Twelve
It was one thing to send a dog after me. It was another entirely to mess with my business. I’m a patient woman, probably even too meek and mild when it comes to confrontation. But if you manage to push the right buttons, my temper scares even me. Sabotaging trees, threatening the elderly, and sending out dogs to bite me were on the list of button pushes. I peeled away from Tansey’s so fast the Clunker went airborne as soon as I hit the first frost heave. Even the car crashing back down to earth didn’t convince me to take it slow and calm down.
All the way to Frank’s place I rehearsed the sorts of things I would say to him. My fear of his dog went right out the window as the miles slipped behind me. By the time I pulled into his driveway and yanked on the emergency break, I had worked myself up into an under-five-foot-tall rage volcano.
Someone else looked like rage had gotten the better of him, too. Bob Sterling almost backed into my car as he reversed his own and took off down the driveway as quickly as I had come up it. I raised my hand in greeting but he just grimaced at me and kept both of his hands wrapped tightly on the wheel instead of the usual New Hampshire wave, which involves lifting just one finger up in acknowledgment of an acquaintance.
I wondered what could have gotten under Bob’s skin as I raced up the steps of Frank’s dilapidated porch, kicking aside a soda can and a bungee cord left in front of the door. I pounded as hard as I could on the door, flakes of peeling paint showered down with each blow of my fist. Frank’s dog was the only one to answer my call. He barked and whined from the inside of the house and even jumped up on his hind legs to see who was out there making a fuss.
Despite my tough talk in the safety of the Clunker, I backed away as I noticed the dog was taller than me. But he was inside the house and I was safely on the outside. If Frank wasn’t going to answer, it was likely he wasn’t home. He wasn’t exactly hospitable but he was eager to shoo people off his property. I went round the back of the house to see if there was any evidence of him there. Rusted cars and old oil drums poked up out of snowdrifts and brush. Some sort of a rusty engine sat in pieces on a splintery picnic table. But no sign of Frank.
I moved to the edge of the woods, toward where he might have entered if he wanted to sabotage Jill’s trees. I stood silently listening for rustling or birdcalls that would indicate someone was nearby. I called out his name but no one answered. It occurred to me that Phoebe ought to be around here somewhere even if Frank wasn’t. The last time I had been here they had been fighting but I hadn’t heard that she had moved out or anything. And I had spoken to Myra since then so I would have heard. Myra knows all, sees all. With Myra around it is a wonder the police in Sugar Grove don’t have a hundred percent clearance rate on cases.
Anger is not the most reliable form of fuel for me and I started to feel its strength ebbing away as I turned the corner of the house. A jay called from a tree above my head and when I looked up to spot it I noticed smoke rising from behind the sugarhouse. It was then I thought about letting myself into Frank’s sugarhouse. I walked past the woodpile that had been dug into recently. Several sticks of stove wood stood out of line compared with the rest of the pile. A few pieces lay on the ground in front as though someone had left them where they tumbled when they hastily grabbed some wood.
I pounded on the door of the sugarhouse and waited more patiently than I would have expected. Then I thought about the trees at Jill’s again and about the dummy swinging from Tansey’s rafters and I tried the doorknob. I let myself in and crept cautiously forward.
Frank’s sugarhouse looked nothing like the rest of what I had seen of the property. Shelves lined the walls with things neatly lined up on top of them. Cupboards had doors with hinges that didn’t sag. The floor was swept clean. Everything was just the way I’d keep it myself at Greener Pastures except for one thing. The room was hot. Too hot to be attributed to a normal heating system.
The smoke I had seen had to have been created by something and I was beginning to wonder if the sugarhouse was on fire. With more curiosity than sense I moved farther into the room, looking for the source of the heat. As I approached the evaporator the temperature shot up.
The evaporator in a sugarhouse can take many forms, from something cobbled together from found objects to state-of-the-art equipment. But the basic construction remains the same. You need a shallow pan with a lot of surface area suspended over a source of heat. In order to turn sap into syrup you need to remove a whole lot of water. During the sugaring season the evaporator ran almost constantly at Greener Pastures. But we never ran it outside of sugaring season. No one would want to waste the fuel. And it wasn’t yet sugaring season. The nights were certainly cold but the days were nowhere near warm enough to start the sap flowing. I couldn’t imagine why Frank would have had a fire going in his firebox. He might have had a lot of character flaws but being a spendthrift wasn’t one of them.
“Frank?” I called out. “Are you in here?” I stepped around the evaporator with its empty sap pan and tripped, sending myself sprawling across the concrete floor. My elbow smarted and I’d ripped a hole in the knee of my only clean pair of jeans. I would have spent some time feeling sorry for myself on both counts if my attention weren’t riveted on Frank. His eyes were open and staring straight at me but I was pretty sure they weren’t seeing a thing. From the bits of bark trapped in the bloody dent in the back of his head I was more than certain he wasn’t ever going to look at anything again. I scrambled back from his body and bolted to the other side of the evaporator. Sucking down deep hot breaths of the overheated air, I tried to tell myself to remain calm.
