Maple Mayhem (A Sugar Grove Mystery) (14 page)

Knowing him like I did, I was fairly certain he would be in his train room on a Sunday evening. Ignoring the grumbling coming from my stomach, I headed for Loden’s special space. Loden’s train room is housed in an addition unfortunately dreamt up by one of the more eccentric, and fortunately long-dead, members of the family, Verdant Greene.

Gripped by the Egyptology mania that swept much of the world at the time, Verdant built a pyramid replica on the side of the house. He was so thoroughly devoted to the authenticity of the space that he chose not to include such niceties as windows for light and cooling or a heating system of any kind for the winter. These design decisions, along with an entranceway modeled after a real tunnel into King Tut’s tomb did little to endear this part of the house to anyone except Loden.

Family legend has it that, like an intrepid archeologist himself, at age two Loden had somehow toddled to the doorway and wriggled along the passage. An hour after frantically ransacking the farmhouse and adjoining fields in search of her missing son, my mother sat down in the far pasture to call upon her spirit guides for assistance. She claims she had a vision of Loden perched on a golden throne dressed in a loincloth. Moments later she burst into the pyramid to discover Loden contentedly sitting in the corner as though he owned the place. And he has, for all practical purposes, ever since.

I don’t really give a lot of credence to my mother’s spirit-guide story but I will say Loden’s effect on the space is magical. He has turned the whole place into an extravaganza of miniatures. All of Sugar Grove is spread out in lavish detail. Loden has crafted all the buildings, down to the very last detail himself. He spends countless hours researching each new piece he adds to the display and then executes it with just as much care.

I may not like the accommodations but I love visiting the pyramid because of what Loden has done with it. And because he is there. Loden never was the kind of big brother you feared. I think my tiny size made him unusually protective of me. As an adult I try not to take advantage of his instincts but as a kid on the playground his protectiveness was always welcomed.

I scooted through the entryway and landed at the other end eager to tell him all about Frank and my run-in with Mitch. He looked up from a small barn whose roof he was carefully covering in miniature shingles.

“So how did things work out at Tansey’s?” he asked. Truth be told, I had mostly forgotten about Tansey and the threatening dummy in her barn. I told Loden about my visit to her and then my decision to head up to Frank’s to confront him. When I got to the part about finding Frank with his head bashed in, Loden carefully set aside the miniature barn and gave me his full attention. When I mentioned being questioned by Mitch as a suspect, Loden started pacing the floor. Between the amount of space taken up by models and displays and the slanted ceiling, pacing was no easy feat.

“And to top it all off, Bob Sterling is angry at me for mentioning to Mitch he was leaving Frank’s in a hurry at the same time I was arriving. He told me we had better not need an ambulance anytime soon up here at Greener Pastures.” As I related the incidents of the day to Loden all of the emotion came flooding back at once. I felt light-headed and sick to my stomach. My breath started coming in shallow pants and I worried I was about to pass out.

“Sit down, Dani. You look like you’re about to keel over anyway.” Loden pointed to a free corner and I squatted down in it and put my head between my knees. I felt him sit beside me and take my hand. Sometimes my family makes me crazy with all their interest in my love life or lack thereof and general meddling but at times like these I just felt grateful to have them. When my breathing slowed to normal and the nausea passed I had an encouraging thought.

“The good news is that with Frank dead the sabotage on the sugarhouses should stop. So I can get on with keeping cooperative members on board and placing supply orders.”

“Are you sure that’s a good idea? What did Mitch say?” Loden asked.

“I didn’t think about it until just now. And besides, I’m not going to ask Mitch for permission to go about my business.”

“How can you be sure Frank was responsible for what has been happening? It could be someone else. Which would make it a bad idea to pursue the co-op.”

“Frank is the only one who raised any objections to the idea of the cooperative. He had to have been the one responsible.” If I kept saying that maybe it would make it true.

“I thought of him as the embodiment of the Live Free or Die motto. He didn’t want anyone telling him what to do and didn’t much care what you got up to either. Given Frank’s attitude toward the sovereignty of his own property, it seems out of character for him to damage some else’s,” Loden said.

“If not Frank, then who do you think might have done it?”

“I think you should consider Dean Hayes.” Loden fixed his eyes on the floor, studying a spot on it with more interest than I thought it warranted.

