Town in a Maple Madness Read online

  Besides, she had a better idea: to follow the trail of clues back to where this whole thing had started, just a few hours ago.

  “So what are you thinking?” her father asked.

  When she turned to him, she saw that he was eyeing her curiously. So was Finn.

  She took a moment to glance back down along the river, and out toward the backs of the departing crowds, and to the traffic on the Coastal Loop, before she turned her gaze inland, in the general direction of Sugar Hill Farm.

  “I think,” she said, with a tilt of her head, “I need to go maple sugaring.”

  ELEVEN

  For the second time that day, Candy navigated her way along the lane that led to the house, barn, and sugar shack at the Milbrights’ place.

  She kept a relatively light grip on the steering wheel, letting it slide easily in either direction through her fingers as the road jerked and twisted the front wheels, but she was ready to clamp down instantly should the Jeep swerve too far off track. As a farmer herself, she was used to roads like this. She drove them all the time. This one wasn’t as muddy as some she’d been on over the past couple of weeks, but she noticed still-melting ice crusts rimming the sides of the road, and puddles all along the way, and knew it could turn sloppy real fast if it received too much traffic, as it probably would this weekend. Hutch had anticipated that, she saw, dropping down a mixture of gravel, straw, and topsoil in some of the muckier places to help firm them up. He’d also finished placing signs along the dirt lane and out on the main road, pointing tour buses and anticipated visitors toward his maple sugaring operation, which would be running at full steam all weekend.

  The road twisted and dipped, and she drove through a cluster of sugar maple trees with the sap buckets still attached to them and a chaotic network of clear tubing running from the buckets to a collection tank somewhere nearby.

  As she came out from under the trees and approached the house, she spotted a large, hand-painted sign up ahead that read PARKING. A red arrow directed visiting vehicles to a roped-off lot to the right of the barn. A little farther along, a banner hanging across the front of the barn announced, WELCOME TO SUGAR HILL FARM AND OUR WORLD-FAMOUS SUGAR SHACK.

  She was doubtful of the second half of that particular statement, but supposed some visitor from across the pond, maybe Scotland or Ireland, had stopped by the sugar shack at some point in the past, and that gave Hutch and Ginny reason enough to profess their international recognition. After all, in maple sugaring, as in most things in life, marketing was important.

  There were more signs around the house and barn, pointing visitors to the maple sugar shack back toward the tree line on the right, and inside the barn, where the Milbrights planned to sell bottles of their maple syrup on tables they’d set up.

  They’ve been busy, Candy thought as the pulled the Jeep to a stop in front of the barn. The place looked like it was nearly ready for the maple sugaring tours. As she’d just heard from Carol, a number of volunteers had been lined up to help out with the tours, so the Milbrights could focus on boiling the sap and monitoring the sales table in the barn. Candy would be helping Neil do the same thing tomorrow over at Crawford’s Berry Farm.

  From the driver’s seat, she quickly surveyed the place, looking for Hutch and Ginny, but unlike earlier when she’d been out here, there was no one around. A white Ford Explorer, probably ten or fifteen years old, was parked in the driveway. That was primarily Ginny’s vehicle, Candy knew. Hutch sometimes drove an old green farm truck; she could see its tail end sticking out behind the barn. The tractor was gone, though, and the sap collection wagon—just like over at Neil’s place. Obviously, the Milbrights were out in the woods making last-minute sap collections.

  Candy pulled up beside the barn, stopped the Jeep, and shut off the engine. Again, in the absence of anyone here to talk to, she pondered her next move.

  She could head back to Blueberry Acres and let the whole thing go for now—let the authorities handle it. They were the experts at this sort of thing. That, she thought, would be her best move, and probably her smartest one. She had plenty to do over the weekend to keep her occupied without getting herself involved in an amateur murder investigation.

  Or she could drive into the village, to the newspaper’s office on Ocean Avenue, and find out if Wanda Boyle had heard anything new about Mick’s death. That was still an option, though still not a good one. She could hunt down Maggie and head over to Town Park, as they’d originally planned. She could make another trip over to Crawford’s Berry Farm and try to track down Neil and Random. She could, of course, head over to the police station and report what she’d found. Or she could just give the chief a call—and get herself in hot water with him, all over again, for the nth time in a row.

  She could do any of those things.

  She was still thinking it over when the mobile phone buzzed in her back pocket. She leaned forward in the driver’s seat, reached behind her, pulled out the phone, and looked at the screen.

  She’d received a text—from the chairman of the town council, no less.

  Can you solve this ASAP? read the message from Mason Flint, the town council chairman.

  That was it. Nothing more. Candy blinked several times. She really didn’t need to read more. She knew what was behind his request.

  Mason had relied on her before to help solve some of the past murders that had taken place in Cape Willington—unofficially, of course, off the record. But his entreaties in those instances had been urgent. In addition to ensuring the safety of the villagers as much as possible, his goal, as always, was to protect the town’s reputation—and its business community—as best as he could.

  The sooner this is solved, he’d probably tell her if he was sitting in the seat beside her, or leaning in the side window, the better for us all.

