Vermont Valentine. Kristin Hardy

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      “You working at the Institute?”

      “That depends.”

      “On what?”

      She grinned. “Whether I find it.”

      “Well, Jacob Trask, who would have thought you were such a good-looking boy under all that hair?” Muriel Anderson, the comfortable-looking clerk at Washington County Maple Supplies gave him a long look up and down. “I almost didn’t recognize you. I see those Eastmont girls took you to task.”

      Those Eastmont girls had trimmed and tidied and upholstered him until he could hardly stand it. In the first stunned moments when he’d stared at his newly shorn face in the salon mirror, all he’d been able to do was calculate feverishly how long it would take to grow back. He’d been shocked at how naked being clean-shaven made him feel.

      He’d grown the beard at twenty and left it on. Without it, he almost hadn’t recognized himself. In the intervening sixteen years, his face had grown more angular, the chin more stubborn, the bones pressed more tightly against the skin.

      It was the face of someone else, not him. A week, he’d figured, a week to get covered up.

      He hadn’t figured on noticing the mix of gray hairs among the black in the new beard as it sprouted. More, far more than he’d recalled before. There certainly weren’t any on his head. He could do without the ones down below. After all, a man was entitled to some vanity, wasn’t he? The beard, he’d decided, would stay gone.

      “Hi, Jacob,” purred Eliza, Muriel’s twenty-year-old daughter, as she walked past.

      Or maybe it wouldn’t, he thought uneasily, taking the fifty-pound bag of diatomaceous earth off his shoulder and setting it down on the counter. He was all for having a personal life, but the non-stop scrutiny he’d begun attracting from women felt a little weird. He liked cruising along below the radar; he had from the time he’d looked around in third grade and realized he was a head taller than any of his classmates. Cruising below the radar had gotten hard, though, all of a sudden.

      “Did you hear they found some cases of maple borer over in New York?” Muriel asked as she started ringing up Jacob’s order. “They had to take down 423 trees from the heart of a sugarbush to get it all. Sixteen-inchers, most of them.”

      Four-hundred-some-odd trees? Nearly ten acres, maybe more. That would be a financial hit, and one that would persist for decades. After all, sugar maples didn’t grow old enough to tap for thirty or forty years. “Are you sure they’re not exaggerating?”

      “Tom Bollinger said it, and he can be trusted.” Muriel shook her head. “You should spend less time looking at books in Ray’s and more time around the stove talking to people, Jacob. You might find out something you can use.”

      “I’d rather hear it from you.” He winked at her, as he had so many times over the years. And to his everlasting shock, she blushed.

      “Oh, you.” She shook her head at him. “Talking isn’t nearly as hard as chopping brush.”

      For Jacob talking was harder, except in the case of a handful of people, such as Muriel.

      “Everything I hear tells me we’ve got something to worry about here,” Muriel continued. “Some of those Institute fellows were over at Willoughby’s sugarbush a couple of weeks ago, poking at his trees and muttering.”

      Concern was immediate. Willoughby’s property adjoined his own. Like most sugar-makers, Jacob found solvency a delicate balancing act, especially now that he was the one running the farm to support his mother and himself. The prospect of losing five or ten percent of his revenue-producing trees was a sobering one. “Do they think his trees are infested?”

      “They don’t know. Took some samples, said they’d get back to him.”

      Jacob stuffed his change in his pocket distractedly. “If you see him, tell him I wish him luck.”

      “You can tell him yourself at the county growers’ meeting tomorrow.” His noise of disgust earned a click of the tongue from Muriel. “You’ve got to show up at these things, Jacob,” she chided.

      “I do show up, Muriel.”

      “It’s not enough to show. You need to talk. You can’t just sit through the program. That’s not where you learn the important things.”

      It was where he learned all he needed to know, Jacob thought, that and the Internet. He’d never understood people’s obsession with sitting around and yapping their fool heads off about nothing. Working he understood, and he was happy to do it. Standing around and chewing the fat in hopes he might get something more than idle speculation was a waste of time.

      A couple of miles from the Feed ’n’ Read, Celie began wondering if she’d somehow missed a turn again. It wasn’t that the directions were difficult but that the term “road” was a vague one. To her, it meant pavement and a sign. To the clerk at the feed store, who knew? She’d passed several things that looked more like gravel drives. They could be part of a sugar-bush access system, assuming the maples she was driving through belonged to a sugarbush, or they could lead to someone’s house.

      Or they could be her landmarks.

      She was reasonably confident she’d gotten onto Bixley Road all right. She hadn’t seen a covered bridge, though, and by the directions her contact had sent her, she should have found the Institute long since. Wrong turn? Possible, but she might also have been close because she was clearly driving through tended maples, and the Institute was located in the middle of a sugarbush. More than likely, she was on the property already.

      She scanned the trees automatically as she drove, a habit so established she wasn’t even aware of it.

      Suddenly she saw something that had her swerving to the side of the road, pulse speeding up. It was almost too subtle to be seen, the striations of the trunk, the slight thickening at the base of the tree that set off warning bells. A closer look, she thought, hoping to God it wasn’t what it appeared to be.

      Turning off the engine was barely a decision at all. This was more important than what time she arrived at the Institute. After all, she was already late enough that it wouldn’t matter one way or another.

      This would.

      Reaching behind the front seat of her truck, Celie pulled out her field kit.

      She wore hiking boots, as was her habit. It paid to be prepared. With a job like hers, you could be tramping around a stand of trees at a moment’s notice. It was one of the things she loved about it. Oh, growing up in Montreal had been exciting, but it had been too confined, too structured. And it was too associated with the dusty, musty demands of the Cité de L’Ile, the bookstore that was her family’s legacy. Her family’s, not hers. Hers was going to be eliminating the insatiable pest that had the power to destroy the maple forests of North America.

      In warmer weather, the dip she crossed to get to the trees was probably a drainage ditch. Now, it was just a running depression in the snow. Celie walked back parallel to the road. Sixteen-to eighteen-inch trunks, she estimated, moving among them. A mature, tended stand with only a handful of non-maple species. She was unfortunately going to show up at the Institute with some unwelcome news about what had every appearance of being their sugarbush.

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