The Sugar House Read online

  Pushing bills across the counter, Jack picked up his bag, paper crackling. He had no intention of feeding an old grudge. His or Joe’s. “I didn’t come here to cause trouble,” he informed him, wondering what it was they thought he was going to do to the woman. Or anyone else, for that matter. “Not for her. Not for anyone.”

  “Then, why are you here?”

  “To set things right.” Steel edged his tone. That same unbending resolve glinted in his eyes as he walked past the man he could have sworn was trying to stare him down.

  “How do you intend to do that?” Joe demanded over the tinkle of the bell as Jack pulled open the door.

  “That’s between me and Emmy, too,” he called back, and closed the door a little harder than he probably should have.

  He hadn’t forgotten how narrow and protective the small-town mentality could be. In Maple Mountain the sins of the father carried right down to his offspring. The fact that the offspring had defended the father was obviously remembered, as well. He just hadn’t thought he’d have to deal with anyone other than the Larkins.

  The muscles in his jaw working, he headed through the dark and cold to his less-than-welcoming motel room. The good news when he got there was that he didn’t have to deal with anyone else—and that the only homage to the local wildlife on his room’s knotty pine walls was a painting of a moose. The bad news was that he still didn’t know Emmy’s full name.

  That didn’t do much for his mood, either.

  Emmy knew Jack hadn’t left Maple Mountain. Agnes had called last evening while she’d been filling tins with syrup, a task that couldn’t easily be interrupted, and left the news flash on her answering machine.

  She hadn’t called Agnes back. Nor had she done anything other than thank her for her call after services that morning before excusing herself when the elderly minister’s wife, bless her, rescued her from the speculation Agnes had clearly been itching to share.

  It had been Emmy’s experience that the less she let on that something was a problem, the less others treated it like one. She’d also learned that life was less complicated when the personal parts of it weren’t served up for public consumption. She tried hard not to look back, to focus her energies on the present, and allowed herself to look no farther ahead than the next season.

  The only season on her mind at the moment was the current one. As she bounced her rugged and reliable old pickup truck over a berm of snow at the edge of her driveway, her only thoughts were of getting home and to her chores before she lost any more of the day. It was already one o’clock in the afternoon.

  The pastor’s wife had asked a favor of her, and completely sidetracked her from her original plan to be home before noon.

  Sidetracking her now was the black sedan parked by the old sycamore—and the sight of Jack standing outside the stable that now served as a garage.

  He hadn’t struck her as the sort who would give up easily. Knowing he’d stayed last night, she’d pretty much expected him to come back, too. She’d just rather hoped that he would come back, find her gone and leave.

  Not sure if she felt threatened by his persistence or relieved by it, she drove past him and through the open doors of the utilitarian white building.

  What he had come back to do had been on her mind all evening. It had been the first thing on her mind that morning. Part of her, the part that felt unkind and uncomfortable about how she’d walked away from him yesterday, had actually considered stopping by the motel to apologize for being so insensitive. She felt awful for the way she’d treated him. After she’d had a chance to truly consider what it must have taken for him to come back, and after she’d acknowledged the courage, the integrity, and the basic sense of decency he would have to possess to even want to make amends after so long, she’d felt even worse.

  She hadn’t even thanked him for his apology.

  Another part of her, the more protective part, had hoped he would tire of waiting for her and be halfway to the free-way—which was probably, she figured, why she really hadn’t minded the delay getting home.

  Feeling no less torn by his presence now, she climbed out of her truck and squeezed past the cherry-red snowmobile she used to haul skids of firewood from the woodshed to the sugar house, or to get into town when the snow was too deep to drive there. The sun that had shone so brightly yesterday had given way to a ceiling of pale gray. From that solid layer of clouds, a few tiny snowflakes drifted down as she headed into the open expanse between the outbuilding and her house.

  They weren’t supposed to get snow until that evening, she thought, looking from the sky to the tall and totally disconcerting man closing the distance between them. He wore the same clothes he’d worn yesterday, the dark-gray jacket that made his shoulders look so wide, the darker-gray turtleneck and sweater, the worn jeans that molded his lean hips and long, powerful legs. He’d shaved, though. She could tell from the smoothness of the skin on his strong, too-attractive face, and the nick under his chin.

  That tiny vulnerability made her feel guilty for his long wait. He’d shaved before he’d come to see her.

  “Come to the sugar house,” she said, saving him the trouble of telling her he needed to talk to her. “I need to get the fire stoked and bring in more wood. We can talk there.”

  A fleece cap in the same shade of pale pink as her turtleneck poked from the side pocket of her quilted black coat. Without the cap she’d worn yesterday, the spitting snowflakes clung to the top of her head, caught in her high, swinging ponytail. Watching her walk away, it seemed to Jack that her shining baby-fine hair seemed darker, more auburn than the deep red he remembered. Richer. Softer.

  He’d heard somewhere that natural redheads tended to be rather volatile. He’d never dated one to know how much truth there was to the claim, though one particular blonde had proved explosive enough. Emmy, however, didn’t strike him at all as a woman prone to fits of temper. The sense of quiet control about her gave him the feeling she’d go as far out of her way as necessary to avoid confrontation.

