“Early settlers boiled sap in metal cauldrons on tripods they set up over open fires,” Franklin explained. “These days, though, we’re a little more sophisticated.” Crossing the small room to a door on the far side, he paused for dramatic effect. “Which brings me to the next stop on the tour: the evaporation room!”
“He’s like Willy Wonka giving a tour of the chocolate factory,” said Calhoun, and Mackenzie and I both laughed.
“I’m in heaven,” Mackenzie murmured as Franklin flung open the door and we were suddenly enveloped in a warm, maple-scented cloud of steam. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. “Wake me up when Spring Break is over.”
“Hello, everyone, I’m Frank Freeman,” said Franklin’s father, who was waiting for us next to a long piece of gleaming stainless steel equipment. “As you can see, ours is a completely modern processing facility. Our wood-burning evaporator here can process about twenty-five gallons of sap per hour.”
We watched as he opened a furnacelike door at the far end of the apparatus and threw in more wood. The coals and half-burned logs inside glowed a brilliant fiery orange. I could feel the heat all the way across the room.
“This is called the firebox,” said Mr. Freeman, warming his hands briefly in front of the blaze before shutting the door again. “A storage tank outside feeds the collected sap into this stainless steel evaporator pan.” He pointed to the long, low horizontal pan set on top of the evaporator’s surface. “As the sap boils, water is released through steam, and the sap becomes more and more concentrated. When it reaches the proper density—a sugar content of sixty-six percent or more—it’s officially syrup.”
Mr. Freeman looked around the room. “I’m happy to stick around after the tour and answer questions for anyone who wants more technical information, but for the rest of you, I’ll conclude by explaining the final step, which is when we filter the syrup to remove any niter, or sugar sand—a sediment of naturally occurring minerals. From there the syrup is bottled and graded and labeled”—he held up a bottle bearing one of Freeman Farm’s distinctive orange labels—“and sent next door to our store in the barn, which you fine folks will be visiting next, if memory serves.” He winked at the crowd, who all laughed obligingly. “Any questions?”
A hand at the back shot up. “How much sap does a single maple tree typically produce?”
“Good question,” said Mr. Freeman. “Usually between ten and twenty gallons, which translates to a quart or two of syrup.”
“Wow, that’s not much syrup for all that sap,” someone else noted, and Franklin’s father nodded.
“You are correct. Maple farming is a labor-intensive process, which is one of the reasons that syrup isn’t necessarily cheap.” He waggled his dark eyebrows. “But every drop is oh so worth it, right?”
The onlookers laughed again.
“Can you put more than one spile in a tree?” asked a woman in a blue cable-knit hat.
“Yes, but you need to be careful not to overtap,” Mr. Freeman replied. “The bigger the tree, the more taps you can place. Depending on the circumference of the trunk, you can use one, two, or three spiles.”
“So you must have to tap a lot of trees in order to produce a decent amount of syrup,” the woman added, and Mr. Freeman nodded again.
“Our farm has one of the biggest and best sugar bushes for miles around,” he said proudly. “There are thousands of trees on our property.”
“Do the trees mind having their sap taken?” a little kid in the front piped up.
Franklin answered this one. “Not at all. It’s kind of like donating blood, in fact. Just as your body replenishes itself, so the tree gets busy producing more sap to replace what’s been taken. And, by the way, some maple trees on our property have been tapped for over a hundred and fifty years and are still producing!”
A chorus of oohs and aahs went up at this. I looked over at Mackenzie. I could tell she was enjoying herself. The Freemans put on a good show.
The tour over, Franklin led us out of the sugarhouse and into the barn store next door. It took Mackenzie forever to decide what to buy. I followed her around, keeping an eye on Calhoun as I did. The good thing was, he wasn’t hovering around my cousin the way Scooter and Lucas were doing. The bad thing was, he wasn’t hovering around me, either. He ignored us both as he leafed through a coffee table book about maple syrup production.
