The Sugar House

by Christine Flynn

  The guilt he’d carried about her before had been because of his father’s actions. If she was hurt now, it would be his fault. He would leave Maple Mountain as soon as the roads were passable, and the last thing he wanted to do was take advantage of her. She’d been through enough because of a Travers without having her think he’d used her somehow.

  He slipped a little lower on the sofa, tightened his arms a little more around her. “Comfortable?” he asked.

  Her quiet “Very” sounded almost like a sigh.

  “Good,” he murmured, and contented himself to do nothing other than hold her. It was what she had seemed to need that morning, anyway, before her scent and her softness had hooked him and she’d played utter havoc with his libido. With the quiet surrounding them, the fatigue of the day seeping into his bones, just holding her for her sake didn’t seem like such a difficult thing to do.

  Emmy had thermoses of coffee and cocoa filled and tuna sandwiches packed in the backpack when Charlie arrived an hour after the sun rose the next morning.

  She had been up earlier than usual, anxious to get started on the long day ahead. Anticipation at the thought of being with Jack had prodded her, too. She’d almost fallen asleep in his arms last night. She probably would have, had he not finally tugged her to her feet, helped her with the dishes, then taken her by the shoulders and aimed her for her bedroom.

  He had freely offered the comfort of his arms. Yet, he had made no attempt at all to repeat what had happened in the hallway. With everything else on her mind that morning, she wouldn’t let herself question what was going on with him, any more than she would allow herself to question why she had so easily allowed his touch. She simply accepted it as the gift it seemed to be, and tried hard to tell herself that what she felt most toward him was simply gratitude for his help.

  “Got it,” he said, grabbing the backpack when she reached for it and headed out the mudroom door with his snowshoes in his other hand.

  Giving Rudy instructions to be a good boy, along with an extra treat because he’d have to stay in alone again today, she grabbed her own gear and a black knit cap for Jack to wear. Heading out behind him, she saw Charlie hand him warm gloves and a pair of navy waterproof pants to pull on over his jeans.

  Jack smiled at the unexpected thoughtfulness. “Hey, Charlie, thanks.”

  Charlie’s only reply was a typically gruff, “Emmy said you needed ’em” before he said, “Mornin’,” to her and they headed for the woods.

  “Before I forget,” Charlie said, as if forgetting were a distinct possibility at his age, “Joe came by on his way to west county. He didn’t get a chance to check on folk there yesterday, and comin’ here wasn’t on his way.

  “Anyways, Jack,” he continued, rubbing his nose with the back of his glove, “he wanted me to tell you that Joanna over at the post office is a notary. He heard you’re lookin’ for one. Said, too, to tell you that if you’re needin’ a phone, the one at the general store is still workin’. He thought you might have business that needs takin’ care of, bein’ the plows won’t get the road to the highway open till tomorrow or day after.”

  Jack glanced to where the older man followed him a few steps back. Charlie had almost said more in the last minute than he had all of yesterday afternoon.

  If Charlie found anything unusual about Joe’s message it wasn’t evident in his wizened features. Emmy seemed to catch some significance to it, though. Her glance had darted to his, then away, as if what she’d just heard wasn’t necessarily good news.

  Jack wasn’t quite sure how to take it, either. His inquiries at the motel and the store about a notary had obviously made their way to Joe. Since the guy knew he wanted to give the property back, he’d obviously figured out that the transferring document needed to be notarized. Jack could understand that Joe would want to help him convey the property to Emmy for her sake, but for Joe to have considered his business concerns and send word of a working phone made it almost seem as if he were offering some sort of truce.

  From the moment his old teammate had first resurrected the bitterness between them, Jack hadn’t thought it possible to put the old grudge to rest. For either of them. With that small capitulation on Joe’s part, thanks to Emmy, it didn’t seem so hopeless after all.

  “Thanks, Charlie,” he finally said, and dropped back to walk with the woman studiously avoiding his eyes.

