The Sugar House Read online

  It was as apparent to Emmy as the muscle jerking in Jack’s jaw that he resented the blame heaped on his father. Blame that had hung in the periphery of her own mind, and much of it unjust were she to believe what he’d just claimed.

  Caught in a confusion of emotions she could barely begin to identify, she didn’t feel at all inclined to forgive his father anything. Or Jack, for that matter. He wasn’t the only one feeling offended. Aside from his impossible assertions, she very much resented his suggestion that she had somehow deluded herself all those years. He’d just implied that all she’d accepted as true had been nothing but illusion and lies.

  She didn’t believe him. Couldn’t. But the last thing she wanted to do was deal with the latest developments from their fathers’ actions in front of the man who’d just dumped them on her.

  “I’m sure I never heard anything about it because it’s not true,” she insisted. She’d never understood why in less civilized times it often had been the messenger who’d been shot for delivering bad or questionable news. She now understood completely. “I really wish you had never come here, Jack. I wish you had just forgotten we even existed and kept your guilty conscience to yourself.”

  She saw a muscle in his jaw twitch a moment before she turned to snatch up her sandpaper. “There’s a bottle of oil in the lower right cabinet in the mudroom. Matches are to the left of the sink.”

  The tension in the house became as thick as the blowing snow. Emmy managed to avoid Jack and the worst of it by digging out a box of old correspondence her mother had kept beneath the stairwell and closing herself in her bedroom at the end of the downstairs hall. Sitting on her white quilt-covered bed, she tore through those cards and letters by the light of the oil lamp she’d brought in last night and a high-powered flashlight looking for something—anything—that might verify his claim.

  That was where she stayed until an hour later when she heard Jack, who had exiled himself in the kitchen, head upstairs, and the creak of the floorboards that told her he was in his room.

  Rudy started pawing at her door to get out. Cold, because the closed door had blocked the minimal traces of heat in the hall, and knowing Rudy needed his supper, she hurried into the kitchen with her flashlight to fill his dish and set out some bread and a bowl of soup for the man who was probably now prowling his room like a caged panther. Every animal deserved to be fed.

  She frowned at herself. She didn’t want to think about Jack. She didn’t want to do anything but prove to herself that he was wrong.

  Fueled by that desire, she added more fuel to the woodstove and fireplace and let Jack know dinner was ready by knocking beside his partially open door. She didn’t get close enough to see inside the dimly lit room. Nor did she wait for him to answer. She simply told him from the safety of that distance to help himself to the soup on the woodstove and to just leave his dishes in the sink. She was going to bed now.

  She didn’t go to bed, though. Having found nothing helpful in the box of letters, she quickly followed the beam of her flashlight into the dining room, pulled the old family Bible off one of the shelves of books lining the walls and took it to her room to search the entries her grandmother and her mother had made of births, marriages, confirmations and deaths. She went through the thick volume page by page, looking for a letter, a note, a date, a name.

  She found nothing. So an hour later, after hearing the creak of boards above her that told her Jack had returned to his room, she quietly dragged out a trunk of her parents’ memorabilia from under the stairwell.

  For the next four hours she sat on the narrow hallway floor with Rudy curled up beside her, sharing his warmth, going through every letter, note, album and photograph by the light of the oil lamp she’d set above her on the small hallway table and the flashlight.

  The pictures were the hardest. She hadn’t seen any of them in years, and many brought memories that now seemed terribly bittersweet. Pictures of birthdays, Christmases, sledding and summer picnics. Picking berries by the creek. Riding Chaps. Yet what struck her most about those family photos was that her parents had looked so incredibly young in them—and that there were no pictures at all of the time after the property had been sold.

  After finding nothing in the trunk, she took her flashlight back into the closet and brought out a box holding several years’ worth of household bill receipts.

  She found nothing there, either. Nor did she find anything in a box of old ledgers her father had kept. But by then her eyes had grown tired of reading in the eye-straining light, and she wasn’t sure if she felt disappointed or relieved that she hadn’t found anything the least incriminating.

  Since she hadn’t expected to find anything, she knew she should have felt nothing other than totally vindicated. Yet, as she left everything scattered on the floor and took the lamp into her room with Rudy on her heels, she couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe all had not been as it had seemed. She’d found no evidence, but something Jack had said kept nagging at the core of her knee-jerk denial.

  He had claimed that his mother had no reason not to tell him the truth. Considering that the woman knew her son’s intent was to apologize and return the property, and that she’d believed at the time that her parents were still alive, making up such a thing would have made no sense at all.

  The more Emmy thought about it as she hurried about in the chill of her room to ready herself for bed, and the more she tried to make herself remember, the more she realized that her mother had actually never said a word against either Ruth or Ed Travers. Nothing Emmy could recall hearing, anyway. Her mom had actually been strangely silent about them, except to say when she heard talk that she really wished everyone would mind their own business.

  Leaving her door open to allow in the lingering heat from the other rooms, Emmy crawled under her thick quilts in her socks and thermal pajamas and blew out the lamp on her nightstand. Even as she did, she couldn’t help but wonder if her mother’s silence had actually been her way of defending the Traverses because they’d kept talk from becoming so much worse.

