A Sticky Inheritance: Maple Syrup Mysteries

by Emily James

  The second Cavanaugh brother laughed, but it trickled away quickly, and Mark’s smile looked tense. I got the feeling I’d swallowed my foot, I just didn’t know how. The silence stretched a little too long.

  The second Cavanaugh brother cleared his throat. “Sorry, no weird cloning or body-snatching experiments going on here. I’m Grant Cavanaugh, and I’m the one you’re here to see.”

  I did shake Grant Cavanaugh’s hand. Seeing them standing side by side, I could pick out a few small differences now. Grant didn’t have Mark’s dimple or his smattering of silver hairs. I did belatedly notice that both men wore wedding rings.

  Grant swiped his arm in an arc. “My office is this way.”

  I leaned my suitcase against a wall. If someone wanted the heavy thing badly enough to steal it, I could replace anything in it. Better that than breaking myself by continuing to lug it around after me.

  “Before we talk arrangements…” I shoved my hands in my pockets to keep from smoothing my jacket again. I was a big girl. I could handle this. Even alone. “I’d like to see my uncle, please.”

  “He hasn’t been prepared, and the mortuary fridge isn’t the place where you want to see him and say your good-byes. Why don’t you wait until we have his body ready for viewing?”

  He was probably right, but I needed to see my uncle. Since my parents got the call, I’d kept expecting someone to call back and say it’d been a mistake. They’d confused Uncle Stan with someone else. My rational mind knew that wasn’t possible. People here knew him—had known him for well over ten years—but that last seed of hope wouldn’t die, and I couldn’t accept reality until I’d seen him. I didn’t want to wait.

  “I’m a criminal defense attorney. I’ve seen my share of crime scene photos. I promise you I can handle it.”

  A little white lie never hurt anyone, right? I was a defense attorney, but I’d never been the lead on a case, and I hadn’t actually looked that closely at many crime scene photos. Blood and anything medical made me feel faint—only one of the many waving red flags that should have warned me I might be getting into the wrong profession.

  Grant nodded slowly and led the way through a door marked STAFF ONLY. He lifted the handle on a heavy silver door inside. “Give me one minute.”

  He was back in less. He held the door open, and Mark followed me in. My legs felt like I was the one with rigor mortis, my knees locking and making each step awkward and heavy.

  I silently cursed out my parents. I shouldn’t have had to do this alone. No matter how angry my dad still was at Uncle Stan, they’d been brothers.

  I stopped five feet back from the metal table where…my legs didn’t seem to want to…

  I sucked deep breaths in through my nose and out through my mouth. Hold it together, Nik. You’re a thirty-year-old woman. You’re not a little girl.

  I inched the rest of the way until I stood close enough to touch him. The color in his face was wrong, a strange pasty blue like someone dropped a robin’s egg in bleach. He’d aged since I’d seen him last, his hair thinner and the wrinkles around his jowls more pronounced, which I should have expected, since the last day we were together was the week before my sixteenth birthday. The last day I hugged him.

  I blinked hard. I wasn’t going to cry here, in front of strangers. I could cry later.

  Pressure built in my chest and behind my eyes, and I couldn’t help it. The tears came hard enough that I gulped in air and hiccupped it out. He’d been my only uncle and as much a father to me as my dad. I hadn’t spoken to my dad for nearly a month after he banned Uncle Stan from trying to contact any of us unless it was to tell us he’d come to his senses. I’d been grounded for almost that long when Dad found the long distance charge on our phone bill the time I broke the rules and called Uncle Stan here in Fair Haven.

  It was an embarrassingly long time before I could get control of my tears. I wiped my eyes with the back of my sleeve, leaving a mascara smear on the dry-clean-only wool. What kind of an idiot doesn’t buy herself waterproof mascara for a funeral? “Sorry. I think some part of me didn’t believe he was actually dead.”

