Gum Drop Dead
A Sampling of Murder
Poison-Spiced Cupcakes
Cat and Mouse Whodunit
A Tail of Murder
Of Mice and Murder
Barking Up the Wrong Tree
Catastrophe
A Rash Decision
The Purrfect Murder (coming 2024)
For my dear friend Katie. It takes a lot of courage to do things your own way.
Worse than telling a lie is spending the rest of your life staying true to a lie.
Robert Brault
1
I wouldn’t have thought I was the type of person to be excited about a wooden door, but I almost felt like dancing in the frost-touched leaves when the door to the new, historically accurate sugar shack stayed open on its own.
Considering that I’d almost died, trapped inside the original sugar shack when it burned down, making sure that the door on the new one didn’t slide shut randomly had been a priority for me.
Russ slid it shut, then opened it again one more time.
Watching it made me feel like I could take a full breath for the first time after having the wind knocked out of me. I could finally set free the fear that came with the memories of that day.
“I made sure the contractor leveled the ground,” Russ said. “Even if the mechanism on the door gives out, gravity won’t be pulling it closed anymore.”
He waddled through the doorway, his barrel-shaped body rocking side to side more now than ever. His breathing wheezed. I doubted Russ had ever been a thin man, but he’d put on forty pounds since I’d met him a year ago.
He dropped into the nearest chair, and it groaned under him even though it was one of the few new items in the place. I’d spent the last two months sourcing period pieces to replace ones we’d lost in the fire. We’d finally be able to put the sugar shack back into our tours—which meant we’d be getting bookings from school groups again soon.
Russ leaned over his knees, but his wheezy breathing didn’t ease. The excitement drained out of me and left a trail of tension behind it.
I knelt down beside him. “Are you okay?”
He shook his head. “Just tired from the walk here.”
The walk here had taken us less than five minutes. As much as I didn’t want to spoil the joy of finally reopening the historical sugar shack, maybe it was time I talked to Russ about his health.
The problem was I had no idea how to open a conversation like that. It seemed nosy to even think about it, given how very private Russ tended to be. “Do you think maybe you should see a doctor?”
Russ grunted. “I’ve already seen one. He didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know. Lose weight. Take my medications regularly.”
Medications plural. The last I’d heard, Russ only took high blood pressure medication. “He put you on something new?”
“A few of the numbers on my blood test were high. But I’m nearly seventy. What does he expect?” He pointed across the room. “I had Dave set the tools up a little different from how they were before. He’s looking forward to running his first tour. He says meeting more people will help him create characters, whatever that means.”
Trying to distract me with Dave’s growing role at Sugarwood and his eccentricities as a writer weren’t going to work. “What new medications did he prescribe you?”
He got back to his feet with a groan. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
Clearly I did because it seemed he wasn’t worrying enough about himself. Maybe if he’d been only my business partner I could have agreed with him, but he wasn’t. He’d become like family. My Uncle Stan had been my only uncle, and I didn’t have any aunts. Russ had stepped into that role for me. The thought of losing him, too, made my chest hurt.
I followed him out of the sugar shack. “Just promise me you’re taking your meds at least.”
His gaze shifted to the side like he was trying to spot something he could distract me with.
My phone rang. If I didn’t know it wasn’t sentient, I would have suspected it of conspiring against me with Russ.
I swiped my finger across the screen. “This is Nikki.”
This conversation isn’t over, I mouthed to Russ.
The person on the other end of the line didn’t respond immediately. I knew they were still there, though. I could hear them breathing and sniffling. For a second, I thought it might be a prank call and I considered hanging up.
“Is this Nicole Fitzhenry-Dawes?” a vaguely familiar man’s voice said. “The one who was looking for a vintage 1800s maple syrup bucket?”
The timing was ideal. That bucket was the last piece we’d been missing. Not surprisingly, wooden items didn’t age as well as metal ones. I’d found many of the metal tools within the first few weeks. The large pots used to evaporate the sap had taken me longer. Buckets and wooden sap spires had been elusive.
