I screamed and jerked my steering wheel. My car skidded onto the icy shoulder. I slammed on my brakes, but they locked and I kept sliding, right into the snowbank in the ditch. The call with Russ had dropped.
I sat there, my pulse pounding loud enough in my ears that it sounded like an avalanche bearing down on me. And all I could think was that my air bag hadn’t deployed again, and it probably should have, because I was in a ditch. And I could be dead right now. And Russ might be dead.
Something had exploded at Sugarwood.
My hands were shaking so badly that it took me two tries to correctly dial 9-1-1. I explained to the dispatcher what I’d heard. He assured me they’d send police, an ambulance, and a fire truck.
I hung up without telling him that I was in a ditch. I could call back if it came to that, but if I did, I’d have to wait for police and maybe even an ambulance for myself. I was pretty sure I hadn’t hit my head on the steering wheel, so I should be fine.
What I needed was to get home and find out what had happened.
The person I most wanted to call was Mark, but I couldn’t, not even now. I tried to call Erik, but as was the new normal since he’d become interim chief, his line was busy. I went straight to voicemail. I didn’t bother leaving a message.
Instead, I called the only other person I had to call anymore. At least the only person who might be able to get to me fast enough and get me to Sugarwood to find out what had happened.
“Scott,” Elise’s voice said.
Considering how much she’d disliked me less than two weeks ago, she was remarkably patient as I blurted out my story again, this time adding in the fact that I’d driven my car into a ditch. In the back of my mind, I recognized the tone in her voice as the same one she’d used on the child who’d called her about the missing tooth. The random thought that she was probably a great mom flitted through my mind.
Elise told me I should get out of my car to wait for her. She didn’t want me inside with the engine running in case the exhaust pipe was plugged by snow and I asphyxiated myself. It was rare to meet someone with nearly as paranoid a mind as I had.
She was right. Had circumstances been different, we might have been friends.
The shoulder I’d dislocated last fall ached as I undid my seatbelt and climbed up out of the ditch. Fortunately for me, temperatures had to come up above freezing for the sap to run, which meant I wasn’t in sub-zero temperatures while waiting.
I tried calling Russ’ cell phone back twice in the time it took Elise to reach me. No answer. With each failed attempt, my heart climbed higher in my throat until I could barely swallow around it.
When Elise rolled up, her lights were on and she stopped the car only long enough for me to jump in and buckle up.
“Have you heard anything yet?” I asked.
She shook her head. The contrast between her dark hair and her pale skin was starker than when I’d last seen her. It took me a minute to remember that Russ had once been engaged to Mark’s aunt before she died from cancer. It could have been a maternal aunt, but it might have also been a shared aunt, so Elise might view Russ with the same affection that Mark did, as a person who would have been family had life gone differently.
She was probably more scared right now than I was, and I had no comfort to give her.
As we pulled into the parking lot out front of the sugar shack, we couldn’t get anywhere near the building. A firetruck and Fair Haven police cruiser blocked the way, and an ambulance was parked to one side beyond them. I caught a glimpse of Officer Quincey Dornbush’s balding head bobbing around in the crowd of milling people.
Thankfully, no flames licked from the building. Whatever had exploded either hadn’t caused a larger fire or the fire department had already put it out.
We jogged toward the chaos, Elise leading the way and parting the crowd in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to. The flashing lights and impending sunset gave the whole setting the feel of a creepy outdoor disco. We came out the other side, closer to the building and the ambulance.
Russ and another woman I recognized as one of our employees sat on the back edge of the ambulance, a paramedic working on each of them. Streaks of dark blood ran down the side of Russ’ head and dampened the left shoulder of his shirt, but he was upright and talking.
I would have thrown my arms around him if that wouldn’t have gotten in the way of his treatment. “What happened?”
“Reverse osmosis machine exploded,” Russ said. The paramedic dabbed at Russ’ skull, and he grimaced. “I got clipped with some shrapnel. Might have been worse if I hadn’t climbed out from under the machine to talk to you right before it happened.”
“It would have been worse,” Quincey Dornbush said from beside me. “It blew up like a gigantic pressure cooker. He could have been killed.”
Heat burned over my face, and my hands went cold. Coincidences happened—my parents exploited that fact all the time to help get their clients acquitted—but in the big things, when it really mattered, I had a theory they were rarer. And it seemed like an awfully big coincidence that our reverse osmosis machine exploded and could have killed the person trying to repair it so soon after our repairman was hit in the head, sending him into a coma.
I caught Elise’s glance, but I didn’t know her well enough yet to know if she’d come to the same conclusion. Despite her similarities to Mark, she wasn’t his twin. He already had one of those in Grant, and even they reacted differently.
I nodded toward the other side of the ambulance. “How many others were hurt?”
“Nancy and I are the worst of it,” Russ said. “When the RO machine blew, it knocked over the evaporator and she got splattered with boiling sap.”
Two was bad enough. I turned to Quincey. “May I look inside?”
“You can look in the door.” He made a firm line with his hand, as if blocking off how far I could go. “The chief wants the bomb dogs to go through it before we let anyone back in.”
Well, at least I knew I wasn’t the only one who thought the timeline was suspicious.
My eyes must have gone round or the color must have drained from my face because Quincey patted the air with his hands. “It’s a precaution. You know how the chief likes to cross his I’s and all that. We don’t know the cause of the explosion yet, and given what happened here last week, he wants to be sure.”
Elise tapped my elbow. “I’ll go to the door with you.”
I took it as her signal that she wanted to talk to me privately, so I nodded.
“Not exactly how I’d hoped to get Noah’s case classified as an attempted murder,” she said as soon as we were far enough away not to be overheard.
It hadn’t been mine, either. “Did you look at the name I gave you?”
“Her father’s Tony Rathmell. He owns Quantum Mechanics.”
That’s what I’d been worried about.
We stopped at the door. It hung open. The inside looked like a tornado had touched down. Pieces of the reverse osmosis machine littered the floor, and the evaporator lay on its side. Glass shards and sap were everywhere. The room reeked of charred sap and overheated metal.
This was going to be hard, if not impossible, to recover from this season. Given how expensive the machinery was, I doubted we kept backups hanging around, but I’d ask Russ later to be certain. As soon as the police cleared the building, I’d have to start cleanup with whatever employees agreed to stay and help. I’d hold no ill will against anyone who would rather leave. They’d experienced a trauma.
The big question was whether or not someone had done this on purpose, and why.
“Do you think this was meant for Noah as well?” I asked Elise.
She was staring into the building with a dazed expression like she hadn’t expected it to look as bad as it did. “If Noah hadn’t been in the hospital, he would have been the one working on anything that malfunctioned?”
I nodded.
She shrugged and one corner of her mouth narrowed. “It’d still be a long shot, wouldn’t it? Noah might not have been around when it blew.”
True enough, though Russ had been under the machine because it’d been sounding strange. If Noah hadn’t already been in the hospital, he would have been the one to do it, and I likely wouldn’t have been calling him. “Maybe it was a fluke. Maybe it has nothing to do with Noah’s situation at all.”
Elise continued to stare into the room rather than looking at me. “Maybe.”