Town in a Maple Madness Read online

  THE BOSWORTH REPORT

  Closed for the season. (Judicious is in hibernation; he should reappear by early May. We’ll keep you posted on any sightings, which are extremely rare at this time of year.)

  ONE

  “I think,” said Hutch Milbright in a low, confidential tone, “that somebody’s been stealing my sap.”

  “Your sap?” Candy Holliday flicked her cornflower blue eyes toward him and tilted her head inquisitively. “What, you mean from your maple trees?”

  “That’s it exactly.” Hutch jabbed a thick, callused farmer’s finger in the air for emphasis and leaned in so close she could smell the onion bagel he’d had for lunch on his breath. He was a man in his late fifties, burly and dark haired, with a florid face and a scruffy beard. He wore overalls and had a toothpick dangling loosely from one corner of his mouth. He tossed the toothpick around with his tongue periodically as he talked.

  “I got this sugar bush—that’s this cluster of sugar maple trees, you know—out on the back side of the southwest ridge, over by the Crawford place.” He waved a hand in a general westerly direction. “You know the area I’m talking about. Some pretty good producers. Valuable little grove. Anyway, I was out there this morning with the tank wagon to collect the sap from those trees, and the whole bunch of ’em got multiple taps in them. Four or even five in some trees. I couldn’t believe it! As you probably know, you can do up to three taps in some of the bigger trees, but never four or five. Personally, I never do more than two taps per tree, but there they were, all these trees with four or five taps in them. And these are big taps too.” He held up a thick thumb and forefinger, a fair distance apart. “Regular taps are five-sixteenths of an inch, maybe seven-sixteenths, tops. But these are nearly an inch. Triple the regular width. I got some photos on my phone to prove it. Looks like a professional job. Someone who knew what they were doing. Practically milked the trees dry.”

  Hutch paused a moment to let that thought sink in. His mouth grew tight, and he squinted at her. “Some of them might not survive.”

  Candy wasn’t sure if he meant the trees or the sap thieves, but guessed it was the former—or possibly both. “But why would anyone want to do that?” She’d heard of people stealing sap from sugar maple trees on land that didn’t belong to them—she’d read an article about it in the Portland Sunday paper a few years back—but never thought it would happen in their sleepy little village.

  Then again, you never really knew what your fellow villagers were up to, did you? She’d learned that lesson a number of times, in often surprising ways, over the past few years. Some in this coastal community could be quite devious and secretive, and at times, even murderous.

  “It must be for the money, is all we can think of,” said Hutch’s wife, Ginny. She was a sensible, rustic-looking woman, in faded jeans, a dark-colored hooded sweatshirt, and big mud-stained boots. Wispy strands of uncombed brown hair framed her flat, weathered face. She had a working person’s hands, with large knuckles and unpolished nails, and watchful eyes. She stood a little stiffly in a small circle with her husband and Candy, shuffling her feet nervously as the three of them spoke.

  They were just outside the Milbrights’ sugar shack, which was not in operation today. Candy had been here on other days when it was going full blast, though, and she recalled catching the aroma of the sweet-smelling steam that emanated from the building’s cupola and swirled into the air around them. She missed it today.

  “You can make a lot of money with stolen sap,” Hutch was saying, and he nodded his head for emphasis. “But I don’t have to tell you what maple syrup is going for these days, do I?”

  Indeed, he didn’t. Candy often helped with the maple sugaring operation at Crawford’s Berry Farm, run by her good friend Neil Crawford. She’d been out there several times over the past week, helping him collect and boil sap from his own trees. It was something she’d been doing for the past few years. She didn’t get paid for the work, but she got a few free gallons of maple syrup out of the deal, enough to last the year, with some left over to give away to friends. Considering maple syrup retailed for forty to sixty dollars a gallon or more at the grocery store, it was decent payment for her efforts. Plus, Neil helped out at her own farm, Blueberry Acres, whenever he was needed, so her efforts were reciprocated. And she just enjoyed doing it, since the flowing sap in the sugar maples was among the first signs that winter was almost over and spring was on its way.

