The Sugar House

by Christine Flynn

  “What is it that we’re being blamed for, beyond taking that property?”

  For a moment it seemed her motions stilled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do.” The sense of being wrongly accused battled the need to not sound totally insensitive. He already knew his own transgressions had been embellished upon. It seemed more possible by the minute that his father’s had, too. “What happened to your parents, Emmy?”

  This time, there was no mistaking her hesitation. It lasted a half-dozen seconds before she took a deep breath and reached to shut off the water.

  “Dad was in an accident. Mom got sick.” She set the container in the sink, reached for a white terry towel on the rack below to dry her hands. “What do want in your coffee? I don’t have fresh cream out here, but there is powdered.”

  She clearly didn’t want to talk about Stan and Cara. Had no intention of it, from what he could tell by her blunt change of subject.

  “Black’s fine.”

  Only a jerk would push about something so sensitive. Swallowing frustration, unable to imagine, anyway, how an accident or illness could be blamed on his father, he switched subjects himself.

  “So, is it Emily or Emma?” It could be Emmaline or Emmanuel for all he knew. His jogging buddy’s wife was Saratoga. Sara to anyone who knew her, but that only proved that anything could be different from what it seemed. “And what’s your middle name?”

  The nature of her guard shifted with the slow shake of her head. “You don’t give up easily, do you?”

  “Rarely,” he admitted, when ‘never’ was more like it. “So what’s your name?”

  “I told you—”

  “I know,” he cut in. “You don’t want it. Why not?”

  “Because I’m perfectly happy with exactly what I have.”

  He didn’t believe that any more than he believed in the Tooth Fairy. Her hesitation moments ago had spoken volumes.

  “No one is ever completely happy, Emmy.”

  “That depends on what they think is important. If a person is always wanting more than what they have, then they’re probably not. If what they have is everything they want, then they are.”

  Jack didn’t know a single soul who was totally content with where they were in their life, what they possessed, or who they were with. He had the feeling, though, that there was a certain sensible logic in her philosophy. He also had the feeling she might have just given him the key to her inexplicable refusal.

  “So, you’re totally happy. All the time.”

  “Probably not,” she conceded a little too easily. “But I’m willing to settle for brief periods of close enough.”

  Leaving the towel on its hook, and the thermos in the sink to heat for a minute so it wouldn’t crack when she poured in the hot coffee, she sought distance at the worktable. Picking up a roll of thin silver-colored elastic cord from the surface lined with log-cabin-shaped tins, she started cutting the cord into eight-inch lengths.

  Jack stayed where he was by the pan. It was easier than following her all over the room. “‘Brief periods’ is a long way from ‘perfectly happy,’” he informed her, watching her faintly agitated motions.

  “Depends on your perspective. And, honest, I’m quite happy without that property.”

  “Have you considered what having it could mean?”

  The metallic clip of scissors met the faint exasperation in her tone. “Have you considered that I meant what I said?”

  “Have you always been so stubborn?” he countered.

  “No,” she admitted, still snipping lengths of cord. “I’m often worse.”

  “Emmy.” Striving for patience, he moved to the table, anyway. “You’re completely missing the bigger picture here. That property rightfully belongs to you. Just adding to the overall size of your acreage will increase the value of the land you already own.”

  “That’s just a number on paper.”

  “It’s an investment. And it wouldn’t just be a number. You’ll have more immediate income because you’ll have all those additional trees to tap. Your revenue would go up by a third.”

  “My immediate revenue wouldn’t go anywhere but down,” she informed him. “My father was tapping those trees with buckets. I can’t even afford to buy the reverse-osmosis machine I want, much less all the extra tubing and equipment it would take to gather sap from those trees the way I am from the rest of the sugar bush. Even if I had the extra money, I wouldn’t have time to do all that extra work.

  “Aside from that,” she continued, quietly strengthening her position, “if I accept that land, I’d just have to pay taxes on it, and that would only take away from my income, too.”

  She had considered far more than he’d thought. Certainly far more than he had.

  His brow pinched. “What’s a reverse-osmosis machine?”

  “Something that pulls water from the sap before it goes into the evaporator. Some of the new ones can cut boiling time by up to seventy-five percent.”

  “Then, lease out the land to one of the other sugar houses around here and let them boil that sap,” he suggested, surprised that she wasn’t seeing the obvious. “Or there’s the big factory in St. Johnsbury. Whoever leases it from you can tap the trees and sell the sap. Either way, you’d have the lease income to pay taxes and buy your machine.”

  For a moment the only sounds in the little building were the muffled roar and crackle of the fire and the tolerant snip of her scissors.

  “Edna Farber has a mule like you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m not the one being stubborn here.” She finally glanced up. “You’re actually beyond obstinate,” she concluded, studying him as if she’d never actually encountered a member of the human species quite so intractable. “You’re not even listening to me. What part of ‘I don’t want it’ do you not understand?”

  He couldn’t believe she’d just compared him to an old lady’s mule. She even managed to look utterly angelic while doing it.

  “If you don’t want it, then sell it.”