“Why Dean?” I asked, but I had an idea why he would suggest Dean. Loden is a fair and levelheaded person but he has been not so secretly in love with Piper for years and years. He didn’t even realize how much it showed until around Thanksgiving when I suggested he ask her to marry him. Loden is never a fan of the men Piper spends the winter dating and Dean was just the latest guy he wished would be permanently abducted by aliens.

“I heard him talking the other day at the hardware store about trying to convince Jill to finally give up sugaring and to put their place on the market. Dean sounded angry when he mentioned Jill refusing Frank’s offer on the property.”

“What does that have to do with the sabotage?”

“I’m just saying, who would be in a better position to girdle the trees than someone who lived on the property. He had legitimate reason to be in his own sugar bush and he would have known which trees to attack in order to cause maximum damage.”

“Frank’s property borders the Hayes acreage. He could easily have slipped onto their land without being noticed. The damaged trees are well out of sight of the house. And anyone who has ever tapped a tree could guess which ones would be most missed if they were put out of commission.”

“All I’m saying is there has been a lot of damage to the sugarhouses around here and, with what happened at Tansey’s place, it seems to be escalating. And we don’t know if Frank was a victim of the same sort of thing or if he was killed for some other reason.”

“No, we don’t. Which means I would be foolish to put off finalizing the plans for the cooperative because the incidents might be linked to Frank’s death.”

“I think you are more foolish to pursue it until Mitch finishes the investigation.”

“You can’t mean that. It’s Mitch we’re talking about. He has never been in charge of the department for more than a couple of days before and he certainly hasn’t been in charge of a murder investigation.”

“Mitch may be unseasoned but that doesn’t make him incompetent. I’m worried about you and about our own sugarhouse. Frank’s death is no guarantee this is over.”

“I’ll take extra precautions but that’s the most I’ll promise. And while I’m busy with that, I think you ought to be asking yourself why you are so eager to suggest Piper’s latest squeeze is a dirty rotten saboteur.” I stood, gave him a bit of a wave, and scootched back out the passageway. I had some lunch I wanted to finish.

After a less than refreshing night’s sleep I wanted to do something to take my mind off sabotage and murder. I really needed to replace the image that was bouncing around in my head of Frank lying facedown on the floor of his sugarhouse. I decided spending a little time in my own sugarhouse would do me a world of good. I had a bunch of paperwork to put together for the potential co-op members and I wanted to post a new recipe for a cheddar cheese maple spread to our website. Once a week I post a new recipe or article on green living on our blog attached to the site. I even started selling green products like stainless steel water bottles and cloth grocery bags with the Greener Pastures logo printed on them.

The back of the shop area houses a small office and I spent a lot of my time there ever since it was built the previous year. We always used to do the books in the main house den but as the business has grown I wanted to keep things separate for tax purposes. I also wanted to stop other people from using up all the sticky notes. Besides, once something was on a sticky note I needed to be able to find it again and in a shared office, peopled by family members, my notes kept getting stuck to the inside of a wastepaper basket more often than not. No one else liked the shop office as much as I did and that solved the problem.

I pushed open the sugarhouse door, glad to be in the familiar space. The rough wooden walls and long workbenches were worn smooth in places by generations of Greenes. Down under the bench in the corner my great-great-grandfather had carved his initials in the wall and when I was six I found it one summer day playing hide- and-seek with my siblings. When I shared my discovery with them, they laughed and said they both already knew about it. That’s the thing about being the youngest in a family with a long history in one spot. There’s no new territory to explore unless you make it up yourself or find a new way to look at a place already traveled.

Which was one of the reasons I was so committed to making the sugaring operation a success. Everyone had a niche to fill and a part to play in the family. Grandma and Grampa endowed the school. My parents had created an artist colony in a back parcel of land and hosted talented people who went on to win prizes in all fields of endeavor. Celadon set up a land trust that spanned hundreds of acres and received national attention. Loden used his law degree to run a free clinic out of our spare barn for neighbors who couldn’t otherwise afford legal help in civil matters. What I wanted, more than anything, was to make my own contribution to the community. The maple cooperative was my first stab at doing just that. Coming up with ways to help my fellow sugar makers stay in business was one of the best ways I could think to be of service.