Mackenzie finally settled on maple syrup and maple candy for her parents. “And Cameron will love this,” she said, grabbing a container of maple hot sauce and putting it in her shopping basket.
“Who’s Cameron?” asked Scooter, popping up behind us.
“Mr. Perf—” I started to say, but Mackenzie stepped on my foot.
“My, um, friend,” she finished, at the same time that I said “Ouch.” “We’re on the swim team together back in Austin.”
I gave her a look. Since when was Cameron McAllister just a “friend”? Apparently my cousin was enjoying all the male attention here in Pumpkin Falls.
“I should be getting back,” said Lucas, glancing anxiously at his watch. His outings always came with a time limit. “My mother said she’d treat us all to lunch at Lou’s, if you guys want to come with me.”
“I never turn down a cheeseburger,” said Calhoun, who had rejoined us.
“I thought you were going to show us the scene of the crime?” I murmured to Franklin, glancing around to make sure we weren’t overheard.
He nodded. “It’ll just take a couple of minutes. We can stop there on our way to Lou’s. Let me just ask my mom if I can go first.”
As we were leaving the barn store, a car pulled into the lot and a woman in jeans and a down vest got out. I’d seen her before at Lovejoy’s Books—she was one of the reporters from the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle.
“There you are, Franklin!” said his mother. “Would you mind showing Janet what we found out in the sugar bush yesterday?”
Franklin flashed us an apologetic look. “Sure,” he said. “Can I go to lunch at Lou’s afterward, Mom? Mrs. Winthrop’s treating.”
“May I go to lunch,” his mother replied automatically. I guess all parents have the grammar reflex. “Make it a short one. We need your help here.”
“Okay.” Motioning to the reporter to follow, he headed for the woods.
“Why is it called a sugar bush?” asked Mackenzie as we trotted after them. “I thought the sap came from trees, not bushes.”
“It does,” Franklin replied. “But for some reason a stand of maples—especially sugar maples, which is mostly what we have on our farm—is referred to as a ‘sugar bush.’ It’s tradition, I guess.”
“Your family puts a lot of work into managing this operation, doesn’t it?” asked the reporter, rapidly scribbling in her notebook.
Franklin nodded. “Yep. The sugar bush has to be constantly monitored and maintained. We clear out underbrush and dead wood in the spring and summer, thin the saplings to make sure there are no more than fifty to sixty trees per acre—lots of stuff like that. Then there’s equipment maintenance and repairs, cutting and stacking enough wood to keep the evaporator fire going during the sap run, making sure everything is spotless, ordering supplies, setting up the tubing and vacuum pumps—it kind of never ends. Plus, the barn store is a year-round operation, and we do all our own packing and shipping.”
I looked at my classmate with new respect. I’d known he was kind of obsessed with maple syrup, but over the past few days I’d seen firsthand how hardworking he and his family were, and how much pride they all took in their business. It was impressive.
The sun was directly overhead now, and I unzipped my jacket. A light breeze stirred in the branches. I looked up, on the alert for birds. It would be totally cool to see another owl.
“What was it Franklin said the Abenakis called this time of year?” I asked my cousin.
“Maple moon, I think.”
We walked along in silence. Maple moon. I liked the way that sounded. Mayb
e the maple moon would bring me luck in spotting an owl of my very own. Or maybe my new silver earrings would. I touched a finger to one of them and glanced over at Calhoun again, wondering if he’d noticed them.
A couple of minutes later Franklin stopped in front of a trio of trees. They looked exactly the same as all the others in the woods to me, but he obviously knew his family’s property better than I did.
“This is where the sabotage took place,” he told us.
I looked at the network of plastic tubing that linked these trees with all the others in the sugar bush. “How can you tell?”
“See that vertical line?” He pointed to a length of black tubing that connected the spile on the tree in front of us to the fatter horizontal blue tubing below it that led downhill. “When we were doing a routine inspection yesterday, we found that it had been severed. We replaced it, but my dad left the piece that had been cut so that we’d remember the spot.”
