Лори Касс - Pouncing On Murder

“Adam who?”

I started to explain the relationship between Henry and Adam, but before I got all the way through, she was shaking her head again.

“Last couple of years, I never saw Henry sitting with anybody other than you,” she said.

Which pretty much destroyed the Round Table theory I’d proposed to Detective Inwood the day before. “Well,” I said, sighing, “after what happened to Adam, I was just wondering, that’s all.”

“What do you mean?”

And that was when I remembered that Sabrina never read the local paper. She didn’t need to, she’d said time and time again. “Right here is where I get all the news I need, and a lot that I don’t.” But since Adam was new to the area and lived out of town, he wasn’t yet connected to the town’s talk.

I told Sabrina about Adam’s near miss with the car and she was appropriately shocked. “That’s Irene’s husband, right?” Because, since Irene worked in Chilson for her regular job as a bank’s loan officer, she was connected to the town.

Nodding, I almost started talking about the oddness of Henry’s being killed by a tree one week and, less than two weeks later, the guy who’d been with Henry that day being almost killed by a car. But then I remembered where I was and to whom I was talking. There was a time and a place to encourage the spread of rumors, but this wasn’t it. Not yet, anyway.

A bell rang in the kitchen. “Order’s up,” Sabrina said. “Got to go.”

I wrapped my hands around the warmth of my mug and opened the book I’d brought to read, but even Louise Penny’s evocative prose couldn’t keep me from thinking about Henry and Adam and what might really have happened that day out in the woods.

Chapter 8

Up above me, trees were just starting to bud. Tiny bits of color showed at the ends of thousands of branches, and if I squinted, the entire forest canopy fuzzed out to a light green, the color of spring.

I tried not to think that, downstate, spring had sprung almost three weeks ago and that it was still possible, up here, to get another snowfall. Late springs were a hazard of Up North life, and it didn’t do to whine about the situation, since we were all in the same metaphorical boat. And at least it was sunny and warm. Well, nearly warm.

My hands, encased in warm wool gloves, were shoved into my coat pockets, and my feet were inside high hiking boots. I’d stuffed a fleece hat onto my head, knowing my obstreperous curls would be escaping all around in an unattractive manner, but I didn’t expect to run into anyone out here at Henry’s.

It had been while I was swiping the last piece of my Round Table sausage in the last of the maple syrup that the idea to come out to Henry’s house had popped into my head. Maybe I wouldn’t find anything, probably I wouldn’t, but how could it hurt to have another pair of eyes taking a look at the place where he’d died?

Besides, it was a glorious April day and I wasn’t scheduled to work. If I didn’t go somewhere and do something, it was likely that I’d end up in my office, and all work and no play might make Minnie a miserable mess.

“ M words,” I said out loud, and shook my head at myself. Barb and Cade had infected me with their word game and I had the feeling it was a permanent contamination.

I studied Henry’s house. The curtains on the two-story home of fieldstone and white clapboard were drawn tight and it had that forlorn look houses get when they’re not being lived in. In my fanciful moments, of which I had many, I was sure that houses could feel the difference between their people being on vacation and never coming back.

This house knew. And Henry’s front door? It knew for sure.

Turning away, I hoped I’d remember to never say any of that out loud to anyone, because I’d get a patient nod and, soon afterward, concerned phone calls about my well-being would be exchanged.

I looked up the hill. Somewhere up there was Henry’s sugar shack. Which meant there had to be a trail, because there would be a lot of traipsing back and forth. I wandered around the yard for bit and found a narrow path by the back of the garage.

The winding way took me up the hill by a circuitous route, around this big tree and that big tree, and it wasn’t until I noticed a dribble of damp coming out of a small hole in a tree trunk that I realized I was following in Henry’s ghostly footsteps.

I stopped and fingered one of the holes, which were smaller than the diameter of my finger and about four feet off the ground. In the cold of February, Henry had drilled those holes, inserted a small metal spigotlike thing, hung a bucket on the spigot, and waited for the weather to warm. When the sap started to drip, he’d lugged pails from tree to tree, emptying the tree buckets into the bigger pails and hauling it all to storage vats.

I laid my gloved hand over the hole and wished for things to be different. Henry shouldn’t be dead. Adam shouldn’t have had to watch a friend die to learn that he himself had a heart condition. And Irene shouldn’t have to be so worried about her husband and their finances.

“It’s not right,” I told the tree, and I was pretty sure it agreed. Or at least it didn’t disagree, and that was almost the same thing. I gave the tree a pat and went back to walking the trail.

Around more trees I went, and next to a creek. Then the trail turned steep, and when I was almost out of breath, it went flat again, and that was when I saw the sugar shack.

I’d somehow thought the term was more traditional than accurate. That the word “shack” was a holdover from the old days, and that the locations for cooking maple syrup were, in fact, brightly lit structures of modern construction.

Not so. At least not here at Henry’s.

I eyed the cobbled-together conglomeration of wood siding, vinyl siding, and aluminum siding and stopped wondering why the sugar shack was so far from the house. Henry had, for a long time, been married to someone who everyone said was a lovely woman, and no lovely woman I’d ever met would have allowed something like Henry’s shack within sight of the kitchen window.

“Score one for Mrs. Gill,” I said, and wished I’d had the chance to meet her. And to meet Henry when she’d been alive.

More wishes.

I walked to the front door—the only door—of the shack. There was no knob, just a latch. I opened it and went inside.

And promptly came back out again. I pulled my cell phone out of my coat pocket and fired up the flashlight application. It wouldn’t light very much for very long, but any light would make that darkness more friendly.

The dim light played over what little was in the shack. A vast rectangular pan sat atop a homemade arrangement of bricks and blocks, filling most of the space. At the pan’s far end was a metal chimney that rose to the roof. In one corner lay a neat stack of split wood, two corners had uncomfortable-looking stools tucked into them, and a cluster of tools occupied the fourth corner.

It could have been a scene from fifty years ago. A hundred years ago, even, if you forgot about the vinyl and aluminum siding outside.

I danced the light on the walls, ceiling, and dirt floor, and saw nothing except for a few spiderwebs. There was very little dust and dirt, which was good for a place where food was cooked, but surprising for a shack in the middle of the woods. The darkness seemed odd, but I supposed once the fire underneath the pan got going, there’d be light enough to work.

I stood there for a moment, imagining Henry sitting on a stool, the room warm from the heat of the fire, his coat hanging on a nail, getting up to pour sap into the pan, then sitting back down and picking up the library book he’d laid down, turning pages and reading from the light cast by the fire’s glow.