Apparently I am not much of a salesperson. By the time I got my fingers to work well enough to operate my cell phone and dialed Myra at the police station I was gulping down hiccupy gasps and had trouble making myself understood. She must have made out the word Frank and identified my number as the one calling. Myra may be a first-class gossip but she is an equally good dispatcher.
In under ten minutes Mitch was skidding the town’s newest cruiser to a stop in Frank’s driveway, lights and flashers both announcing his arrival. He burst in through the door, one hand on his gun holster. I took one look at him and after valiantly trying to hold it in, I burst into tears.
I’d like to say it was because of the lack of sleep, the stress of the cooperative, and the pent-up emotion of being so angry but I think I was just rattled. Thoroughly and completely rattled. Sure, I’d seen dead bodies before. People at funerals, people in movies, even a murder victim only a couple of months earlier but none of them had looked like they had been the victims of violence. I kept seeing the back of Frank’s head with his fringe of graying hair matted with blood. Mitch wrapped his long arms around me and gave me a couple experimental pats on the back like I was a baby he was trying to burp. I pulled myself together and then pulled away.
“Frank’s right over there.” I pointed to the other side of the evaporator and noticed the baseball cap Frank always wore lying abandoned on the floor. Mitch crossed the room and squatted. When he stood back up he looked a bit rattled himself. It might have been the lighting but I thought he had a distinctly green tinge to his face.
“He’s dead all right, that’s for sure. Can you explain what you were doing in here?” Mitch took a step toward me and turned his back to the evaporator and to Frank. Maybe being aggressive was easier than feeling scared. Especially if you were in charge of a crime scene.
“I came to ask Frank about the sabotage to my car and to Jill’s and Tansey’s places. You know, the stuff you were too busy to investigate until pie was involved.”
“With Lowell away I’ve had more important things to do than to worry about infighting between local businesses.”
“Well it looks to me like the sabotaging just got to be your number one priority. Especially since Lowell is out of town. Maybe if you had taken it more seriously something like this wouldn’t have happened.”
“This isn’t my fault. And you still haven’t said exactly what you were doing here. Were you accusing him of sabotage or did you want to warn him it could happen to him, too?” Mitch crossed his arms over his chest and gave me the same look he had when he was preparing to pat me down in front of the Stack earlier in the week. It was a good question though. I hadn’t even thought about the possibility that Frank’s place could have been targeted, too.
“I was going to confront him. Just about everybody thought Frank was the one trying to warn people off the cooperative by messing with their properties.”
“And?”
“And, after I saw the dummy in Tansey’s barn I drove straight up here to tell Frank off. I was so mad I was getting light-headed on the drive over.”
“Mad enough to kill him?” Mitch towered over me and I was glad to hear the ambulance in the near distance. He didn’t look like someone I wanted to be alone with for much longer.
“I was mad but I don’t think I’m even tall enough to have hit him. And I very much doubt I’m strong enough. Besides, the evaporator was heating away and Frank was on the floor when I arrived.”
“You look like you’ve been in a bit of a tussle. Can you explain that?” Mitch pointed at the hole in my jeans and the scrapes on my hands.
“I tripped over Frank’s body and banged myself up when I hit the concrete floor. From the bark I saw caught in the trough in the back of his head it looks like he was coshed with a stick of stove wood.” I felt myself getting a little hysterical, like I might start laughing inappropriately. All I could picture was a maple tree uprooting itself and wandering over to hit Frank upside the head with one of its branches for girdling Jill’s trees. That wasn’t going to go down well with Mitch though.
“A likely story.”
“It’s the truth. That would explain the evaporator being on, too. I bet whoever killed him put the stick of stove wood into the evaporator and lit a fire in the box to destroy the evidence.”
“You seem to know a lot about this for someone who claims not to have been involved.”
“I doubt someone would need to be involved in this crime to make the same suggestion.” I wished more than ever that Lowell was in town instead of frolicking on a cruise ship with my mother. Mitch had been looking for any excuse to get back at me for the failure of our lackluster romance. Suspecting me of murder was about as good a way to get back at someone as I could think of. While Mitch was not the smartest guy I had ever met, he wasn’t dumb either. If I could give him some other viable suspects, he would certainly look at them, too. “Besides, there are plenty of people in Sugar Grove who hated Frank.”
“That may be true but people have had problems with Frank for years. Why kill him now?”
“Last night Frank pointed his shotgun at Luke Collins for crossing his property line. When Mindy heard about it she threatened to kill him if it ever happened again.”
“Did Frank threaten her kid again?”
“Not that I know of but I haven’t been with her since this morning. Anything could have happened since then.”
“Seems unlikely to me. You still seem like a better suspect since you’re right here on the spot.”
“What about Bob Sterling? As I pulled into the driveway this afternoon I saw him hauling out of here like his backside was on fire.”
“Bob? What reason would he have to hurt Frank?”
“Bob was saying at meat bingo on Friday night that Frank’s dispute about the property line was keeping him from selling his land. He was really angry about it.”
“And he was here when you got here?” Mitch uncrossed his arms, which I took to be a good sign.
