Prologue
It’s the scent of the accelerant that does it. Both sweet and sour, painful and pungent in the nostrils but a hot thrill in the belly. The same old dance but with a new partner each time. A light soft-shoe across the floorboards to the beat only heard within the skull. A graceful twirl in the black of midnight, punctuated only by thin strips of moonlight through dust-covered window panes. But all will be light soon! Fingers strike a match, and a shiver of anticipation creeps through each limb and nerve as the sulfurous scent fills the air. A two-step and slow slide as the lit match is joined with the matchbook. The hands quiver as the match burns brighter and the others join the dance in a small fireball. Pushing a sound out through the mouth in a tribal, ancient cadence, a hum pounds through the stillness of the night as the hand drops the matchbook into a dark puddle. Glorious purple and red and white dancers explode into life, jump onto the walls, and race across the wooden floor.
Chapter 1
“Leigh, put down that sledgehammer!” a voice shouted from a distance.
Leigh Hill halted mid-swing and turned to look at the people crowded around her. Leigh’s best friend and business partner, Paloma Finch, stood in front with her hands on her hips, her head shaking slowly back and forth, a long black braid swaying down her back like a snake.
“What? I wasn’t actually going to smash anything,” Leigh said. She grumbled a little under her breath like a kid who just got caught scribbling where she shouldn’t be.
“Sure you weren’t.” A very tall, very large man in a red flannel jacket stepped forward slowly and gingerly removed the sledgehammer from Leigh’s grasp, like if he spooked her she might take a crack at him with it.
“Hey, Jason! I wasn’t done with that,” she said. “I just want to sledge something!”
Jason Chevalier placed the sledgehammer gently back on the ground with the small collection of other tools. He brushed snowflakes from his bushy brown beard and gave her an understanding nod. “I know. I know. You’ll get your chance.”
“Can we go inside?” Paloma asked, stomping her feet and blowing into her cupped hands to warm up. Even through her wool gloves and insulated snow boots, her extremities were starting to go numb.
“Don’t worry, Leigh,” another man chimed in, approaching her with a large ring full of jingling keys. “When I need a wall knocked down later, you’ll be the first one I call.” Adam Salem was a quiet, wiry man who was preternaturally comfortable in the outdoors. His dark curls coiled around the bottom of his gray knit hat. He tromped through the deep snow in heavy-duty woodsman boots, leaving large footprints behind.
Leigh, having worn low-top canvas tennis shoes for the occasion, picked gingerly from one footprint to the next as the group made its way toward the front door of the large old building. Paloma followed her down the path with Jason bringing up the rear, whistling a faint tune.
“And why again, pray-tell dear Adam, are we doing this grand tour event on a day with six more inches of snow forecasted and a temperature of twenty degrees?” Leigh asked. “I can’t feel any of my toes. That’s probably bad.”
Adam ignored her question and held up the keyring in the diffused sunlight shining through low snowy clouds, picked through at least a dozen keys, and grabbed onto the biggest one. “Here we go!” he said with a crooked grin. “Should we go in?” he looked with apprehensive mock confusion to Leigh, then to Paloma, and Jason, and then back to Leigh.
“Let me in or I’m going to freeze to death literally right here!” Leigh said in a tone that got a little higher with each word. “And the last thing you need is a dead person out here. That would probably be a liability issue for you now, don’t you think? As the owner of this whole… thing,” she finished, waving around at the old maple factory facade, with its broken windows and cockeyed wooden siding.
Jason leaned down and said into her ear, “Maybe this will teach you to wear the proper attire for the weather next time, you think?”
“Probably not!” Leigh laughed, shaking her head up at him, snowflakes flying off her blonde ponytail.
The key clicked in the old lock, and Adam grasped the handle to open the huge wooden door. After a few hard yanks, the door burst open with loud squeals and squeaks from the rusted hinges.
A chorus of flapping wings echoed inside – a small flock of birds startled from their cozy corner somewhere. The four friends crossed the threshold out of the blowing snow and freezing cold into the vast room, blinking into the darkness as their eyes adjusted to the scant available light.
###
Paloma peered into the dark cavernous space. “This place is haunted for sure,” she said with a shiver that was only partly due to the cold. “Next time I’m bringing a dozen bundles of sage and we’re going to smudge the heck out of the whole building.” At the top of the exterior walls was a line of square windows that wrapped around three sides, but the muted light coming in was not enough to reach into the farthest corners of the room.
Adam put a hand up as if to stop her. “Please don’t bring fire in here. It’s not ready for that kind of test.”
Paloma laughed and had to agree. The whole place appeared like it could blow down in a stiff breeze.
“This will be the front lobby,” Adam said, leading them a bit farther inside. The building had been the Fall Haven Maple Factory for almost a century but had shut down over fifteen years ago when people started shopping for things like specialty maple syrup online more than in person. The days of families taking long road trips together to places like Fall Haven to take tours and stay in local inns just to get their fix of the best grade A maple syrup in the state were long past.
