Pouncing on Murder Read online

  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.

  It felt a little Abraham Lincoln–ish, and I wondered if Mr. Lincoln had ever made maple syrup back in his Illinois days. Things like that rarely make the biographies, which was a pity, really, because—

  “Who are you?”

  I jumped high and whipped around, dropping into a crouch, aiming the only weapon I had—my cell phone in flashlight mode—directly at the intruder.

  “Who are you?” I countered, backing toward the corner where the tools stood. The man blocking my exit wasn’t huge, but even an average-sized man was a lot bigger than I was. If I could grab the poker, or even the shovel, I could do him enough damage so I could make my escape. I inched back, reaching behind me with my free hand.

  “Felix Stanton,” the man said. “Northern Development.” He reached into his pocket and I grasped a tool. Whatever it was, it had to be better than nothing. “Here’s my card,” he said, holding the flat rectangle in my direction. “Are you a real estate agent? Because I’ve already talked to the family.”

  Everything fell into place. I looked back at the tool I’d grabbed. A leaf rake. Well, it might have worked. “Minnie Hamilton,” I said, taking his card. It was made of thick paper stock and was emblazoned with a logo so professional I almost asked him for the name of his graphic designer. Then I shoved the designed-to-impress card into my coat pocket and looked at Felix. Or tried to; the light was so poor that all I was seeing was a silhouette in the doorway. “Let’s go outside.”

  “What? Oh, sure.” He walked out and my shoulders released a bit of tension. My brain hadn’t really thought I was under attack, but my tummy had been concerned.

  Outside, the sky was still blue and the air still fresh. I’d probably only been in the shack for ten minutes, but time had shifted while I was in there and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a complete change of seasons and different decade.

  Felix Stanton looked to be in his early fifties. He was about five foot ten, broad-shouldered, broad-faced, and had a little bit of a paunch. His cloth driver’s hat, a canvas jacket, navy blue pants, and leather hiking boots looked comfortable and expensive. He also looked familiar.

  “Do I know you?” he asked. “Because you look familiar.”

  “I’m a librarian in Chilson, but I don’t think that’s where I’ve seen you. And I drive the bookmobile, but that’s not it, either.”

  He shook his head. “No time to read, these days. I keep meaning to, but you know how it goes.”

  I didn’t, actually, but I smiled anyway. We started playing the Up North game of How Do I Know You? and it wasn’t long until I snapped my fingers, which doesn’t work all that well when you’re wearing gloves. “Shomin’s Deli.” The deli had booths with hooks for coats at the ends and I remembered seeing that hat hanging from one of the hooks.

  “That’s it.” He nodded. “They have the best Reubens in the county.”

  “Swiss cheese and green olives on sourdough for me.”

  He winced. “To each his own,” he said, then looked at me speculatively. “So, what’s a librarian doing on Henry Gill’s property on an April morning?”

  Now, that was an excellent question, and if I thought a minute, I could probably come up with something he might believe. “Not much,” I said. Lam
e. So very lame. “Henry used the bookmobile, so I’d gotten to know him the last few months.” Sort of. “He brought me maple syrup and I just kind of wondered what his sugar shack looked like.”

  It was still a seriously sad answer, but Felix was actually buying it. “He made a great syrup,” he said, nodding. “That smoked flavor was something special.”

  I put my hands back in my coat pockets, and his business card poked into the middle of my palm. “Henry’s heirs are looking to sell the property?”

  Felix smiled. “Just looking into the possibilities.”

  A light breeze pushed the upper branches of the trees around in small swirls, and I thought about Henry and his father and his grandfather and who knew how many generations back, all harvesting maple sap from these trees. “You’re not thinking about condos, are you?”

  “No lake access to this property,” Felix said, but it was a fast answer and even I knew enough about developing to know that just because one parcel didn’t have lake access, it didn’t mean that parcels with lake frontage couldn’t be purchased.