  But her thoughts weren’t on spring right now. They were on illegally tapped maple sugar trees. And sugar shacks.

  Besides the Milbrights, Neil owned the only other maple sugar shack on the cape.

  She knew what they were implying.

  “You think Neil had something to do with this?”

  “Well, he’s the only other person around with an operation to turn sap into syrup, isn’t he?” Ginny pointed out.

  “Makes sense he might want to increase his profits at the expense of someone else, especially a competitor with a farm so close to his,” added Hutch, and he nodded toward his wife. “That’s why we decided to talk to you first, before we went to the police.”

  “The police?” This caught Candy off guard. “But Neil would never do anything like that. He has plenty of sap of his own. Besides, maple sugaring is just a seasonal activity for him. He makes his real money from the strawberry fields.”

  “Nevertheless, everyone can use a little extra bump in their bank account these days, can’t they? Whoever tapped those trees will get at least a few batches out of it—and it’s close to the end of the season, so it’s the premium stuff.” Hutch grimaced, as if it pained him to have to spell it out for her. “I’m sure there’s a simple explanation, Candy. Maybe he thought those trees were on his own land. Maybe he just got turned around in the woods somehow. Or maybe he’d been smoking something funny when he tapped those trees. Makes no difference to me. He just needs to stop it, and stay on his own land. So you need to have a talk with him.”

  “We don’t want no trouble,” Ginny added with a sour expression. Her arms were crossed loosely in front of her. “We just want it to end. We won’t even ask for restitution. If it stops, we’ll just let it go, no hard feelings.”

  “That’s right. No hard feelings,” Hutch echoed, though he seemed uncertain as he said it.

  “We’ve had a few things go wrong around here lately,” Ginny revealed, with a shift of her eyes. “We can’t afford to lose that money. It’s been a rough time for us, and, well . . .”

  “We don’t need to add to it with whatever shenanigans Neil Crawford might be up to,” Hutch finished for her.

  “Shenanigans? But . . . but . . .” Candy sputtered for a moment, uncertain of how to respond. “I’m sure he didn’t have anything to do with those trees.”

  “Maybe not, but he’s the most obvious suspect, isn’t he?” asked Ginny. Her gaze had narrowed and her jaw was firmly set as she waited for a response.

  Candy hesitated to admit that the other woman was probably correct in her assumption—if what they were saying about the tapped trees was true. But Candy still had a hard time believing Neil Crawford was involved with this in any way. It must be a mistake of some sort.

  Still, the Milbrights had a reputation for causing a ruckus around town whenever things didn’t go their way. Especially Hutch, who could become quite cantankerous when he got worked up about something. And it was common knowledge that Ginny knew how to rile him up, egg him on, though always behind the scenes, rarely in public. He was the out-front person; she was the brain behind the scenes.

  They could be an unpredictable couple. They had lots of ties around town. It would be a mistake to let this get out of hand.

  Against her better judgment, Candy nodded toward Hutch’s pocket. “You said you have photos?”

  It took him a few moments to react, but with a nod and a “Yeah, yeah,” he pulled out his phone and
started punching at the screen. He cursed at it a couple of times, and Ginny tried to talk him through the process of bringing up the photo app. “I hate these newfangled things,” he grumbled a time or two, but finally he figured it out and held out the phone toward Candy.

  There were perhaps half a dozen images. She flicked through them quickly. Hutch must have had an unsteady hand and a questionable photographer’s eye, because most of the images were blurry or badly lit or off-center. But one or two showed what appeared to be large, freshly drilled holes in the tree trunks. A few had makeshift plastic or stainless steel spiles—hollow pegs a couple of inches long, similar to a spigot or spout—still tapped into them, but most were just raw, gaping holes in the tree bark. The collection buckets, whatever form they’d taken, were gone.

