The Sugar House

by Christine Flynn

  Emmy felt Jack stop behind her in the doorway of the sugar house. They had shoveled the five-foot-high drifts of snow from the window and doors, including the big one they’d had to open to bring in more wood. They’d shoveled around the woodshed, too, and brought in another load of split logs by dragging a loaded skid with the snowmobile Jack had retrieved from her converted stable. The machine had bogged down a couple of times in the drifts and they’d had to dig it out, but using it to pull the skid had still been easier than carrying all that wood through the snow themselves.

  Everything was finally ready to start boiling. Would be when she started the fire, anyway. All she need was sap.

  “I just checked the tank again,” she replied. “There’s nothing there yet.”

  Still hoping for the best, trying not to fear the worst, she moved to the next task on her mental list. “I need to let Rudy out for a minute.” As much as her pet loved the outdoors, he didn’t do well in fresh snow as deep as he was tall. An Alaskan husky, he was not. “We can bring lunch back here.” Then, she thought, if there wasn’t something in the tank, she would start checking the lines.

  The small smile she gave Jack when she glanced up at him looked as distracted as he knew she was. She was worried. Worried and trying very hard not to let it show.

  He’d seen the way she’d looked at the trees as they’d shoveled, and how her glance kept straying up the hills and into the woods. Some of the waist-high plastic pipelines still hung above the snow. Other lines were buried in drifts of the deep white stuff. A few broken branches dangled here and there.

  Her eyes had met his when she’d first noticed those hints of larger damage, but she’d said nothing. Neither had he. They could only do one job at a time.

  “Maybe the ice is keeping the trees from warming.”

  “Maybe,” she murmured.

  With a small, hopeful smile, she stepped outside to clamp on the snowshoes she’d stuck tail-end in the snow. Closing the door behind him, Jack moved beside her and strapped on the teardrop-shaped footgear that kept him from sinking to his knees with every step.

  The fog of their breath trailed off in the crisp clean air as they started toward the house. Snow crunched beneath their feet, the only sound in the surrounding stillness. Since those unexpected moments in the hallway, a quiet sort of caution had slipped between them. It had been there as they’d dug and hauled. It lingered even now.

  From the corner of her eye, Emmy saw him reach down and scoop up a handful of snow. Straightening, he let it filter through his bare fingers. Once they’d been able to get into the sugar house, he’d worn Charlie’s old gloves from the woodpile while he’d worked. The leather was worn and uninsulated and would provide scant protection in real cold, but they were the only ones she had that were big enough for him to use.

  “I forgot what it’s like here after a storm.”

  She pulled her glance to the tracks they’d made in the snow that morning. He had good hands. Big. Strong. Capable. “It snows in the city.”

  “Not like this. It doesn’t look like this for long, either. What isn’t shoveled away, turns to a gritty slush along the curbs in a matter of hours.”

  “What about Central Park?” she asked, thinking of pictures she’d seen of its lawns and gardens. “Or Rockefeller Plaza?”

  “Maybe not there.” Tipping back his head, he looked up through the crystalline branches of the trees stretched across the azure sky. “But I’ve never been anywhere in a city where it’s this quiet.”

  There was a special quiet in the deep woods. A profound sort of silence that somehow made all other senses sharper, more acute. Especially after a new snow. Cold felt crisper. Eyes seemed to catch movements that might have gone unnoticed. The quick flash of a doe darting through the trees. A flurry of snow silently falling from a bough, unweighting it, springing it back in place. That quiet could be so intense that it absorbed any trace of sound around it. So quiet it even seemed to muffle anxious thoughts.

  The thought that Jack recalled that silence made her wonder if he might actually miss the place he’d left so long ago. Until just then, it hadn’t occurred to her that he might have any pleasant memories of Maple Mountain at all.

  “It’s always like this here,” she reminded him. “Even in the summer.”

  “Except for the birds.”

  “Did you like living here?” she asked, suddenly wanting to know. “Before, I mean.”

  A faint smile formed. “I was born here. What else did I know?”

  “Is that a yes or no?”