  He figured Charlie’s mention of the notary had her thinking he would start pushing her again about the property. He wasn’t about to mention it now, though. She had too much else to deal with. So did he.

  “Mind if I borrow your snowmobile?”

  “The key’s in the ignition.”

  “Thanks. I’m going to go use the phone at the store. I shouldn’t be gone long.” He fell back a step, his glance now on her back. “What do you want me to pick up while I’m there?”

  “Bread. And milk,” she called back, and tried very hard not to think about what Charlie had said about the road to the highway being open tomorrow.

  Jack had no idea how a plow could clear the road all the way from the highway, through Maple Mountain and out to Emmy’s house by morning—unless all the major roads in the county had been cleared yesterday and the plows were now being sent to less populated places. He remembered from having grown up here that it had sometimes been days before a plow came through after a big storm.

  Wondering if he could find out how far away the plow was for certain, he tramped through the snow and up the general store’s shoveled steps. He was knocking snow from his boots when the squeaky screen door opened. Grabbing it, he held it for a pretty young woman he didn’t recognize, but who smiled at him anyway.

  “Say hi to Dr. Reid for me, Jenny,” came Agnes’s hollered request from inside. “And you be careful out there in the snow. You don’t need to be fallin’ in your condition!”

  “He says hi back. And I’ll be careful,” called the woman who barely looked pregnant at all in her short ski jacket. Carrying a bag of groceries, she carefully made her way between the berms of snow lining the path that had been shoveled the length of Main.

  Jack was watching her go, and wondering at the mini population boom in Maple Mountain, since Joe’s wife apparently was pregnant, too, when he heard Agnes holler again.

  “I’m not heating the great outdoors. Come on in and close the door before it’s warmer out there than it is in here.”

  The admonishment had a friendly edge to it. One that Jack had a feeling would fade as soon as Agnes saw who it was letting out the heat blazing from the old potbellied stove.

  Remembering his last reception there made his smile feel a little strained.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Waters.”

  Agnes stood on the far side of the counter, stacking boxed candles on its scratched surface. Two other women stood back by the dairy case. The electricity was on here, he noticed, but Agnes had obviously had a run on candles and lamp oil from those who weren’t so fortunate. Only three bottles of oil remained in the nearly empty box beside her.

  What he noticed most was the way Agnes’s smile faltered.

  “Mornin’, Jack,” she allowed, though what he saw wasn’t the disapproval she’d treated him with before. As she brought a little of that smile back, her rounded features held something that looked more like curiosity, along with a hint of embarrassment. “Joe said you might be stoppin’ by.”

  So that was the reason for the attitude shift, he thought. Joe had passed on his purpose for being there. The woman with the birds appliquéd to her sweatshirt, quail this time, knew he wasn’t building condos after all.

  “I understand your phone works.”

  “It does.”

  “Mind if I use it? I’ll put everything on my calling card.”

  The women by the dairy case, one in a purple stocking cap who looked vaguely familiar, the other in pink who looked as if she might be her daughter, already had their heads together. They whispered as they watched him, then hurriedly
looked away when they realized he’d noticed them talking.

  “That’d be just fine,” Agnes replied. “That phone line north of town seems to be the first to go down whenever we get ice. Don’t know what the problem is,” she continued, sounding strangely friendly as she motioned him to follow her. “What I do know is that the phone company won’t be here to fix it till the road gets plowed.”

  “Any idea when that will be?”

  “I hear from Joe that the plow’s due in here tonight. The driver stays over at the motel, then heads up north from here.”

  She led him along the wall of ice fishing gear to the back of the store and through a door that opened into her stockroom. “You’ll have more privacy if you use the phone in here,” she confided, flipping on the light to indicate a small desk littered with invoices. “People keep comin’ and goin’ out front.”

  Even as she spoke, the bell over the door gave its cheery little tinkle.

  “Thanks,” he murmured as she turned away. “And when you see Joe thank him, too.”