  She scrolled back through the pictures, taking a closer look at each image. “What about footprints?” she asked, her attention still focused on the phone’s screen.

  “Footprints?”

  She glanced up at Hutch. “Yeah, did you look around to see if you could find any sort of clue as to who might have done this?”

  Hutch shrugged. “I didn’t think to do that,” he said.

  Candy nodded and handed the phone back to him. “Anyone with a drill and some hardware from Gumm’s Hardware Store could have tapped those trees,” she said. “You don’t even need anything from there. You could just use PVC plastic tubing for something like that. And plastic milk containers for collection buckets. It’s some high school kids, probably, as a prank. Or maybe someone who just wanted to make a small batch of syrup.”

  “You might be right,” Hutch said as he slipped the phone back into his pocket, “but there’s something else. Late yesterday afternoon, while I was out working on the northwest side, I caught sight of a red vehicle out through the trees. It must have been on that dirt access road that runs along the conservation land at the back of the property. Not many people use that road, you know. It’s pretty muddy right now, since the thaw’s under way. Easy to get stuck out there with nobody around. That’s why it caught my attention. Who could be driving back there at this time of year? I wondered.” His gaze focused in tightly on her. “I seem to recall your boyfriend drives a red car, right?”

  “Neil? He’s not my boyfriend, but . . .”

  Abruptly she stopped.

  Hutch was right. Neil drove an old red Saab station wagon.

  Candy paused a moment, glancing from one Milbright to the other as she tried to focus her thoughts. “But why me?” she asked finally. “Why get me involved? Why don’t you just talk to Neil yourselves?”

  “Well, for several reasons—one being, like I said, he’s your boyfriend.”

  Candy took a quick breath and was about to protest again, but Hutch held up a hand and pressed on before she could respond. “But that’s not the only reason. It’s also because you’re our local problem and mystery solver, aren’t you?” He gave her an assured smile that told her he’d already thought this through. “We’ve been talking about it, Ginny and me, about what to do, and you have experience in these areas—chasing down the clues, flushing out the culprit, that sort of thing. You can get to the bottom of this fast. Besides, I’d get too confrontational if I talked to him myself. Just my nature. I’m not trying to make any enemies.”

  “We’re good people,” Ginny assured her. “We don’t want to cause no trouble. I’m sure you understand that, Candy. We just want these taps to stop.”

  “Gin’s right. We just want it to stop—before it gets out of hand, and I go over there myself and introduce him to the business end of my fist,” Hutch concluded.

  He made the last statement in such an easygoing manner that Candy wasn’t sure if he meant it or not. But his smile had disappeared, and there was a faintly menacing look in his eyes.

  Probably best not to take a chance. Best not to let this thing escalate more than it already had.

  Still, the last thing she wanted was to get involved in a local dispute over tapped trees. That was a definite puddle of mud. Easy to get stuck in something like that. She had too much else to do.

  Candy had been in the kitchen at Blueberry Acres, rinsing off the breakfast dishes earlier that morning, when Ginny had called. Candy had hoped to quickly finish her chores, dash out of the house, run a few errands, maybe even stop at the local garden center before heading into town for a community event at the riverfront. But her plans had been put on hold when she got the call from Ginny, who asked if she could stop by Sugar Hill Farm as soon as possible to talk about something important. “Something very important,” Ginny had emphasized over the phone, her voice edged with concern. “You could say it’s an urgent matter. When can you get over here?”

  Candy had hesitated. She knew how the Milbrights could talk. It might be difficult to extricate herself from a conversation with them once it started. Besides, what could they possibly want to talk to her about? She’d spent the better part of an afternoon with them just a couple of weeks ago, interviewing them for an article she’d been writing for the town’s weekly newspaper, the Cape Crier, and discussing their plans for Maple Madness Weekend, which started tomorrow, on Saturday morning. But she’d finished and submitted the article a week ago. It was already published, running in the paper’s current edition. She’d also mentioned them in her column this week, as a friendly gesture to give them some extra publicity. But the paper had gone to press. It was out on the streets today—too late to add or change anything. There didn’t seem to be much point in talking to them right now.

