Town in a Maple Madness Page 18

  In a purple van, perhaps?

  It was certainly an intriguing thought, and if true, it would begin to weave some of the disparate threads together into a tapestry that finally might reveal some answers.

  With her eyes still locked on the Saab, Candy half listened to Wanda and began to spin out scenarios in her head.

  Since the car keys were hanging inside, she could conclude that Neil hadn’t had them on him when he’d gone out into the woods to collect sap. It meant he had no intention of going anywhere in the Saab. The tractor’s keys were always left in its ignition, so he didn’t need his key ring to collect sap. And the tractor was gone from its spot in the barn.

  So the red station wagon was still here, but the tractor wasn’t.

  That led her to the most logical and likely explanation: He’d gone out into the woods to collect sap, and never returned. It also meant the tractor was probably still somewhere in the woods.

  What time would he have gone out there? She started ticking off the events on her fingers to try to mentally establish some sort of timeline.

  This was early Saturday afternoon. She’d found Neil in the boathouse late yesterday afternoon between five thirty and six P.M. She’d come out here to his berry farm earlier yesterday, at around ten thirty A.M., looking for him after she left the Milbrights’ place, but he’d been nowhere around. The tractor had been missing at that time, she recalled, and the car had been in its usual spot. She knew that, because she’d visually inspected it.

  So, she concluded, Neil had disappeared sometime yesterday afternoon or morning, most likely, or anytime earlier, really, even as far back as Thursday, or even Wednesday. She tried to recall the last time she’d been in contact with him. It had been Tuesday night, four days ago, she remembered, when they’d talked on the phone about their plans for the week. He wouldn’t have gone out into the woods that night after they’d talked, but logically it could have been anytime from Wednesday morning to Friday afternoon.

  A fairly big window of time. A span of more than forty-eight hours.

  Her gaze shifted to the woods at the distant edge of the strawberry fields.

  Where was the tractor? she wondered. What had happened to him, whenever he’d gone out there?

  Again, she played out a scenario in her head. He’d been out in the woods, sometime in the past couple of days, collecting sap. Something had happened to him along his route. He’d found something, or saw someone doing something. There had been an unexpected encounter of some sort, perhaps resulting in his abduction. Or his coercion to accompany someone someplace. Either way, he’d been assaulted at some point, knocked unconscious, transported to the boathouse, and left there in a canoe with a murder weapon beside him, and Random locked in a nearby shed.

  How long had Neil been in that boathouse before she’d found him? Did he remember anything about what had happened to him out in those woods?

  She would ask him herself shortly.

  Her gaze shifted across the strawberry fields and back toward the buildings. A few visitors were still milling around, some of them wandering into the sugar shack, barn, and hoophouses. A few kids were playing, laughing, and shouting at the edge of the fields. She noted the serenity of the early-spring landscape, the sharp freshening of the breeze, the ever-present cloud of steam and smoke spiraling from the sugar shack, before her gaze shifted back to the distant line of trees at the edge of the gray woods.

  Whatever had happened to Neil, it must have started back in those woods, back where his maple sugar trees were located.

  She was still staring at the woods when Wanda finally finished her call, tapped at the screen, and lowered her phone. She frowned as she looked over at Candy. “You still here? I thought you’d be gone by now.”

  “I’m thinking,” Candy said, arms crossed and eyebrows knit together.

  “About what?”

  Candy answered as honestly as she could. “A lot of things.”

  Wanda caught her drift. “Something bugging you?”

  “Lots of things are bugging me. Lots of questions without answers.”

  “Anything I can answer for you?”

  Candy’s gaze sharpened as she turned toward Wanda. “Possibly. Have you ever seen a purple van with a license plate that reads RIP DIG?”

  “RIP? As in rest in peace?” Wanda thought a few moments before she shook her head. “Don’t think so. Why?”

  “Is there any way you could find out? Maybe put out an alert on one of your social media accounts? I’d ask the police, but I don’t think they’d tell me.”

  “They know about this?”

  “I told them everything last night—at least, as much as I could remember.”

  “This for your little personal investigation?”

  “Let’s just say I’m curious.”

  Wanda nodded and lifted her phone again. “Consider it done.”

  “Let me know what you find out.”

  “You headed over to Ginny’s?”

  “I am,” Candy said, “but I think I’m going to make a detour first.”

  “To where?”

  Candy didn’t respond right away. Instead, as if a sudden thought had occurred to her, she turned her head first one direction, then the other, her eyes suddenly searching with increasing alarm. “Say, have you seen Random around anywhere lately?”

  THIRTY-FOUR

  He was gone.

  She searched the entire farm, the barn and hoophouses and sugar shack, inside the farmhouse and the Saab, back in the groves of cherry trees and over in the pumpkin patch, anywhere and everywhere she thought he might be. But despite all her efforts, her calls and whistles, she couldn’t find him. So she searched again, enlisting the help of some of the visitors, who gladly joined in, excited by the quest. But, again, they came up empty.

  Random was nowhere to be found. He’d simply disappeared.

