Maple Mayhem (A Sugar Grove Mystery)

by Jessie Crockett

  “I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.”

  “You can make it up to me.”

  “What did you have in mind?” My stomach fluttered and thrashed and generally made a nuisance of itself. I was torn between wanting to know what he would say and dashing out the door and down the steps before he could squeak a word out.

  “I’m sure I’ll think of something.” Graham pointed his packet of sausage at me, gave me a light peck on the top of my head, and strode out the door.

  Seven

  Saturday morning breakfast at Greener Pastures is a thing of beauty. On weekdays we eat well. There is no shortage of home-baked goods and oatmeal or eggs. Sometimes someone even makes bacon and if you are up early enough, there will still be some when you get to the table. When we were all growing up, weekdays were school days and there just wasn’t enough time to do breakfast justice. So Saturday was set aside as the day for life’s most important meal.

  Everyone gets to the table by eight with the sort of attitude generally reserved for religious occasions. Reverence is what Grandma’s breakfasts bring out in the family when she has time to unleash her full culinary skill set. Her own mother, who was the cook for a logging camp as a young bride, had taught Grandma the way round the kitchen. Which meant she was taught to make everything from scratch and in generous amounts.

  Considering how good a cook my grandmother is, the quantities manage to disappear no matter how much she churns out. When we were all teenagers Grandma baked at least three loaves of bread each day. The breakfast menu is always a surprise since Grandma didn’t even know herself what she would want to create until she woke up that morning. So it was with eager anticipation I trotted to the warm and cozy kitchen and poured myself a cup of strong coffee. Stirring in a glug of maple syrup and a generous splash of cream, I asked if there was any way I could help.

  Grandma may be a whiz in the kitchen but she is a teacher at heart. Every one of us is adept at whipping up a sit-down meal for forty. Well, maybe not the kids, just yet. Grandma starts in early teaching whoever is new to the family how to bake beans, frost a cake, or season a stew. Grandma believes everyone should know how to cook for themselves even if she prefers to do it for them. She’s fond of mentioning that when she teaches one of us something her mother taught her, it makes her feel like her mother is still with us.

  I know just what she means because I feel the same about sugar making. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t help in at least a small way during sugaring season. As soon as I was walking, my father would take me with him and point out his favorite trees. Which ones were the best producers, which ones needed the attention of an arborist. He showed me how to tap, how to boil sap down, and, most important, how to be a good steward of the patch of land we influenced. Every time I taste Greener Pastures syrup it is like he’s still out there. Like I might just spot him weaving through the trees, running his hands over the bark on one, leaning up against another.

  “No, you just sit yourself down and get ready to tuck in.” Grandma waved a potholder at me and opened the oven door. A sugary, bready smell wafted out as Grandma attempted to hoist an oversized cast-iron skillet from its depths. Loden shot to his feet and took over.

  “You just tell me where you want it and I’ll move this to the table.” He gave her one of the smiles I keep hoping will win Piper over and Grandma didn’t make even the slightest protest. Celadon slipped into the room just as the pan reached the maple leaf shaped trivet and Spring followed in her wake, dragging her favorite blanket behind her. Grampa brought up the rear and took his place at the table, tucking a checked napkin into the neck of his shirt.

  “Well, Olive, tell us how you’ve outdone yourself this morning.” He rubbed his hands together and grinned.

  “It’s an experiment. I’ve made a version of those Dutch apple pancakes you all like so much.” A cheer went up from the table. Grandma’s apple pancakes were a thing of beauty. Puffy and eggy, with just the right balance between the tartness of the apple, the sweetness of the sugar, and the richness of the butter it made me want to tear up. But I didn’t. I saved my energy for wrangling an extra piece. It was strange not to see my mother or Hunter at the table but it meant there would be more for the rest of us and that promised to be a good thing with Grandma womaning the stove.

