Vermont Valentine (Holiday Hearts #3)

by Kristin Hardy

  “They are. The borer doesn’t like ash or black oak, for example. It’s not just a taste thing. Those trees have high levels of the inhibitor chemical—if he keeps eating, he dies. Unfortunately, in the sugar maple it’s not sufficiently strong for protection.”

  “Aren’t there any insecticides we can use?” asked one of the state forestry specialists.

  “None of the insecticides currently approved for use in the U.S. are effective against the maple borer.”

  Ford looked at her keenly. “So there is something, just not for us?”

  “Sort of. I was part of a team that isolated the inhibitor chemical and concentrated it into an insecticide called SMB-17. It was commercially released last year in Canada and in Japan.” She waited a beat. “The trade name is Beetlejuice.”

  That got a round of laughter from all except Rumson.

  “What about here?”

  She tamped down all frustration so that none would sound in her voice. “U.S. agencies appear to require a little more time and data.” And meanwhile, trees by the thousands came down. “We have hopes the red tape part will be done soon.”

  “Soon enough to help us?” asked Marce.

  “I wouldn’t hold my breath, although I’m told the regulatory action leader has been reviewing data and should make a decision soon.”

  “That’s encouraging, isn’t it?”

  “The RAL’s been reviewing the data for about six months.” And ordering more tests, and stalling and stalling and stalling…

  “You ask me, they’re being responsible,” Rumson said heavily. “Just because you think it’s hot stuff doesn’t mean we can just start spraying it around.”

  “You don’t spray it, you inject it.” Her voice was curt.

  “There’s more involved here than just your program. Maples produce a food product and if you think that you can just whip up something in your lab and expect us to take your word on it, well, you don’t know how things work. Taking the time to do it right is the responsible thing to do,” he added pompously.

  Good old Dick, she reflected, always most patronizing when he didn’t have a clue what he was talking about. “Well, they have five years of data from three independent sources, all of it submitted two years ago, to work with. I’d hope they could make a decision based on that in less than a year.”

  Several of the state specialists looked amused, she noticed. Interesting. It appeared that Rumson wasn’t any better liked by his staff than he was by her.

  “At any rate, that’s the future. It doesn’t change what we do today,” she said briskly, moving on. “Right now, our only weapon is removal of the infested and high-risk trees, the sooner the better. The inspection process might be hard work, but it’s critical to the future of this area, so stay alert. If you find a suspicious candidate, mark the tree, log it, take a sample. I’ll collect them from you at the end of the day and follow up from there.” She passed out a stack of maps. “Here’s where I want you deployed.”

  Rumson intercepted one of them. “I think I can direct my own people. We’ll work the southern half of the county.”

  “No, Dick, you won’t.”

  His brows lowered. “Don’t you tell me—”

  Calm, Celie reminded herself. Calm was the way to prevail. “How about if you and Bob and I have a quick confab, Dick? Everybody else, go out to the lobby. We’ll be with you shortly.”

  In a few moments, they were alone.

  Rumson rounded on her. “Don’t you think you can tell me what’s what in front of my people.”

  “You can’t run this, Dick, I’m sorry. For the search to remain focused and effective, it needs central direction.”

  Rumson bristled. “Are you telling me I don’t know how to manage my own staff?”

  “I’m telling you it’s irrelevant. We need to be organized if we’re going to get done on time. I’ve been running these types of search operations for going on three years. I know how to work them efficiently. We’ll get the inspections done quickly and I’ll be out of your hair that much sooner.”

  “You’re not going to come in here and take over my people.”

  Celie searched for patience. “I don’t care about your territory, Dick. Trust me, I don’t want it. What I want is to get rid of the maple borer. The faster I can do that, the better off we’ll all be. People need a single source of information, and I’m in the best position to offer it.”

  “As head of state forest resource protection, I need to know what’s going on here.”

  “And I’ll be happy to keep you informed. Hell, I’ll give you a daily report if you like,” she snapped, finally worn down. “I don’t want to control your people, Dick. I recognize your authority. This is a special project. My experience is that this is the best way to get in, get the job done and leave.”

  Rumson stared at her.

  Celie did her best to look reasonable and unthreatening.

  Finally, mollified, he nodded. “All right, but I want those reports.”

  “Fine.”

  “Daily.”

  “You’ll get them.” She rose. “I think we’ve settled this. Now let’s go get the teams out in the field.”

  Jacob had always loved the winter forest best. There was a stark beauty to the leafless trees, an openness with the thin, winter sunlight shining down. Somehow, though, this time he didn’t see the beauty. This time, as he moved through with the inspection team, the trees just looked naked and exposed.

  They reached the creek that bordered one side of his property. Celie stopped and raised her voice. “All right, everyone, let’s get started. Spread out in a line and move from here to the road, marking as you go.”

  They were here to help, Jacob reminded himself as he walked behind Celie. They wanted what was best for his trees. So why was it that he felt as though he were letting a pack of strangers paw through his private belongings? They were, after all, just woods.

  But they were his woods.

  “So tell me again why I can’t help?” Even as he followed her to her starting point, he assessed each tree from force of habit; he’d known some of them by sight for most of his life.