  Where had he gone?

  Candy could think of several possibilities. He’d simply nodded off under an out-of-the-way tree somewhere, or crawled under the porch, or maybe even jumped into the wrong car and was having lunch right at this moment downtown at the inn with some welcoming tourists. But she doubted that’s where he was.

  And then, Candy realized, she already knew.

  He’d gone back into the woods.

  It was the most likely explanation. And it was confirmed when she talked to a trio of kids playing at the edge of the woods. Random had been here a little while ago, they told her, and they pointed toward the trees.

  “He ran off in that direction,” said a young dark-haired girl, dressed in a dark green cotton sweater and white leggings. “I think he was chasing something.”

  A rabbit, probably, Candy thought. Random loved chasing rabbits.

  She called to him some more, but heard no response.

  Then, from somewhere back in the woods, she thought she heard what sounded like frantic barking.

  She hesitated, uncertain of what to do. This was Random’s home. He knew his way around those woods. He probably disappeared back in there all the time. She doubted Neil would worry much if his dog was digging around in the woods. But Neil wasn’t here. Random was in her care. And given all that had happened over the past couple of days, she couldn’t help but feel a slight uneasiness at his sudden interest in something back among the trees.

  She looked toward the sugar shack and thought again about Neil’s missing tractor. Probably abandoned somewhere back in the woods, she’d concluded. Is that where Random had gone? Was he possibly looking for Neil, thinking he might still be somewhere in the woods?

  She considered walking back among the trees, following some of the trails left by the tractor’s passage, to see what she could find. But she had a better idea.

  She didn’t have to walk. She had her own transportation.

  Five minutes later she w
as behind the wheel of the Jeep. Starting up its engine, she steered it away from the house and barn, headed up around the strawberry fields at a slow pace, and followed a well-worn trail into the woods.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  As the trees closed in around the Jeep, the farm disappeared behind her, replaced in the rearview mirror by gray trunks, dark crooked branches, and thick brown vegetation matted down from the heavy winter snows.

  A short distance along, the trees closed in overhead as well. She drove through an arch of low-slung limbs into an even lower tunnel, where the twisting branches were entangled just above the Jeep’s roof. But the trees soon cleared as the trail dipped and bent around with the landscape into a series of tight turns, which switched back and forth.

  In some places, other trails angled off in either direction, but these looked less traveled, so despite Robert Frost’s advice, she stayed on the main track. As she drove along, she was on the constant lookout for Random and Neil’s tractor, but so far she’d seen no evidence of either.

  For the most part, the Jeep’s four-wheel drive system had little problem negotiating the soggy twin-rutted tracks left behind by the tractor’s passage. She encountered some places where the ground turned fairly firm, and she could traverse these areas fairly easily, but she also came across some rougher patches, usually in low, muddy spots, where the trail bottomed out. The ruts in these areas were dug deep, creating high-walled trenches of damp, unstable ground. In a few weeks the trenches would dry and harden, making the trail easier to navigate, but for now these areas had to be crossed with caution. She skirted the muckier spots when she could, but there were a few tense moments when the Jeep’s tires became mired in deep mud, and they jittered and jerked as the four-wheel drive took over, working to finally free the vehicle. And she was off again, making good time. That’s why she’d decided to take the Jeep into the woods today. It was certainly quicker than walking, as she’d done the day before at the Milbrights’ place. Still, she didn’t push it too hard. She kept a steady yet cautious pace, not moving too fast, mostly to avoid damage to the Jeep’s undercarriage, but also to give herself time to scan the woods as she passed through them.

  She saw numerous tapped maple trees. In places, plastic tubing lines creating a gravity-fed collection network were strung between the trunks like silky strands of a giant spiderweb. She passed one large, pill-shaped collection tank, made of opaque polyethylene. It sat on a well-constructed bed of medium-sized branches in a cleared space near the trail. She saw another one a little farther along. Both were more than three-quarters full—which meant Neil probably hadn’t emptied the tanks in a while. The sap was still running, obviously, but how fast? How long did it take for the tanks to fill? Twelve hours? Eighteen? A day, or more?

  They could hold a lot of sap—fifty or sixty gallons, she estimated. They would take some time to fill, a day or two, probably, even with multiple trees feeding them. That was the point. Neil didn’t have to make this trip daily. He could do it every other day, or every third day, depending on the time of the season.

  So when was the last time he’d been through here? Her best guess was that the sap in the tanks hadn’t been collected since at least sometime the day before, twenty-four hours earlier, and more than likely sometime before that, possibly yesterday morning, or even the previous morning or afternoon.

  She looked around but, again, saw no signs of the tractor, nor of Random, so she moved on, slow but steady.

  At one point, after skirting a boggy area, she drove up a short rise into a boulder-strewn clearing, from which she could view the surroundings. She stopped and let the engine idle, studying the landscape 360 degrees, before moving on, plunging back down into the woods.