I wandered through the shop, running my hand over the stock and checking for dust. Not many people came to the sugarhouse at this time of year but we still did get the odd customer looking for something to give as a gift. Between Christmas and sugaring season, the only people who sought us out for purchasing were locals but I still wanted to make a good impression.

I made my way to the back of the shop and stopped short as I entered the small office. A drawer in the oak file cabinet sagged open and some file folders were shoved in like someone was in too much of a hurry to do the job neatly. I never leave things like that. I’m not compulsively neat but I can’t stand to leave drawers hanging open. It looks like an unmade bed in the middle of your office.

Besides, how lazy can you be? It’s not like a file drawer is all that heavy. Nor is it tricky to operate. No one who was authorized to be in the sugarhouse would have left it in this sort of a state. I took a last look around then sat in my chair and bent over the file drawer to retrieve the file containing the information for the cooperative.

The file wasn’t where I thought I left it. I pulled open the other drawers and ran my fingers across the contents of each. Boxes of permanent markers, rubber bands, and pricing stickers sat neatly side by side but no files containing a list of contacts for suppliers or the contract I had created for members to sign were with them. Nothing whatsoever pertaining to the cooperative was there.

Deciding not to panic, I sat once again at the desk and booted up the computer. Or at least tried to boot it up. I pushed the power button on but no familiar sounds of thumping and whirring filled the small room. No moaning or a fan that sounded like a small plane preparing for takeoff greeted my ears. Just the sound of me cussing and the clacking noise I made on the keyboard as I tried to make it respond.

I climbed under the desk to check that the darn thing was still plugged in and that’s when the bad news struck. Someone had neatly snipped the plug end off the cord and left it on the floor. I stared, confused at what I was seeing. No one had ever broken into our home in the more than two hundred years since my family had been given the land by the governor to settle the place. The closest thing to trespassing we ever had was Knowlton looking in the woods for things to stuff.

I wasn’t even sure what to do. I banged my head on the underside of the desk as I struggled to back out. I wondered if there was any chance an animal had somehow gotten into the building and gnawed through the cord. I knew it was ridiculous but somehow it seemed preferable to a human being invading my space with malicious intentions.

I decided to check the stack of catalogs I keep near the wingback chair in the shop for anything I could use to rewrite the informational packets for the co-op members. Not only were the magazines missing, someone had taken the entire basket. Now there was no hope at all a wild animal was responsible. I also had to reconsider whether or not Frank was truly responsible for the sabotage in town. I hadn’t been in the sugarhouse since Sunday morning.

It was conceivable that Frank had come by after that on Sunday when no one was looking and then returned home in time to be murdered before I found him at around one thirty. The time frame seemed tight but it might have been possible. At least I hoped it was, otherwise the saboteur was still out there and the problems for the cooperative might just be getting started.

I hurried out the door and considered locking it, then thought better of the idea. Firstly, I had no idea where the key could be found to open it up again later and secondly, I didn’t like the idea of changing my life because of an unkind prank. Maybe I should have been more worried than I was but I shut the door behind me and hightailed it for the house.

I thought about calling the police but decided if Mitch hadn’t been inclined to take the sabotage seriously before he had his hands full with Frank’s death, he wasn’t likely to do so now. I headed back to the house trying to decide if I should tell someone in the family about what I had found. I didn’t want to tell Grandma or Loden whose voices I could hear laughing and singing in the kitchen. It would just spoil their good mood. Grampa would bluster and complain about how much he hated the computer anyway and how glad he was it had gone and gotten itself killed. I noticed Celadon in the living room cutting out paper snowflakes with Spring and Hunter. The kids were actually sitting still and getting along so there was no way I was going to disturb that. It was as rare an occurrence as a flamingo at our bird feeder.

There was only one thing to do. I needed to procrastinate. I grabbed my keys and left a note scribbled on the chalkboard in the hallway to let the family know what had become of me. Breakfast at the Stack Shack was the perfect way to mark time until a decision appeared full-blown in my mind.

I chugged down into town, wishing once more Lowell were manning the police station instead of a deck chair in the middle of the Atlantic. My stomach rumbled as I thought about a hot stack of Piper’s famous pancakes or an omelet the size of the moon filled with creamed spinach and sun-dried tomatoes. And coffee.