  “There’s nothing to apologize for. It’s a normal reaction.” Mark handed me a wrinkled brown napkin that looked like it’d come from a fast food restaurant. “It’s all I could find in my pockets.”

  Grant’s face was red all the way to the tips of his ears. “We have tissues all over the place, but not in the fridge. You looked like you’d be okay.”

  My breakdown clearly rattled him enough to shake the professional funeral director veneer. I waved my hand in my best not-your-fault gesture and tried to dab my runny nose in as ladylike a manner as possible. It wasn’t working. I gave an internal shrug and blew my nose into the napkin. The honk was so loud I could sense my mother cringing six hundred miles away.

  But who really cared if they saw me doing something as disgusting as blowing my nose? They were both married, and it’s not like they were even potential clients. I was only here for a week or so to settle the funeral details and deal with Uncle Stan’s estate. After that, I’d be back to Virginia. And besides, knowing I’d blown my nose in front of them should make me embarrassed enough to overlook the fact that both brothers belonged in some sort of male pin-up calendar.

  I shoved the slimy napkin into my pocket and swallowed down a final hiccup. “How did he die?”

  Grant and Mark exchanged a glance. It was more of a silent conversation really, one jutting his chin and the other raising his eyebrows just a hair and giving an almost imperceptible shake of his head. Had I not been trained to observe every detail, I might have missed it all.

  Finally Mark sighed. “Didn’t the officer who contacted you explain the situation?”

  I hadn’t spoken to the officer. My dad was officially next of kin, so whoever gave the notification called my parents’ house. I’d been there for supper, otherwise they might not have even told me Uncle Stan was dead. But I didn’t want to try to explain my family dynamics to either of these men. They clearly had a strong bond, and it would only cast a pall over Uncle Stan’s memory to wave about all the family skeletons in their dirty underwear.

  “My parents didn’t share the details with me, only that he’d died.” My voice cracked again on the last word and I drew in a deep breath, holding it until I felt steady again.

  Mark’s eyes had taken on that pitying look that people got when they had to break bad news. My heartbeat grew so loud in my ears that it threatened to drown out everything else.

  He twisted his wedding ring around on his finger. “Stan’s autopsy showed a high alcohol level in his blood stream and an overdose of his heart medication. It wasn’t clear whether the overdose was accidental or suicide.”

  Chapter Three

  A shiver rolled over me that had nothing to do with the temperature in the fridge. Thirteen years ago, Uncle Stan was diagnosed with a heart condition. I’d assumed that’s what killed him. Now they were saying his death was by his own hand, maybe intentionally. “That’s not possible.”

  “I know how upsetting it can be to hear a loved one might have taken their own life.” Mark had stopped twisting his ring, and he met my gaze now. “But I performed the autopsy myself. And I double-checked because I knew Stan, and I didn’t think it fit, either. The results are sound.”

  The results might be, but their conclusions weren’t. “My uncle doesn’t…didn’t drink. At all. Ever. You performed the autopsy, so you must have read his medical records by now.” I tapped the spot over my own heart with two fingers. “His heart condition was alcoholic cardiomyopathy.”

  “Which is caused by years of heavy drinking.”

  Mark’s voice was too soft and patient. He probably didn’t mean it to be, but it bordered on patronizing. Made me want to stomp on his foot.

  Instead, I straightened my shoulders and glared at him. “He’s been sober since his diagnosis. He used to be one of the most highly regarded cardiologists in the country. He wouldn’t have tak
en the risk of drinking again. Not with his condition and not with the medication he was on.”

  He was the reason I was an anomaly among my generation. I hadn’t touched a drop of alcohol since the night he’d caught my friends and me with a bottle of wine we’d swiped from my dad’s collection. He’d put the fear into me that I’d let future stress and peer pressure push me into drinking more than was healthy. He’d made me promise not to risk my life the way he’d risked his. I was fifteen. Two weeks later, he announced he was quitting his practice and buying a farm here in Fair Haven.

  Mark frowned. “He was a doctor?”

