Just beyond the outfitter was a bridge, a narrow latticework of metal girders and wooden beams painted green. Not the covered New Englander I’d envisioned. The Passumpsic River looked dark and menacing as we crossed over. On one bank, an ancient brick power station.
Soon the road’s name changed to Hale. Forest took over on both sides. Lofty pine, less lofty spruce. Hardwoods, their branches nude, their bark black and sparkly wet.
Then there were no homes, no barns. Just the Hundred Acre Wood.
Seven minutes of silence, I kept checking my watch. Then Ryan made a right beside a battered post that at one time may have held a mailbox. A sign nailed to a tree said ORNE in letters sun-bleached to the color of old denim. Below the truncated name, an equally faded fleur-de-lis.
The track was little more than an absence of trees and two ruts undecided between mud and ice. As the Jeep bounced and swayed, I braced myself with palms to the dash. My fillings were loosening when Ryan finally braked to a stop.
Across a clearing, maybe ten yards distant, sat a small frame house that had seen better days. Single-story, once probably yellow with white trim. But, as with the mailbox, the paint was long gone.
The front door, accessed by one concrete step, was propped open with a rock. The windows visible on the front and right were boarded on the inside with plywood. To the left, up a slight rise and nestled under a stand of tall pines, stood three sheds, one large, two small. Dirt paths connected the trio to one another and to the house.
Parked in front of the house was a Hardwick PD cruiser. I assumed it belonged to Umpie Rodas. Beside the cruiser was a crime scene truck. Beside the truck was a black van with double doors in back. My gut told me the vehicle had ties to a morgue.
“Tabernac!”
I swiveled toward Ryan, ready to be livid for what he’d held back. He looked as surprised as I felt.
“What’s the deal?” I asked.
“Damned if I know.”
“Rodas didn’t tell you?”
“He just said they’d found something we needed to see. Sounded distracted.”
“No doubt. He was busy making a whole lot of calls.”
I raised the hood of my parka to cover my head. Pulled on gloves. Got out and started toward the house. The wind was gusting hard, blasting sleet at my face like fiery little pellets. My mind was racing, running possibilities. Senseless. I’d know in seconds. Behind me, Ryan’s boots made swishing sounds in the slippery leaves and grass. Mimicking my own.
A uniformed cop stood inside the front door, thumbs hooked in a belt half hidden by a substantial roll of fat. His hat and jacket bore insignia patches saying Hardwick PD.
The cop straightened upon seeing us.
“Dr. Temperance Brennan.” I flashed my LSJML security card as Ryan badged him. “Rodas requested our presence.”
The guy barely glanced at our IDs. From another room, I heard the sound of drawers opening and closing. “He’s in the big shed out back.”
“Thanks.”
“Tight security,” Ryan said when we’d rounded the corner of the house.
“It’s rural Vermont.”
We followed the path up the hill. Added ours to dozens of boot prints in the half-frozen muck.
The shack was made of unpainted boards barely maintaining contact. The roof was rusted tin, louvered at the top, curling free of the nails securing it at the bottom.
The shed’s two barnlike doors were thrown wide, and its interior was visible in bright detail. The scene looked surreal, like a movie set lit by an overzealous gaffer. I assumed portable lights had been brought in and set up.
Set up for what?
In a far corner, partly in shadow, two figures stood talking beside a blue plastic barrel. One was Umpie Rodas. The other was a tall woman with a red knit hat pulled low to her brows. A full-length black coat obscured her shape. Both turned at the sound of our footsteps. Rodas was hatless, and his jacket was unzipped. He may have had on the same red shirt he’d worn in Charlotte. Or maybe he had a collection.
“Glad you made it. Sorry about the weather.”
Ryan and I entered. The shack smelled of smoke, moist earth, and something sweet, like a pancake house on a Sunday morning.
I was right about the lights. There were three, the standard tripod variety often used at crime scenes. The generator was gas-powered, the kind you can buy at any Home Depot.
Rodas made introductions. The woman, Cheri Karras, was with the chief ME’s office in Burlington. Instead of mittens, she wore surgical gloves. So did Rodas.
I felt a knot begin to form in my gut.
Behind Karras, a man in a thick padded jacket was snapping photographs. His breath glowed white each time his flash went off.
I took a quick look around. The floor was hard-packed dirt, filled with a hodgepodge of items. Enormous cauldrons, blackened by fire. An open box containing blue plastic bags. Beside it, dozens of identical boxes, unopened. Circling the walls, rusty buckets, saucepans of differing sizes, screens, juice and milk cartons, five-gallon white plastic tubs stacked to form wobbly five-foot towers.
Crude shelving held wooden boxes filled with small metal implements that had a spike at one end and a downspout opposite. Others held metal hooks. Two drills. An assortment of hammers. A half-dozen coils of blue tubing. Jugs of household bleach.
At the shack’s center, directly below the vented part of the roof, was a three-by-five brick-lined pit with iron bars running between the long sides. On the bars sat a rectangular flat-bottomed metal pan, empty, its interior yellowed by some sort of residue. The bricks and bars were fire-blackened and covered with soot. Ditto the outside of the pan.
I was stumped. But one thing was clear. Whatever the shed’s purpose, cobwebs and grime suggested years of disuse.
“—got word no one was occupying the property, I decided to take a look around, be sure vandals weren’t up to mischief. We get squatters sometimes, folks find an empty summer home, decide to move in for the winter.”
My attention refocused. On Rodas. On Karras. On the ominous blue barrel between them.
“House had been breached, all right. Lock was jimmied. That was my green light. No damage inside, nothing worth stealing, so I took a peek out here.”
“Cabane à sucre.” For some reason, Ryan said it in French.
Of course. The shed was a sugar shack, a place to convert maple sap into syrup.
I eyed the barrel. The knot tightened.
Rodas nodded. “A Quebecer would know, eh?”
Karras’s phone buzzed. Wordlessly, she stepped outside. I watched her as Rodas continued talking. She seemed untroubled. A raccoon in the barrel? Or just another day with death?
“The property’s deeded to Margaux and Martin Corneau. Ten acres, eight of ’em mixed red and sugar maple. Until the late ’80s, the Corneaus ran a small operation, provided ten, twenty gallons a year to an outfit that bottled and sold locally.” Rodas arced an arm at the paraphernalia around us. “The old stuff’s theirs, cauldrons, aluminum buckets and lids. The plastic collection bags and polyethylene tubing, now, that’s something else.”
“Meaning?” Ryan asked.
“Meaning they’re new.”
“Suggesting a more recent operation.”
Rodas nodded, his expression grim. But something else. Excited? Eager?
“By whom?” Ryan asked.
“I’m working on that.”
“What’s in the barrel?” Not trying very hard to hide my impatience.
“We’d best wait for Doc Karras.”
“Where do you buy sugaring equipment?” Ryan asked.
“Anywhere. The barrels are widely used for food storage. The tubing’s multipurpose.”