  Watching her ponytail bounce, he started after her. She also possessed an absolute gift for throwing curves. Rather than meeting the wall of resistance he’d expected, she hadn’t seemed all that opposed to finding him waiting.

  Telling himself to be grateful, he glanced back toward her truck. Heavy tire chains wrapped the tires. Bags of sand lay in the bed for better traction. It was the vehicle itself that had first caught his attention, though. The old workhorse of a pickup looked very much like the one her father had driven fifteen years ago.

  “Was everything all right this morning?” he asked, thinking the truck had to be pushing thirty years old by now.

  “Everything’s fine. Why?”

  “I just thought that with the sap running, you’d be in a hurry to get back and start boiling.”

  Instead of heading for the sugar house, she’d angled toward her home.

  “The minister’s wife asked me to do a feasibility study for the restoration of the church. We started looking around,” she said, snow crunching under their boots, “and I lost track of the time.”

  She truly had. For a while. There wasn’t much that appealed to her more than the prospect of taking something old and falling apart and returning it to what it once had been. Just studying the 120-year-old building and researching its repair excited her. Or would have had she not been so aware of the man who’d just walked up beside her.

  She could practically feel his frown on the side of her face.

  “I thought you turned down the scholarship.”

  She stopped in the snow, looking up at him as a tiny flake settled on her cheek. One clung to a strand of the dark hair falling over his wide forehead. Another drifted between them. “How do you know about that?”

  “Agnes said you were going to study architecture and design, but that you turned down your scholarship to stay and help your mom.”

  The corner of her mouth quirked, half in acknowledgment, half in something th
at looked almost as if she might have expected as much.

  “I did turn it down,” she replied, but offered nothing else as she continued on.

  “Then where did you learn what you’d need to know to restore a church?” he called after her.

  “The same places I learned the plastering methods for the walls and moldings when we restored the library. I ordered books and did research on the Internet. That led me to a restorer in Montpelier, so I spent a week one spring working with her. She came out later to check what we’d done.”

  Leaving him staring at her back, she headed up the shoveled steps to the back door of her house to let out her dog, then pulled open the aluminum storm door. The moment she opened the wooden one behind it, her impatient pet leaped past her in an exuberant blur of pale-gold fur, then practically slid to a stop ten feet from the porch when he noticed Jack standing a few yards away.

  “It’s okay, Rudy,” she called, closing the doors to descend the stairs herself. “He’s coming with us.”

  The animal instantly went from eyeing him to ignoring him. Looking like a mutt on a mission, he raced ahead to lift his leg on the side of a stump, then ran off, snow flying, to weave his way toward the distant gray building.

  Clearly on a mission herself, Emmy hurried past Jack and along the packed path.

  “The truck you were driving,” he said, still thinking about it. “That isn’t the same one I used to drive for your dad, is it?” It was the same make, but he’d thought that truck had been dark green, not dark blue.

  He couldn’t see her face, yet there was no mistaking her hesitation in the moments before she replied.

  “No, it’s not,” she said, continuing on. “That one was wrecked.”

  “What happened?”

  “It was in an accident. Rudy!” she called, putting a deliberate end to what he’d thought was harmless conversation. “This way, boy!”

  She hurried ahead of him more quickly, glancing up as she entered the woods to cast a troubled glance through the bare tree branches.

  Wondering what happened to the old truck, and even more curious about why she so obviously didn’t want to talk about it, he looked up at that darkening gray ceiling. Tiny, sporadic flakes continued to fall.

  When he’d checked the weather before he’d left yesterday, the report had been for sun through the weekend. Listening to the only radio station he’d been able to get in his car, since he’d needed something to do while he’d waited, the weatherman had mentioned a large front moving in that evening.

  It looked to him as if that front were on its way in now.

  Wanting to be gone before anything nasty developed, he lengthened his stride. He just had a few details he wanted cleared up before he left.

  He still needed Emmy’s full name so he could change the deed. There wouldn’t be time today to get his signature notarized and make a copy of the document so he could leave the original with her, but he could get what he needed and mail it later. Having learned what he had about her, he also felt obligated to find out how she was managing the responsibilities she’d inherited. Then there was the niggling need to find out what had happened after his family had left. He couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that the Travers were being held responsible for something more than he’d believed when he’d arrived.

  First, though, he would let her talk. From the way she’d invited him to come with her, it was clear she had something she wanted to say.

  Chapter Three

  “Is that the wood you’re taking in?” Emmy heard Jack ask as he pointed to the pallet of cordwood near the building’s wide end door.

  She told him it was, and that she’d take it in after she stoked the fire. She also needed to check the tanks on her gas generators in case the incoming weather took out the power, she reminded herself, opening the smaller door near the sugar house’s only window. It was so much harder working in the sugar house with only oil lamps for light.

  With the flip of the switch inside the door, the bright overhead bulbs illuminated the small but efficient space. The far end of the open room served as an office where she ran her invoices and made mailing labels with the computer. Nearer the door, stacked boxes of syrup waiting to be shipped and empty tins waiting to be filled obscured the rough wood wall behind the worktable where she packaged her finished product.

