Drizzled With Death (17 page)

“Did you go in?” It wasn’t going to be good for his drinking or his promises to his wife, but if he had been spotted in the bar, it would at least give him an alibi for the time the syrup was being poisoned.

“I’m not proud I got so far as the parking lot, but I am proud to say I got no farther. I stayed in my truck deciding what to do until closing time.”

“So you were in the parking lot until around one a.m.?”

“I was. Then I dragged my sorry self home and snuck into bed next to Felicia and tossed and turned all night long.” At least that’s what he said he did. There were a few hours between then and the time the breakfast started to slip into the grange hall and poison the syrup. And like almost everyone else in town, Roland had a key to the place.

“Well, that explains why you looked so beat the next morning at the pancake breakfast.” At least, it could explain it.

“It explains my performance, too. I’m gonna beat your grandfather some year if it is the last thing I do.” Roland nodded his head like he needed convincing. Which everyone would. Grampa was a force of nature when it came to pancakes.

Since it was just next door to Roland and Felicia’s inn, I decided to
poke around at Alanza’s property. It was silent when I pulled in and stepped out of the car. Even the birds and squirrels seemed to be giving the place a miss. I wasn’t sure if it was a sort of commentary on Alanza herself and the energy she had put forth while living there, or even the natural world’s commentary on storage facilities. The squat little office building for the storage facility was set back enough to obscure it from sight of passersby out on the road.

If someone was going to kill Alanza, I wondered why he or she decided to do it in such a public fashion. Why not just sneak out here and clunk her over the head in the middle of the night? Why would someone need to implicate my business in their beef with her? Was Alanza even the intended victim or was Greener Pastures? Maybe she was just someone easy to dispose of because of her unpopularity in the community. No one would miss her and she was doing her best to cause problems.

But what reason would anyone have to bother Greener Pastures? I didn’t think I had any enemies particularly, but maybe I was being shortsighted. Knowlton had been chasing me for so long, it was a town-wide joke. Maybe he was tired of being mocked and tired of being rejected. And Tansey wasn’t any too happy with me either. As far as she was concerned, I had missed the boat by passing up what her darling son had to offer. She also might have blamed me for another sugaring operation starting up in Sugar Grove.

I thought about Lowell and whether or not he had considered the possibility that killing Alanza with Greener Pastures syrup was much more deliberate than I had first thought. I would have asked him about it, but since I was avoiding him like I avoided people with the stomach flu, I couldn’t very well do that.

I rounded the corner of the building and spotted Jill Hayes pulling a box out of her jeep. In the bright clear light of day it was still possible to make out her bruising under a heavy cover of makeup. I called out to her and she dropped the box on the ground, spilling most of the contents.

“You scared me half to death.” Jill and I both squatted down at the same time to retrieve the scattered tree-tapping supplies, and we smacked heads. Now I was going to have a bruise.

“Sorry. I’m glad to see you out and about. Are you feeling better?”

“I was until you banged heads with me. What are you doing here?” I had to think fast. Then I thought of the perfect excuse.

“I lent Alanza a book about sugar making and I thought she might have left it here. I wanted to get it back before whoever inherits starts clearing out the place.”

“Good idea. Once that happens, you probably won’t see it again,” Jill said.

“So what brings you by?” Jill had no better reason to be there than I did.

“I was just checking on some of the equipment I had here for tapping the trees. You know how busy it gets during sugaring season.”

“It looks like you were bringing supplies in, not checking on what was already here.” I handed her a spile. She blushed and took it.

“I guess I don’t know if I’m coming or going lately.”

“That would explain the problem with your story about being at Hanley’s camp Friday night.”

“What do you mean?” Jill stood, the box forgotten on the ground.

“Knowlton says you weren’t with Hanley on Friday night like you said you were. He said no one was up there at all.”

“Knowlton is a fruitcake who talks to a stuffed woodchuck when he’s looking for some company.”

“He may be an eccentric but he doesn’t tend to lie.” Except for all that stuff he said about me and the contortionism to anyone in the world of taxidermy who would listen.

“What did Hanley say?” Jill gave me the same cornered but still fighting look my niece and nephew do when they’re trying to wriggle out of trouble and it isn’t looking good for them. Even though I hadn’t asked him about it yet after speaking with Knowlton, it was time to see what she thought of their relationship.

“What do you think he said?” I watched her shoulders sag and the brave leaked all out of her.

“I think he said I was with him at first and then he told you the truth the minute you applied any pressure.”

“Well, if he is willing to hit you, I don’t think the relationship is all that good, do you?”

“He didn’t hit me. I lied when you came to see me that day.”

“You aren’t going to tell me you walked into a door, are you?”

“It was someone else.” Jill started to speak then stopped herself.

“Did another man hit you? It wasn’t your brother, was it?” Suddenly I feared for Piper’s safety. She might do a lot of things that felt unsafe to me, but she had never put up with an abusive man and I didn’t want to even consider the possibility that she could start.

“It was Alanza.” Jill sagged against the wall as if the weight of her secret had thrust her off her feet.

“Alanza hit you? Why?” The idea of a physical altercation between grown women in a civilized town was so tacky it nauseated me. It had been hard enough to think about Hanley using his fists on Jill, but to credit the damage to another woman was hard to wrap my mind around.

“It was about the trees.”

“The trees?”

“Lewis Bett had allowed me to tap the trees here for years since my own property isn’t big enough to produce the amount of sap I need to run a thriving business.”

“How does that lead to Alanza giving you a black eye?”

“As soon as Alanza decided to go into the sugaring business herself, she didn’t want anyone else to tap her trees. I reminded her I had a long-standing arrangement with Lewis and that he had promised me when he died it would still stand. He wanted the property to go on being an asset to the community.”

