel ladder. It was an homage, he insisted, to all the long-suffering sea widows who had stood for countless hours, days, weeks, and years, gazing out to the sea for the first sight of sails on the horizon, searching earnestly for any sign of the return of their loved ones.

Horace’s own grandmother had paced just such a widow’s walk for years upon end at the family’s primary home in nearby Searsport, awaiting her husband, an esteemed sea captain, who had set off on a three-year voyage and never returned, lost somewhere at sea on a journey that was to have taken him and his crew to Africa and the Far East. It was told that she had fretted away and eventually died there on her widow’s walk, wrapped in a frayed black shawl, grieving ’til death for her beloved husband.

Unable to persuade Horace otherwise, the Boston architects had relented, and the widow’s walk atop the Pruitt was still the tallest point in Cape Willington, affording a spectacular panoramic view of the town and the far-reaching sea for those privileged enough to see it.

The Pruitt had a third unique feature: In the late 1970s, when the aged Town Hall on Main Street had burned down due to faulty wiring, the town offices had been temporarily relocated to a series of rooms in the Pruitt’s basement. These rooms had once been rehearsal halls and storage rooms, but once properly renovated and lighted, they served their new purpose so well that the town never moved out. It had proved to be a mutually beneficial relationship, for the town had the entire building at its disposal for whatever purpose presented itself, and the Pruitt’s operating committee had a continual flow of income from the town that proved immensely useful with repairs and upkeep. So the Pruitt Opera House now served as not only the cultural and social center of the town but also its governmental center.

Over the years, the stage of the Pruitt had been graced by performers of nearly every ilk, some truly gifted, but for the past twenty years or so it had been taken over annually for one night a year in mid-summer by a different troupe of performers-the young contestants in the town’s Blueberry Queen Pageant.

This year, like every other in recent memory, a full house was expected for this greatly anticipated event, and the turnout did not disappoint. The place was packed to its gilded rafters. The main hall’s maximum capacity was posted at three hundred and fifty, but Candy could have sworn there were more people than that stuffed into the auditorium, its wide balcony, and its half dozen viewing boxes, making the fire marshal scowl nervously as he paced the side hallway at the outer edges of the crowd.

The noisy crowd assembled there was crackling with anticipation as the clock in the foyer pronounced six o’clock, and Bertha Grayfire, the town council’s chairwoman for nearly a decade, and tonight’s mistress of ceremonies, bounced up a set of well-worn wooden stairs and took the stage with a wave and a smile. She was dressed in a pale yellow flowered dress with a high collar and a low hemline, giving her an appearance that was at once festive yet conservative, which was appropriate, considering her station in town.

Bertha was well-known around town as a good listener and a friendly sort, witty, approachable, and socially savvy. But what the townspeople most admired about her was how she could be tough and focused when necessary-say, during the annual budget process-and light and personable at other times. So it was not unfitting that she was greeted by a warm round of applause as she strode to center stage.

“Good evening, everyone!” she said into the microphone, “and welcome to the Forty-First Annual Cape Willington Blueberry Queen Pageant!”

Applause erupted again, louder and more energetic this time, accompanied by a few whoops and whistles, which were quickly buffered and absorbed by the Pruitt’s excellent acoustics.

For those unable to snag a ticket to the event, the pageant was being broadcast live over community-access cable. Candy would have preferred to watch it on TV at home with Doc, her feet propped up and a glass of white wine in her hand, but a week ago Maggie had thrust a ticket at her and insisted she come.

“I need you there for moral support,” Maggie had told her. “Ed’s going to be traveling-another damned business trip that he says he can’t postpone-and I need someone there to hug if Amanda wins, and a shoulder to cry on if she doesn’t.”

So here she was, sitting in the middle of a row of padded seats halfway back the auditorium, wedged between Maggie on the right and an older, overweight gentleman with a bad cough on the left, trying to remember why she had come.

Maggie leaned in close. “Isn’t this exciting?” She had to practically shout into Candy’s ear to be heard over the applause.

“More fun than baking a blueberry pie,” Candy said with a sarcastic edge that was lost on her friend. She’d had a long day at the booth, spending nearly eight hours straight on her feet dealing with demanding customers, so it was not surprising that she was finding it hard to match Maggie’s enthusiasm.

Maggie gave her a nudge and pointed into the crowd. “Oh look, there’s Mrs. Pruitt!”

Candy craned her neck to peek around the heads in front of her. Sure enough, sitting in the front row was a dangerously thin older woman wearing an impeccably tailored mauve business suit with a lavender-colored scarf. Her steel gray hair was pulled up into a tight swirl; a string of large pearls adorned her thin neck.