Maple Mayhem (A Sugar Grove Mystery) (2 page)

“Well you don’t look like you know how to clean, that’s for sure.” I gestured at him with the hand that happened to be holding the flatware. His uniform was stretched tightly across his bulky chest, which highlighted his muscles but also showed off a streak of egg yolk running down the front, stark against the blue of his uniform.

“Are you threatening an officer of the law?” He dropped his gaze to the flatware roll in my hand, the napkin lifting in the stiff breeze and showing off the butter knife tucked in its recesses.

“You can’t be serious.” My heart began to slam around in my chest like a Super Ball on a trampoline. Mitch might actually arrest me. He’d pat me down for hidden weapons and then administer a cavity search back at the station. I would die of shame before my thirtieth birthday.

“I am. Put your hands on the car and hold still.” Mitch put his ticketing pad on the hood of the cruiser and stepped toward me. I dropped the knife and fork with a clatter on the sidewalk and was preparing to place my sweaty palms next to the pad when the wind picked up even more. One strong gust lifted the pad like a dried leaf and sent it whirling down the sidewalk. Mitch raced after it, stabbing out a long leg, attempting to stomp on it before it blew too far down the street. He had gotten about half a block away when Myra Phelps pulled up in the town’s only other cruiser. I wiped my sweaty hands on my jeans and tried to stop shaking.

Myra wriggled out from behind the wheel of the cruiser, dragging her purse along with her. “What happened here?” Myra kicked my car’s front-right tire and the whole thing sagged even closer to the ground. “Lowell said Byron had finished with this just yesterday. Better than new, he said.”

“It was, when I left it to go in for some breakfast.”

“Lowell’s been gone less than three hours and the town’s already going to hell.”

“I would have thought it was some random mischief except for this.” I pointed at the back of the little car. Myra took a look for herself and clucked her tongue.

“Must be one of those militant animal rights groups I keep hearing about. They think all chickens should be free-range. You must have made them ornery by locking your flock up at night.”

“It doesn’t say coop, it says co-op. I think someone doesn’t like the idea of the maple cooperative.”

“Well that’s just ridiculous. Who wouldn’t want to save a bunch of money on things they need to buy anyway? Except maybe for Frank.”

“If this is the sort of thing the cooperative is going to inspire, I’ll be glad when Lowell gets back.” We both watched as Mitch danced down the sidewalk still chasing his pad. “I’m not sure the current man in charge is up to any serious police work.”

“Lowell asked me to watch out for that boy and to make sure playing chief for a week didn’t go to his head.”

“I think it’s already too late for that. He just tried to arrest me for brandishing a weapon at him.” I pointed at the flatware lying abandoned on the ground.

“Well he seems to be too busy chasing litter to worry about arresting you,” Myra said as we caught sight of Mitch banging his head against a car bumper as he lunged at the ticketing pad. “Why don’t you just call Byron to come get your car and then head on home before he catches up with you.”

“I don’t want to leave and get in even more trouble.”

“I’ll have a word with him. He’s sure to come into the Stack. Sausage is the special today and he’ll want to snag some before Piper runs out.” Myra was the most informed person in Sugar Grove. She was the police dispatcher, which put her at even more of an advantage than Piper, news wise, but she also was interested in everyone’s life above and beyond the call of duty. It didn’t surprise me that she knew Mitch’s breakfast preferences. It wouldn’t surprise me if she knew which soap the pastor used, or the odds of any couple in town getting a divorce. “Take the cruiser. I’ll have Mitch give me a ride back to the station.”

“But what will you say?” I appreciated Myra’s willingness to help but I didn’t want her to fan the flames of trouble with Mitch.

“I’ll tell him if he doesn’t stop looking for ways to spend time with you, I’ll have to tell his new girlfriend, Phoebe, what he has been up to.”