  Standing in her kitchen, hands still damp from doing the dishes, Candy had weighed her response, considering the pros and cons, but in the end, curiosity got the better of her. Ginny had said it was urgent, so Candy decided to give the other woman the benefit of the doubt.

  Just to keep the peace. And to find out what was going on.

  “I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” she had told Ginny.

  Once she’d arrived at their place, the Milbrights had been personable enough, at first. But as the three of them walked from the driveway out past the barn to the sugar shack around back, the small talk had slipped away, and Ginny’s tone had turned more serious as she told Candy how hard they’d worked to get the place ready for the upcoming weekend’s festivities, and how much time they’d put into collecting and boiling sap over the past few days, and stacking firewood, only to have this happen. That’s when Hutch had told her about the tapped trees.

  Now they were both watching her, waiting for some sort of response. She had to tell them something. They didn’t look like they were about to let her off the hook.

  “Is all of this really that serious?” she asked finally, still trying to find a way to wiggle out of the middle of a potentially sticky situation.

  “There’s a sap thief running around Cape Willington,” Hutch said, his hardened expression an indication that he was unwilling to give ground. “That’s pretty serious, especially if it gets in the way of this weekend’s events—or escalates, if you know what I mean.”

  Candy sighed. She knew what he meant. She also knew she didn’t have much of a choice.

  “All right,” she told them, making no attempt to hide the reluctance in her voice. “I’ll see what I can find out.”

  “Today,” Hutch said. “We can’t let this thing drag on.”

  “It’s got to be nipped in the bud,” Ginny added crisply.

  “Right. Nipped in the bud.” Candy nodded, looked from face to face, and sighed. “Okay. Today.”

  TWO

  As she drove away from their farm, Candy wasn’t quite sure what to make of her encounter with Hutch and Ginny Milbright. What they’d told her had been unexpected, to say the least, and puzzling. She couldn’t stop thinking about some shadowy tree tapper who might be lurking in the woods around Cape Willington, causing trouble with a cordless drill, a hammer, and some plastic buckets.
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br />   Possibly someone who drove a red vehicle, glimpsed through the trees by Hutch, out on a muddy back road behind the Milbrights’ property.

  Candy had never been on that particular road, but she’d been on others like it, numerous times. They had a long dirt lane out at Blueberry Acres they had to contend with, and Neil had one at his place as well. Dirt roads like theirs were ubiquitous in New England. They were as common as maple trees and stone walls. In fact, there were probably more unpaved roads on the cape than paved ones. They crisscrossed the landscape like veins in a leaf. A lot of them led out to isolated farmhouses or fields, to secret spots on the coastline, or along conservation land, or around ponds and along streams, or simply connected the major paved roads to one another. Some were single lane, others were double—and all of them could become rivers of mud and muck at this time of year.

  Candy and her father, Henry “Doc” Holliday, took good care of their lane at Blueberry Acres. They’d raised it slightly where they could to improve drainage and minimize the mud, and Neil did the same. But a dirt road was a dirt road. At times it could become impassable, no matter what you did to it, especially during fast thaws in the spring, when the days were warming but the nights were still cold. She knew, as all locals did, to avoid dirt roads as much as possible at this time of year, and travel on them only when you absolutely had to.

  So why would Neil have been driving on that back road late yesterday afternoon? Why would anyone, she thought, drive on that road at this time of year? Where did it lead? she wondered. Where did it originate, and where did it terminate?

  She had no real reason to doubt the truth of Hutch’s story. Judging by the photos on his phone, the taps looked authentic—and fresh, if she was any judge of these sorts of things. But if that was true, if the illegal taps did exist, who could have put them there?