  As she sat in her Jeep in the driveway at the Milbrights’ place, she considered her response. After a few moments she texted him back.

  I’ll do what I can.

  Then she keyed off the phone and slipped it back into her pocket, gazing out at the woods around her as she did so.

  She knew what she had to do. She’d avoided it, hoped the situation wouldn’t call for this, but ultimately she knew it would. There was no getting around it. If she wanted to solve the mystery of the sap thefts, and determine if there were any links to Mick Rilke’s death, she had to see the place where the whole thing had started that morning. She had to find those illegally tapped trees out in the Milbrights’ woods and search the area herself, to see if she could locate any clues that might lead her to some answers.

  So she hopped out of the Jeep and walked around toward the back, where she opened the rear hatch. She slipped out of her tennis shoes and pulled on calf-high rubber mud boots, which she always kept with her at this time of year. She also grabbed wool ear warmers and gloves, just in case she got chilly, and made sure she had her compass with her. She didn’t want to get lost out there.

  When she was all set, she closed the hatch, locked up the Jeep, and set off into the woods behind the sugar shack.

  TWELVE

  The wind died and the sun receded as dark trunks closed in around her. They nudged in from the sides, while overhead a canopy of entangled limbs began to block out the sky. It was far from gloomy in the woods, however. There was a certain brightness to it today, a glistening, and a surprisingly fresh scent. The birds were out and active, singing high in the trees and flittering about, and she heard the typical cracking and sighing sounds as the snow and ice still left on the ground disintegrated, creating soggy spots she was careful to avoid.

  Other than the muddy patches, her path, as it turned out, was a relatively easy one. Once behind the sugar shack, at the edge of the trees, she’d spotted a well-trodden track leading back into the woods, a trail created by the frequent passages of Hutch’s tractor and cart as he went back and forth on his sap-collecting
trips. In the early sections the trail was relatively dry, just loose gravel and dead leaves and flattened vegetation where the tractor’s wheels had passed. She encountered the soggy spots a little farther in, where the tractor and cart had left deep ruts that dug into the crusty ground cover. In those places she stayed to either side, seeking high ground when possible, or sometimes walking in the center of the track between the two ruts, always looking for the least soggy footing. Still, her boots soon became encased in mud and muck and clumps of moist earth and dead dry leaves and twigs. She was glad she’d worn them.

  Despite the mud and muck, she made good time. It wasn’t quite as chilly here in the woods as she’d thought it might be. The land was warming. There was a low, misty fog in some of the swampier places, but in others the sun shone through the trees.

  A few hundred yards in, she came across the first offshoot from the main trail, headed to the north and apparently looping around toward the east, to her right. But it looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in several days, perhaps a week, so she stayed on the main trail, which took a more westerly route, through the trees and occasional clearings, and along a rocky ridge.

  As she moved farther into the woods, she thought she might hear the hum and sputter of Hutch’s tractor, or maybe the echoes of its passage through the trees. But for the most part the woodsy silence remained unbroken, except for an occasional animal call or the brisk clatter of branches overhead as a burst of wind shot through them. She hurried on, not exactly sure where she was going, but keeping an eye on the ground for clues as to Hutch’s whereabouts.

  She soon came upon a small clutch of tapped trees to either side of the trail. There were perhaps ten or fifteen sugar maple trees in a fairly tight area, all with white plastic collection buckets hanging from them. No real need for a network of plastic tubing here, leading to a collection tank on the ground—as a larger operation might have—since the trees were close enough together to make collecting the individual buckets a fairly quick process.

  On an impulse, Candy darted to one side and checked several of the buckets. They were mostly empty, though she saw the sap was still flowing freely today, with a steady drip coming from many of the trees. Empty buckets meant Hutch had collected the sap recently, she thought, especially if the sap was still flowing at that pace.

  Looking down, she focused her gaze on the disturbed earth around the trees, and soon spotted what looked like traces of fresh footprints pressed into the ground in a few places—a heel here, a boot toe there. Probably made by Hutch’s boots. So he’d been through here, but how long ago? An hour, or two? She’d seen him just a few hours ago. So he must have come through here recently. He must be close by.

  She looked around again, turning a complete circle, her ears sharpened to every sound.

  Was he still out here, somewhere just ahead of her? Or had he looped around back toward the sugar shack?

  At the moment, she thought, it didn’t really matter where Hutch had gone. The goal was to find the illegally tapped trees. So she pressed on.

  She walked for another ten minutes, past two more turnoffs. Nothing. She knew she was somewhere near the back of the Milbrights’ property. She hesitated. Was she close to the illegally tapped trees? Was she even in the general vicinity? Should she go on, or turn back?

  She checked her watch. It was nearing one thirty. She felt time slipping away, and she had other things to do. She wanted to find out what had happened to Maggie and head over to Town Park to help her set up the booth. She wanted to stop back by Neil’s house to let him know about the Milbrights’ accusations, so he wasn’t blindsided by them. She had to catch up with her father.

  “Five more minutes,” she told herself, “and then I’ll turn back.”

  It didn’t take five minutes. She found the trees in question just over the next rise in the trail, only a few hundred paces farther on.