“Mitch is seeing Phoebe?” That was music to my ears. A new woman in his life was sure to help keep him out of mine. And Phoebe was a nice person. Probably too nice to be interested in Mitch but I wasn’t going to discourage their relationship if it meant he might leave me, and my driving record, alone. I decided if Myra was giving me a way out, there was no reason for me to stay standing outside catching my death of cold waiting for Mitch to come back and run his beefy hands all over me. I asked her to tell Piper what happened, then waved good-bye to Myra and hopped into the cruiser. I drove away as quietly as I could manage. I caught sight of Mitch in the rearview, his ticketing pad finally in his grasp. He was running down the street after me waving the pad and shaking his other fist.

I parked the cruiser next to the barn and walked along the worn path to the sugarhouse. The sugarhouse sits back near the tree line, away from the main house but not so far enough to be onerous when the snow starts piling up. You never know in New Hampshire if it will snow by Thanksgiving and stay white until past Easter or if you’ll still be seeing brown grass after the turn of the year. I couldn’t decide how I felt about it either. When the snow came early I felt the inconvenience of it, but when it was late everything looked so bleak and dead. Snow drapes the bare bones of the land in a way that highlights beauty. Dead grass and dry leaves just looked depressing month after month.

I headed into the sugarhouse gift shop to start a pot of coffee. I would want another cup or two if I was going to figure out what was behind all this on so few hours of sleep. I hadn’t told Piper that although I had made peace with the relationship between my mother and Lowell, I still had trouble falling asleep. It was one thing to realize they had feelings for each other and that they went on dates. It was quite another to help your mother pack and to spot lingerie in her suitcase that caused you to blush. I don’t think of myself as a prude but I don’t think of my mother as having a sex life either.

I couldn’t even talk to anybody about it. It wasn’t as if chatting about something like that with your siblings seemed natural, no matter how close you were with them. And Piper wasn’t an option. She had no reservations about any such thing. I once overheard her asking the pastor’s wife about what the Bible had to say on the subject of threesomes. When she was explaining it to me later she made it sound like the conversation had started out about the Holy Trinity and had spun out of control from there.

While waiting for the pot to brew I started pacing around the gift shop. I grabbed a feather duster and flicked it over the displays of maple-themed plates and cups, maple leaf shaped napkin holders, and jugs of syrup. As I flicked and swished, an uncomfortable idea began to take root. What if I wasn’t the only one to have experienced vandalism because of the cooperative? I hurried to the closet to put away the duster and pelted back down the path to the house.

I needed to talk to someone about my concerns and that person was Grampa. If anyone could tell me if I was overreacting, it was my grandfather. I tore along the back hall and found him, thankfully alone, in the library. Grampa’s long beard was serving as a bookmark in a well-thumbed paperback with a Western-themed cover. I never knew what would catch Grampa’s fancy in the book department. He was as likely to be caught reading a gothic romantic suspense as he was a snowblower repair manual.

This time, he was dozing. I wasn’t sure if his beard got caught as he fell asleep or if he had time to park it in the correct page before nodding off but the result was the same. He was gently snoring away in a wingback chair beside the fieldstone fireplace. The fireplace had been built with stones from our own fields over two hundred years earlier. I sometimes thought about the passing of time and the passing of Greenes through this house when I bothered to slow down and ponder my place in the world every once in a while.

Grampa had been getting in the habit of nodding off more and more frequently lately and it gave me a cold squeeze around my middle to think about him one day being one of the Greenes who had passed on through the house and through my life. After my own father’s death five years earlier those things weighed on my mind more than they might have otherwise. I paused in the doorway, unwilling to wake him. I stepped back from the threshold and the floorboards creaked. Grampa’s eyelids fluttered open and he twisted his head in my direction, tugging his beard out of the book.

“Sorry to wake you,” I said feeling guilty and selfish. Grampa had been up early, too, and I should have thought of that before approaching so loudly.

“Who said anything about sleeping. I was just resting my eyes.” He gave me an exaggerated wink, as if to show off how energetic his eyelids now were. “Something I can do for you?”

“Well, since you’re awake, there is.” I told him about what had happened to the Midget and about the warning gouged into the trunk. “Now I’m wondering if some of the other members have suffered damage, too.” Grampa twiddled the end of his beard between his thumb and forefinger.