  Grandma wiped her hands on her vintage floral apron, moved to the table, and sliced into the pancake, dishing up heaping servings onto empty plates. I cut into mine with the side of my fork. I gave an appreciative sniff before popping a bite into my watering mouth. The apples I expected were replaced by sliced peaches. And nutmeg. The sweet flavor of brown sugar and the silkiness of butter in the sauce cascaded over the fruit.

  I took a second bite and more nutmeg, stirred into the batter before baking, met my taste buds. I had never been so glad that my family was smaller on this particular Saturday than I was at that moment. I’m sure, eventually, I would miss my mother and nephew but with a breakfast like this one it was hard to imagine I’d regret their absence anytime soon.

  I cleaned my plate and served myself seconds. I sometimes wish that I needed to watch my girlish figure or that my figure might have the hope of ever being something other than girlish but today was not one of those days. Today was about a super metabolism. I closed my eyes in order to better enjoy what was going into my mouth. Things were perfect. Until Celadon added her two cents.

  “You know what would go perfectly with these? Those sausages Graham won last night at the meat bingo.” I slowly squeaked open one eye and gave her a dirty look with it. She didn’t seem to notice. “Any chance he’s going to be traipsing down the stairs to join us for breakfast?”

  “Celadon, don’t tease your sister like that. She’ll get around to managing Graham’s sausage in her own time.” Grandma gave me a tight smile and I wanted to drop through the floor. Loden started choking on a bit of pancake and all I could do was be grateful my mother wasn’t here to contribute to the conversation. She would be sure to explain the innuendo to Spring, just in case, as a six-year-old, she managed to miss it.

  “I’m just suggesting Graham seems like a great catch and that they looked pretty cozy last night. I thought maybe we might start planning a June wedding if Dani would find a way to turn on some more charm.” Even caramelized peaches can turn to dust in your mouth given the right circumstances. I swallowed a swig of coffee to clear my palate.

  Before I could say anything else the phone on the wall rang and I jumped up to answer it. I wondered who could be calling so early and then worried it was my mother and her psychic sense on the other end of the line eager to add her long-distance thoughts to the conversation.

  “Dani, it’s Jill Hayes. I was hoping you could come on out to my place this morning to take a look at something.” Jill sounded angry. Her voice was pitched higher than usual and she was speaking so fast she sounded like she must have completed an auctioneering course.

  “Sure. When did you want me?”

  “Now.” I looked around the table and noticed with some regret the speed with which the pancake was disappearing. I also noticed the faces of the family gently leaning in my direction, their ears flapping and their eyes shining. I needed space more than I needed extra carbs.

  “I’ll be right over as soon as I dress my feet.” I rang off and headed for Grandma to kiss her on the top of the head.

  “Please tell me it was Graham calling,” Celadon said. Our father always said she had a one-track mind once she was onto an idea. She wasn’t going to let it drop until she got her way. Celadon had managed to get the school cafeteria to switch to locally sourced, organic food. She had started a program to provide transportation for seniors in town who could no longer drive and she had spearheaded a rails-to-trails program that turned miles of disused train track into hiking and biking paths. Now it seemed the entirety of her laserlike focus was on my marriage prospects. I was done fo
r if I didn’t steer clear of her to the best of my ability.

  “Jill Hayes. She wants me to look at something up at her place.”

  “While you’re out would you stop in at the hardware store and pick up some birdseed? We’re almost out.” Grampa took bird feeding seriously. He was like some people are about gas in their cars. When the seed barrel got half-empty he filled it up because you never knew what could happen. As far as I remembered we had never experienced a birdseed emergency at Greener Pastures but that might have been because of Grampa’s careful planning. Besides, that’s what family is about right? Helping with the priorities of your loved ones even if they are not your own.

  “Sure thing.” I waved at them and dashed for the mudroom. It wasn’t muddy or raining but I stuffed my feet into my rain boots because they didn’t need tying and dashed out the door clutching the keys to the Clunker in my sweaty fist.