  “This is an official eradication action. We can’t have the property owners involved.”

  “I’d say the property owners are pretty definitely involved if you’re talking about clearing acres of trees,” he said, an edge to his voice.

  She flicked him a glance and then went back to scrutinizing the tree she was circling. “If trees need to come down, they need to come down. I’m not afraid to do what needs to be done, but I’m not the enemy here.” Briskly, she dabbed on a spot of yellow paint and walked on.

  Jacob made himself release a breath. The fact that the tree she’d marked was safe made it easier. “I know.”

  “It might be better if you just wait until we’re done.”

  Impossible. There was no way he could stay away while they were out in his trees, no way he could stop himself from wondering where she was, what she was doing, what she was looking at.

  What she was thinking?

  “Just go on with it. I want to be here for now.” He let out a sigh. “You’d better take a look at a couple of the trees down here at the bottom of this hill. One of them looked pretty stressed last summer. It could be the borer.”

  “I’ll check it. There are other kinds of blight. You might be okay.” Celie walked forward to stop in front of a tree he’d have been hard-pressed to get his arms around. Slowly, thoughtfully, she circled it.

  “So you really do have to look at each and every tree?”

  “Each and every one.” She dabbed yellow paint and went on to a sapling not much more than two inches in diameter, one he’d been planning to transplant to a new area. “We can ignore ash and black oak—we know they don’t like it. Just about all the other hardwoods are fair game, though. That’s why we use the paint. It’s the only way to be sure.”

  “Hard on the feet.”

  She gave him an amuse
d look. “It keeps me in shape.”

  And he was pathetic because even with his gut tied up in knots he couldn’t help but look at her in her parka and remember how she’d looked the other night.

  “Speaking of in shape,” Celie continued, oblivious, “you’ve done a really good job with your sugarbush. I haven’t seen a single tree I’d thin so far.”

  “I try to stay on top of it. This red maple over here might have to come out. It’s been a slow grower. I don’t think it’s got your bug, but it’s got some kind of a canker at the root line and it would release the others around it.” Celie frowned at a sugar maple directly ahead of them. “Not that one,” Jacob corrected, “that one’s healthy. I mean the red maple over here.”

  But she ignored him, smile fading, walking forward to the sugar maple.

  And a ball of ice formed in his gut. “These trees are healthy,” he said, keeping his voice calm. “Most of them took two taps last season.” A bucket a day of sap off each tap, ten or fifteen gallons of syrup per tree over the course of the season. Thousands of dollars worth of revenue within a stone’s throw of where he stood.

  “They’re not healthy, Jacob. They’re hosts.”

  “You won’t know that until you test,” he said, a thread of desperation in his voice.

  “That’ll confirm it but this one has all the classic signs. I suspect it’s infested. We’ll have to take it and the trees around it.” She must have seen something in his face because her voice softened. “Jacob, we don’t have any choice. I know they all look fine but we’ve got to catch it before it becomes obvious. We’ve got to be aggressive. We’ve got no choice—if it spreads, we’re looking at losing trees all over the county, maybe the state. The government will cover the cost of removal and replanting.”

  “Replanting? So that, what, I can start tapping them when I’m seventy?”

  “Trees can grow to tappable size in as little as twenty years under the right conditions,” she countered.

  “Under the right conditions. In the meantime, what about my income? Will the government cover the loss of that?” How would he support his mother? he wondered desperately. How would he support himself?

  Celie didn’t answer, just looked down to unzip her field kit. Focused on the tree, she scraped at the hole with her little spatula and put the material in a sample vial.

  Impotent fury washed through him as he watched her mark the tree with a large X.

  X marked the spot. No more trees, no more sugarbush. “So if your tests prove positive?”

  “The tree comes out, along with the buffer circle.”

  “How far again?” he asked, keeping his voice steady.

  Celie glanced at him and began to pace away from the tree, counting he strides. And Jacob followed her, laying a hand on the trunks of the trees as he passed, trying to ignore the sudden pressure in his chest as they moved further and further away. So many. So far.

  “Isn’t this enough?” he asked, when the sounds of the other inspectors had died away behind them. “These are healthy trees.” They’d gone over a low hill and dropped down again.

  Celie stopped counting and turned to look at him. “You know how this works. All these trees are within the flight range of the maple borer. If adults emerged from that tree last summer, they could have infested any of these.”

  He looked ahead of them to where the ground sloped up again to a south-facing slope, the most productive slope of his entire sugarbush. “So are we at the edge of the circle?”

  Celie shook her head and stepped forward.

  He wanted to grab her and make her stop. Each footfall that sounded made him tighten up inside, like a clock spring wound a bit tighter, and a bit more.

  “This is a hundred yards,” she told him. “Current protocol calls for a hundred-and-fifty-yard clearance zone around each infested tree.”

  “A hundred and fifty yards? That’s fifteen acres of trees. How’d you decide that, by licking your finger and holding it to the wind?”

  She gave him a sharp look. “No,” she said slowly, “we put out traps and release a clutch of marked, sterilized beetles. We take the flight distance of the farthest beetle and add a safety margin to it.”