  Beneath his heavy parka, his broad shoulders lifted in a shrug. “There are a few things around here that I remember being pretty cool. Hanging out at the old mill. Skiing over at Hunter’s Hill. Swimming out at the lake.”

  “What about the quiet? Do you miss it?”

  He gave the matter a full six seconds’ worth of thought. “Sometimes. But after a while, I think all the stillness would drive me nuts. I like the energy of a city.” He brushed the remaining snow from his hands, wiped them against his jeans. “I like being close to restaurants and airports and in the middle of what’s going on.”

  Emmy lifted her chin in acknowledgment. She would like the energy of the city, too, she thought. She just couldn’t imagine living any way other than how she’d lived all of her life. She’d stopped trying to imagine when she was eighteen.

  As for the quiet, that hushed stillness slowly faded with the encroaching whine of a snowmobile engine.

  Two engines, Emmy realized as she and Jack emerged from the trees and the sounds grew louder.

  Within seconds the vehicles came into sight, their riders bundled in snowmobile suits and helmets with face shields that totally obscured their identity. Despite the camouflage, she easily recognized her company.

  From the sudden set to Jack’s jaw, it seemed he had no trouble identifying one of them, either. Watching the two low-slung vehicles, one blue, the other black and bearing the crest of the county Sheriff’s Department on its nose power toward them, he muttered a flat, “Great.”

  The roar of the machines all but drowned the terse sentiment, then eased off to a low, reverberating idle when both came to a stop ten feet ahead of where they’d stopped themselves. With the almost simultaneous turn of ignition keys, the engines died.

  Joe dismounted first. Wearing a brown uniform snowmobile suit with Sheriff’s Department insignia on the shoulder and his badge on his chest, he swung his leg over the seat like a ranger climbing off his horse. He’d no sooner removed his shiny helmet, than he bounced a glance of cautious censure between her and the man who’d just stopped at her side.

  “I thought you left,” he said to Jack. “Is everything okay here?” he immediately asked Emmy.

  Intent on defusing the quick snap of tension in the cold air, Emmy offered a quiet, “Everything is fine. It started sleeting before Jack could get out of here, so I offered him a room. How is everyone else doing?” she asked, genuinely concerned. “No one got caught in the storm, I hope.”

  Joe distractedly rubbed his jaw. “Haven’t been able to check on everybody yet. But so far, so good.”

  Relieved to hear that, she smiled past his shoulder. “Hi, Charlie,” she said as the rider in the navy snowmobile suit dismounted with a little less ease than his companion.

  Charlie Moorehouse removed his helmet to reveal a shock of silver hair and the full silver beard he grew every winter so he could play Santa at the community center. Grumpy as he’d grown to be in the past few years, his eyes still twinkled when he donned the red garb. He made an excellent Santa, too. He just required a lot of padding. The seventy-something ex-maple farmer was as tall and thin as a birch sapling.

  “Is your toe better?” she asked.

  Charlie was far from verbose. He also wasn’t given to snap decisions.

  “Uh,” he began, scratching his beard. “Yup,” he concluded, and sat himself sideways on the long black seat of his machine to hold up one foot. “Got a boot
on.”

  “Charlie said he checked on you yesterday morning.” His tone oddly accusing, Joe nodded toward the man who’d given him his scar. “You should have told him this guy was still here. We could have found a way to get him to the motel.”

  “I’m fine right where I am.”

  At Jack’s flat statement, Joe’s eyes narrowed. “I wasn’t thinking of your comfort, Travers. I was thinking of how awkward it must be for Emmy to have to put you up and feed you. After what your father did to her family, she shouldn’t have to—”

  “Don’t, Joe.” The warning in Emmy’s voice sounded suspiciously like the warning she’d heard in Jack’s tone yesterday when she stepped on that same sensitive ground. The fact that she spoke with warning at all had Joe and Jack both looking at her as if she’d just taken leave of her senses.

  Still sitting sideways on his snowmobile, Charlie merely arched a bushy gray eyebrow at them all.

