Drizzled with Death (A Sugar Grove Mystery)

by Crockett, Jessie

  “How could I not? Is this why you weren’t at the competition?” I dug in my pocket and found a crumpled napkin, probably from the Stack. It didn’t look used so I handed it to her. She dabbed her eyes so slowly I knew she was still trying to hide. She nodded just enough to let me know I was right but even that looked like it hurt from the wince on her face.

  “Who did this to you?” I asked. “Was it Hanley?” I waited for an answer that took its time coming.

  “Yes.” Jill’s voice came out muffled through her tear-clogged throat and inflated lips. “It was Hanley.”

  “What in the world did he do a thing like that for?”

  “He gets drinking sometimes and he doesn’t think.”

  “But you hardly know him.”

  “We’ve been seeing each other for several months.”

  “But he’s married to Connie.” And even if he wasn’t, I couldn’t imagine what Jill saw in him. Hanley was such a loud, obnoxious kind of guy and Jill was so pleasant and soft-spoken. I would have thought someone like him would have turned her off completely.

  “He says he doesn’t love her. Not like he loves me.”

  “This doesn’t look like love to me.”

  “This is the first time it’s been like this.” Jill snaked a slim hand out from under the blanket and rubbed the cat behind the ears.

  “Has he ever hit you before?”

  “No. He’s grabbed me and shaken me once or twice. Sometimes he holds on to my wrist or arm too tightly and leaves a bit of a mark. He had too much to drink up at his camp on Friday night and he let loose on me, that’s all.” That’s all. Not really a healthy standard.

  “How did you meet him?” Not that everyone in town didn’t know the guy. It’s just that most tried to steer clear of him whenever possible. Considering he is the most experienced forester in Sugar Grove, and Greener Pastures is a tree farm, that isn’t a luxury I’ve had.

  “We got to know each other up at Alanza’s last spring when I was tapping her trees. Hanley takes care of the trees on the property so he was always around. One thing led to another.” And he wasn’t working at Alanza’s anymore since there wasn’t any Alanza. I wondered if Jill had heard about her death.

  “Jill, did he tell you what happened to Alanza?”

  “No. He hasn’t said anything besides ‘Is there any more beer?’ to me since he did this.” Jill gestured at her face.

  “Alanza’s dead. She keeled over in her stack of pancakes at the competition yesterday morning.” I watched her face, looking for surprise or worry, but it was hard to make anything out with all the bruising and swelling.

  “That’s terrible. Did she have a heart attack or something?” Jill pulled the afghan up closer to her chin like she was warding off the bad news.

  “Not exactly.” I wasn’t sure how much Lowell wanted the public to hear yet so I felt like I was on slippery ground. “The police are treating it as a suspicious death.”

  “Oh my God.” Jill slumped back, clutching the afghan even higher up on her chest, so high, in fact, her chin and lower lip disappeared behind it. “Do they have a suspect?”

  “I don’t think anything is certain yet, not even exactly how she died. It looks like it could have been poison.”

  “Poison. That’s terrible. How did she take it?”

  “Badly.”

  “That’s not what I meant and it’s not something to joke around about either.” I think Jill was glaring at me but I couldn’t be sure with the way her eye was swelled shut.

  “It looks like it may have been in the syrup bottle at her place setting.”

  “Didn’t your sugarhouse donate the syrup?”

  “We did.”

  “You must be frantic. What if the whole batch was tampered with?” Jill sat up again and loosened her grip on the blanket in her distracted state. “You’ll have to recall everything sold since the last year. Or even before that if the syrup wasn’t from this year’s batch.”

  “We sold out last year. It was definitely this year’s batch.” That got my dander up. Selling out is something I pride myself on. Sometimes we have so many orders we have to dip into the family’s private stock just to not have to disappoint customers before we can put the sold out announcement on the website or up in the store.

