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I did what she asked and placed the baking pan in front of her. “What’s next?”
“I’ll just whisk these together and then we’ll get to the secret ingredient,” she said, measuring flour, sugar, and cocoa powder to a glass bowl.
“What’s the secret ingredient?” I asked, watching her add a pinch of salt to the mix.
She reached down and pulled a second bowl from the cupboard beside her.
“Cannabutter,” she said as she cracked an egg into the new bowl.
I looked at her blankly.
Cannabutter?
Then it hit me.
We were making cannabis brownies.
Laughter tugged at my lips. “Are we making brownies with weed?”
The old lady with the wild red hair, face full of makeup, and crazy colorful nails leaned in and gave me a wink. “Are there any other kind?”
I started to laugh.
I was falling crazy in love with this old lady.
“I bake them out here because I have nosy neighbors,” Grandma Sybil explained, adding a splash of milk to the egg mix.
Grandma Sybil didn’t seem like the type to let a neighbor force her to do anything. Hell, Grandma Sybil didn’t seem like the type to let anyone force her to do anything. I was pretty sure this whole thing was a charade just to check me out. The girl staying with her grandson in her river cabin.
I didn’t blame her because I’d want to check me out too.
And I couldn’t help but smile at her ruse.
Cannabis brownies.
Grandma Sybil was fucking hilarious.
For the next twenty minutes she showed me how to make a marijuana pouch using grounded up marijuana and a muslin cloth, and how to double-boil butter and water on the stove.
“The perfect cooking time for potency is two hours,” she explained as she pulled a container out of the grocery bag. “That’s why I’ve brought some already made. We can let this simmer while the brownies bake. Means we’ll have plenty for next month’s batch.”
I watched her heat the pre-made cannabutter in the microwave and then mix it through the batter.
“So what do you do with special brownies?” I asked.
She tipped the batter into a baking dish, scraping it off the sides with her spatula.
“I belong to a ladies’ circle. Ladies of the River, we’re called. A ridiculous name, I know. Makes us sound like we dress in togas and sacrifice animals to a water god. But they are a fun bunch of women. We meet once a month at the town hall. Have been going on forty years now. We used to meet to swap recipes and support one another. Now we catch up with bottles of wine, my brownies, and Led Zeppelin playing on the radio.”
She ran a spatula over the mix to smooth the top layer before shoving it into the oven. “I’ll tell you what, sweetheart, it’s a lot more fun at my age. You get away with a lot more than you do when you’re young!”
I thought about my foster grandmother back in California. She was cold and impersonal, immaculately put together with an over-sprayed bouffant, Chanel suits, and gold jewelry. She wasn’t fun or colorful like Grandma Sybil. We never received a hug from her. Children weren’t her thing. They annoyed her.
How different my life might have been if Kerry Silvermane had been raised by someone as cool and as fierce as Grandma Sybil. It might have given him some balls.
I was just about to ask her what else they did at this Ladies of the River circle when the front door burst open and two very large men appeared in the doorway.
At first I thought they must be friends of Chance. They were big, biker big, although there was something a little less sophisticated about them than the other Kings of Mayhem bikers I had met. One had a long mullet and looked like he’d stepped out of a nineties redneck movie while the other looked scary with beady eyes and a heavily pock-marked face.
A cold chill ran down my spine.
They weren’t friends of Chance.
They were there for something very different.
My panic started in my bones. I thought of my handgun in the nightstand next to the bed, but I knew I had zero chance of reaching it before one of these brutes put their hands on me.
“Well, well, well, what do we have here?” The tall, beady-eyed one said as he sauntered into the lounge room. Grandma Sybil stepped in front of me as if to protect me.
The one with the mullet raised his chin and inhaled the aroma of baking weed.
“Seems to me these lovely ladies are baking up some ganja brownies,” he said with an ugly grin.
“Mmm, I love me some weed brownies,” his gross friend said as he walked around the kitchen counter toward me, peeling the clothes from my body with his horrible eyes.
“What do you want,” Grandma Sybil demanded calmly.
