Page 23 of Threat of Danger
“No, sir.”
“Better head home, then.”
Kaylee dropped a kiss on his leathery cheek. Then she hugged Jess again, her mile-wide smile back. “I’ll come see you tomorrow after church.”
“I don’t remember you being that strict,” Jess told Chuck after the girl left.
“She’s seventeen,” he mumbled, as if that was all the explanation needed. Then he sighed. “You wouldn’t believe how the boys come around. I’m scared to death I’ll lose all control any day now. I don’t have any idea what I’m doing here.”
“Looks like you’re doing a good job. She’s a great kid.”
Chuck nodded and went back to his default setting: smiling. “You going to Burlington to see Rose this morning?”
“I’m heading out right now. Just wanted to check on things and say hi.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a tiny bottle, stoppered with old-fashioned cork instead of a screw top. The syrup inside had the color of antique gold.
He held the sample out for Jess. “Here. Take this to her. She’ll want a taste.”
When Jess took the bottle, Chuck picked up a spoon from the table next to him and dipped it into an open mason jar of maple syrup that sat on the middle of the table. He held the spoon out to Jess. “You try it too.”
The sweet maple flavor instantly spread on her tongue, bringing back a new wave of memories, a hundred tastings, dripping hot syrup in the snow in funny shapes to freeze, making maple candy with Zelda in the kitchen, maple cookies, maple cake.
She moaned. “It might be the best ever.”
Chuck beamed, as proud as if he’d personally put all that sweetness into the sap. “Isn’t it?”
“Any progress on the sugar sand project?”
Sugar sand was impurities that they filtered from the syrup, a by-product they threw away. Chuck had been trying, for as long as Jess had known him, to come up with a use for it, without success.
“Not yet. But I’m on it.”
“Anything new?”
He shrugged. “Bags.” He pulled a blue plastic bag from a cardboard box from the floor and held it out to her. “A couple of people already switched. I’m thinking about it.”
“To replace buckets?”
“We could see how full the bags are from far away, no need to walk up to each and every tree like we do now with the buckets. It’d save a lot of time.”
Yet he didn’t seem all that excited, so Jess asked, “But?”
“Damn squirrels get thirsty and chew holes in the bags. Then the sap drips away.”
They talked some more about that before Jess finally left, with a promise that she’d go out to the trees with Chuck after she returned from the hospital. Where she was finally going to talk her mother into moving from the farm.
Chapter Seven
SUGARING WAS OBVIOUSLYgoing well without Rose Taylor having to be on the premises. Both Rose and Zelda needed a house without all those steps, a shower they could easily get in and out of instead of the high-sided tub. They needed bingo during the long evenings in winter, not being locked up inside for months at a time because outside everything was frozen and dangerously slippery.
Jess gathered a list of supporting arguments as she drove through Taylorville. She stopped only to run into the coffee shop next to the gas station for her second cup of the morning.
She tried to see through the window in between poster ads, then gave up and stepped in so she wouldn’t look like a weirdo, spying through the glass. She couldn’t avoid every place for the next three weeks where Derekmightbe.
The tantalizing scent of coffee and baked goods hit her. She glanced around.No Derek.Relief, she told herself. She felt relief and nothing else.Notdisappointment.
A dozen or so people sat at the tables, but Jess turned toward the counter without looking at them for more than a split second, preferring not to be recognized. She didn’t want to be tied up in conversations for the next hour here.