  THIRTEEN

  She knew it right away. There was no mistaking it.

  Hutch had cordoned off the area in a general fashion using yellow police crime scene tape he’d picked up somewhere. He’d marked the boundaries with stretches of tape ten or fifteen feet in length, creating a partially enclosed octagon of sorts. And she noticed a few outliers here and there—trees outside the ring with yellow tape tied around their trunks. None of the trees she could see, in or outside the ring, had sap collection buckets attached to them. Someone had removed those. But she could see darker spots on some of the tree trunks, disturbed areas that could indicate some tampering.

  From where she stood on a high spot along the track, the slope stretched away from her, downward for twenty or thirty feet before leveling out. This part of the woods was relatively clear of underbrush, with a soft carpet of dead leaves, pine needles, dry bracken and grasses, and a few heavy patches of moss, which looked silver today and matted down, like tightly packed steel wool. Small rocks were strewn everywhere, and farther along she could see larger boulders bordering the trail, which eventually veered to the left, back toward the farm.

  A quick scan of the area revealed no sign of Hutch or his tractor. But she saw tractor tire marks in the damp ground just a little ahead of where she stood. He’d been here and moved on.

  But she was hesitant to move on. She wanted to survey the scene first.

  Instinctively she edged a little closer to a nearby tree as she studied the landscape. Leaves rattled at her feet and the forest shuffled and sighed around her. Something about this place made her feel uneasy. It was as if she’d wandered into a crime scene of sorts, though no one had died here—at least, no one she knew of, except perhaps a tree or two. A whispering wind rattled the tops of the branches above her, and while the rest of the woods had seemed sunny and bright, there was a shadow here. She looked up. Just a cloud passing by, blocking out the light, filtering it strangely. A temporary thing. It would pass. And hopefully her uneasiness would pass also. Still, she thought it best to be cautious.

  For a final time she looked in all directions. Then, moving carefully and quietly, she started to her right, stepping gingerly as she began to circle around the outside of the ring. Aware of any footprints she might be leaving behind, she tried to stay to the leafier or rockier spots, to the clumps of pine needles or the crusty patches of leftover snow, which were melting and would soon take with them any signs of her passing. She knew she was probably being overly cautious, but she didn’t want to make any mistakes, given the unknowns about the current situation.

  She wished, in that moment, that she’d brought someone along with her. Maggie, perhaps, or her father. Someone for backup—or to run for help, just in case. It had never crossed her mind, until just now, as she was creeping through the woods alone. She wasn’t sure it was the brightest thing she’d done, and briefly considered turning back, but she quickly shook that thought away. She’d come this far. Might as well finish what she’d started.

  After she’d made her way halfway around the ring, she swung to her right to inspect one of the outlier trees, which stood apart from the other maples in a nest of low pine trees and shrubs. She could see right away that it had multiple taps in it, one larger than the others. A deep wound digging into the ragged bark, it looked nearly an inch across. A mass of congealed sap had gathered around the intrusion, as if trying to heal it. The overflow had left cloudy, clumpy streaks running down the bark, but it appeared the tree had dried up. There was no fresh, glistening sap.

  She moved on, seeing the same thing on other trunks. While the sap was still flowing on the trees she’d passed earlier, here the sugar maples had nothing left to give. They looked as if they’d been tapped out—and seemed to confirm what Hutch had told her earlier in the day.

  She also noticed, on closer inspection, that the ground was disturbed in some places around the trees. Dead leaves had been shoved aside, and she saw heavy bootprints in the churned-up earth. Someone had been tromping around a lot out here.

>   She moved from one tapped tree to another, crouching down at times to inspect a print closer, until she found what she was looking for, around a small cluster of sugar maples. All had been heavily tapped, and the ground was low and soggy. Here, she found two different pairs of footprints in the mud. They were almost side by side, though headed in opposite directions. One was larger than the other, possibly a ten or eleven shoe in a men’s size, but both were wide, with deep heel marks. Different treads were on the bottoms. The smaller one had a wavy pattern, and the larger a blockier design made up of geometric shapes, like trapezoids and parallelograms.

  Two different bootprints, two different shoe sizes.

  She tried to recall the bootprints she’d seen earlier along the track. They’d been the ones with the wavy pattern, on the smaller boots. Were those Hutch’s prints? Or someone else’s?

  On an impulse, she pulled her phone from her back pocket, leaned in close, and snapped a few pictures of each print.

  So two people had indeed been out here at some point over the past day or two. But were the two people adversaries? Or had they been working together? Hutch and Ginny, for instance? That could explain it. Simple enough. Ginny had been helping her husband collect the sap; hence, two different sets of footprints in two different sizes. But if Hutch’s boots were the smaller ones with the wavy pattern on the bottom, did that mean the larger ones were Ginny’s? Or had the prints been made by someone else?

  Both sets of prints looked fairly fresh, though it was hard to be sure about these things. Also, there was no way to tell if they’d been made at the same or different times.

  As Candy pondered the possibilities, her gaze wandered, shifting around the woods, and a sudden thought came to her: