Vermont Valentine (Holiday Hearts #3) Read online

  “That was the idea,” Celie said, wondering why now, as she sat amid the warmth of the Trask family, it didn’t seem so appealing. She’d been on the run from being tied down for so long. On the run from the dusty bookshop in Vieux Montréal. Now, though, as she looked across the table at Jacob, she wondered if she’d lost a piece of herself somewhere along the way.

  “Your parents must miss you.” Molly raised her water glass. “Do you get to see them much?”

  “I get up to Montreal most years,” Celie said, realizing as she said the words that they sounded woefully inadequate. “My job’s pretty crazy,” she added lamely. “And my family’s got a bookstore that keeps them all busy.”

  “Owning a small business usually means it winds up owning you,” Molly said ruefully. “I can testify to that.”

  “So what about you, did you grow up in a sugar-making family, Molly?”

  “Heavens no.” Molly Trask laughed. “My parents ran a gas station on the other side of town.”

  “Eastmont?”

  “Yep. A small-town girl from day one.”

  “Did you ever think about leaving?”

  “Oh, I went off to college for a few years. The University of Vermont. I thought I might be a teacher. But every time I came home, there would be that pesky Adam Trask asking me out. I kept telling him no, but he didn’t seem much of a mind to take no for an answer.” Her lips curved. “After a while, it got so I was looking forward to being back home more than I was looking forward to being gone.” And then the smile slipped a notch.

  Celie caught the glance of concern that flashed between Jacob and Gabe. “You don’t need to talk about—”

  “Of course I do,” Molly said fiercely. “I miss talking about him. That’s what happens when people go. Everyone gets so worried you’re going to get upset that they try to keep the subject away from the person you’ve lost. And the less you talk about them, the more they fade away.” She swallowed and blinked. “I don’t want Adam to fade away.”

  “He won’t,” Gabe said. “Not as long as we’re around.”

  “He’s in the sugarbush.” Jacob’s voice was soft, certain. “And he’s in the sugarhouse and this house and anywhere on the farm. He’s there and so is everyone who ever ran the place. As long as it’s still around, so are they.”

  Legacy, Celie thought. It wasn’t always a millstone. Sometimes it was an anchor, something that helped you stay steady in a turbulent world. Sometimes it was the thing that helped you know who you were.

  Chapter Six

  The shrieking growl of chain saws shattered the morning quiet. Jacob stood amid his trees and watched the removal crews go to work. At this moment, the sugarbush looked as it always had. And in twenty-four hours, he’d stand in this same spot staring across a bare expanse of ground.

  He couldn’t get his head around it.

  It was too sudden, too easy. In the old days felling trees had been heavy labor, men wielding axes, pulling band saws back and forth to sever trunks slowly and finally, letting them fall with a cry of “Timber!” Now, the chain saws with their voracious chorus collapsed the labor of hours down to minutes. The crews didn’t even have to section each tree, taking it apart from the top down as they would in an urban area. In the woods, all it required was a single mercilessly efficient cut to make an end to a hundred years of slow growth.

  Laughing at a companion’s joke, the arborist for the lead crew approached his first target, a sugar maple with a trunk as broad as the pillars that held up the State House in Montpelier. Trees weren’t sentient creatures, Jacob reminded himself. They couldn’t feel pain. Why, then, did it look like the crown was trembling, quaking as the chain saws bit into the trunk, sending woodchips and fragments of bark flying? Why did it fall with such heavy finality?

  He squeezed his eyes closed at the thud.

  “You don’t have to be here,” said a voice beside him.

  Celie.

  “Of course I do. They’re my trees. I…” He stopped, about to say “I need to be here for them.” Ridiculous but somehow still true. He’d been up before the sun that day, walking through the ranks of maples in the silence of the dawn, trying to accept what he knew was inevitable. “I need to be here.”

  “You’re putting yourself through torture.”

  But somehow watching the process would make it less shockingly abrupt than arriving a day or two later to see it all gone. He knew that.

  It was just making himself endure it that was the hard part.

  Celie walked over to supervise the men grinding down the stump. The others briskly sectioned the maple and loaded it into the growling chipper that spat it into the waiting trailer in a hail of wood fragments.

  Less than five minutes. It had taken less than five minutes to bring down a tree that had probably spent the better part of a century and a half growing. A tree that his great-grandfather had probably tapped when he’d first owned the property.

  A tree that was now only a memory.

  Someone whistled. “I’m gonna have to get me one of those chain saws. I bet they have this whole area cleared by sunset.”

  Jacob turned to see a vaguely familiar man in a green twill shirt. The crew put their chain saws to the trunk of the next tree and in less than a minute it toppled to the ground.

  The man shook his head and spat. “Well that’s the sound of a few hundred bucks a year disappearing. The poor son of a bitch who owns this place is going to be in the unemployment line come summer. Then again, looks like he just rolled over for these federal idiots.”

  Jacob’s jaw tightened. “Who are you?”

  “Dick Rumson, head of forest resource protection with the Vermont Division of Forestry. Who are you?”

  “I’m the owner.”

  Rumson tucked a toothpick in his mouth and began to chew it. “Ain’t going to be the owner of much by nightfall. Hell, they could at least leave you some to use for fuel wood.” His words were ripe with disgust. “They’re taking them down for no reason. If I was the one running things, I’d at least let you burn them.”

  “Which is exactly how the maple borer’s been transferred in Minnesota and Wisconsin,” Celie said as she walked up. “It doesn’t matter if the tree’s dead. If the eggs or larvae are in the wood, they can emerge as adults. You’ve got to completely destroy the trees to eliminate all possibility of spread.”

  “You say.” Rumson’s voice was contemptuous.

  “I say and I’m running the operation. You’ve gotten your reports, Dick. Is there a reason you’re here?”

  “Just wanted to see what it looks like when you take away a man’s livelihood.” He glanced at Jacob. “I’ll get going now.” He trudged away through the sugarbush toward his green Division of Forestry truck.

  “I’m sorry,” Celie said in a low voice. “I didn’t know he was going to be here.”

  “He’s quite a prize. Is he right?”

  “About the eradication? Program policy was decided by a science advisory panel of the USDA. Fifteen specialists. It was a consensus decision, not just mine.”

  “In other words, our Mr. Rumson is just a garden variety jackass?”

  “No comment.”

  The roar of additional chain saws added to the noise as the second crew got to work on the other side of the dell, focusing on a strip of smaller trees that bordered the old growth. The chain saws tore into the wood.

  It was the same sort of horrified fascination that made people stare as they drove by the scene of an accident, Celie thought. There was damage and wanton destruction and it was impossible to look away. The trees going down were young, only just mature enough for tapping.

  She heard an oath and turned to see Jacob, his face drawn taut.

  “Are you okay?”

  A muscle jumped in his jaw. “I planted those trees with my father,” he said. “I was about six. He told me that one of these days I’d be tapping them.”

  And now his father was gone. She ached for him. “Go away, Jaco
b, please. Don’t watch this.”

  “I have to.”

  She wished she could comfort him, but she knew he wouldn’t accept it. Not here, not now. She glanced back to his truck to see Murphy in the cab. Without a word, she walked over and opened the door. In an instant, the dog was out and running over to jump around Jacob, leaping up to lick his face.

  And Jacob, with a zone of isolation around him a mile wide knelt down to put his arms around the wriggling dog.

  Celie walked up and rubbed Murph’s ears. “I thought you could use your buddy.”

  Without turning away from the tree cutting, Jacob laid his hand over hers. “Thanks,” he said softly.

  And in that moment, she knew she’d take any risk necessary to keep from doing further damage to this man.

  The best way to battle rumors was information, Bob Ford said, and Celie agreed. Only a week had passed since the first growers’ meeting, only a day since they’d started the removal operation at Jacob’s, but the mood at the elementary-school auditorium was decidedly different. It had been since she’d walked in.