  I planted my hands on my hips in my best impression of my mom’s don’t-mess-with-me pose. “One of the very best. He’d travel all over giving lectures. Your results might be right, but they don’t make sense.”

  “People do slip,” Grant said. “If he happened to be depressed, maybe he went back to what comforted him in the past.”

  Mark rubbed the back of his pointer finger against his lips and gave a grudging nod.

  Now I wanted to stomp on Grant’s foot, too. I’d almost won Mark over as my ally. And I’d need an ally if I was going to convince the powers that be in this town to reopen the investigation into Uncle Stan’s death. I was an outsider here.

  I chewed the inside of my cheek. Was I really going to argue that his death was suspicious, though? The Cavanaughs wouldn’t be the only ones to think I was crazy or unreasonable. Yet the only other alternative was to accept that the man I’d hero worshipped most of my life wasn’t at all who I thought he was. The uncle I knew never would have killed himself or made such a foolish mistake.

  “Did he seem depressed to either of you? Did any of his friends seem worried about him?”

  “Nicole.” Mark took my elbow and led me out of the fridge. “Depression isn’t always easy to spot or understand, even when you’re close to someone. How long has it been since you’ve seen your uncle?”

  Ouch. He probably well knew thanks to small-town gossip that this was my first visit to Fair Haven and that Uncle Stan never went back to Virginia after he settled here. It wasn’t that I hadn’t wanted to see him again. At first I couldn’t because of my parents, but then there’d been college, then law school and clerking in the summers.

  That didn’t mean, though, that I’d lost touch with him. Since I moved out on my own, we’d either talked or emailed every week.

  I yanked my phone out of my purse and brought up my email account. I scrolled through until I found what I was looking for and pressed it. I highlighted a section and shoved my phone at Mark. “Read this.”

  Hopefully he wasn’t nosy enough to read the text surrounding it. The email I’d pulled up was Uncle Stan’s reply a week ago to an email I’d sent telling him I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a lawyer anymore and expressing my fears over what would happen if I decided to quit. Uncle Stan was the only one who could understand.

  Everyone in my family for over a hundred years back on both sides had been either a doctor or a lawyer. As the daughter of two lawyers, no one ever asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. Obviously, I’d be a lawyer. And growing up on shows like Matlock, I thought being a defense attorney would be the best job ever. I’d get to run around solving puzzles, uncovering clues, and proving that my client was really innocent. Most of the time, I’d even identify the actual bad guy for the police.

  Real life didn’t quite meet my expectations. Most of the people my parents defend are guilty. I’d developed insomnia worrying about the criminals we were trying to set free or win the shortest possible sentence for.

  For a while, I thought I could simply switch to being a prosecutor once I had a few years’ experience, but they didn’t solve cases, either. They took the evidence given to them by the police and had to decide whether there was enough of it to bring charges. Their lives were more about debating and weighing the odds than about deduction and investigating. I’m good one on one, but it turns out I didn’t inherit the public speaking gene. My tendency to botch my opening and closing statements was the reason I’d never been given the lead on a case.

  And heaven knows I’m not cut out to be a cop. I’d probably accidentally shoot myself in the foot on the first day.

  The bottom line was that what I’d loved about being a lawyer, what I’d dreamed about, was something lawyers didn’t actually get to do. That’s what I told Uncle Stan in my email, along with the fear of what my parents’ reaction would be. They’d shunned Uncle Stan because he gave up his successful life to be a “hick farmer,” as my dad called it. I still remembered them arguing about Uncle Stan throwing away his talent.

  I knew exactly what would happen if I gave up practicing law.

  Uncle Stan wrote back that living life miserable and afraid was no life at all. He’d loved his patients, loved his job, but it still wasn’t right for him. The stress and long hours, the lives that hung on his decisions, had sucked all the joy out of his life until he’d almost drunk himself into an early grave. The best decision he ever made was moving to Fair Haven and buying Sugarwood. He’d never been happier or more content.

