“Of course you do.”I got to my feet and followed him to the door.“But I have to say it’s mighty convenient.”
He stopped with one foot on the porch and looked back.“What is?”
“Seems fishy you’d get a call that needs your personal attention when there’s a casserole waiting for you in the refrigerator.
He grinned and then leaned down and gave me a quick kiss.“The Lord works in mysterious ways.”
And then he was gone.
CHAPTERNINE
Mrs.Wexler wasat the back door a little before six, same as always, with the croissants and the cinnamon rolls and a box of the chocolate eclairs that sold out before the breakfast rush had properly begun.She was a round, soft-spoken woman who’d been baking the things I didn’t have the hours to bake for as long as I’d owned the shop, and she had flour worked permanently into the creases of her knuckles where other women wore rings.
“Morning, sugar,” she said, handing the boxes across one at a time so I could stack them in order.“Eclairs are heavy on the chocolate today.The good stuff came in from my supplier and I couldn’t help myself.”
“You’ll have Mrs.Pinkerton proposing marriage.”
“Let her.I could use a rich widow.”She laughed, peered past me into the kitchen the way she always did to make sure I’d kept the place standing, and was gone again in under five minutes, her van rattling off down the alley toward the next stop.
I had the case filled and the chalkboard rewritten and the front door unlocked by half past six, and the morning came in behind it like a tide that had no intention of going back out.
Mondays in the off-season ran slow enough that I could read a magazine between customers.Summer Mondays did no such thing.I hadn’t had a quiet hour since Memorial Day, which was a fine thing for the register and a cruel thing for my feet, and I’d long since made my peace with the trade.
Howard took his window table.Mrs.Pinkerton took her chamomile and her silence.Greta came and went without cracking a single piece of intel, which told me she was saving something and wanted an audience bigger than the breakfast crowd could give her.
By nine the worst of it had passed, and Carly and the new girl, Audrey, had the floor in hand, and I trusted them enough now to leave without standing in the doorway giving instructions nobody needed.
I’d dressed for a day of driving and door-knocking in a vintage shirtwaist in butter-yellow cotton with a full skirt and a row of covered buttons down the front, a thin brown belt at the waist, and flat brown sandals because I had learned my lesson about heels and crushed-shell driveways.My hair was pinned back at the temples and already plotting against me in the humidity.
I made up a plate before I left.Lemon scones, two of the brown butter, a few of the little almond cookies that traveled well.A woman did not show up at a stranger’s door asking questions with empty hands.My grandmother would have risen from her grave to scold me, and I had enough ghosts to manage already.
Chowder was behind the counter on his cushion in a chambray bow tie with tiny white anchors, having spent the morning accepting tribute from regulars and contributing nothing to the running of the business.
“Hold down the fort,” I told him.
Estelle Pruitt lived directly across from Henry’s old house, in the pale yellow Charleston single with the black shutters and the three tiers of piazza I’d stood under a hedge admiring on Friday.I’d half expected it to feel different up close, the way grand things sometimes shrink when you stop looking up at them.It didn’t.The boxwoods were clipped to within an inch of their lives and the ferns hung heavy and green between the columns, and the brass knocker had been polished so recently I could see my own red mouth in it.
She answered before the second knock, which meant she’d watched me come up the walk.She was somewhere in her late sixties, slim and upright in a linen blouse and pressed slacks, her gray hair set in the soft waves that required a standing weekly appointment.Reading glasses hung from a beaded chain at her throat, and her eyes went over me head to foot, the dress, the plate in my hands, the car at the curb, and filed all of it somewhere for later.
“Good morning,” I said.“I’m sorry to come by unannounced.My name is Mabel McCoy.I own the tea shop down on?—”
“I know who you are.”She said it pleasantly enough, but there wasn’t a flicker of surprise in it.“You’re the one with the bulldog who dresses him up like he’s running for office.And you’ve been seeing the new sheriff.”
“News travels.”
“Like a rocket on this island.”She looked at the plate.“Greta Carmichael told Patsy Hindman you’d reopened, and Patsy told my hairdresser, and my hairdresser told me you’d been asking after Henry Wainwright.”A pause that had a whole verdict folded inside it.“I wondered if you’d find your way to my door.”
“And here I am.”
“Here you are.”She stepped back and held the door.“You’d best come in out of that heat before it ruins your hair.”
The inside of the house was cool and dim and smelled of lemon oil and old roses, and she walked me back through rooms full of good furniture, to a sunroom at the rear with a view of the garden and, past it, the river.A tea service was already laid out on a low table, the pot under a quilted cozy, two cups turned right side up and waiting.
“Sit,” she said, nodding me toward a wicker chair with a cushion that had never known a stain.“I’ll put the kettle on.You’ll take tea, and don’t tell me you won’t, because I’m having some and I won’t drink alone before noon like a degenerate.”
“I’d love some.Thank you.”
She disappeared toward the kitchen, and I heard the run of the tap and the click of a burner and the small domestic sounds of a woman who’d made tea ten thousand times and could do it without thinking.When she came back she carried a tray with the pot and two cups and set it on the low table between us, and she handed me a plate’s worth of fuss in reverse, exclaiming over the scones, arranging them on a dish that matched the cups, asking which were which.