“You’ve got to go talk this up with folks in person and find out. I’d start with Tansey because she’s a big producer and will be flattered to have been thought of first. Then go over and talk with the Shaws. They’ll understand about Tansey but won’t appreciate being too far down the list.”

“I’ll have to stop at Frank’s, too, won’t I?”

“You will if you think he’s the one responsible. He’ll bark but he won’t bite. And if he decides it has become controversial to become a co-op member, he just might join.”

“Not if we’re lucky, he won’t.” Just then Grandma appeared in the doorway.

“Do either of you have any idea why Mitch Reynolds is standing in the kitchen, saying he’s here to arrest Dani?” Grandma asked. She sounded calm enough but she was rubbing the jade pendant on her necklace between her fingers like it was a worry stone. My father had given it to her for Mother’s Day the year he died and in the years since she had polished it to a satiny gleam with all the rubbing.

“He can’t still be mad about the cutlery. Myra said she’d make him see sense.”

“He didn’t mention flatware but he did say something about stealing a police car.” My heart sank. If he was willing to arrest me for pointing a napkin-wrapped butter knife in his direction, what would he do to me for carjacking a cruiser?

“I can explain. Myra let me borrow it just to get home.” Grandma shook her head slightly and compressed her lips together a bit. My grandmother may be a law-abiding citizen but she understands that sometimes the letter of the law needs a little work in the penmanship department. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“I can’t imagine how it happened but I’m afraid Lowell may have left his coffeepot on when he headed out of town this morning. How about if you drive his cruiser back over to his place and check?” she asked Grampa.

“I was planning to head on into town anyway. There are a few things I wanted to do to get ready for meat bingo tonight.”

“I’ll send Loden out to follow you in the minivan, just in case you need a lawyer.” My older brother, Loden, was primarily a model-train enthusiast but he was also a card-carrying member of the legal profession. So far he had only used his skills on pro bono work for community members who couldn’t afford a lawyer. I hoped neither Grampa nor I was going to be responsible for changing that.

“I’ll keep Mitch busy with some coffee and a maple cardamom sweet roll while the both of you skedaddle. Dani, you aren’t going to be making up any more mischief today are you?”

“Grandma, you know I never mean to make problems.”

“I know. But you tend to attract trouble like black pants attract white cat hairs.”

*   *   *

January in New Hampshire is no time to be riding around in a car with a busted heater. Pulling into the yard at Tansey Pringle’s place drove home just how cold I was. I couldn’t feel my legs as I tried to wriggle out of the Clunker. My feet, although wrapped up in a pair of wool socks and a heavy pair of snow boots, felt like two bricks. I hobbled up the porch steps and banged on Tansey’s door. No one answered and I should have realized they wouldn’t. Tansey wasn’t ever to be found in the house during the day.

I traipsed around the side of the barn and on back to the sugarhouse at the rear of the cleared area in her yard. Smoked curled up out of a chimney desperately in need of repointing. A flock of Barred Rock hens waddled over to idly peck at my bootlaces. I knocked twice on the sugarhouse door, then shoved it open. Tansey never stood on formality and if you waited for her to answer, you’d stand around until nightfall. I was surprised to see Tansey with a notebook computer perched in her lap. From the sounds of things she was watching some sort of a video.

“Backwoods Bruce just put up his latest episode.” Tansey pointed at the screen.

“Who’s that?” I squinted at the small screen and saw what looked like the interior of a bomb shelter.

“The survivalist guy from New Hampshire.”

“Never heard of him.”

“Never heard of him! Well, you have been missing out for sure. Fortunately all his videos are archived online.”

“Is that all he does?” In the video it looked like he was aiming his camera around at a specialty knife and waxing poetic about its superiority to other blades of similar cost. On the back wall of the cabin hung a topographical map of New Hampshire and a vintage vanity license plate declaring
GEEZER
.

