The Maine Mutiny (3 page)

Mara turned to me. “What about you, Jessica? Like a refill?”

“Not for me, thanks, Mara,” I said, passing my hand over the top of my cup. “I’ve had my quota for the day.”

Mara moved on to the next booth, where Mayor Jim Shevlin and two colleagues were huddled over a map of the town, trying to figure out how to accommodate all the tourists if the upcoming lobster festival were rained out.

Cabot Cove had its share of tourists every summer, but the town’s attractions were typical of Maine—quaint houses, many of them Victorian, like mine, and a busy harbor with two charter-boat stations offering, depending upon the season, fishing, island exploring, whale watching, sea kayaking, and scuba diving at a sunken wreck down the coast. Visitors usually made a beeline to the docks, or to one of our seaside restaurants, driving right past the downtown. For years, the merchants had been trying to convince the town fathers that something was needed to bring out-of-towners to Main Street, but their pleas had been, if not exactly ignored, tabled. Finally, they took matters into their own hands. The chamber of commerce prevailed upon the
Cabot Cove Gazette
to conduct a survey, soliciting suggestions for ways to draw tourists to the village center. The newspaper promised to publish the most interesting proposals in a weekly feature on the front page.

Submissions had poured in, and the mayor, with elections not far off, succumbed to the pressure and agreed to judge the proposals with an eye toward implementing the best ideas. One wag advocated a wet-T-shirt contest, which was rejected immediately, although just the thought caused consternation among the members of the Ladies’ Auxiliary, who had in mind something less raucous, like a crafts fair.

After sifting through a pile of letters, the mayor’s office had decided against a permanent installation, turning down proposals for an amusement park, a petting zoo, and a maritime museum, and instead settled on a temporary event, one that could start off small and grow as success allowed. The final decision, outlined in a poster exhibit in the village library, gathered a number of the suggestions into the first annual Cabot Cove lobster festival, to be held in late August so as not to compete with the long-standing lobster festival in Rockland earlier in the month.

To start, plans called for a parade through the center of town; the crowning of a Miss Cabot Cove Lobsterfest, each candidate to be sponsored by a local business; a Ladies’ Auxiliary crafts fair; an arts competition among local schoolchildren for the best expression of “What Cabot Cove Means to Me,” the entries to be displayed in shops along Main Street; and all culminating in a community lobster dinner under a tent in the village center, the success of which relied heavily on Cabot Cove’s lobstermen supplying the centerpiece of the meal.

“How many can you seat inside, Mara?” asked Roger Cherry. He was a retired accountant and former president of the chamber, who’d volunteered to help the town with the event. Mayor Shevlin was relying on him to come up with foul-weather plans.

“Fifty-four at tables and in the booths. Eight at the counter,” Mara said, filling the men’s coffee cups. “If we let the awning down, and the wind’s not too bad, we can probably fit another fifteen outside on the dock. If the weather’s fair, I can push that up to thirty.”

“Fair weather’s no problem,” Roger said. “We just want to make sure the tourists have places to go and things to do if it rains.”

“I’ll help put out the chairs, won’t I, Mara?” Barnaby called from his stool at the end of the counter. In his thirties, Barnaby was a slow learner who’d left school early and made his living doing odd jobs for the town merchants. Mara employed him every summer to work in her restaurant.

“How many people do you figure you’ll get?” she asked.

“No way to know,” Roger replied. “We could get anywhere from a couple hundred to several thousand over the festival’s three days, but, of course, a good portion of them will be local citizens.”

“Won’t hurt to remind them of what they can find in Cabot Cove. We’re not a mall, but we’ve got a lot to offer, all the same.” The speaker was David Ranieri, who, with his brother, Jim, owned Charles Department Store, which had been a mainstay of downtown commerce for decades. It was the first place I looked for anything I needed, from sewing notions to small appliances to shoes, and, remarkably, they always seemed to have it in stock.

Gwen opened her bag and pulled out an electronic organizer. She drew a slender stylus from its side and tapped the screen. “How am I ever going to get everything done in the next fourteen days?”

“What do you have to do?” I asked.