  That same disquieting thought accompanied Emmy as she walked past her little mess in the hall the next morning. As soon she had some caffeine in her system to make up for her restless sleep, she would go through the boxes under the stairwell that she hadn’t gone through last night.

  Or so she was thinking when she walked into the kitchen intending to stoke the fire and start the coffee.

  The room already felt toasty warm. Coffee perked away on the woodstove.

  Jack was obviously up. He’d even done his laundry—last night before he’d gone upstairs the second time it seemed, judging from the pristine white undershirt and gray cotton turtleneck hanging over a chair by the stove. Both looked dry.

  She could only assume that he was wearing whatever else he’d washed.

  He wasn’t in the kitchen. Neither was Rudy.

  She’d just wondered if they’d gone upstairs when she noticed the door of the mudroom ajar. Seeing that Jack’s boots and jacket were missing, she pulled open the back door and promptly shielded her eyes at the brightness of blinding white snow and brilliant blue sky.

  Through the insulating glass of the storm door, her narrowed glance landed on Jack’s broad back. He had already shoveled off the porch. Now he was working on the steps.

  Her first thought was that he obviously couldn’t wait to get out of there, though he was going to need snowshoes to do it. The snow piled on either side of the porch looked two feet deeper than it had been before. What occurred to her next was that Rudy wasn’t pawing at the back door to answer nature’s morning call because he was already out there with Jack.

  Turning from the view of her dog contentedly watching his new friend scoop and toss snow like a man on a mission, she shoved back her hair and headed for the sink. The thought that she’d do the dishes he’d left there last night died when she saw that they had already been done.

  It appeared that Jack had been up for quite a while.


  It also seemed that he felt as guarded as she must have looked when he and Rudy walked in a minute later.

  She had set a pot of water on to boil for oatmeal and poured herself a mug of steaming coffee when she heard his heavy footsteps go silent in the mudroom.

  He was watching her. She could feel it even before she turned to see his glance run from the hair she hadn’t bothered to restrain, over the shape of her face, her mouth, and settle on the pink fleece pullover she wore with her jeans and long silk underwear. Before she could do much more than note the sudden tightness of his jaw, he looked away to hang his parka on the hook and knock the snow from the bottom of his heavy boots.

  The cold had turned his skin ruddy. Nighttime stubble shadowed his jaw. He looked more rugged than she’d seen him before, tougher in a decidedly masculine sort of way.

  Clutching her mug where she stood absorbing warmth from the woodstove, she watched him move toward her. The blue of his eyes seemed as intense as the biting winter sky when he stopped six feet away.

  The last time she’d seen him, she’d made it abundantly clear she wished she’d never laid eyes on him. The tension colliding with hers in the narrow space separating them made it abundantly clear he remembered that, too.

  So much for treating him as if he were only a guest.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Morning,” she echoed, hating the way the nerves in her stomach jumped.

  “I did some laundry last night. Everything but my jeans.” He nodded toward the chair that had served as a makeshift clothesline. “Hope you don’t mind.”

  She swallowed, shook her head. The slate gray sweater he wore fit differently without the other layers under it. With only a single layer of knit covering his skin, she was more aware of sculpted muscles than sheer size. She was also aware that, with his underwear drying overnight, he must have slept in the nude and come downstairs this morning wearing nothing but the jeans clinging to his narrow hips.

  The image that formed unbidden in her mind had her swallowing again. “Of course not.”

  “I heard on the radio that it’s supposed to hit the high thirties today.”

  The weather, she thought, dragging her glance from his chest to her mug. She should focus on the weather, too. High thirties meant the sap could be running by noon.

  “I’d better get busy after breakfast then. I’ll need to dig out around the door of the sugar house and get a fire going. After this long, most of the embers will be out.”

  “I’ll help you.”

  “That’s not necessary,” she insisted, thinking he had probably pulled on his sweater the moment he’d come down. With the furnace still out, the house was too cold first thing in the morning for a person to run around half-naked. “I can manage.”

  Feeling more in control having mentally covered him, she glanced up to see the telltale muscle in his jaw jerk. She’d noticed it jump that way before. Yesterday when he’d defended his father. The day before when he’d told her about what had actually happened between him and Joe.

  His hands, raw red from working outside without gloves, landed on his hips. “Tell me something, Emmy.” Challenge flashed in his eyes. His deep voice remained deceptively even. “Do you generally have a problem accepting help when someone offers it? Or is it only when I do?”

  Puzzlement made her frown. “I accept help.”

  “From whom?”

  “Charlie, for one,” she replied, thinking that should be obvious.

  “Does he work for you for free?”

  “Of course not. He does a lot of work, so I pay him for it.”

  “I mean help you don’t pay for.”

  Unable to imagine what he was getting at, thinking it best to avoid adding any more antagonism to what lingered from last night, she calmly said, “There’s Bud Calder. He brings his wood splitter over and quarters limbs we clear from the sugar bush to use for firewood.”