  There had been no joking around the coffee urn this time, no smiles or flirtations. This time, everyone gave her a wide berth. This time, the stares ranged from skeptical to outright hostile.

  It was nothing new to her. Trees coming down changed the atmosphere. She understood it, but understanding didn’t keep it from cutting. Understanding didn’t take away the sense of isolation. For a brief time, Eastmont had felt like a home. Now, it was anything but.

  Celie picked up the microphone. “I asked Bob to call the meeting so I could update you on the situation. I realize that everyone is concerned.” She took a long look at the growers. “So far, we’ve found three infested maples. We’re currently taking steps to remove trees at risk in those locations.”

  “You’re taking out maples we need to make a living,” somebody protested from the back of the room.

  “If we get an infestation, your trees are going to die anyway,” she returned. “This is the only chance to save them.”

  “How do you know it even works?” The gray-haired sugar-maker with the lantern jaw shot to his feet. “You’ve been taking out trees all over the northeast, but the problem still keeps spreading. Sugar maples don’t grow overnight, you know. You come in here and take them down, we can kiss that part of the sugarbush goodbye for as long as we’re around.”

  “Yeah,” echoed the pugnacious redhead. “Clayton’s right. How do we know you’re not making a mistake?”

  “I’ve spent the last ten years of my life studying the maple borer. We’ve come closer to controlling it here than anyone has done worldwide.”

  “Closer,” the redhead repeated, his voice rich with contempt. “What does that mean? Do you have it under control or don’t you?”

  “What we’re doing is working,” she said.

  “If it’s working so all fired well, then how did the bug get here at all?” Clayton demanded.

  “Yeah,” someone else echoed.

  The angry muttering grew until Bob Ford rose. “All right, people, getting ticked off about the situation isn’t going to change things. We’ve got a problem and we’re dealing with it the best way we know how.”

  “Sure, by taking away our crop trees.”

  “Now take it easy,” Ford said.

  “You take it easy,” the redhead retorted. “This is our income we’re talking about. She’s wading in here clearing out entire acres. It says right here that there’s no proof it even works.” He waved a newspaper in the air.

  “It says so where?” Celie asked.

  “The Montpelier paper. A state forestry guy named Dick Rumson. He’s the—”

  “I’m well aware of who Dick Rumson is.” Celie ruthlessly squashed down the surge of anger.

  “He says he was on your fancy science panel and voted not to take out such a wide buffer layer of trees.”

  “And the other fourteen panel members disagreed.”

  “Are you going to stand there and tell me he’s lying?”

  Calm, she reminded herself. Stay calm. “I have data to support our control measures.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t give a crap about your data. I’m watching trees on my neighbor’s property coming down and you’re coming to me next. Are we going to get any money for this?”

  “What’s your name?” asked Celie.

  “Paul Durkin.”

  “Don’t get ahead of things, Mr. Durkin. Let’s go through the inspections before you go borrowing trouble.”

  “I don’t have to borrow trouble,” he said hotly. “It’s finding me whether I want it to or not.”

  “And we may have gotten all the infested trees, in which case you’re getting bent out of shape unnecessarily. Let us finish our inspections, then we’ll know what we’re dealing with.”

  “What if we don’t let you on our land?” Durkin demanded.

  Celie’s gaze chilled. “The eradication of the scarlet-horned maple borer is a federal priority. If anyone refuses to grant me access to their property, I’ll get a court order. We’ve got to get any host trees out now, before adults start emerging in a few weeks. Any delays and we’ve got a population explosion, and that’ll hurt not just the people here but the whole northeast.” Her voice hardened. “I’ve been to Asia, I’ve seen what the borer can do if left unchecked. And it’s not going to happen here.”

  “What are you going to do to stop us?”

  “Whatever it takes, Mr. Durkin. I hope it won’t come to that, because I think once you think about the big picture you’ll realize the importance of what we’re doing here.”