  “I’ll do that,” she assured him, and headed off to see who’d just come in.

  The women out front were already talking when he closed the door on the low drone of chatter and picked up the phone.

  He called his new office first to get an update on the situation there, only to learn that the edge of the storm had moved as far south as Boston and that the New York office had actually closed early yesterday afternoon. Since he hadn’t been the only one to suffer because of weather, it was much easier to reschedule everything for the following week, which would leave him with the schedule from hell, but he was accustomed to that.

  He then called his old landlady to make sure his possessions had been packed and shipped, only to learn that the weather had delayed that, too. The movers were now due to arrive today. That information necessitated a call back to his new assistant to coordinate the details with the moving company and his new landlord.

  Because he was anxious to get back to the sugar bush, not bothering to question why, he made the call to his mom as short as possible.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” he assured her, when Ruth Travers asked the first thing she always did when she heard his voice. “I’m still in Maple Mountain. I’ll give you the details later about the Larkins,” he promised, certain his location alone had raised a dozen questions. “There’s just something I need to know. Who was it Stan was involved with?”

  Aware that he might be heard by anyone on the other side of the door, Jack stayed away from it and kept his voice low. It just never occurred to him as his mom told him everything she could recall, that Agnes had picked up the phone by the cash register to see if he was still on the line—and that she was now listening to everything they said.

  Chapter Nine

  Wildfire didn’t spread as fast as gossip in Maple Mountain. Even with only half the telephones in the area working, news that the Traverses claimed Stan Larkins had cheated on his wife and had an illegitimate child made it through the core of the community and out to Emmy’s place by midafternoon.

  That was when Charlie’s wife, Mary, arrived on her son’s snowmobile, and gave the two sets of three short horn blasts that was their signal when Charlie and Emmy were working in the sugar bush.

  Hearing the distant beeps, Emmy left the men where they were running a new line and headed down to meet her. Charlie had told her earlier that Mary planned to bring over a casserole for Emmy and Jack’s supper. The dear lady often sent meals for her and Charlie when the two of them were up late sugaring. Mary also usually left whatever it was she brought in the mudroom or brought it to the sugar house. The fact that she’d used their signal meant she wanted something other than to simply drop off the much-appreciated meal.

  With a smile for her nearest neighbor, Emmy emerged from the woods and waved at the woman in bright blue wading through the snow toward her. The curls around the edges of her cap were as white as the ground, her cheeks pink from her ride over on the snowmobile she drove with the abandon of a teenager.

  Natives of the north country tended to be of hearty, headstrong stock.

  “Afternoon, dear,” she said, motioning toward the house. “I set a cooler with a casserole and an apple crumb cake inside your mudroom. Closed the door to the kitchen,” she added, “so Rudy wouldn’t get to sniffin’ around and try to help himself to chicken and vegetables.”

  “Crumb cake, too?” Emmy’s smile grew. “Thank you, Mary.”

  Raising a mittened hand, she waved off the thanks as if her generosity were nothing. “You know you’re more than welcome. Cake dips a bit in the center, but I think it’ll taste okay. Can’t get that old wood oven of my son’s to keep a steady temperature the way you can an electric range. But their generator only runs the fridge and the furnace, so what can you do?”

  “I’m sure it’ll be wonderful.”

  The compliment should have met with a smile. And it did. In a way. It was just that the usual brightness was missing from it. That brightness had also faded from her keen hazel eyes.

  “I had to go to Waters’s store for brown sugar for the cake,” she prefaced. “Heard somethin’ there you might be needin’ to know. Leastwise before you hear it from someone else.”

  The quick caution in the woman’s expression blended with a heavy hint of apology. That same apology seemed to shadow her tone.

  “Agnes told me and Claire that Jack Travers came in this morning to use the phone. She had him use the one in the storeroom to give him privacy, and picked up the other one after a while to see if he was still on it.