*   *   *

The damage to my computer should have killed my appetite along with my plans for the cooperative but somehow I managed to steer the Clunker into the only free parking space right in front of the Stack. I heard thumping overhead and looked up to see the local chimney sweep, Cal Donaldson, yanking his long brush in and out of the butter pat shaped chimney. It was a miracle he could stand up on the roof with the all lacquer the original builder had poured on it to resemble syrup. It hung down in permanent icicles all along the perimeter of the building, creating a hazard for the very tall as they went through the door.

I waved up at Cal before grasping the spatula-shaped door handle and walking in. A minute later and I was perched on a stool at the counter with a steaming cup of coffee in front of me and a whole list of breakfast specials and old favorites to decide among. Given the emotional ravaging of the last couple of days French toast seemed the best thing to set me back on track. Piper called out my order to Charlie in the back and leaned over the counter to look me right in the eyes.

“It was that bad, huh?” There was no fooling Piper.

“Finding Frank’s body was grim. Telling Phoebe about it was even worse. The vandalism in town is escalating. I feel like I started something I should never have attempted.” I added an extra couple spoonfuls of sugar to the coffee Piper plopped down in front of me, hoping it might sweeten my outlook.

“Don’t say that. The cooperative is a great idea. I was talking about it with Dean and Jill just yesterday. Jill thinks the savings will amount to enough for her to stay open instead of selling.” Now was my chance to put some feelers out about Dean.

“Did Dean seem as enthusiastic as Jill about keeping the business running?” I asked.

“What makes you ask that?” I thought I caught the barest bit of a scrunch between Piper’s eyebrows. She is a great card player and keeps her facial tells to a minimum but it has gotten easier to notice the tiniest wiggle in that region since she got her brow pierced. Light glints off it when it moves. Dean hadn’t been happy and Piper was hesitant to tell me about it. This was just one more way the week was going wrong.

“It just seems like the sugarhouse is more Jill’s pet project than Dean’s. I can see how he might be interested in selling the place if it meant he would have a nest egg of his own instead of all his assets tied up in someone else’s dream.” Here was where I was going to shift the topic just enough to relax her defense of Dean. “After all, things look like they are getting pretty serious between the two of you and maybe he would like to settle down in a home of his own with a family of his own before too long.” Piper’s eyebrow ring twitched again and I thought she looked just the slightest bit green around the gills. I know that look. It blankets my own face anytime Knowlton’s eligibility is mentioned within the range of my hearing.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean. Dean is a whole lot of fun but no one has said anything about settling down.” Piper turned away to fetch my plate of French toast and side order of locally raised and smoked maple bacon. She banged the plate down with a bit more force than necessary.

“So I heard wrong about his interest in selling the property.”

“No, you heard right.” Piper wiped vigorously at an imaginary spot on the counter with the edge of her vintage embroidered apron. “He and Jill got into it a bit actually. She was so happy and he was a total downer. To tell you the truth, it showed me another side of Dean that I wasn’t so thrilled to find out about.”

“Jill called me up to her place on Saturday morning to show me a few of her trees that had been girdled. You don’t think Dean wants to sell badly enough that he would girdle the trees to intimidate Jill into giving up, do you?” There, I’d said it. I busied myself with cutting into the toast, which was sliced so thick you could use it for insulation.

“As much as I wish I could swear I believed he wouldn’t do a thing like that, I don’t think I can.” Piper stopped her rubbing and twitching and looked me in the face. “Dean is a lot of fun. He’s a great musician and up for just about anything, which appeals to me. But I’m not sure I trust him to put someone else’s interests ahead of his own.” Maybe there was hope for Loden after all. It was my fondest wish that Piper and Loden would marry one day and that she would be a legal member of the family rather than an honorary one. Maybe I ought to put in a plug for my brother while we were being so honest.

“You deserve someone who would put your interests first. Someone whose moral compass matches your own and who you would never hesitate to believe in.”

“You may be right but where would I ever find a guy like that?” A cold blast of air barreled into the Stack as Loden opened the door and gave us a wave.

“I think it might be a lot easier than you imagine.” I patted the stool next to me and Loden perched himself there.

“Kenneth called Grampa.” Loden was generally a man of few words but the ones he used were worth listening to. If he thought he ought to drive out to find me and tell me something in person it was likely I needed to know.

“Is it about the cooperative?” I felt the French toast get heavier in my stomach as though there had been a significant change to the force of gravity.