“Well, I’ve already sent press releases to every local paper up and down the coast, and I’ve used an online service to send notices to travel editors across the country. I sent the local PBS stations a tape of the mayor talking about the festival. I’m hoping they’ll bite for an interview. If they don’t, we can run it ourselves on public access, but it doesn’t reach as wide an audience. The radio station will do a remote broadcast from the village square during the festival, and they’re doing a promotion starting next week, giving away tickets.”

“Sounds like you’re doing very well,” I said, impressed with her industry.

Gwen nodded and again tapped the screen. “It’s a start, but I still have to do the final schedule for the Web site, and write up a story on Cabot Cove lobstermen for the
Gazette
. And they’re not being terribly cooperative.”

“Who’s not being cooperative?”

“The lobstermen, not the
Gazette
. The paper’s been wonderful. Even so, I’m swamped.” She put down the organizer and counted off on her fingers. “I have to talk to the photographer about his schedule, and the shuttle-bus company about theirs. We don’t have enough street parking, so we’re going to run a bus from the high school parking lot to downtown. The barbershop quartet wants to go on at the same time as the Dixieland band, and the leaders are not talking to each other. I also have the children’s art exhibit to coordinate. All the drawings have to be mounted on boards and distributed to the merchants to hang in their windows. And we have to pick up the evening gowns from the rental place in Bangor, make sure they fit, and have rehearsals for the beauty pageant, not to mention that I still have to round up the final judges to choose Miss Cabot Cove Lobsterfest.” Gwen stopped counting and looked up at me. “I don’t suppose you’d agree to be a judge, would you?”

“I’m sure you can find someone infinitely more qualified for that task than I,” I said, smiling to soften the refusal. “But perhaps I can help you with the Web site or with the article for the
Gazette
. I’m between book projects right now, and it won’t hurt to exercise my writing muscles a bit.”

“Oh, Mrs. Fletcher, if you would take the
Gazette
article off my hands, I would be eternally grateful. I’ve been chasing Linc Williams for a week, but he won’t give me the time of day. I can’t decide if it’s because I’m a woman, or because I’m from away, but he just won’t talk to me.”

Lincoln Williams was the head of the local lobstermen’s association, a man of great importance, both in his own eyes and in those of his colleagues. He traced his family ties to Cabot Cove going back close to two centuries. All the men had been fishermen, but those in the last few generations had gone out for lobster, and each had led the association, passing the presidency down from father to son as if the position were a royal throne. None of the members of his association, I knew, would consent to an interview without Linc’s say-so. And getting to Linc, as Gwen had found out, was not easily accomplished, unless you were a lobsterman. I doubted Linc would condescend to talk to me, either, but I knew another way to reach him.

“What kind of story were you looking for?”

“It’s for the festival edition of the
Gazette
, the one that’ll be handed out for free the first day. The new editor, Evelyn Phillips, wants kind of a ‘day in the life of a lobsterman’ story. She’s doing her own piece on the history of Cabot Cove and has someone else doing an article on how to eat a lobster.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think you can do it?”

“I’m pretty sure I can,” I said, hoping it was true. “Mary Carver is on the Friends of the Library committee with me. Her husband, Levi, is a lobsterman. I’ll ask Mary to ask Levi to ask Linc if I can trail along for a day on one of the boats.”

Gwen’s eyes shone. “That would be perfect, Mrs. Fletcher. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I am in your debt forever.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” I said, smiling. “Now that I’ve volunteered, I hope I don’t let you down.”

“You could never let me down. You’ve done so much already. I don’t know where I’d be without the Friends of the Library and the Ladies’ Auxiliary. That old saying, ‘If you want something done, ask a busy woman,’ is absolutely true. The Cabot Cove Lobsterfest could never come off if it weren’t for the women in this town.”

“Well, we’re all excited about this event, and hope it will give the downtown economy the boost it deserves.”

“It will, if history is any guide,” she said. “The festival over in Rockland has raised a ton of money for community programs there. I’m sure the Cabot Cove version will be just as successful. You’ll see.”

“I’m sure it will, too,” I said. “Just look who we have working for us.”

She pumped her fist into the air. “Yeah, Gwendolyn Anissina, girl genius.”