  “You sell it,” she countered before he could tell her she’d have a profit then, even after taxes. The man was beyond mulish. He was flat-out pigheaded. “I don’t want the bother.”

  It wasn’t just the inconvenience she didn’t want. She didn’t want anything to do with any money she might get from that land. No matter how it might be earned. She had no good feelings about the acreage that sat heavy with undergrowth just north of her modest twenty acres. Its loss had caused nothing but pain. She might have told him that, too, had she thought it would do any good. But he clearly wasn’t hearing her more practical arguments. Since he’d brought back memories enough, she wasn’t about to share an emotional one.

  Jack frowned at the knot of restrained auburn hair atop her head as she started cutting again. He had no idea how anyone who looked so sweet could be so frustrating. He was also fresh out of ideas that might make the land appeal to her. He hadn’t made it as far as he had by giving up in the face of a little resistance, however. Convinced there had to be some way to get her to take it, he was hoping whatever that way was would occur to him before she remembered the thermos when he noticed that a faint ticking sound had joined the crackle of the fire.

  In the lengthening silence, Emmy seemed to notice it, too. The sound grew louder, turning to a clatter on the roof, against the walls. Looking as if she hoped the sound wasn’t what she thought it was, she abandoned her task and hurried to the window by the door.

  Chapter Four

  The tug of apprehension Emmy felt when she opened the front door was familiar. So was the unwanted chill in her chest that had nothing to do with the blowing arctic air.

  The wind she’d heard whistling through the cracks of the uninsulated building carried bullets of sleet from the slate-gray sky. Those pellets of ice stuck to the snow, the branches of the trees and were, at that very moment forming a crystalline sheet over the landscape and the road
s.

  As she heard Jack walk up behind her, it occurred to her that a sheet of ice was also forming on the freezing metal and glass of his car.

  He must have realized that, too. He didn’t swear. But the exasperated breath he exhaled made it sound as if he wanted to.

  “I thought this wasn’t supposed to hit until tonight.”

  She turned at the deep rumble of his voice. As near as he was, she couldn’t see anything but a wall of charcoal-tweed sweater. Not needing anything else to unsettle her just then, she jerked her glance from his very solid-looking chest and turned back to close out the cold.

  Rudy had darted to the door at the turn of its knob. From the click of his toenails on the floor, it sounded as if he’d decided he wanted nothing to do with what he’d seen out there and retreated to the comfort of his bed.

  She envied her pet his oblivion. “That’s what I’d heard, too.”

  “Do you think this has already hit the pass south of here?”

  He needed to know if the pass was still open. Knowing an ice storm would close it, his question pulled her apprehension into focus.

  Wanting desperately to escape that feeling, she cut a wide berth around him. “I’ll check.”

  Steam and water vapor formed a billowy white blanket above the pan as she headed for her desk and dialed a number from a neatly typed list thumbtacked to a corkboard.

  Snow was simply a way of life from roughly November to May and it literally took a blizzard to slow her and her neighbors down. It was freezing rain that she hated. Snow rarely damaged. Heavy sleet nearly always did.

  She must not have been the only one calling the recording for the state Highway Department. The line was busy.

  She told Jack that as she hung up and reached toward the shelf above the desk. “I’ll try again in a minute. We might hear something on the radio.”

  Maple Mountain still only received one radio station. Jack swore it hadn’t updated its programming in the past fifteen years, either. As the low notes of something that sounded suspiciously like elevator music joined the staccato tap of ice on the roof, he stood at the window watching a coat of ice form over the blurry landscape.

  Moments ago he’d been thinking only of his frustration with Emmy’s inexplicable stubbornness. His only thought now was that his schedule was in serious danger of being totally screwed.

  His natural inclination to ignore what might slow him down locked firmly into place. He wasn’t gaining a thing standing there wondering how far he could drive before he found himself stranded somewhere else he did want to be. What he needed was solid information.

  “You have other things to do,” he said, heading for the phone. “I’ll try.”

  “The number for the Highway Department is third from the bottom on that list.”

  “Thanks,” he murmured, and was thinking he would just hit Redial when he found himself frowning at the antiquated black telephone he’d only now noticed. The Smithsonian-quality instrument made the several-year-old computer on her painfully neat desk look positively cutting edge.

  Picking up the heavy receiver, he stuck his finger in the rotary dial and placed his call. Except for the computer, the corkboard and the current calendar, it appeared she hadn’t spent a dime upgrading anything. Though everything she used to make syrup looked scrupulously clean, her sugaring equipment was old, too. But then, he thought, listening to the ringing on the line, she’d said herself that if she’d had money to spare, she would spend it on a labor-saving device.

  The recorded female voice on the other end of the line cut off his mental muttering. A minute later he slowly replaced the receiver.

  “The recording hasn’t been updated since this morning. The closures are all north and east of here.” The fact that there were closures at all wasn’t a good sign. “Do you know which way this thing is coming from?”

  Emmy had returned to cutting lengths of elastic thread. Though her focus stayed on her task, a new note of disquiet entered her tone. “Northeast.”

  That meant the pass to the south was probably still open, he thought and shoved up the sleeve of his sweater to glance at his watch.