  “Seems he was,” she concluded. “Agnes says she heard him talkin’ to his mom about your dad having been…in-discreet,” she decided to call it, since she wasn’t the sort to sensationalize details herself. “She seemed to think you knew what he was sayin’ because he mentioned to his mom that you’d had questions.”

  Even as Mary spoke, Emmy felt her heart sink. If Agnes had told Mary and Claire McGraw, who happened to be the biggest gossip around, then she had shared what she’d overheard with everyone who’d walked into the store.

  Mary’s concerned deepened. “You did know he was sayin’ it, didn’t you, Emmy?”

  Pushing back the hair the breeze blew past the headband covering her ears, Emmy nodded. “I’d asked him to get more information from his mom,” she allowed. Her tone fell. “The grapevine has to be on overload by now.”

  “I’d imagine.”

  At the woman’s rueful comment, Emmy blew a long low breath.

  “Thank you, Mary,” she said, because she truly did appreciate what the woman had just done. Charlie’s wife wasn’t asking questions herself. She wasn’t judging, offering her opinion or hinting around to find out how Emmy felt about her father supposedly having another child, or how she felt about Jack and his mother for believing such a thing. The kindly woman who’d once told her how much it meant to her to have her husband doing something he loved, had simply come to warn her—and give her time to react to the news before she found herself confronted by less-sensitive souls.

  As it was, Emmy had about fifteen seconds before a high-pitched “Oh, Emmy!” pierced the lovely afternoon quiet.

  Realizing who it was chugging up her driveway, it was all she could do not to close her eyes and groan. Bertie Buell, the fog of her breath puffing like a locomotive and bearing down with about as much speed, plowed toward them on snowshoes and swinging ski poles to make her rangy frame move as fast as it could go.

  “I’m glad you’re out here,” she called as she drew closer, then stopped to pull the cap off her flyaway salt-and-pepper hair now that she’d worked herself into a sweat. Making a two-mile trek from town wasn’t extraordinary for Bertie. It was something the lean, leathery woman might have done just for the exercise on any other day. Today, however, it appeared that an invigorating workout was the last thing on her narrow little mind. “Didn’t want to have to holler all over the woods lookin’ for him.”

  She fina
lly glanced to the woman she served with on the community women’s league and church board. “Afternoon, Mary.”

  “Bertie,” Mary said, and looked back to Emmy as if to apologize for not having given her more lead time.

  “Him?” Emmy asked.

  “That Travers boy. Where is he?”

  Not at all sure what the woman’s problem was, Emmy motioned vaguely behind her. “He’s working in the sugar bush with Charlie.”

  “Well, I imagine you can’t get rid of him soon enough. But I got a thing or two I need to say to him before you do. I can see where you’d want to wait until you get your papers signed on that property before you run him off, and I’m glad you’re making him work off his room and board, but I don’t know how you can be civil to him starting such rumors. If he was trying to clear his father’s name by giving back that land, he did a lousy job of it. Slandering a man is even worse than stealing his land.”

  Bertie practically vibrated with indignation. But then, being indignant was pretty much the prudish and opinionated woman’s natural state. She wasn’t happy unless she was in a huff, and she could get herself in a huff over just about anything. The problem was that she saw everything as either black or white—and wouldn’t recognize a shade of gray if she painted her house with it.

  The bigger problem was that she appeared to see herself as Emmy’s champion. She also had far less information than Emmy did and none of the reluctant perspectives Emmy had forced herself to realize.

  “Jack didn’t come back here to start rumors, Bertie. And it’s only slander if it’s not true.”

  Incredulity washed the woman’s thin face. “You’re not saying you believe him, are you?”

  “I don’t believe he’s making this up as he goes, if that’s what you mean. His mother, either,” she said, thinking of how Ruth Travers had sent her apologies back with Jack for not having more information to give her. All she’d recalled was that the woman had been a young widow over in West Pond, and that she had apparently moved to Montpelier sometime before the child was born.