  “And you don’t pay him.”

  “Not with cash.” She did barter, though. She did that with a lot of things. Everyone in Maple Mountain did. “But I do give him part of the wood to use for his family.”

  “I’m talking about just letting someone do something for you,” he clarified. “No compensation. No trade. Just accepting a favor.”

  Emmy didn’t know which bothered her more at the moment. The certainty in his expression that she preferred to keep things even so she wouldn’t be obligated to someone, or the fact that he’d figured that out and seemed to have a problem with it.

  Before she could say a word, he muttered a totally confusing, “That’s what I thought,” and headed toward the mug she’d set out for him on the counter.

  “By the way,” he continued, voice taut, “it’ll be another day or two before I can get out of here, so I am going to help you. You’ve got two feet of new snow out there. The way the wind was blowing it’ll be in drifts up to your head at the sugar house. If you’re concerned about owing me because I helped you shovel it, just think of it as payback for room and board.”

  Mug in hand, Jack reached past her and picked up the enameled coffeepot from the woodstove to pour himself a much-needed cup of liquid caffeine. He wasn’t sure what made him feel edgiest just then, knowing he should be in his office in Boston at that very moment, the fact that he’d lain awake half the night torn between regret and irritation with Emmy or having to cope with yet another legacy of their fathers’ actions.

  He’d noticed before how reluctant Emmy was to accept help. At first he’d thought she was just being polite in her small refusals. Or maybe that it was simply her nature to take care of those around her, no matter who they were. There was no mistaking how she tended to do everything she possibly could on her own. But he’d be willing to bet his new promotion that what some might see simply as graciousness or independence was also a need to protect herself.

  She’d seen what had happened when her dad obligated himself to someone he’d thought a friend. After all that had happened to her, the thought of being obligated to anyone in any way might well feel threatening somehow. He could appreciate that, he supposed. Or would have, had he been in any frame of mind other than the one he was in now.

  He took a sip of coffee, nearly burned his tongue. Swearing at his own impatience, he left the coffee to cool down a few degrees and reached for bowls to set the table whether she liked the idea of his help or not. He’d thought shoveling show would take the edge off his restiveness. And it had, until he’d walked back inside and seen her with her face freshly scrubbed and her hair tumbling in a fall of silk over her shoulders. As she’d stood cradling her mug, she’d looked impossibly sweet, incredibly sexy and, with the little sleep crease in her cheek, as if she were barely out of bed. Since thinking of her in bed led his thoughts in a direction he wouldn’t let himself go, he turned to tell her he was going back outside to shovel until breakfast was ready—and found that she’d left the room.

  The sound of something heavy hitting something solid filtered through the kitchen doorway. Wondering if his frustration had just worn through her commendable calm and she’d slammed herself into her room, he moved to the kitchen doorway and glanced down the hall between the wall and the staircase.

  The three doors in the hallway were open. The hall itself was a mess. Jack had barely noticed the narrow hallway when he’d passed it on his way to the kitchen half an hour ago. With no windows to let in natural light, the space had merely been a shadow. The doorway at the end of the hall next to the bathroom was open now, though. So were the curtains on that room’s window—her bedroom, he assumed from the black and white architectural drawings framed on the walls and the blanket and dog bone at the foot of a white-quilt-covered bed.

  The bulk of his focus, however, was on what occupied the carpet runner halfway down the hall itself.

  A large trunk, old and with leather hinges that buckled rather than latched, sat against one wainscoted wall. Surrounding it were stacks of albums, framed pictures, letters an
d a wooden holder of tobacco pipes beside an open cardboard box.

  Another box, larger and looking far heavier, was emerging from behind a short open door on the staircase wall.

  Stepping around the items scattered over the floor, he pulled the box into the middle of the hallway and crouched down to see Emmy on her knees under the stairwell. She’d set a flashlight on end, its beam pointing up and filling the small space with pale yellow light.

  “What else do you want from in there?” he asked.

  Emmy opened her mouth to tell him she could get what she was after. With him looking as if he dared her to do just that, she motioned behind her. “The two boxes on the far right,” she said. “Everything else is Christmas decorations.”

  He held his hand out to her. Taking it because it looked as if he were daring her to refuse his help there, too, she let him pull her out and up to her feet.

  With more ease than she could have managed, given how heavy the boxes were, he pushed them out, piled them atop the first box and closed the stairwell door.

  In the daylight filtering in from her bedroom, she watched him frown at what she hadn’t put away last night.

  “What are you doing?” he asked, moving that frown to her.

  Last evening Emmy had felt a faint sense of desperation as she’d first torn through, then more quietly considered the things she’d searched. That desperation had been masked by her certainty that she could somehow prove Jack wrong. With thoughts of how his mom wouldn’t have invented something so outrageous, and her own mother’s silence about his parents still fresh in her mind, she had the feeling now that she was clinging to a hope that might have no substance at all.

  She’d heard nothing of an affair. But some of her father’s summer jobs had been in communities far from the reach of Maple Mountain’s network of prying eyes.