Maple Syrup Mysteries Box Set 1: Books 1-3

by Emily James

  “Can’t say as I do. If you want more than what I’ve told you, you can try Georgiana later.”

  I thanked him and ended the call, but I’d blown it. The way I’d phrased the question had given him an easy out.

  Elise and Mark were watching me, their eyebrows raised in an eerie mirror image. Though, admittedly, Mark’s eyebrows seemed a little less mobile at present due to the bruises on his face.

  I shoved my phone back into my purse. “Noah had an argument with a teenage girl outside of the Bar & Grill recently.”

  Even as I said it, something about our theory felt like it didn’t fit, like a piece taken from one puzzle trying to be forced into another.

  Elise pushed an escaping bobby pin back into her bun. “I think I’m going to go to the station and talk to Erik personally. If he’s worried about the brass, we can always run this by a district attorney and see if they think there’s enough to make a case with it all connected.”

  Mark yawned, then winced. His battered face didn’t make him any less attractive to me, but for his sake, I hoped it healed soon.

  I skimmed my fingertips along his jawline. “Now you are tired.”

  “A little.” He started to yawn again, but his mouth barely opened before he clamped it down. “You two don’t have to wait for Quincey. I might be able to catch a nap before he comes.”

  I rose to my feet, and my gaze skipped to his lips. I wanted to kiss him goodbye, but I didn’t want our first kiss to be in front of Elise. I pressed a kiss into his forehead instead. “Call me when they’re ready to release you, okay?”

  He nodded. His eyes had drifted to half-mast.

  Elise and I left. Quincey came out of the elevator as we went in.

  We rode down in silence since we were the only ones to get on. A niggling sensation, like I was missing something important, crept into my mind. I tried to ignore it and blame the tension on the elevator, but it wouldn’t budge.

  We left the elevator, and the automatic doors at the emergency room entrance swished open for us. We stepped out into the dark. The snow had returned to flurries that were only visible in the street light halos.

  Elise spun her keys around on her finger. “This is definitely not the way I thought today would end.”

  I stopped walking. Keys! That’s what felt wrong. “We lock the sugar shack when no one’s working.”

  Elise turned around and her nose crinkled. “Okay?” She drew the word out in that I don’t know where you’re going with this type of way.

  “We’ve had a couple of days where the sap wasn’t running and so we weren’t working in the sugar shack where the reverse osmosis machine was. That’s the only time someone could have sabotaged it. Otherwise our employees would have noticed someone tampering with it.”

  “Okay,” Elise said in the same drawn-out tone.

  I pointed at her keys. “You need a set of keys to get in. The only set that the saboteur could have gotten access to were Noah’s. We didn’t think to take them at first, and they were sitting with his clothes in the cubby hole until I took them back the other day.”

  Elise held her hands out to the side and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not following.”

  I was kind of taking the circuitous route to saying what I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to jump to conclusions, and working through it verbally helped me make sure it all hung together.

  “Stacey told us they wouldn’t let her in to see Noah. You promised to have her put on the list, remember? That means she couldn’t have taken the keys, and her defense council will be sure to point that out. But I did see Tony at the hospital the other night when I came to pick up Russ, and when I went up to Noah’s room to check in on him, no one was around to watch who was coming and going. Tony could have been bringing the keys back after using them to get in to the sugar shack or taking them to make a copy.”

  “Okay.” The same word, but this time with the sense that she was finally following my rabbit trails. “But if we think this was about you from the beginning, and not Noah, then we’re back to our original problem. Tony has no reason to want to hurt you or Mark.”

  I headed for the police cruiser again. This case didn’t make sense. Every theory had a hole in it. Tony didn’t have a reason to hurt me, and I’d always gotten the impression that he liked me…or at least that he found my propensity to wreck my car amusing. His only motivation in all of this was protecting his daughter.

  But maybe that was the answer. “What if they were in on it together?”