  I examined Mark’s face as he read. His expression didn’t give anything away.

  He handed the phone back to me. “It could have still been accidental. Maybe he took a double dose by accident because he’d been drinking.”

  Now he sounded more like he felt the need to raise every possible objection than that he actually believed what he was arguing for. “Maybe, but I don’t think so. If we could get into his house, I could at least examine his pill box and look around for any alcohol or empty bottles or cans. Did the police check those things?”

  “I couldn’t say for sure. I turn in my report, but I’m not involved in any other part of their investigations. If you’d like, I’ll take you to see the chief of police, and you can ask him any questions you have. Would that set your mind at ease?”

  This time I wouldn’t turn down his offer of a ride. However far away the chief’s office was, it was too far. My feet were already aching, and I swear my suitcase was mocking me. “Yes, please. I’d appreciate that.”

  “Mark?” Grant said.

  We both turned in his direction.

  His face was hard. “A word.”

  Mark followed him to the other side of the room, next to the doors that I guessed led into the visitation rooms based on the pedestals next to each door for guest books.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” Grant asked, his words almost a hiss.

  “She raises enough good questions that I want some answers. It’s probably nothing, but Stan was too good a man for me not to at least follow up on this.”

  It was strange watching twins arguing, like seeing a person fight with their reflection in a mirror.

  Grant crossed his arms over his chest. “You don’t need to be involved any more than you already are in another suicide.”

  I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but the sound in here carried and it would look quite odd if I stuck my fingers into my ears. I turned my back to them to give the impression of privacy at least.

  “I’m fine,” Mark said. “This isn’t the same.”

  I stole a peek over my shoulder.

  Mark walked a little ways away, dialing a number as he went. “Carl? It’s Mark. Do you have a few minutes? I’d like to bring Stan’s niece by…”

  They might not have completely believed me yet, but I knew my Uncle Stan. This wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t suicide.

  It was murder.

  Chapter Four

  Mark returned to where I was waiting, his phone already back in his pocket. “I told him everything you said. He can’t get away tonight, and he asked that we don’t go poking around—”

  I raised an eyebrow at him.

  He held up his hands. “His words, not mine. That we don’t go poking around without him. If there is evidence of something, he wants to properly document it before we touch it. Since the scene’s already
been released, nothing we find will be admissible, but they could still use it to point them in the right direction for investigating.”

  Okay, that made sense. Evidence could easily be accidentally contaminated, lost, or muddled. “Fair enough.”

  “You weren’t planning on staying there tonight, were you?”

  In my dead uncle’s house? No thanks. “I booked a room at The Sunburnt Arms.”

  The name had seemed strange to me when I reserved my room, but it was the only place open in the off-season. According to the lady I spoke with, the other bed and breakfasts wouldn’t open up again until after the first big snowfall or for the Christmas season, whichever came first. Now that I’d seen more of Fair Haven, The Sunburnt Arms seemed to be a perfect fit name-wise.

  I shot my giant suitcase—I swear it’d gained another ten pounds of girth since I’d left it leaning against the wall—another quick glare. “Could you tell me how to get there from here? Preferably with landmarks rather than street names.”

  Mark grabbed hold of my suitcase handle and pulled it toward the door as if it weighed no more than a pair of shoes. “It’s too far for you to walk. I’ll give you a lift.”

  I followed him out to the same charcoal-gray pickup he’d been driving before. I had to do an awkward hop and slide to climb in. Clearly whoever designed trucks didn’t expect women in narrow skirts to be riding in them.

  My cheeks burned and I peeked over to where Mark was. He either hadn’t noticed my graceless entry or he was too much of a gentleman to show it.

  He tossed my suitcase into the truck bed and climbed in. “I’ll have to pick you up tomorrow morning as well. Sugarwood is on the opposite end of town from The Sunburnt Arms.” He flashed me that gorgeous dimple again. “Assuming you don’t mind me tagging along. If someone did harm your uncle, I’d like to know.”