  “It’s hard to outrun weather.”

  Wondering how she could possibly have known what he was thinking, he glanced back up.

  “As persistent as you seem to be,” she explained, as if she’d read that thought, too, “I figured you’d think about trying.”

  At least persistent sounded better than obstinate. “There’s nothing wrong with a little determination.”

  “As long as you don’t confuse it with foolishness.”

  Now he was foolish?

  “I have tire chains.”

  “They don’t do much good on ice.”

  “They’re better than nothing.”

  “And ‘better than nothing’ can be useless, too.” She looked as she sounded, totally torn between the need to offer the warning and knowing what his heeding it would mean. “When it gets like this, nothing helps.”

  As anxious as she seemed to be to get rid of him, the fact that she’d warned him at all stalled his request for sandbags or something to weigh down the back of his car for better traction. Conditions had to be fairly threatening for her to suggest that he delay his departure. That was exactly what she was doing, too. Telling him he really didn’t want to go.

  He moved toward the door but stopped at the window instead.

  He’d already known chains on ice were next to useless. He just didn’t want to concede the possibility that he could be stuck for another night. Yet, at the rate the ice was forming, if the road wasn’t already as slick as a skating rink, it would be before he made it the two miles into Maple Mountain. Even if he made it that far without sliding off the narrow and winding mountain road, it would take another couple of hours to reach the highway. Much of that drive was through more mountains on roads that had already been snow covered when he’d traveled them yesterday. With the bulk of the weather front still coming in, he had no idea where he would be when it did or if the highway farther south would be plowed and open when he got there.

  The wind shifted, driving pellets of ice harder against the building.

  He didn’t mind taking risks. A chance now and then was always good for an adrenaline rush. But his idea of a good time wasn’t spending the night in a ditch and running out of gas trying to stay warm, or plunging down a hill because he couldn’t see in a blizzard. He could barely see a few feet beyond the frosted corners of the glass as it was. Before long, he’d need an ice pick to get into his car.

  He lifted his hand, shoved his fingers through his hair.

  Watching his broad shoulders shift with the movement, Emmy suspected he was nearing the same disconcerting conclusion she’d reached herself.

  The thought that he might not be able to leave battled the awful and unwanted fear that he would. She would love nothing more than for him to go and take the memories he’d brought with him. But if he did, the old and lingering dread that clutched at her even now would only grip harder. At least it would until she knew he was safe. She didn’t know if he remembered the hazards of weather like this. But she was intimately familiar with just how dangerous the roads could be when ice slicked their surfaces. Especially on the curves. And the downhill grades. Her father had died on just such an afternoon.

  The nerves jumping in her stomach formed a neat little knot. She had thought more about her past since Jack had bought that land than she had in the past couple of years. Wanting to escape the thoughts he’d elicited now, she quickly opened a box of the product tags she ordered from a maple syrup supply house.

  “I have extra rooms,” she told him, thinking the least she could do was offer him the shelter she would have offered anyone else in such conditions. Trying to ignore how torn she was about him taking it, she poked an elastic thread through the hole on the little pamphlet of maple facts. “Charlie sometimes stays with me when we’re here late sugaring. And always when it’s late and the weathe
r turns. You’re welcome to stay, too.” Her voice dropped. “When it gets like this, none of the roads are safe.”

  Her offer made him glance back to her, but it was something in her voice that had caught Jack’s attention. The odd strain in it almost sounded like a plea. Yet, all he could see in her expression was the anxious pinch of her brow as she concentrated on her task.

  Considering who he was, he figured any anxiety he sensed in her was only there because she might be stuck with him. Despite her unexpected invitation, the physical distance she deliberately kept putting between them practically screamed of her unease with his presence.

  Wondering how much more distance she thought she could get without disappearing through the wall behind her, he clamped down the fierce frustration clawing at him and, with one more glance toward the window, caved in to the inevitable. Nearly an inch of ice already coated the sill. He might be a lot of things, but he was no fool.

  “Thanks,” he muttered. He’d have to get on the phone first thing in the morning and call the movers. And his landlady. And his secretary. “It looks like I’m going to have to take you up on that.”

  His stomach churned at the thought of all that had to be rescheduled. Knowing there wasn’t a thing he could do about any of it now, he did what he always did when the unforeseen messed with his priorities. He shifted to the next on the list. Or, as in this case, moved back to the one at the top.

  “What do you want me to do?” A while ago, he’d thought he had ten minutes to figure out what was going on with her and Maple Mountain. It now seemed he had all night. “Put in more wood?” he asked, taking off his jacket to hang by her coat. He nodded toward the table. “Or work on those?”

  Emmy couldn’t deny the relief she felt knowing she wouldn’t have to worry about him going off the road somewhere. That relief, however, got buried as she dropped her tag to the table.

  “I should have added wood ten minutes ago.” Talking more to herself than to him, she skirted the table, headed for the pan. “That sap will take forever to boil down.”

  She couldn’t believe how totally he’d distracted her. At least not until he stepped in front of her, blocking her path, and distracted her even more.