  “You’re just guessing. You could take out all our trees for nothing.”

  She stared at him steadily. “The eradication program will proceed. Now if there are no more questions, you can get a copy of the inspection schedule up front before you leave.”

  The last stragglers were leaving the auditorium as Celie stood in the back, pulling on her coat.

  “You okay?” Bob Ford asked, coming up behind her.

  Was she ever okay after these sessions? “Yeah, sure. It went better than some.”

  He gave her a steady look. “They’re good people who want to do the right thing. They’re just scared right now.”

  “I know.”

  “I’ll walk you out,” he said.

  “No, you go ahead. I need to stop in the ladies’ room.” And she really needed a few minutes alone because she felt way too fragile just then.

  She believed in what she was doing, Celie thought after as she stared at her reflection in the low mirror of the girls’ room. She’d always believed in it. After four years in the trenches, though, she was getting weary of it all, the debates, the battles, the suspicion, the hostility. That she could understand it didn’t make it any easier. She was sick of always being the enemy when she was doing her damnedest to help, sick of knowing what a toll her attempts took on people’s lives. She remembered the look on Jacob Trask’s face as they’d cut down his father’s trees. It didn’t matter that it was the only accepted way, it wasn’t good enough.

  What she needed was Beetlejuice.

  Outside, the cold bit at her cheeks and numbed her fingertips even through her down-filled gloves. She plodded to her truck. The cab was little warmer, but at least there was the promise of heat soon to come. She started to fit her key into the ignition. And stopped. Something was wrong, she could feel it. There was a tilt to the vehicle, a tilt that hadn’t been apparent when she’d driven in.

  And she cursed as she got out in the icy wind and walked around to find her right rear tire flat. Things hadn’t gone as well as she’d thought, apparently. She was familiar with this, oh, she was familiar with it. They were scared and defensive, sure. And ready to strike out, just as others in different towns had struck out, over and over again.

  Sighing, she walked back toward the cab of the truck.

  “Need a hand?”

  She turned to see Jacob stand
ing under the light. In the wash of harsh illumination, his eyes were shadowed, his cheeks hollow.

  “Just a flat. I can get it, thanks.”

  “You’ll mess up your clothes. Let me take care of it.”

  It was on the tip of her tongue to say no, but she was suddenly just too tired to deal with it. “That would be really nice of you. Let me open up the shell so we can lower the tire.”

  “I’ll get that. You get the jack.”

  By the time she’d managed to undo the toggle bolt and get the jack out, Jacob was sitting on his heels in front of the flat, running his fingers over the slit in the rubber. “Someone slashed your tire,” he said blankly.

  Celie gave a ghost of a smile. “Not everyone appreciates what I do.”

  He frowned. “You think it was someone here at the meeting?”

  “All I know is that I had four good tires when I got here. I suppose Eastmont could be a hotbed of youth violence but I doubt it. I think someone wanted to vent their frustration.”

  “You don’t sound surprised.”

  “You get used to it after a while. There’s a reason I drive a clunker. If I got a new truck, I’d only be paying money to present a nice, shiny target, and you can bet it would just tick them off all the more.”

  Before, he’d assumed she drove the old, battered truck for the same reason he did—frugality and because it was less of a hassle than actually going to a dealership. It never occurred to him that she was a target.

  He reached out and ran his fingers over the grooved paint on the side of the truck bed and turned to her, eyes sober. “I guess this wasn’t a drunk keying your car in a parking lot.”

  “It could have been, I suppose. But when the dents and scratches keep showing up, you start to see a pattern.”

  And a cold anger awoke in him. “You don’t deserve this.”

  “I don’t think it’s a matter of deserving. I think it’s just people.”

  Because he had to move, he slammed his hand down on the tire iron to crack loose the lug nuts. “Are you telling me it doesn’t get to you?”

  “Of course it gets to me, especially on a night like tonight. I just don’t know anything else to do but put my head down and keep going.”