The factory’s entrance was offset to the eastern edge of the front of the building. This was once a reception area for the factory as well, with a long carved wood counter with enough room for a receptionist or two. “We’ll clean up this old thing. It just needs a good sanding, staining, and polishing. No big deal,” Adam said.
It sounded like a very big deal to Paloma, who ran her gloved hand over the wood surface and pulled it away with at least fifteen years worth of dust and muck embedded in the purple wool fibers. “Yick.”
The reception area was closed in on two sides by walls that didn’t reach all the way to the twenty-foot ceilings above. “Leigh, these walls will have to come down,” Adam said with a wink, patting the offending partial wall. “This will be one of the first things we whack.”
“Yeah, let’s go!” Leigh said, running over to the wall and slamming her palm against it as if getting warmed up to tear it down.
“Easy there, Sister Sledge,” Jason said, grabbing Leigh’s jacket and gently tugging her back toward the group. “You’re just dying to destroy something, aren’t you?”
“Later,” Adam promised as he motioned for everyone to follow him into the building’s interior. They scuffled along in a close-knit group, both for warmth and for safety in the debris-strewn old building.
“What happened to all the factory equipment?” Paloma asked, looking around. She had been here in the old days, when the factory was still functioning to make and bottle maple syrup. It hadn’t been a giant operation like some of the Canadian behemoths she had seen as a child, but there had been giant vats and conveyor belts, filling and capping machines, and more. Now everything was gone, aside from an odd metal end table or tool here and there.
“It all got sold back when the factory closed, to some other factory upstate,” Adam said. “I was relieved though. I definitely had no use for it.”
Adam paused the ad-hoc tour as they reached the middle of the main room. He pointed toward the far wall, beyond the reception desk. A rickety-looking set of wooden stairs climbed to the second floor, where a long row of eight doors faced out over the factory floor. “Up there, see those doors? Those will be the upstairs guest rooms.”
“What were those rooms for before?” Paloma asked.
“I think they were just offices, like Payroll, Public Relations, and what-have-you. Office stuff.”
“You’ll have to add bathrooms,” Jason said with a tsk.
Adam shrugged, like the idea of adding eight fully-functioning bathrooms to the rickety old place didn’t bother him much. “And where we’re all standing will be the lobby. But not the kind of lobby where you sit on a weird bench and wait for your ride. More like, you grab a book and order a drink, and sit in a deep leather armchair or an overstuffed couch next to the fireplace, and just read for two hours while the snow falls.” His eyes lit up just talking about it. “Or it’s where you meet your buddies to set out for a fishing trip at 5 a.m., and you stop over here to grab a cup of coffee on your way.”
“Local maple coffee!” Leigh chimed in.
“Exactly!” Adam said, pointing at her. “She gets it.”
Paloma had never seen the man say more than maybe ten words in a row before and was finding his excitement and vision to be catching. As he explained where the bar would go – behind the reception desk against the far wall near the stairway – Paloma could picture standing there to order a signature cocktail, maybe something with a maple-sugar rim, while tourists talked about their day of hiking or fishing in the nearby mountain range.
“And over here, I’ll put in a small stage. I want to have local music sometimes. There will be plenty of seating here in the lobby. The fireplace will go on that wall,” pointing toward an empty space near the entrance.
“What else?” Paloma asked, invested now that she could envision it herself.
Adam motioned for her to follow him across the future lobby, kicking garbage and debris out of their path as he went. “I’m glad you asked. On the other side of this wall used to be a loading dock. There’s a big roll-up door over there, and a big space. Almost as big as this lobby area. We’ll have to do a little demolition–”
“Me! Me me!” Leigh called from the other side of the room, waving her hand in the air as she jogged toward them.
“Okay, sure, fine,” Adam conceded. “Leigh will do some demolition, at the appropriate time, right here on this wall. We’ll take most of the wall down, make a nice opening or transitional space, then this will flow right into the new Fall Haven Old Maple Factory Farm-to-Table Restaurant!” He waved a hand through the air as if unveiling the restaurant right then and there.
The others studied him, then the bare wall, trying to imagine it. A long moment passed, and Adam shifted his gaze to them each in turn, his eyebrows raised in a question.
“This is going to be amazing,” Jason finally said, breaking the silence.
“It’s going to be so good. There’s going to be a bar?” Leigh said in a breath.
“This is going to be absolutely perfect,” Paloma agreed. “I’ll want to spend all my time here.”
Adam took a deep breath, looked around the decrepit old place, and sighed a giant satisfied sigh. He rubbed his hands across his stubbly jaw. “It’s going to be a romantic bed and breakfast, and a fishing lodge where buddies from three different states can meet up and spend time outdoors, and a place where locals can come to listen to some music or get a cocktail on date night. And we’ll have a gift shop, where local businesses can have a few things for sale!”
Paloma registered aromas of the moment, always on the lookout for the next custom candle scent to create for the Wicked Wick candle shop where she and Leigh worked. Now, here: Antique wood, dust, something like… old newspaper, maybe? And the pervasive lingering scent of sweet maple.
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