  19

  Elise’s eyebrows formed pointy triangles. She unlocked the car. We climbed in, and she cranked the heat but stayed parked. “Even if they were in it together, that still doesn’t explain why Tony would go along with hurting you. It’s so out of character.”

  It didn’t, and it was. I pressed my hands closer to a vent. Maybe if I warmed up, my brain would work better. Right now it wanted to jump back and forth between Mark’s not married and how cold I was. I needed to think like my dad. If his client was accused of this crime, how would he spin the Tony–Stacey element to cast more than reasonable doubt?

  “We’re thinking that Tony’s motive was protecting his daughter, and Stacey’s motive was jealousy because she believed the rumors. So let’s assume Stacey and Noah fought about the rumors and Stacey hit him with his own wrench. She goes running to her dad, and he sabotages the reverse osmosis machine to make it less obvious why Noah was attacked?”

  Elise finally put the car into drive. She drummed four fingers along the steering wheel. “What about your sap lines, though? Didn’t you say you found leaks before Noah’s attack?”

  We had. The sap lines had leaks when we turned the machines on in the morning, and I’d seen Noah walking and talking then. “I wonder if Noah could have caught Stacey or figured out that she was sabotaging the lines and that’s part of what they argued over.”

  “Maybe.” Elise’s lips narrowed. “But that still doesn’t explain Mark.”

  It didn’t. He hadn’t known anything that could prove Stacey did this. Maybe if it’d been my car I could understand it. Tony knew I had a picture of Stacey with Noah, and that I was asking around. That might have made him nervous enough that he felt he needed to stop me.

  Oh no. I grabbed the arm rest. “The last time I was in at Quantum Mechanics, Tony thought I was there to pick up Mark’s truck for him. He might have compromised the brakes, expecting I’d be the one driving it when they went.”

  After Elise dropped me and two fresh bags of dog food off, I grabbed the dogs from Russ and a pair of boots and latex kitchen gloves and went back to the stables. Now that I knew we were probably looking for a wrench, I wanted to make one more pass of the crime scene.

  I flicked on the lights in the stable and squeezed my hands into the gloves. Even though fingerprints on anything I might find couldn’t be used in court, that didn’t mean the police couldn’t use them at all. The main things I wanted to figure out were whether we’d guessed the right weapon and whether whoever did this brought it with them or used what was at hand. If they’d brought a weapon with them, that meant premeditation.

  I went through the tack room again while Toby and Velma enjoyed themselves sniffing the hay bales and around the stalls. Noah’s neat labels specified where every piece of equipment went. Nothing seemed to be missing or out of place. I shined a flashlight over it all for extra visibility and moved the pieces around, looking behind them. Nothing.

  We’d already looked through the horse stalls, so I skipped those and the bin where we kept the brushes and other small items. None of them were hard enough or the right shape to create Noah’s wound, and I’d been all through the container in the following days while caring for the horses.

  The only place left to search was Noah’s toolbox. It still sat where I’d seen it the day I found his body.

  I opened the lid. Inside, Noah had taped an inventory to the lid with neat lines of silver duct tape.

  I hung my head ba
ck and stared at the ceiling for a moment. None of the tools inside looked splattered with blood, so the only way to know if something was missing was to take it all out and compare it to Noah’s inventory list.

  My eyes already felt gritty from the long day, but it didn’t seem like the attacker planned to stop. Figuring out exactly what the police needed to search for brought us one step closer to stopping Tony, Stacey, or whoever might be behind it all.

  I laid the tools out, using my phone to search images and descriptions of anything I didn’t recognize by name. As embarrassing as it was, that turned out to be seventy-five percent of the items. My family were apartment dwellers. Whenever anything broke, we called the super.

  An hour later, only one item was missing—Noah’s largest open-ended wrench. Noah was too meticulous to misplace his tools. If the wrench wasn’t there, I’d bet my farm—literally—that whoever attacked him took it.

  I typed the type of wrench into my search bar. The images that came up showed a horseshoe-shaped end. I texted Elise with the brand and style of wrench.