  “So this is all based on the physical abilities of a handful of beetles?”

  “No, it’s based on the physical abilities of an entire species. An entire very destructive species.”

  “And do you ever wonder if the beetle you catch in your little experiments is just a genetic freak who can go farther than the rest?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Sure, I worry that it’s not representative. I worry that we’re underestimating their range or that they only fly as far as they need to and if there weren’t any maples around they could fly clear to the next county. I worry that I’m taking down trees needlessly precisely because I’m not taking down enough.”

  She took a few steps, brushing against some branches with a crackle and then swung around to face him, eyes bright with frustration and something more. “You think I take it lightly? They’ve been here a hundred years, some of the trees I’ve had felled. And they’d be around long after I’m dust except I’m taking them down to try to save the forests. You think I don’t appreciate the irony?” Her voice rose. “I’m taking away people’s livelihoods and I hate it. I hate it,” she said fiercely, eyes swimming with misery, defiance, regret. “But it’s got to be done, and at least if I’m doing it I know that it’s being done right. Count yourself lucky. You could be in the hands of Dick Rumson.”

  She turned and began stalking away.

  “Wait,” Jacob said.

  “For what?” she snapped.

  He took a couple of steps after her, touching her shoulder. “Hold on, okay?”

  She stopped.

  “I owe you an apology and I can’t give it to your back.”

  Slowly, she turned to face him. Her face was pale and pinched with unhappiness.

  Unhappiness he had put there. Jacob exhaled. “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said those things. It’s just…hard to look around and know all these trees will be gone.” He gave a helpless shrug. “They’re part of my world.” The one place he’d always fitted into.

  She bit her lip. “I wish I was here for some other reason.”

  He wished it, too. “We’re lucky to have you here at all.” His world was changing and she was helping make it happen, and yet she seemed like one of the few stable things in the middle of the madness.

  He found himself reaching out to brush her cheek before he quite realized it. He stopped himself before he could. Then he frowned and touched her arm. “You tore your parka.”

  “What?” She blinked, then looked down where he pointed. “Oh that. That’s a couple years old.”

  “Ever think about getting a new one?” He fingered a small tuft of fiber sticking out.

  “It’s a perfectly good parka otherwise. It’s warm, it just looks messy.” She looked at his expression. “What?”

  “There’s something to be said for loyalty,” he murmured. And somehow, obscurely, it made him feel better. “Come on, let’s get back to your inspecting.”

  Chapter Five

  Celie straightened up from her microscope and rubbed her eyes wearily. Dawn had found her back in the sugarbush, tramping from tree to tree, struggling to remain fresh. At least the scarlet-horned maple borer did its business close to the ground rather than in the upper branches or the crown of the tree, where they’d have to use tree-climbers. With the maple borer, she could inspect a tree a minute, counting the walking time.

  Assuming there was no need for samples.

  The upside was that they could go quickly. The downside was that after an hour or so of it, even she got blurry-eyed. That meant taking frequent breaks. Much as she begrudged the time, though, it was necessary, as were the eight-hour days. Sure, they had another hour of daylight but the last thing she wanted to do was push too hard and risk missing something.

  So she tried not to rese
nt the fact that she was back in the lab by late afternoon and instead made use of the time.

  Picking up a carefully marked sample vial, she studied the material inside. Greenish-brown, with bits of bark intermixed. Unscrewing the lid, she used a narrow spatula to remove some of the sample. The process was as familiar to her as brushing her teeth: dissolve, filter, separate, then add two drops of reactant and there it was, the distinctive pale red that indicated the presence of the inhibitor chemical.

  She didn’t bother to check the petri dish she’d touched with the sample the day before. She already knew it would be covered with a gaudy green carpet of fungus.

  With a sigh, she looked at the markings on the vial. Jacob…

  When she’d arrived, she’d hoped against hope, the way she always did, that maybe it would be a false alarm. But there would be trees felled this time. Lots of them.

  More quickly, now, she finished testing the samples, marking the tree locations on a blown-up topographic map of the area. Taking out her protractor, she drew trios of circles and swallowed. Nineteen acres, give or take. Right out of the oldest, most productive trees, trees that could easily support two taps apiece, maybe three, trees twenty inches in diameter.

  Trees that were coming down, and she was the one who had to tell him. She’d could think of a few hundred things she’d prefer to be doing. Getting a root canal, say, or juggling wolverines. Unfortunately, delivering bad news went with her particular territory. She had to do it. She didn’t have a choice.

  Rubbing at her temple to forestall a rapidly forming headache, Celie picked up the telephone and dialed.

  “Pesticides lab, Pete Craven.”

  “Pete, it’s Celie.”

  “Celie,” he said in an overly hearty voice. She could picture him, her grad-school housemate, slight and stoop-shouldered in a white lab coat, black Buddy Holly glasses reflecting the light. He cleared his throat. “You, uh, aren’t calling me from inside the building, are you?”

  “Why?” she asked sweetly. “Just because last time we talked you told me Beetlejuice would be available by now and it’s not?”

  “Look, I’m a lab manager, that’s all. I got nothing to do with the approval chain. All I do is supply data.”