“What he does is inform the public about the best ways to survive off the grid when the government collapses. At my age it doesn’t happen too often but I tell you that man lights my overalls on fire.” Tansey touched her finger lightly to the screen in what I interpreted to be an affectionate caress. I was both uncomfortable with knowledge concerning Tansey’s turn-ons and encouraged by the fact it was still possible to get that worked up at her age. With my romantic life perpetually in the slow lane, I needed all the time I could get.

“His voice sounds funny.” And it did. It was sort of mechanical and false.

“He uses a voice changer to protect his identity. The things he shares with the public could get him in trouble with the government and he can’t be too careful. He tells the truth about big oil and out-of-control personal spending.”

“Are you sure that isn’t Frank Lemieux? Sounds like just the sort of thing he would say.”

“I’ve rattled around in this body long enough to know it would not get stirred to carnal thoughts by Frank Lemieux, secret identity or no secret identity. But I know I’d give a year’s worth of syrup profits for one date with Backwoods Bruce. They don’t make men like that anymore.” I didn’t know about that. I’d started a slow moving romance with a conservation officer from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department a couple months back. He was exactly the type of man Tansey was talking about. Minus the kooky ideas.

“That brings me to the reason for my visit.”

“Romance? Have you come to your senses and are here to tell me you’ve decided to marry my son?” Tansey asked me this question every time I saw her. She’d asked it for years. Not that I am all that special. She asks it of my sister as well, even though Celadon is married to someone else already.

“Not today,” I said. “I actually came to talk to you about the cooperative.” Tansey hit the pause button on the video and shut the computer.

“I’m listening.” She pointed at a pair of seedy lawn chairs set in the corner with a milk crate set between them as a coffee table, Tansey’s office. She settled down into one and pulled a half-smoked cigarillo out of a rusty soup can and relit it. I wondered if I could somehow reposition the chair upwind of her smoke without offending her but nothing came to mind. I sat and tried not to breathe as I launched into my questions.

“I was wondering if you have had any problems since you said you’d join.”

“Well, now you mention it, my knees have been bothering me more than usual.”

“That’s not exactly the kind of trouble I had in mind.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t. You never promised it would lower my costs and stave off my arthritis.”

“So no troubles of any kind? No harassing phone calls? No one lurking around the farm?”

“What’s this about, girl? You’re starting to give me the willies.”

“Someone vandalized my car this morning. They carved a message protesting the cooperative into the trunk.”

“Well, ain’t that a shame. Cute little thing it is, too, that car. I expect Knowlton would be happy to give you a lift until you get it repaired.”

“Thanks, but I’ll manage on my own.”

“Suit yourself. But why you’d want to take your life in your hands riding around in something held together by duct tape and wishful thinking instead of Knowlton’s truck I’ll never understand.” And she wouldn’t either. Tansey loved her Knowlton like a child loves their favorite blankie. It didn’t matter what he looked like or how he smelled, she couldn’t see any of his flaws.

“So you’re still on board then?” I searched Tansey’s face for signs of resistance. She took a deep drag on her cigarillo and blew a smoke ring. I took it as a good sign to continue. “The damage to my car doesn’t worry you?”

“I’m not going to let anybody get between me and my discounts. Besides, it was probably just kids letting off a bit of steam while the police chief is away.” Tansey stretched out her legs and rubbed her knee much like my grandmother did her pendant. It made me wonder if her knee problems were of her own making. “Unless it was Frank.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of.”

“You ought to be. They never made a tool for tightening that guy’s screws.” Tansey creaked to her feet and I hopped up as fast as was safe considering the condition of the chair. “Where you headed next?” Tansey asked as we popped out into the brightness of the day.

“I thought I’d speak with Kenneth and then head over to Frank’s. I’m sure I won’t get to everyone today but I figured since the three of you are the highest-volume producers I’d start with you.” It was the truth as well as a bit of calculated flattery. Tansey prided herself on just how much syrup she boiled down each year, even though Kenneth always had quite a bit more. That was the reason I approached her first. She was touchy about how much more he managed to make and I wanted to keep her feathers smooth.