Chapter One
Rumor has it Stonefield’s own Gwen Sutton is back in town. She relocated to Vermont following the huge success ofA Quaking of Aspens(which may or may not have been based on Stonefield, and we certainly all have opinions about that) but according to one informed reader, she might be staying here in New Hampshire for a while.
—Stonefield GazetteFacebook Page
“Well, look at that. Gwen Sutton’s home again.”
Case Danforth heard his cousin’s statement and looked up from the small laptop he had propped on his knees. They co-owned the tree service left to them by their fathers, and every Saturday night they sat on Case’s front porch and didn’t allow themselves to have a beer or go out until the paperwork was completed. It was the only way the administrative tasks ever got done.
But the goings-on at the Sutton house across the street were a lot more interesting than reviewing the increases in their insurance costs, so he watched as the small silver sedan with Vermont plates parked between two SUVs. He knew she’d turned the ignition off because the lights eventually went dark, but the door didn’t open. Apparently Gwen was just going to sit in her car for a while.
“This might not bode well for you, Lane,” he said, closing the laptop and setting it on the table next to him. It was going to be a few minutes before they got back to the paperwork.
His cousin shook his head. “No, it doesn’t. If Gwen’s home, Mallory probably asked her to come, which means there’s a problem. And a problem for the Sutton family could be bad for me.”
Mallory was the middle Sutton sister, and the only one who’d stayed in Stonefield. Gwen, who was the oldest, had been the first to move away. Then Evie had gone, leaving Mallory to hold down the fort, so to speak.
Boomer snuffled in his sleep and nudged Case’s leg, so he reached down and scratched the top of the dog’s head. Boomer—so named because they’d returned from lunch one day to find him asleep under the boom truck—had decided immediately that Case was his person. When all efforts to identify the dog had failed, Case had surrendered to the inevitable. He was pretty sure Boomer was a mix of German shepherd and black Lab, and the former’s intelligence when it came to training mixed with the latter’s basic predisposition to loving the outdoors and being content to sleep in or under a truck made him the perfect companion for Case. And for Lane, too, since they were together so often. But Case was definitely his person.
“Maybe they’re doing some kind of memorial for their dad,” he suggested to Lane, trying to be optimistic. Maybe Gwen coming home had nothing to do with the business Lane had started with David Sutton.
“I probably would have heard something about a memorial in the works,” his cousin said, and he wasn’t wrong.
When Lane and David Sutton had decided to invest everything they had into finally opening the brewery they’d been talking about for many years, Case had had some reservations, but he kept most of them to himself. And things had gone well for a while. Lane was the brewer and, while it took him away from the tree service more than Case would have liked, his cousin was happy so they made it work. David loved the brewing, too, but he was also the idea man, owned the carriage house they were converting into a tavern and would coordinate everything to do with the public.
Nobody had seen the heart attack coming. David’s passing had left them all reeling, but with so much on the line financially for Lane, he’d had to keep pushing toward the goal. Ellen, David’s widow, had told Case she was determined to make the brewery a success in honor of her husband’s dream, with Mallory’s help. But Gwen coming home probably meant Mallory was desperate for help.
“I guess if there’s something big going on, Evie will show up anytime,” Lane said, and the wooden rocker creaked as he shifted his weight.
She’d been another of Case’s reservations about the whole endeavor. His cousin and Evie Sutton had been married for all of a year after Lane returned from college, and going into business with his former father-in-law was a tie with his ex-wife Case wasn’t sure Lane needed. Lane had brushed it off as not a big deal, but that was easy to say when the woman in question was rarely seen in Stonefield.
“How are you going to handle that?” Case asked.
“Same as I handle every other day of my life. Cut some trees. Brew some beer. Drink some beer. Sleep and repeat.” He chuckled, but it sounded a little forced. “Evie and I are very, very ancient history.”
He’d let Lane keep telling himself that for now. Case had a theory that the primary reason his cousin hadn’t settled down over the years since his divorce was that Lane’s brain might think his feelings for Evie were ancient history, but his heart didn’t.
Across the street, the car door opened and Case watched Gwen slowly climb out of the driver’s seat. She was wearing a light cardigan over leggings, with her long blond hair piled in a messy knot on her head. He wasn’t close enough to see her expression, but he’d grown up with the Sutton sisters and he knew she’d look tense. Being the most introverted and serious of them, she often looked closed off. Resting bitch face, he thought it was called.
But Case also knew she had a smile that lit up her face. And when she really let herself go and laughed, everybody in the room had to laugh with her. Her joy was infectious, but she usually kept it buttoned up. Especially when she was in Stonefield.
When she popped the trunk, Case’s eyebrow shot up. “She brought a lot of luggage.”
“What do you think the chances are she just decided to come home and it has nothing to do with the brewery?”
“It’s possible. I mean, she really doesn’t like it here, but with her dad gone, maybe she wants to be back here with her mom.” But that didn’t feel right to him. They all knew Gwen was happy in Vermont, and that she and her mother remained close despite the distance.
Lane sighed and then pushed himself to his feet. “It’s time for a beer.”
Boomer lifted his head, probably to see if Lane was going to do something interesting like throw a stick or fry up a pan of bacon, but he’d only had nine or ten naps that day and was exhausted. He was snoring again before Lane reached the door.
“We’re not done with our work,” Case protested, waving his hand at the laptop. But he could see the tension in his cousin’s face. “Breakfast meeting tomorrow?”
“Sounds good.” Lane disappeared into the house and came back with a beer for each of them. They were from a brewery in the southern part of the state they’d visited last weekend—Case didn’t mind the research trips at all—and they sipped in silence for a few minutes.
“Ellen and Mal keep telling me everything’s okay. They’ve shown me plans and projections and stuff. But the execution...it’s hard to tell. I think it’s going okay, but we need to bemorethan okay at this point. And trying to balance being pushy with respecting the fact that the woman lost her husband six months ago is hard.” He sighed and shook his head. “It’s all well and good to say it’s strictly business, but I’ve known Ellen my whole life. She’s one of my mom’s best friends. Hell, she was my mother-in-law.”
“After we finished the paperwork, I was going to tell you Ellen caught me on my way in tonight. She asked if I could come over and look at a few things in the carriage house.”