Leaning over, he picked up a slender piece of black tubing that was lying on the ground. The reporter took out her camera, and Mackenzie and I both snapped a few photos as well.
The reporter made us all pose for a picture, and then my friends and I all milled around inspecting the evidence. Suddenly, there was a crashing noise in the underbrush behind us. We turned around to see someone striding toward us through the woods.
It was Coach Maynard, and he did not look happy. Not one bit.
“So this is the way you Freemans want to play it, is it?” he said, shaking something at Franklin. It was a piece of black plastic tubing, identical to the one we’d just photographed. “You want to ambush me again? Well, two can play at that game. Where’s your father?”
CHAPTER 13
Word travels fast in a small town.
Ella Bellow helped it along, of course. How she found out about the showdown in the sugar bush was a mystery, but I suspected that Janet-the-reporter had something to do with it. Whoever or whatever fed the flame, by the end of the day Pumpkin Falls definitely had a full-blown feud on its hands, and people had started taking sides.
After our photo session at the scene of the crime with the Pumpkin Falls Patriot-Bugle, my friends and I had continued into town to Lou’s, where we’d discussed what we’d seen over burgers and fries.
“If Coach Maynard’s place was hit a second time, do you think it might happen again at your farm too?” I asked Franklin.
“I don’t know,” he replied, his expression troubled. He dipped a French fry into the puddle of ketchup on his plate. “I hope not.”
“It seems like kind of a stupid thing to steal,” said Mackenzie. “They’d have to take a ton of sap to even make a single gallon of syrup, right?”
Franklin nodded. “Yup. Forty gallons or so. My dad thinks it might just be vandals. You know, teenagers blowing off steam.”
“From Pumpkin Falls?” Scooter looked doubtful.
Franklin shook his head. “He’s thinking West Hartfield, maybe. Remember last fall, when some guys from their football team spray-painted their stupid bobcat mascot on the side of one of the Farnsworths’ cows?”
Scooter and Lucas and Calhoun started to laugh.
“I’ll never forget the look on their faces when Mr. Farnsworth drove up to their next home game with his trailer and unloaded the cow right onto the field during halftime,” crowed Scooter. “He said, ‘This belongs to you, apparently,’ and then let it loose.”
“It was epic,” Calhoun told Mackenzie, grinning. “That cow chased their football team and marching band into the gym.”
“Seriously?” My cousin’s voice shot up in disbelief. “People actually do stuff like that here? Pranks with cows?” She paused, gave my classmates a mischievous grin, then trotted out her fake radio announcer voice. “Pumpkin Falls: the town that time forgot.”
“Yeah, it’s a hopping place,” Calhoun replied. Then his expression grew serious. “I hope your dad’s right, Franklin, and it’s vandalism. Because if it’s sabotage, that means someone deliberately wants someone else’s business to fail.”
Lucas looked down at his plate. “Wow, I hadn’t thought about that.”
We were all quiet for a moment, considering this possibility.
“I just wish there was a way to find out for sure who’s responsible,” said Franklin finally.
Scooter got a funny look on his face. At first, I thought maybe he’d accidentally bitten his tongue or something, but then I realized he’d just had an idea.
“I have to go check something out,” he told us, sliding off his counter stool. “I’ll text you guys later, okay?”
“That was weird,” I said, watching as Scooter sprinted out of the restaurant.
“Uh-huh,” Mackenzie agreed.
We finished our lunch, thanked Mrs. Winthrop for treating, and then went our separate ways, agreeing to be in touch again later after we heard back from Scooter.
“So what else do you feel like doing today?” I asked my cousin when we were back outside.
“Weren’t we going to try and find a German-English dictionary?”
“Oh yeah, I totally forgot.”
I steered her down the street toward Lovejoy’s Books, pausing by the antiques store so she could gawk at the moth-eaten moose head in the display window. It was sporting a pair of sunglasses today, along with a “Maple Madness!” sign around its neck. The Mahoneys had jazzed things up for the celebration.
My cousin pulled out her cell phone and snapped a picture. “Cameron is crazy about—”
“Taxidermy?”