  “It’s been nice talking to you, Minnie.” Felix smiled. “Next time we run into each other at Shomin’s, at least we’ll have names to match the faces.” He nodded and headed out, walking back toward the driveway.

  I watched him go. While I understood the need for new homes and new developments and understood that growth was prosperity, I also wished that some things didn’t have to change. Wished that some things, at least a few things, could stay the same forever and ever.

  More wishes.

  But happily, since wishes weren’t and never had been horses, I wouldn’t have to think about where I’d stable mine. Or what I’d feed them. I’d grown up in the city, just as Ash said Detective Inwood had, and I was essentially clueless about what, or how much, a horse ate. And they were big, so they’d probably eat a lot more more than Eddie did.

  I shook away the thoughts that wanted to distract me and tried to remember what Adam had said about finding Henry that day. After all, the reason I’d come out here in the first place was to see if I could find something that might point to who’d killed Henry and tried to kill Adam.

  What I might find that the police hadn’t found, I didn’t know, but it would have been embarrassing if the answer was right there, lying about, waiting to be found, and no one bothered to pick it up.

  Then again, the only things I could see lying on the ground were last year’s leaves, a few blades of grass poking up, and sticks and branches of various sizes.

  I kicked halfheartedly at the leaves, sending them flying in short arcs. Nature girl, I was not. I’d been kidding myself if I’d thought I’d find anything out here. I couldn’t tell a maple tree from an oak tree if the leaves weren’t all the way out. Woods were pretty much woods, as far I could tell, and—

  “Wood,” I said out loud.

  Adam said that Henry had gone out to stack some wood. Which would lead pretty much anyone to think that there was a stack of wood somewhere out here. Which meant I was looking for wood in the woods, and might be sillier than bringing coals to Newcastle, but I had to try.

  I trudged around the sugar shack in ever-widening circles, looking for anything close to resembling a pile of wood. I found brush piles that might have been made by Henry or might have fallen into heaps naturally and I found fallen trees that might have dropped to the ground via natural means, but how was I to know for sure? Women who weren’t nature girls had no way of telling.

  Still. I had to try, and I would try.

  My circling walk grew to a radius so large that I started to lose sight of the shack. The leaves on the short, scrubby trees in the understory were farther out than the treetop version, and I took off my gloves to feel their softness. Spring. In spite of the recent snow and the cold mornings, it really was spring. Daffodils were budding and would soon be in bloom and—

  And there was a tidy stack of wood. I walked around all four of its sides, looked at it from various angles, frowned at it, even smiled at it, but the only thing it looked like was a plain old stack of wood.

  So much for this brilliant idea. I might as well have—

  “Hello. Who are you?”

  I jumped high and to my left, away from the large man standing next to a massive tree trunk. And here I’d figured Henry’s place would be empty today. I would have had more solitude if I’d stayed home.

  “A friend of Henry’s,” I said, trying to sound casual and not like I’d just had the bejeebers scared out of me. And for some reason, scared I definitely was. I inched backward, away from the guy. “He used to bring me maple syrup. I’m . . .” My throat was suddenly too tight to talk. I gave it a quick rub and tried again. “I’m going to miss him.”

  The man nodded. He was probably in his mid-forties, was more than six feet tall, bulky as a football player, and dressed in jeans, work boots, and a hooded fleece sweatshirt from a private university. “Cole Duvall. I have a summer place over there.” He tipped his head, covered with carefully cut white-blond hair, in the direction of Rock Lake. “Sure is a shame about Henry.”

  I introduced myself and said, “He and his wife had children, didn’t they?”

  “Three boys.” Cole Duvall leaned against the tree, his hands tucked into the hand-warmer part of his sweatshirt. “Don’t remember what any of them do, but they’re scattered all over the country. We’ve had this place five years now and I’ve never met any of them.”

  “Do you think they’re going to sell the property?”

  Cole shrugged. “No idea. Like I said, I’ve never met them. But it’s hard to figure them keeping it, being so far away and all.”