  * * *

  The road up to Jill’s place offered a long look out over the town. Sugar Grove is quintessential New England. The roads wind, the river runs, the white church steeples stretch high above any other structures. Even at this time of year, when snowbanks were growing as fast as teenage boys, it looked beautiful to me. A gray squirrel skittered across a bare limb of a towering oak at the roadside. It would have been a lovely drive in the Midget. In the Clunker, it was something else.

  In a lot of families kids end up with their car privileges suspended if they have done something wrong. That was never the case in my family. My mother decided early on that parenting a teenager who could drive him or herself to after-school activities and out on errands was a whole lot more convenient than parenting the non-driving kind. She saw no reason to punish herself because her kids’ report cards or ability to make curfew was unsatisfactory. So instead of taking away car privileges, kids in trouble had to drive the Clunker.

  It was easily the ugliest car in town, with its mismatched doors, bald spots in the upholstery, and a predominant paint color best described as earwax. It started on the first try only half the time, one window wouldn’t roll up, and the heater never worked. Not that you’d want it to. At some point a skunk had sprayed while positioned just in front of the open window and had soaked the upholstery. Even after all these years, even with all the windows down in the summer, it was hard to sit in the thing. Just thinking about what it would have been like in winter with the windows mostly closed and the heater blasting made me want to gag.

  And the worst thing of all about driving the Clunker was that it served as a general announcement around town that you were in trouble. My mother had gone ahead and spread the word to everyone she bumped into about Loden’s unusual transport the first time he was sentenced to drive it. From then on part of your punishment was the public knowledge of your private business. I thought again about the person who had attacked my Midget and I didn’t need the heater to get all warmed up.

  Jill’s place was on the outskirts of town and it took a good fifteen minutes to reach it. Jill was standing in the yard waiting for me when I pulled up. She looked about how she had sounded on the phone, hot and bothered, despite snow covering the ground. She didn’t stop pacing even when I got out and slammed the Clunker’s door.

  “I think your cooperative idea is causing me a bunch of trouble.” Jill crossed her arms over her chest as if to emphasize her words.

  “Has something happened?” I felt sick to my stomach. Yesterday I had been angry about the damage to my car but also relieved no one else associated with the cooperative seemed to be experiencing problems. Maybe I had been too quick to set my fears aside.

  “Follow me.” Jill took off for her sugar bush, which is what sugar makers call their stands of sugar maples. I struggled to keep up. Jill’s legs were longer than mine and she was fueled by rage. She was a hard act to follow but I managed to keep her in sight until she stopped abruptly near a magnificent old maple. I stopped next to her and looked where she was pointing. What I saw yanked a gasp out of me like one from a rescued drowning victim. Tears filled my eyes and I understood her anger completely.

  “Girdled. And it isn’t the only one.” Jill’s hands trembled as she stuck them into her pockets. I couldn’t believe someone had done such a thing. The trunk of the maple in front of me was more than two feet in diameter. Someone had deliberately removed a four-inch wide strip of bark in a ring that completely encircled the tree.

  Bark is more than a passive outer layer on a tree. It is the nutrient delivery system for the entire entity. If a tree has been girdled, as this one had, it could no longer use the pathways in the layers of the bark to move nutrients up from the roots to the rest of the organism. Someone had deliberately set out to kill that tree and was most likely going to succeed in doing so. Bridge grafting might save it but it was a lot of work and there were no guarantees that the graft would take. Any way you sliced it, it was a bad situation.

  “I can’t believe this. How many others were damaged?” I looked around and spotted another, and then another, from just where I was standing.

  “Six that I’ve found. All mature specimens with no signs of disease.”

  “This is shocking, but are you sure it is connected to the cooperative?”

  “I’m not certain but considering what I heard about your car, it makes me wonder if that could be the cause. I can’t think of another reason.”

  “Any idea who would want to do it?” I hoped I wasn’t going to hear what I was sure I was going to hear.