“Shut up. Vintage sunglasses. Those are really cool.”
“Vintage sunglasses. I’ll be sure and make a note of that,” I said drily, and she made a face at me, then laughed.
“Greetings and salutations!” said Aunt True, looking up from the shipment of books she was unpacking as we came through the bookshop door. “You girls are just in time for afternoon treats.”
I’d been hoping that was the case.
“Don’t touch the ones on the red tray,” she added. “I need to drop those off at the General Store later for the Bake-Off.”
“I’ll bet you win,” Mackenzie told her, grabbing two Bookshop Blondies from the other tray on the counter. She took a bite out of one of them. “These are fantastic!”
My aunt looked pleased. “Why, thank you, ma’am.”
Miss Marple, who’d heard the word “treats,” roused herself from her nap and trotted over. She sat obediently before anyone could say a word—“the preemptive sit,” my father has dubbed it—and looked at us expectantly.
“Yes, Miss Marple, you can have a treat too,” Mackenzie told her, taking a dog biscuit from the cookie jar on the counter. My grandparents always kept it there for four-legged visitors.
“Dog people are book people,” Gramps liked to tell customers. When Lola pointed out that cat people were book people too, my grandfather would wink and add, “But cats don’t bring their owners into bookshops on a leash.”
“Any chance there’s a German-English dictionary somewhere around here?” I asked.
Aunt True’s eyebrows shot up. “I didn’t know you were taking German.”
“I’m not.”
“Oh?” She gave me a quizzical look.
“Um, actually, it’s for me,” Mackenzie said. “It’s for this, uh, project I have to do.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her slip one hand behind her back and cross her fingers.
“Really? Interesting.” My aunt disappeared into the travel section, returning a moment later with a thick paperback. “Will this do?”
Mackenzie and I nodded, and my cousin reached for her purse.
“Absolutely not,” said Aunt True, waving it away. “What’s the point of having a family business if you can’t do something nice for your family now and then?” She handed the dictionary to my cousin and smiled. “Good luck with your project.”
Mackenzie’s face flushed. She was obviously feeling guilty about the fib. Not too obviously, I hope
d. “Thanks.”
“So I was showing Mackenzie the original Truly’s passport,” I said quickly, changing the subject. “You know, the one that’s hanging on the wall outside my bedroom door? Anyway, we were wondering if you knew what Matthew Lovejoy did for a living. Besides being a soldier in the Civil War, I mean.”
“Farming, I think,” Aunt True replied absently, turning her attention back to the box of books she was unloading. “I’m pretty sure most of our ancestors were farmers. When they weren’t founding colleges and naming lakes and mountains after themselves, that is.”
Mackenzie and I exchanged a glance. Whatever it was that the original Truly was so worked up about in her diary sure didn’t sound like farming.
“Oh good!” cried my aunt. “The new Inspector Mistlethwaite mystery is here!”
I smiled at her. “You thound like Pippa.”
She smiled back and passed me a stack of books. “I thuppothe I do. Stick two copies on the new releases table by the front door, would you? And put one with Miss Marple’s Picks. The other three can go in the mystery section.”
I nodded and took them from her. “Um, did Matthew maybe have another business on the side?”
Aunt True peered at me over the top of her zebra-striped reading glasses. “What makes you ask?”
I shrugged. “No particular reason.”
“Your grandfather would probably know. He’s the family historian.”
I glanced up at the clock on the wall and frowned. “What time is it in Namibia?”
Aunt True made a quick mental calculation. “Let’s see, they’re six hours ahead of us this time of year, so early evening, I think.”
I turned to Mackenzie. “Dang! We won’t have time to call them before swim practice, and by the time we get home, it will be too late.” We’d have to wait and try first thing in the morning.
“Sounds urgent.” My aunt gave me a thoughtful look, her curiosity definitely piqued.
“Uh, no, not really,” I said hastily, and grabbing my cousin, I scurried off to distribute the new mystery books.