  Though that made sense, it made my heart droop a little. “There was a developer here a few mintues ago. He said he’d talked to the heirs.”

  “Oh?” The expression on Cole’s face sharpened the slightest bit. “Any idea who it was?”

  “Felix Stanton, Northern Development. Um, are you okay?” Because Cole had an odd expression on his face.

  “He didn’t waste any time, did he?” Cole asked, disgust thick in his voice.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Stanton has been trying to talk Henry into selling since last fall. The poor guy is barely in the ground and already that vulture is poking his nose around, trying to make a buck off Henry’s sons.” He made a rude noise in the back of his throat. “Hard to believe some people, you know?”

  We chatted a little more, said amiable good-byes, and I walked back down the hill via the two-track that Cole had pointed out, thinking all the while.

  Hard to believe some people, you know?

  “I do know,” I murmured. “I absolutely do.”

  Because, after all, I was a librarian, and librarians knew a lot more about people than what kinds of books they checked out.

  Chapter 9

  After a late lunch at the houseboat—peanut butter and jelly for me, cat food for Eddie—I drove to the boardinghouse to pick up a few things.

  “You do this every year,” Aunt Frances said. She was sitting at the kitchen table, paperwork spread out around her.

  “Four years in a row,” I answered cheerfully. “Moving with the seasons, out with the old winter, in with the new spring, opening myself up to new horizons and new adventures, opening my bedroom here for new boarders.”

  “No, I mean every year you leave things behind.”

  I looked at the cardboard box into which I’d been tossing items. A book, a magazine, a handful of hair bands, a comb, a bottle of liquid soap that had been a Christmas present from my sister-in-law, and a package of instant oatmeal. “Not a lot, percentage-wise.”

  She laughed. “I’m just saying that maybe it’s psychological. That you leave things behind because you want to come back.”

  “Well, of course I want to come back. You’re my favorite aunt in the entire world.”

  “I’m your only aunt,” she said.

  “True, but even if you weren’t you’d still be
my favorite.”

  “And you know this how?”

  I grinned. “Going with the odds, that’s all. You’ve met my uncle, haven’t you?” My mom’s bachelor brother was a fine man, but there were common qualities in everyone born to the Rivard family, including my mother, and a keen sense of the absurd was not one of them.

  Aunt Frances nodded, conceding my point. “Speaking of favorites, how’s Tucker doing?”

  “Fine,” I said vaguely, repacking the box. Which didn’t need repacking, but with any luck she didn’t know that. My aunt, however, had the eyes of an eagle and suddenly didn’t seem very interested in her paperwork, so a fast distraction was needed.

  “Ash Wolverson stopped by the marina the other day,” I said. I’d found out last fall that Aunt Frances was a friend of Ash’s mother.

  “He’s a nice boy,” my aunt said.

  “Boy” wasn’t a term I would have thought applied to the very masculine deputy, but whatever.

  “Are you two becoming friends?” she asked.

  I’d met Ash last year, during the bookmobile’s maiden voyage, but almost all of our interactions had been law-enforcement-based. “I doubt it,” I said. “He asked me out.”

  “And you turned him down?” Aunt Frances frowned.

  “Of course I did.” I frowned back. “I’m dating Tucker.”

  “Exclusively?”

  I looked at her. “Aunt Frances, what’s going on here? No, don’t deny it, I know from the way you’re pursing your lips that you’re holding back on me. What aren’t you telling me? Have you heard something about Tucker?”

  She blinked at me. “Good heavens, no. How would I hear anything about him?”

  “Because you have amazing powers that, thankfully, you use only for good. And you have a vast network of contacts. I wouldn’t be surprised if you’d been getting reports from a former boarder all winter about Cade’s recovery.”

  Smiling, she said, “You make me sound like a spymaster. A career choice I never considered. But to answer your question, what I’m holding back is about Ash. Though it’s an old story, and public knowledge, I still feel a little squirmy telling you.”