  Aware of Jack walking in behind her, she moved past what took up the other end of the room; the four-by-twelve-foot-long stainless steel evaporating pan where she boiled down sap.

  “Leave the door open for Rudy, would you?” she asked, grabbing a pair of battered leather gloves from the dwindling pile of wood beyond the pan.

  Still wearing her good winter coat, she pulled the gloves on, opened the metal door of the fire arch built under the pan, and stoked the embers she’d banked last night. As she did, Jack stopped beside her with two quartered logs he’d picked up from the pile.

  “Do you want me to bring in more wood while you do that?” he asked, holding the logs out to her.

  Taking what he offered, she shoved them into the arch. “I’ll do it in a minute.”

  “I don’t mind carrying some in.”

  “That’s not necessary. Really,” she insisted, not wanting him to take the time. “I just need to get this going and fill the pan.”

  Sparks flew as raw wood hit glowing embers. Heat radiated toward her face. She felt heat at the back of her neck, too, where he stared down at it.

  Disconcerted by the sensation, she shoved in two more logs and closed the door with a solid clang. Leaving her gloves on an upended log, and him standing where he was, she headed for the spigot at the opposite end of the long metal pan. An inch-wide main line carried the sap from the acres of tapped trees around and above the building to the storage tank. With a turn of a knob, she watched the watery liquid from the holding tank flow into the top of the pan, and took a deep breath.

  With nothing else demanding her immediate attention, she prepared to do what she should have done yesterday, and felt totally ambivalent about doing now.

  The weather-grayed building wasn’t very large. Thirty feet by twenty, give or take a foot. She just hadn’t realized how small that space could be until she turned to where Jack and his rather imposing presence seemed to dominate the entire room.

  “I have to be honest with you,” she quietly admitted, wanting to get her apology over with. “I’d hoped you would be gone when I got here. But I’m glad you came back. I didn’t thank you for your apology yesterday,” she explained, when his brow lowered at her admission. “After all this time, you could have easily just let the matter go.

  “So thank you,” she conceded, when she really wouldn’t have minded at all if he’d been a man of lesser conscience. If he had considered everything over and done with all those years ago, she wouldn’t just have been reminded of why she’d had to decline the scholarship she’d once desperately wanted to accept, or about the old truck he’d once driven, the one her dad had died in.

  “I can only imagine how hard it was for you to come back here,” she continued. “I just want you to know I appreciate the effort it must have taken. I appreciate your offer to return the land, too,” she admitted, certain that acquiring it had also taken considerable effort and expense. “I can’t accept it, but it was incredibly generous of you to offer it back.

  “And your mom,” she hurried on, compelled to offer him something in return. “Please tell her I especially appreciate knowing she hadn’t felt right about what happened.” It had never occurred to her that Ruth Travers would feel any particular remorse or regret about what had transpired. Locked in her twelve-year-old world at the time, and having grown up knowing only what she’d felt and what she’d heard from others, she had thought of all the Traverses the same way—as people who had hurt her and parents. “For my mom, one of the hardest parts of all that happened back then was losing her friendship.”

  Seconds ago Jack’s only thought had been to ask why she wouldn’t accep
t the property. His only thoughts now were of her quiet admission and of the mental image he could have sworn he’d erased.

  “That was hard for my mom, too,” he admitted. “I think she cried halfway to Maine.” He had blocked the quiet sound of those tears and his father’s hard silence with his headphones cranked nearly high enough to shatter his eardrums. “I don’t know if anyone around here would believe it, but she really cared about your mom and the rest of her friends. She was pretty devastated by the way things turned out.”

  It had been hard on him and his little sister, too. On Liz, two years older than Emmy, because she’d also lost her friends. The girls at school hadn’t throw accusations in her face as his peers had done, but they had excluded her, whispered behind her back, made her cry. He didn’t mention that, though. From what he’d learned since yesterday, Emmy’s life had fared far worse.

  “Tell her I believe it.” Sounding far more forgiving than anyone else he’d encountered lately, she offered an equally pardoning smile. “What happened wasn’t her doing.”

  “She’ll be relieved that you know that.”

  He wanted that smile to be for him, too. He wanted to make sure she understood that it hadn’t been his fault, either, that there wasn’t anything he could have done to stop his father. But the moment was lost. The shadow of a smile she’d given him had already faded.

  “I need to get the wood in,” she said, and walked away.

  Slipping off her coat, she hung it on a peg near the door, glancing back toward him as she did.

  “Do you have a thermos in your car?”

  “A thermos?”

  “For coffee. Or cocoa.” She nodded toward the coffeemaker at the far end of the long board that served as her desk. “I can make either and fill it for you.”

  He’d just been told he was leaving. He just wasn’t sure how she’d managed it so graciously.

  “Coffee,” he said, because he was dying for a cup. There hadn’t been anywhere other than the diner to buy any that morning, and he hadn’t felt desperate enough for caffeine to encounter whoever had been in there. “But I don’t have anything to put it in.”