  I’d found the assailant’s weapon, and it was missing.

  “Erik got the warrant for Quantum Mechanics to look for the wrench,” Elise said when she called me two days later. “The fact that Mark’s brakes were sabotaged while there and he’s a county employee who was helping investigate Noah’s attacker convinced the judge that there was justifiable cause to search.”

  I stripped off the sterile gloves I’d put on a few hours ago when Nancy had started teaching me the process of making maple butter (which, as it turns out, has absolutely no butter in it at all). The process was delicate, but Nancy promised to teach me all the tricks she’d learned in her ten years of working at Sugarwood and cooking at Short Stack during the non-sugar season.

  Since we were between batches, I tossed the gloves and let Nancy know I needed to take the phone call.

  “Have they executed the warrant yet?” I asked Elise.

  “Yesterday morning. Erik took all the wrenches for comparison and analysis.”

  She paused. It had to be for emphasis. I took the few seconds to step outside the back door where I’d have a bit more quiet and privacy.

  “They found it,” Elise said. “They found a wrench with trace elements of blood that matched the description of Noah’s tools you gave us.”

  A bevy of questions poured into my mind, like Were they able to get a big enough sample to compare the blood to Noah’s? But one question outweighed the others in importance. “Whose tools was it with?”

  “Stacey’s. Erik brought both Stacey and Tony in for questioning this morning.”

  I walked away from the building and back. My mom used to always say that only lies were neat and tidy. The truth was usually messy. That Stacey had held on to the wrench and kept it at Quantum Mechanics felt like it belonged more in the neat-and-tidy category, but maybe sometimes things could be simple. My mom wasn’t always right.

  “What did they say when Erik interrogated them?”

  “Stacey claimed she’d never seen the wrench before, that it didn’t belong to her, that she didn’t know how it got in with her tools.”

  All things I would have expected her to say. Elise seemed to have the same talent as Mark with impressions because, even though I doubted she intended it, I could hear the teenage angst in her recitation of Stacey’s reaction. “And Tony?”

  “He had nothing to do with Noah’s attack, he said. Even though we couldn’t prove it, Erik took a gamble and asked why he went to the hospital to see Noah given their history. Tony claimed it was to ‘make peace’ with him. He denied knowing anything about the keys.”

  The skepticism in Elise’s voice matched what I felt. People didn’t tend to change without some catalyst. Granted, Noah’s coma could have been the catalyst, but Tony’s reaction when he saw the picture I showed to Oliver didn’t seem like that of a man who’d let bygones be bygones.

  I moved into a patch of sunlight in the hope of warming up so I didn’t have to take this conversation inside. Eventually everyone in Fair Haven would learn what had happened, but I wasn’t going to be the one to hasten it by speaking around my employees. “The DA might still be willing to charge Stacey based on the weapon and a motive even if Erik couldn’t get anything more solid from them.”

  “He won’t have to.” Elise’s pride radiated through the phone. “He got Tony to confess.”

  Based on her tone of voice, she’d been holding that back for effect. “You could have led with that.”

  “I could have, but I thought you’d want the whole story.” Now there was a smile in her voice. It faded away as soon as she spoke again. “We decided to lay out for each of them the case against the other. Stacey held strong to her story and insisted her dad never would have hurt Noah, either. Tony confessed to attacking Noah and said Stacey didn’t know anything about it.”

  I pushed a hand against the building wall. That sounded a lot more like what a man trying to protect his daughter would do than what a man who was actually guilty would do.

  A bad taste coated my tongue, like spoiled milk, and unease settled in my chest. I’d initiated this conspiracy theory, and I’d pointed the finger in Tony and Stacey’s direction, but something still didn’t feel right. “Why hang on to the wrench, then? Why not toss it into the lake?”

  “Maybe he didn’t realize it could be tested for blood later.”

  Not likely. With all the crime shows on TV anymore, you’d have to be a recluse to not realize you basically had to drop a weapon in bleach if you wanted to rid it of all traces.