  “Well, that’s good. Still, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. It’s going to do a lot of damage to your business if people think they’ll get poisoned using your products.” If I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn Jill was trying to hide a smirk. I wanted to hit her myself, but of course, that would be the wrong thing to do. I decided it was time to go.

  “Is there anything I can get you before I leave?” I thought she needed some soup or maybe a stiff drink.

  “Just promise me you won’t tell anyone about this, Dani. Things will only get worse if Connie finds out.” Jill looked at me cockeyed.

  “I can’t promise I won’t say something to the police if I see this again. But I won’t go around telling anyone else. It isn’t anyone else’s business. But if something happened to you and I hadn’t said anything to Lowell, I’d never forgive myself. That’s the best I can do.”

  “Then I guess I’ll have to accept that.”

  “I make a mean maple martini. Would you like one?” I had to at least offer.

  “Drinking’s what got me into this mess in the first place. I think I’ll pass.” Jill twisted her puffy lips into a smile. “But thanks for offering. Maybe some other time when I have something to celebrate.”

  “Are you going to be all right here alone? What if Hanley comes back? He didn’t seem like he was in a good mood.”

  “My brother will be here any minute. He’ll be staying overnight.”

  “It sounds like you’re all set then.” I waved good-bye and let myself out, making sure the cat didn’t slip out with me. With a mountain lion on the loose, Sugar Grove was no place for a house kitty.

  • • •

  Nothing starts the day right like a walk through the sugar bush. Any time of year the trees and the quiet and the fresh air make me glad to be alive. Which is why my early morning wanderings so often take me to the spot on the property where my father died.

  I had just reached the spot, the one I had made my brother take me to after I got home from the funeral and needed to see just where it had happened, when I heard the kind of crackling underfoot that meant someone wanted to be noticed.

  “Good morning, Dani.” Knowlton stood a few feet away holding a bulging backpack. This was not a favorite part of my mornings. Often when I was out taking my early, early morning walks, Knowlton was finishing up his night of wanderings and we ran into each other. Grampa always let him make himself comfortable on our property, and in my opinion Knowlton took advantage of that fact. He could wander anywhere he chose to look for dead things, but he preferred to lurk around here in hopes of catching sight of a live Greene girl.

  “Still out, I see.”

  “It was a great night. I saw all sorts of things out roaming around.”

  “You didn’t see anything large, did you?” If I was forced to run into Knowlton, the least I could get out of it was a report on mountain lions. Maybe one would eat him.

  “I think I saw a couple of the escaped lemurs. And I picked up a couple of feathers that look like they belong to parrots. Do you know if there were any escaped parrots?” Knowlton will stuff anything dead enough to hold still, but his specialty is birds. Maybe it’s his beaky nose but he is nutty about birds. From the chickens he raised for 4-H fairs as a kid to the bird sanctuary he tried to get Lewis Bett to establish on his property before he died, Knowlton was a hardcore birdaholic. Which got me thinking about Alanza’s death.

  “I heard a couple of them were instrumental in the escape of the other animals.” Not that I was going to tell him how. Any opening to talk about amorousness was not something I was planning to ever give Knowlton.

  “I knew parrots were smart but I wouldn’t have thought they co
uld plan and orchestrate an escape other than out of their own cage.”

  “Let’s just say they were more the catalysts than the masterminds and leave it at that. I wouldn’t want to go gossiping.”

  “That’s one of the things I love about you, Dani. You’re always thinking about the right thing to do.” I can’t stand being around Knowlton. Every time I’m with him, he says something sweet and goofy like that, and it is so hard to brush him off. My only strategy was to hold him at arm’s length until he found a girl of his dreams that reciprocated. Questions about his proposed bird sanctuary always distracted him.

  “So now that Alanza is no longer in the picture, do you think the bird sanctuary has a better chance of going ahead?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.” Knowlton shifted his bag on his shoulder and the tips of his ears pinked as if the temperature had dropped by a good twenty degrees.