  “Jack came to apologize for what his dad did,” she told the scowling deputy, “and to return the land his father sold.” It wasn’t like her to share her personal business. But Jack didn’t deserve the animosity Joe wasn’t bothering to temper. Just as he hadn’t deserved the coolness she’d first treated him with herself. “He isn’t Ed Travers. So, please stop treating him like he is.”

  The deputy’s square-jawed features folded into a deeper frown. She just wasn’t sure what that frown was for—that Jack’s purpose for darkening Maple Mountain’s figurative doorstep was possibly honorable or that she had just defended the man.

  From the low growl of his voice, she figured it was a little of both.

  “He and I have our own issues, Emmy.”

  “We only have one,” Jack muttered. “You’re pissed because I hit you.”

  “You’re damn right I am.”

  “Well, you’re just going to have to get over it. It was fifteen years ago.”

  “I don’t care how long ago it was, Travers. I don’t have to do anything where you’re concerned.”

  The way a muscle in Jack’s jaw twitched told Emmy he was getting a little fed up with Joe’s posturing. She could hardly blame him. Joe was acting like the adolescent he’d been when Jack had popped him.

  Both men were the size of small tanks. Neither looked ready to back down first. Not about to watch a reenactment of what had them both looking like snorting bulls, Emmy stepped between them.

  Tipping up her chin, she looked up at the sandy-haired man she knew could behave much better than he was acting now. “Why did he hit you, Joe?”

  “You know why he did,” he muttered. “Everybody does.”

  “Do they?”

  “Emmy.” She felt Jack’s hand on her shoulder, the pressure of it insistent as he tugged her back. “You don’t need to do this.”

  “Yes, I do.” Her voice was quiet, her tone utterly calm in her conviction. “What they believe about you isn’t fair.”

  Her eyes still on Joe, feeling Jack towering protectively behind her, she moved right back between them. “Is it, Joe?”

  The ex-football hero jerked his glance down to her. As if utterly certain of his response, he opened his mouth—and caught what he hadn’t heard in her soft query.

  There had been no uncharacteristic challenge in her voice, but he could apparently see it in her eyes as she stood her ground. In the time it took him to realize she no longer believed the story that Jack had been looking for a fight and that he’d just been in the way, the air filling Joe’s impressive chest escaped in a huff.

  His version wouldn’t stand up very well with the other participant right there to muddy it with the truth. And the truth, if it hadn’t been so long that he’d forgotten it, would hardly serve his purpose.

  Male pride allowed nothing but his terse, “He knows.”

  She had the sudden and certain feeling that Joe knew, too, but she’d just caught sight of Charlie frowning past them all.

  “You’re not boilin’, girl?”

  Squinting through his silver-rimmed bifocals, Charlie motioned toward the sugar house. Steam from evaporating sap and smoke from a fire in the arch would rise through the cupola in a thick, billowing plume of white. Smoke from a wood fire alone looked threadier and gray.

  He saw neither.

  “We stopped by the Bruner place on the way over,” he told her. “Tom’s been chippin’ ice off bucket lids all mornin’, but his sap’s been runnin’ since noon.”

  Any thought of continuing to play referee vanished before she could consider why Joe’s jaw was working like a grindstone. Ever since the sleet had begun falling, she had quietly feared what it seemed Charlie had just confirmed. Heavy ice broke branches. Broken branches could take out lines in the sugar bush.

  Broken lines meant sap from that section couldn’t reach the tank.

  A broken main line meant nothing reached the tank at all.

  “I have lines down.”

  Her uneasy conclusion met with the feel of Jack’s hand at the small of her back. That small show of support drew her glance to his.

  He had known what she feared. “We need to get moving,” he said.

  Aware of Joe watching them, she jerked her glance to where Charlie had just clipped his helmet to the side of his snowmobile. Unsnapping a leather side bag, the older man pulled out a stocking cap, yanked it over his head and reached for the snowshoes strapped across the back of the seat.

  “Got us a bit of work,” he concluded in his decidedly understated way.

  “You’re staying?” Jack asked.

  Charlie gave a snort. “’Course I am. I came to sugar. Can’t do that till the lines’re fixed.” He clamped on his snowshoes, tested the one on his left foot by bouncing on it a little. “There’s sap drippin’ into the snow out there.”