  “I realize you didn’t want it to be Tony or Stacey,” Elise said, “but at least you and Mark and Noah should all be safe now.”

  Assuming we had the right people. Maybe it was the investigator’s version of buyer’s remorse, but the wrench bothered me. “Do you think it’s possible someone planted the wrench?”

  “Possible, yes. But I don’t think that’s what happened.” Elise had switched to her soft, mothering voice again. “Tony confessed. He wouldn’t have done that if he wasn’t guilty or convinced Stacey was guilty or if he was protecting her because they worked it out together.”

  A cloud moved over the sun, a gust of wind bit into my cheeks, and I shivered. Tony and Stacey weren’t experienced criminals. It was possible that whoever really did it panicked when they realized what they’d done and they’d taken the wrench with them because their fingerprints were on it, then didn’t know what to do with it. A lot more possible than there being a different attacker who’d thought this through carefully and methodically enough to keep the weapon and plant it.

  Except they’d found the wrench in Stacey’s toolbox. “Tony had to be involved, otherwise they couldn’t have gotten the keys to the sugar shack. But if he did it alone or he was involved, why wouldn’t he have put the wrench in his toolbox? No father who’d go to prison for his child would knowingly leave condemning evidence someplace that would point to that child as the guilty party. You’re a mom. Does that sound like something you’d do?”

  Elise said something I couldn’t hear, but the tone sounded like an invective. “Let’s say you convinced me that it might not be Tony or Stacey. His confession makes it almost impossible that we’ll convince anyone else.”

  “Were there fingerprints on the wrench?”

  “None. Not even Noah’s.”

  The uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach grew. No one wiped down a weapon, then put it with their own belongings. “What if we looked for an alibi for him? We could break his confession that way. He should have been working at Quantum Mechanics at that time of day. Someone must have seen him.”

  A creak sounded in the background on Elise’s end, a sound I recognized as the much-needing-oil door to the ladies’ restroom at the police station. Given that she was the only female officer, it was one place she could be guaranteed privacy unless a civilian came in.

  “This town…the people here…” Elise said. “They�
��re loyal to their own. We can try, but if the guys at Quantum Mechanics learn Tony confessed, they’re not going to alibi him out, regardless of the truth. They’ll let him take the fall for this and save Stacey if that’s what he wants to do.”

  There had to be a hole in Tony’s story that we could shove a knife through and tear it open. Otherwise, whoever really did this was going to get away with it, and an innocent man would go to prison. “Did he confess to everything, or only to attacking Noah? Maybe you could convince him to take back his confession if you can show that you know he’s lying.”

  “I don’t think that’ll work, but let me go check his written confession.”

  We disconnected, and Nancy and I had almost finished another batch of maple butter when my phone vibrated in my pocket, letting me know a text had come in. The time between when it arrived and when we were done so I could answer felt three times as long as it actually was.

  He admitted to attacking Noah and sabotaging your RO machine and Mark’s brakes, Elise wrote. No mention of your sap lines.

  Everything he’d included, he could have learned about through the Fair Haven gossip chain, but not the sap lines. Only the real attacker would have known about those.

  Did he say why he did it? I texted back.

  Elise’s reply came fast, like she’d been waiting for a response from me. Gave a reason for Noah but refused for the rest of it.

  Those two together meant that, at best, Tony was covering for Stacey, and at worst, we still had no idea who the real attacker was.

  And no way to prove either.

  20

  “Would it be unchivalrous of me to ask you out on our first official date and then ask you to drive?” Mark said when he called me the next day.

  This relationship was already far different from the one I’d had with Peter. He’d always wanted to stay in. At the time, I’d thought it’d been a sign of how much he loved and desired me, but the truth turned out to be the exact opposite. He hadn’t wanted anyone to see us out together. He also hadn’t spent hours talking to me on the phone when we couldn’t be together the way Mark did. It was too bad I couldn’t have seen the flaws and red flags in that relationship when I was in it rather than only in hindsight. Everything might have turned out very different if I had.