  “You hadn’t thought about it? The guy who once told me he wanted to name his kids Chickadee, Oriole, and Tanager?” I surprised myself by taking an unprecedented step closer to him.

  “Well, maybe I did have a passing thought that since the plans she hatched for the property weren’t going to go forward, the sanctuary might have a chance of happening. But Mother said the property will be going to a conservation land trust group.”

  Tansey wasn’t one to gossip and what she did share was usually very accurate. If she went so far as to say something, it was almost guaranteed to be true. Quite possibly embellished and embroidered beyond the easily recognizable, but true at its core. If she mentioned a land trust, there was sure to be something to it. Especially since she and old Lewis Bett had been neighbors and friends of a sort for almost forty years.

  “Did she say which land trust?”

  “No. I didn’t really pay any attention to that. Once she said she thought the land was going to be protected, I just went back to thinking about the birds. Why do you care anyway? You never pay any attention to birds no matter how much I’ve tried to interest you.”

  “It’s not that I don’t care about wildlife. I mean, I was the one who figured out what to do with that camel at church, now wasn’t I?” I had enough problems with the local Fish and Game official without it getting around that I didn’t like animals. And besides, I did like birds. Especially the kind slowly baked in a maple mustard glaze.

  “I heard you let that camel get to first base.”

  “I didn’t know you were a sports fan.”

  “Generally, I’m not, but I’d be willing to play a few rounds of baseball with you, Dani.” His eyes got all moony and he closed the gap between us.

  “They’re called innings, Knowlton, not rounds. Golf is rounds.” I stepped back so quickly I tripped and ended up on my backside, completely knocking the wind out of myself. He stood over me as I gasped, and that panicky feeling that comes from not being able to breathe filled my entire being. I scrambled to my feet and hurried away as fast as I could go. There was no way, if I was going to drop dead in the woods like my father, Knowlton was going to be the one to find my body. He’d stuff me for sure. I flew out of the woods, leaving Knowlton calling after me about ordering a cable sports channel when he made it home. I had gotten back to the sugarhouse before I realized I still didn’t know any more about the bird sanctuary than I had when I ran into Knowlton in the first place.

  • • •

  The back of the shop area houses a small office, and it was there that I spent a lot of my time since it was built the previous year. We always used to do the books in the main house den, but as the business has grown, I said I wanted to keep things separate for tax purposes but really it was so people would stop using up all the sticky notes. Besides, once something was on a sticky note, I wanted to be able to find it again, and in a shared office, peopled by family members, my notes kept getting stuck to the inside of a wastepaper basket more often than not. No one else liked the shop office as much as I did, and I was putting my own stamp on it.

  I paused on the porch of the sugarhouse, looking carefully at the floorboards for any sign of a large cat. A bit of hair, a claw mark in the wood. Even a bit of dried-on feline drool. Zip. I pushed open the door and entered the familiar space. The rough wooden walls and long workbenches were worn smooth in places by generations of Greenes boiling down sap. Down under the bench in the corner my great-great-grandfather had carved his initials in the wall, and when I was six, I found them one summer day playing hide-and-seek with my siblings. When I bragged about discovering them, they said they already knew about them. That’s the thing about being the youngest in a family with a long history in one spot. There’s no new territory to explore unless you make it up yourself or find a new way to look at a place already traveled.

  Which was exactly why I was so committed to making the sugaring operation a success. Everyone else had filled a niche in the community. Grandma and Grampa endowed scholarships and funded the building of a new high school. My parents created a summer artist colony in a back parcel of land. Celadon was the driving force behind the historic preservation of the local opera house as well as many other neglected buildings. Loden used his law degree to offer pro bono services to community members in need. What I wanted, more than anything, was to put my own stamp on the community. Building the sugaring business using organic and sustainable methods was my way of doing just that. Our website played an important part in making that happen. Once a week I posted a new recipe or article on green living on our blog attached to the site. I even started selling green products such as stainless steel water bottles and cloth shopping bags with the Greener Pastures logo on them.