  “Frank Lemieux. Somehow he heard about our money troubles and he offered to buy us out.”

  “That makes sense since his place abuts yours.” It also would provide him with easy access to the damaged trees since he could have walked from his own property onto Jill’s.

  “He offered to buy it way back when our parents died but I didn’t want to sell. I wanted to let Dean finish high school here. We had lost so much and I didn’t want to lose our home, too. So I told him thanks, but no thanks.”

  “How did he take your refusal?”

  “He wasn’t too happy about it and he said the sugar bush would be wasted on us and that we were sure to make a dog’s dinner of it. He hasn’t spoken to me since, other than to yell about noise from my yard or stuff like that until he tried to talk business again last night.”

  “Did he make the offer to you or to Dean this time?”

  “Both of us, individually. He ran into Dean at the hardware store and they got to talking. I guess Dean gave him the impression I’d love to entertain an offer. Frank pulled up here last night and offered to buy the place again. I thanked him and told him things were looking up because of the cooperative and that we would be hanging on to the property for at least a bit longer.”

  “Did he seem angry that you turned him down?”

  “He got pretty loud and told me we were sure to regret our decision. He said something about not always being able to count on the trees producing all that well and that we would be better off taking the money now.”

  “But you didn’t see him on the property after that?”

  “I didn’t catch him doing this, if that’s what you mean. But somebody cut them up and I can’t think of anyone else who would have had a reason to do this.” Jill pulled a balled-up napkin out of her pocket and dabbed her eyes. I wasn’t sure if she was shedding tears of sadness or frustration but either way I understood her pain.

  “Has this made you change your mind about selling?” I really wanted the cooperative to work but I understood that Jill needed to do what she thought was right concerning her own circumstances.

  “Hell no. If Frank thinks damaging my property is going to get me to sell to him, he’s got another thing coming. If he did this, I’d burn the place to the ground, including all the trees, before I’d be willing to turn it over to him.”

  “What did Dean say?”

  “He said maybe we should seriously reconsi
der putting the place on the market.” Jill shook her head like she couldn’t believe what she was saying, like she was surprised at how differently two siblings could look at a shared home.

  “Is there any way I can help?” I wasn’t sure how I could but it was always best to ask.

  “I doubt it unless you can get Lowell back from his vacation with your mother to investigate. When I called this in to Mitch he told me he was too busy with real crime to worry about something so inconsequential as attempted murder of my trees.”

  “Did he say what kinds of real crimes?” I felt a nervous flutter in my stomach.

  “Something about people evading arrest. Tracking down fugitives. Car theft. I was too upset to listen carefully.” My stomach was right to worry. It didn’t sound like Mitch had gotten over me leaving the Stack the morning before without a ticket and with a cruiser. I didn’t want to be on anyone’s fugitive list but certainly not Mitch’s. And even more certainly with Lowell so far away and unable to help me out. I pointed the Clunker toward town. I wondered if Dean might have any answers.

  Eight

  Village Hardware is in downtown Sugar Grove. Right on Main Street between the barbershop and the bookstore. With a population of fewer than five thousand people, we are lucky to have so many businesses in town. A lot of communities all over New Hampshire are fortunate to have a post office and a couple of half-full churches. Because we are as far out from other towns as we happen to be, and because of a general interest in supporting the local small businesses, we have a grocer, a bakery, a florist, and a five-and-dime.

  We have a restaurant that serves elegant dinners and several antique shops. We have a gift shop, a bookstore, a gas station, a mechanic, and a doctor’s office. We even have an old-fashioned department store, named Bartleby’s, where we’ve always shopped for school clothes. Between what is available in town and what you can get shipped to you by shopping online, some people never feel the need to leave Sugar Grove other than for work or for a run to the hospital. Not that there aren’t wonderful things in the big outer world but it is nice to be able to meet your needs without too much wasted gas.