“What was that?” Barnaby called over from the counter.

We laughed.

“Well, I’d better get going,” Gwen said. “No sense in sitting and complaining; that won’t get it done. Thank you again, Mrs. Fletcher.”

“Please, it’s Jessica.”

“Okay. It’s Jessica.” She gathered her windbreaker and handbag, paid Mara at the register, and, with a “ ’Bye, all,” made her exit, holding the door open for Seth Hazlitt, who was coming in, before she went out into the rain.

“Where’s she off to in this weather?” Seth asked, sliding onto the bench Gwen had just vacated, and dragging a plastic shopping bag in with him.

“More places than I can keep track of,” I said to Cabot Cove’s favorite physician, and my oldest and dearest friend.

“Mornin’, Doc,” Mara said, clearing away Gwen’s dishes. “Can I get you a cup of coffee?”

“Ayuh. You can.”

“Anything else?”

Seth looked over to the counter, where Mara had a cake plate piled with Danish and doughnuts under a plastic cover. “Happen to have any of that peach cobbler left over from yesterday?” he asked.

“Made some fresh this morning. I’ll bring it right over.”

“Gwen was just giving us a rundown of her schedule for the next two weeks,” I said. “She’s going to need some help.”

“You volunteerin’?” Seth asked.

“As a matter of fact I did,” I said. “I’m going to write an article for her for the paper.”

“That’s nice. You let me know if you need my assistance,” he said.

“There is something you could help her out with,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“She’s looking for judges for the Miss Cabot Cove Lobsterfest Contest.”

“The beauty pageant?”

“Now, don’t dismiss it out of hand.”

“You’d make a great judge, Doc,” Mara said, as she slid a cup of coffee and a dish of warm cobbler in front of Seth.

“I’m not going to ogle a bunch of girls walking around in bathing suits. It’s undignified,” he said, taking up a heaping forkful of the sweet dessert to which Mara had added a scoop of vanilla ice cream.

“That’s only a small part of it,” I said. “There’s a talent contest and current-events questions. You’d be good at judging that. Besides, it’s all in fun, and for the benefit of Cabot Cove.”

“Mmm-hmm,” he said around the mouthful of cobbler.

“I wouldn’t mind spendin’ time lookin’ at beautiful girls,” Barnaby put in, “but no one asked me.”

“And no one will,” Mara said. “You’d vote for the first one to flirt with you.”

“I would,” Barnaby agreed.

“Don’t you have something to do in the kitchen?” Mara asked him.

“Nope. I’m on my break,” he said, quickly turning back to his coffee.

“Think about it,” I said to Seth. “Gwen’s working so hard. We should all help her out.”

“That one’s a driver, all right,” Roger said. He turned to the mayor. “Where’d you find her?”

“Put an ad for a festival coordinator in the Bangor paper.”

“Not the
Gazette
?” Seth asked.

“Shh.” The mayor looked around to see who was nearby. “Don’t tell Matilda Watson, please; she’ll skin me alive. But I wanted someone with event-planning experience, and we don’t have anyone in town who fits that description.”

Matilda Watson was the longtime owner of the
Cabot Cove Gazette
. She was not known for her patience, and had been through a succession of editors, firing them for minor infractions as fast as she hired them. She kept the publisher title for herself and was not above browbeating people in town into advertising in her paper. Some people thought she—and not the chamber of commerce—was behind the original idea of a survey to bring traffic to the downtown stores, using the project as a way to solicit more ads.

“What experience does Gwen have?” Mara asked. “She looks like she’s barely out of school.”

“That’s true,” Mayor Shevlin said. “She graduated in June from the New England School of Communications. She’s young but she’s full of energy and ideas. She volunteered at Rockland’s lobster festival for the past three years, and was even one of the contestants in their Sea Goddess pageant before that. Didn’t capture the crown but got a lot of experience. She knows how a good festival runs. We could do a lot worse than to emulate Rockland’s success. So I hired her.”

“Plus, she must work cheap,” Barnaby called from his stool, setting off a wave of laughter.

Mayor Shevlin’s cheeks turned pink. “Well, there is that,” he admitted.