  I wandered through the shop, running my hand over the stock and checking for dust. Not many people came to the sugarhouse in late fall, but we still did get the odd customer looking for a gift. At this time of year, between fall foliage and skiing, most people who stopped by were locals, but I still wanted to make a good impression. I had made a good case for Internet sales a couple of years before, and their success was one of the reasons I was listened to when I made the suggestion to add a shop onto the sugarhouse. Even Celadon had to stop complaining about crass commercialism sullying the family name when I reported on sales figures and reminded her we were donating all post-tax profits to environmental causes.

  I heard creaking on the wide maple floorboards and looked up to see my mother standing in the sugarhouse doorway. Her finger was stuck as a place marker in a book. I squinted at the spine and noticed the title, The Casting Out of Evil Spirits from About One’s Person. I had to assume she was looking up what to do about Alanza. God forbid Alanza should cling to any of us in this life or any other.

  My mother considers herself to be psychically gifted. She reads tarot cards, dowses, and sees auras. She uses Ouija boards for information the way most people use the Internet. I’m not saying I believe she can do all the things she believes she can, or that such things are even possible, but she is right about enough stuff that I can’t help but try to be open-minded.

  She wandered through the sugarhouse, pausing near the evaporator, her peasant skirt swirling and her bracelets jangling as she walked. Everywhere she goes, she swishes and jingles. With her around, it’s like Halloween an extra 364 days each year. She stopped in front of a bench we use to hold jugs.

  “Why do I want to bring in a love potion and sprinkle it everywhere in this room?”

  “Because you always want to bring in a love potion. Did you need me for something?” I hoped an abrupt topic change would keep her from talking to me about my love life. The last few days had been hard enough without that. She had been following me around all week telling me my aura looked a bit tarnished and plying me with herbal teas designed to realign my chakras.

  “Your grandmother was hoping you would run over to Felicia’s to drop off the pickles for the swap.” My mother placed her hand on the bench and squeezed her eyes shut. Grandma and several other women in town had swapped jars of homemade pickles for holiday tables for yea
rs. Each of them had a specialty, and the swap allowed all of them to enjoy a variety of excellent choices for no extra effort.

  “I’ll be sure to take care of it just as soon as I can.”

  “Outdoorsy, a little above average height. Dark hair. Confident. Nice sense of humor. Unmarried.” She’d just described the guy from Fish and Game if his lack of a ring meant anything about marital status. “I’m getting a strong sense of someone like that in here.”

  “Are you sure? Do you remember that time when Celadon was in high school and you were sure she was pregnant? You even called the school nurse about it, but it ended up that Celadon’s supposedly male guinea pig was actually an expectant female.”

  “That was before I had honed my gift. I’ve improved so much with time.”

  “Last month you convinced Martha Rollins to spend her all her disposable income on lottery tickets because you told her you could see an end to all her material concerns.”

  “I was right, wasn’t I?”

  “She was struck and killed by a log truck as soon as she left the store with her lottery tickets.”

  “She had no more material concerns, though, did she?” That’s the thing with Mom’s impressions. If she didn’t try to interpret them, they might actually be spot-on. It was always the reading into them that made a hash of things. You had to take what she said with an ocean’s worth of salt.

  “I’d best go tell your grandmother the pickles will be all set before she puts it on her own to-do list,” she said. I followed her out the door and onto the porch, where she came to a dead stop.

  “I’m sensing a large presence here.” She pointed to the spot where the mountain lion had made himself at home. I didn’t want to tell her about it, though, because knowing Mom, she’d have a team of investigators, complete with video crew, swarming the place. “I’m picking up on curiosity, and stealth. And doubt mixed with derision. Strange. Not at all in alignment with sugar making.” It looked more than ever like that guy from the state thought my report was laughable despite his apologies.