“He was. And from the sounds of things, he’s about to be here again.” The sirens of the ambulance had grown so loud I was certain it had arrived. Sure enough, the door to Frank’s sugarhouse opened and Bob stood there with Cliff Thompson, the fire chief and part-time EMT.
“Keep that under your hat for now.” Mitch tilted his head toward Bob ever so slightly then lowered his voice. “I don’t want to have to slap the cuffs on Bob before he gets the body dealt with.”
“Does this mean I’m not a suspect anymore?” I felt a glimmer of hope and lightness for the first time since tripping over Frank’s corpse.
“Nope. It doesn’t even mean I’ve forgotten about you stealing Lowell’s cruiser. It just means you should be quiet. I’m sure I’ll have more questions for you later. For now, I want you to wait outside.”
Without another word, I scooted past Mitch and Frank and the others. I was glad to get out into the cold fresh air in the yard. I sucked down several deep breaths before I saw Phoebe rounding the corner of the house. She was coming from the direction of the woods beyond the clearing surrounding the house and outbuildings near the drive. Her pale blond hair was all pinned up on her head in a way I had never seen before. I watched as she spotted the ambulance and her pace quickened.
“What’s going on here?” she asked.
“Phoebe, I have some very bad news for you.” Frank, for all his faults, had been a better father to Phoebe than her biological one had ever bothered to try to be. This was going to hurt and having lost my own father, I understood exactly how much.
“Is it my dad?” Phoebe’s already pale face lightened a few extra shades as any blood rushed to her vital organs. I knew that feeling, too. The one where your mind blanks, then your pulse races and your hands go all tingly as you think of all the terrible things that could have happened all in the space of a breath. Stress at that level is the ultimate warper of time. You think you conjured up absolutely every possibility for grief and you did it in a single second.
“I’m sorry, it is.” Phoebe moved like she was going to go into the sugarhouse. I grabbed her arm. “You don’t want to go in there.”
“If he’s hurt, he needs me.”
“Phoebe, you can’t help him. He’s gone.” I couldn’t bring myself to say the word dead to her. It was so final, and so cruel.
“What do you mean gone?” Her pale blue eyes filled with tears.
“I found him in the sugarhouse. It looked like someone must have hit him on the back of the head with something hard.” I didn’t want to go into the details of the dent or the loose bits of clinging bark in the wound. She would be upset enough without having a gruesome image stuck in her mind’s eye. I was going to have a hard enough time with it myself when I tried to sleep that night and I really didn’t even like Frank. My father’s death had been swift and not the result of violence and it still made me sick to think about him dying all alone in his sugar bush, his heart squeezing away and giving out long before his time.
“Oh no! It must have been Mindy. Or Kenneth Shaw. They both hated his guts. Dad told me about Mindy screaming about her Squirrel Squad yesterday and what would happen if my dad bothered the kids again. I have to tell Mitch. He’ll know what to do.”
Before I could answer, Bob and Cliff came out of the sugarhouse bearing a stretcher. Phoebe took one look at the figure lying on it covered in a sheet and started to wail. Mitch took her in his arms and rocked her back and forth gently like a small child. I couldn’t hear what she said but I could see that he bent close to her ear. She nodded slightly and he released her from his embrace. He led her to the cruiser and held the door open while she slipped inside and slouched down in the front seat. He closed the door and headed for me.
“I’m going to need you to come down for a formal statement. Can I trust you to come into the station of your own accord?” Mitch asked.
“Of course. I’m not going to just run off.”
“You’ve done it before.”
“That was different. You were being petty and Myra told me she would explain about the cruiser.”
“Lowell didn’t leave Myra in charge of the department while he was gone, no matter what she is running around tell
ing people.”
“I bet once she hears about Frank she’ll be glad you are the one with his butt on the line instead of her.”
“Which is exactly why Lowell left me in charge. He knew I’d be up for whatever challenge came my way.” Mitch had the speech down but the way he kept glancing around quickly and shifting his weight from one foot to the other like a recently potty-trained child said he was more nervous than he wanted to admit.
“Are you sure you can handle this on your own? Graham is a police officer, too, you know. I’m sure he’d be happy to help.”
“I don’t need any help. Not from Graham and not from you.” Mitch stopped swaying back and forth and crossed his arms over his chest. Making him mad was the nicest thing I could have done for him. Anger had replaced nerves and he was ready to get down to business, if only to show me how much he didn’t need anyone, especially Graham, to help him out.
“Not even help with Phoebe? I know how good you are with crying women.” Mitch had left me alone in the movie theater on our second date because I had started tearing up when the main character’s horse had to be put down. He was so flustered he had driven off and left me to find my own way home.
“The only woman I’m worried about is you and whether or not you’ll show up at the police station to give a statement.”
Thirteen
I waited in the police station for nearly an hour before Mitch made time to question me. I had no idea if that was to bug me or if he really had other things he had to take care of first. Either way, Myra had plenty of time to go over the grislier bits of Frank’s death and to toss out theories of her own as to how he died.
Maple Mayhem (A Sugar Grove Mystery) Page 12