  Ignoring Joe, who’d picked up his helmet from his vehicle’s seat, Jack turned toward the house. “I’m going to let Rudy out for a minute,” he told her. “I’ll be right back.”

  Even as he spoke the deputy climbed back on his snowmobile. “The phone line is down north of Doc Reid’s place.” Skepticism, speculation and reproach etched his craggy features. So did a hint of what looked like disbelief at her disloyalty—or, maybe, it was discomfort—before he jerked that glance away. “There are a few other people I need to go check on.”

  Without another word, he pulled on his helmet, started the engine with a subdued roar. Had he not just made conversation impossible, she would have told him she didn’t care what he’d done as a kid. Heaven knew there wasn’t a person on the planet whose judgment had been all that stellar at seventeen. It was just time to end the talk that never seemed to go away about the Larkins, and stop fueling the rumors about Jack that he’d helped fabricate. The rumors he might well have come to accept as fact himself. For a while, anyway.

  She would have thanked him for coming, too. Living alone, she truly appreciated that he checked up on her the way he did everyone else. She was more concerned at the moment, though, with knowing he didn’t appreciate the way she’d defended the man everyone expected her to hate.

  She wasn’t totally sure how she felt about that herself. She hadn’t thought twice about doing what she’d done. And that wasn’t like her at all.

  Chapter Eight

  “Ya know, Emmy. Since we won’t be sugarin’ tonight, I think I’d best be headin’ home. It’s nearin’ dark and these ol’ eyes don’t see so good with the puny light on that snow machine.”

  Adding another broken branch to the growing pile, Jack saw Emmy look up from where she’d just dug away snow from a line. Her preoccupation immediately faded to chagrin.

  “Oh, Charlie,” she murmured, absently edging back her fleece headband with her forearm. “I didn’t realize it was getting so late. Will you be okay going home?”

  “’Course I will. Still got me a bit of daylight.” He flipped up the collar of his insulated suit. “I’ll be back after daybreak.

  “You be careful.”

  “Always am, girl.”
>
  A rueful smile touched Emmy’s mouth. “No, you’re not.”

  Jack couldn’t hear what Charlie muttered back before the old guy turned and lifted a hand in his direction.

  Jack waved back, only to see Charlie frown as he brought himself to a stop, then headed toward him.

  The old guy hadn’t said much to him as they’d worked all afternoon. Other than to help Charlie haul a couple of the heavier branches from broken lines so he wouldn’t hurt himself, they hadn’t even worked together.

  Beneath the man’s navy stocking cap, his nose and cheeks were cherry red with cold. Nearly hidden by his mustache and beard, his mouth pressed in an upside-down U. His frown seemed to fill his whole face. The problem was that Jack couldn’t tell if he was just thinking, if his toe was bothering him or if the man was finally about to say something he didn’t want to hear about his transgressions or his father’s. A scowl seemed to be pretty much his normal expression.

  Hands on his hips, Charlie peered at him through the top half of his bifocals.

  “Did I hear Emmy tell Joe you’ve come to give back that property?”

  Being a little hard of hearing, it seemed he wanted to get his facts straight before heading home.

  “Yeah, Charlie,” he replied, wondering why he hadn’t posed his question to Emmy.

  “Mind if I ask why you made the trip instead of Ed?”

  Because my father would never have done it, he could have said. “Because he’s dead.”

  Charlie gave a slow, thoughtful, nod. “That condition would prevent the trip.”

  His mouth formed that upside-down U again. For a moment, anyway.

  “I recall you used to work here for Emmy’s dad.”

  It seemed he expected some sort of reply to the statement. Deciding his expression looked more thoughtful than perturbed, Jack gave him a nod of his own.

  “Thought so. Explains why you knew to plug off the tap lines soon as you found a break.” He lifted a gloved hand toward the broken tubing lying in the snow. “You’re good help…for someone living down country.”

  Having said what he’d come to say, he finished with a terse little nod. Even qualified as they were, his words were high praise from a man who was probably as stingy with his compliments as he was with his smiles.