“What did Alanza say to that?”

“She said a whole lot of things were going to change on the property and that the townspeople ought to get used to it. I wasn’t the only one who would be affected and I should grow up about it.” I could relate to that conversation. It sounded like Celadon had been taking interpersonal relationship lessons from Alanza.

“That sounds threatening.” And like a reason someone might decide to get rid of her before she did any more damage to his or her interest in the property. “But you still haven’t explained the black eye.”

“I shoved her. She was right in my face, shaking her finger at me and calling me names. I snapped and I put both hands on her chest and shoved her into one of the very trees she didn’t want me to tap anymore.” Jill started panting a little, like she was reliving the experience.

“And then?”

“And then she hauled off and decked me. She knocked me right off my feet. My eye started to swell shut and my ears were ringing. I’d never experienced anything like it.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?” Lowell was forever being called out to domestic incidents. As a matter of fact, in the annual town report the police log listed four times as many domestic disturbance calls as any other single category.

“I started it. She could have pressed charges against me, too. It was ugly and embarrassing. And I hoped it would all blow over. It wasn’t likely she would change her mind about me tapping the trees if I set the police on her.”

“Is that the real reason why you weren’t at the pancake breakfast?”

“I didn’t want to show up with my face all swollen and I certainly didn’t want to run into Alanza.” But was Jill telling the truth now? It sounded too far-fetched and embarrassing to be made up, but she had lied in the first place about Hanley hitting her.

“So this happened on Friday night when you told me you were with Hanley at his camp?”

“That’s right. I had been planning on going up with Hanley that night, but he said since Alanza had closed her property to use by off-road vehicles, it wasn’t worth it to go up.” So neither of them had an alibi for the night the syrup was poisoned. Where was he if he wasn’t with Jill or Connie and he wasn’t up at his camp? And was Jill so angry with Alanza, she went to the grange and poisoned the syrup to get back at her for the fight and to regain the use of the trees? She wasn’t actually around to see the death, which made her look all the more suspicious to me. As much as I hated the idea, I was going to have to talk to Hanley again and try to worm out of him what he was up to.

• • •

Hanley was standing over a fallen tree, cutting it into stove-length
pieces, when I arrived home. Sawdust covered his lucky plaid shirt like snowfall. I wasn’t looking forward to asking Hanley where he really was on Friday night. Asking him while he was wielding a chain saw was even less appealing. But it had to be done. And besides, Grampa was in the nearby barn kitting out the reindeer in his herd with their seasonal bells. He’d be sure to come running if I started squawking.

Hanley noticed me standing nearby but made me wait fifteen minutes while he finished up. I would have given him grief about it, but I figured calling him a liar was going to be enough punishment. Once the sawdust finally stopped raining down, I stepped up to the task at hand without preamble.

“Jill says you weren’t with her on Friday night, and Connie mentioned you weren’t home either.” There, I’d said it and I lived to tell the story. I did keep one eye on Hanley and the other on the barn.

“You sure are a snoopy little thing, aren’t you?” Hanley used the chain saw like a pointer and gestured in my direction. I was so glad the thing was no longer running, I felt more emboldened than frightened.

“That’s why I’m asking you again where you were and I’m hoping you tell me the truth this time.”

“You’re not my wife. As long as I show up and do the work I say I’ll do, what’s it to you?”

“If my business goes under because it looks like I poisoned people with my syrup, I won’t have any more work for you to do. So I guess it’s more about what it means to you.”

“Syrup making or not, this is still a tree farm, and unless I missed some sort of memo, your grandfather is still in charge of who works on it.” Hanley spat a big gob of something awful within an inch of my favorite work boots.

“Right you are. And my grandfather only hires people he wants to have around. He isn’t a fan of liars or men that cheat on their wives. I’d hate to have to disillusion him about you.” I batted my eyelashes at Hanley and shrugged. From the way he scowled at me and tossed a perfectly good chain saw on the ground like a toddler having a tantrum, I’d say we had come to an understanding.

“I was up at Alanza’s tinkering with my equipment.”

“What does that mean?”

“I was sabotaging my heavy machinery.”

“You were doing what?” How could that be? Sure, he had just mistreated his saw but generally Hanley was meticulous concerning his tools.

“Have you seen the clearing I’ve already done near the storage facility?”

“Yes. I saw it when I was up at Roland’s the other day. It looks ghastly.”

“So you know why I had to do a little damage that would stop the clearing up at Bett’s Knob but would still be easy to fix once I’d managed to get Alanza to change her mind.”

“Why did you sign on to do the work in the first place if you didn’t agree with it?”

“Alanza was one of my biggest clients, just like Lewis Bett before her. If I refused, she would have fired me and given the contract to someone else. With the economy being as bad as it is, I needed the business.” I could see that. At Greener Pastures we were still hiring Hanley whenever we needed him, but someone in different financial circumstances might look on forestry services as a luxury expense.

“If you were up there, did you see Jill and Alanza having a fight?” Maybe he and Jill could still give each other an alibi.

“I heard a bit of a ruckus, but it wasn’t like I was going to investigate. I didn’t want Alanza to know I was there.”

“What made you think you were going to be able to change Alanza’s mind about clearing Bett’s Knob?”

“She had a sweet spot for me.” Hanley widened his stance and patted his oil drum gut. Which was exactly what Tansey had told me.

“Sweet enough that she’d give up her business plans? I doubt it.”

“Maybe not, but I figured if I put her off long enough, the snow would fly and the project would get stalled. I was kind of hoping she would lose interest over the winter and the whole thing would just fizzle.” Or maybe he knew she wasn’t going to be around long enough to order him to complete the work on Bett’s Knob.

“I guess you got your wish then. Alanza’s plans are about as fizzled as they could get.”