  She stopped frequently as she went, keeping the windows rolled down and the radio off, switching off the engine at times so she could listen. Occasionally she’d hear a few distant, echoing barks. They sounded as if they were coming from somewhere up ahead, so she kept going.

  The woods thinned, and then, as she came over the crest of another rise and began to descend on the other side, she stopped.

  There was the tractor. Or at least part of it. The trail angled to the left, around a bend. The front end of the tractor was hidden by some vegetation. It sat smack-dab in the center of the trail, wheels deep in the ruts, the engine shut off. The large sap-gathering tank on the cart behind it was half-full. There was no one in sight.

  Scanning the area, she started off again, continuing on down the slope toward the tractor. She stopped the Jeep about ten feet away from it and shut off the engine. She climbed out and stood hesitantly by the Jeep, still scrutinizing the landscape, looking for any signs of movement or anything out of the ordinary. She thought of calling out to Random but held back. She wasn’t sure she was ready to give herself away just yet—in case she wasn’t alone out here.

  Then again, the sounds made by the Jeep as she drove along the trail would surely have alerted anyone nearby of her approach.

  She finally whistled a little and called out softly, “Random? Random, are you around? It’s Candy.”

  Surprisingly, she got a response. She heard him whimper nearby. And movement, a rustling sound of disturbed leaves and soil.

  Following a quick search, she found him pulled into a tight ball under the tractor. He occupied the center island between the ruts and the big rubber tires. The island was flat and covered with a thin bed of leaves, dead ferns, and pine needles. Random had made himself a little nest of sorts under there.

  She spoke to him softly as she approached, and leaned over to look him in those big wet eyes. “Hey there, Random. What are you doing down there?”

  His thumping tail was his only response.

  In a soothing voice, she said, “I bet you’re looking for Neil, aren’t you? But here’s not here. He’s at the hospital. That’s where I was headed. I came to see if you wanted to ride along with me.”

  At the sounds of the words Neil and ride, Random rose to his feet. He shook himself, making his collar tags jingle, then kept this head down and body lowered as he crawled out from under the tractor. He came up to her and nuzzled her hand.

  “Hi, there,” she said as she patted him gently on the neck and shoulder. “How are you doing, buddy?”

  She gave him some attention, scratching him and ruffling his fur, then straightened again, and studied the woods around her.

  “I wonder why Neil stopped the tractor here,” she said to the dog, after a few moments. “It seems an odd place, doesn’t it? There’s no collection tank here—or anything else.”

  Except there were some tapped trees, she observed. Quite a few of them, all relatively close together. A sugar bush, Hutch had called it. There was no plastic tubing here, or collection buckets hanging from the trees, as she’d seen on some of the other trees along the way. But they had definitely been tapped. She could see dark spots on the trees, large holes where the spiles had once been hammered into the trees. Multiple taps, it looked like.

  She felt a jolt. These trees looked just like the ones she’d seen over at the Milbrights’ place yesterday—the illegally tapped trees.

  She instantly knew what had happened, and what Neil must have found when he’d been out here collecting sap: He must have caught the sap thief in the act.

  Her brow lowered as she squinted into the woods. “Something fishy happened here,” she said, and she looked down at Random. “Should we go investigate?” She leaned over to scratch him behind the ears, studying the trees for a few moments. “Yes, I think we should, don’t you?”

  She straightened and took a couple steps in the direction of the tapped trees, then leaned down to pat the dog one more time, for reassurance. “Stay close by me, okay?” she told him in a low voice, “just in case I run into a little trouble and need some backup.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  Random did as she asked. He stayed right by her side, trotting
alertly along as she walked toward the tapped trees at a cautious pace. She said nothing as they went, preferring to listen and observe. Her boots and his paws crunched on the leaves and twigs scattered on the forest floor. The only other sounds were the rising wind, the call of the birds, and the clattering of bare branches overhead.

  It didn’t take long for her to verify that she was correct in her initial assessment. These trees were not tapped in the normal manner. The holes were larger, almost an inch across, and there were multiple taps—four or five—in most of the trees. Some still had short lengths of PVC piping jammed into the holes, instead of typical spiles. In other trees, the holes were ragged and clogged with congealed sap.

  Just as she’d seen over at the Milbrights’ place.

  She took a few steps back, thinking, as Random sniffed around her feet.

  So that’s why Neil had stopped his tractor here. His trees, like the Milbrights’, had been illegally tapped by . . . someone.

  The alleged sap thief had struck again, and was apparently targeting multiple farms.

  Maybe, she thought, even hers. There were some clusters of sugar maples toward the back section of Blueberry Acres. They weren’t usually tapped, but who knew? She hadn’t been back there in a while—she’d had no reason to. Maybe she should.

  But that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was, who was doing this? And why? Why tap Neil’s trees, as well as Hutch’s?

  She thought back to what Ginny had told her yesterday, out at Sugar Hill Farm: “It must be for the money, is all we can think of.”

  Money. Was that really the answer? Or was there more to it?

  Glancing around, she noticed that Random had wandered away. She spotted him heading off through the trees, his nose to the ground, shifting first one direction, then the other.