CHAPTER 7
THE coffee helped. A shower helped. Two of the chocolate crinkle cookies Astrid dropped by on her way to work, still slightly frozen and dunked in more coffee, helped, too. Add in a big sniff of my energy essential oil blend—peppermint and rosemary mixed with eucalyptus and tea tree oil—and I felt as bright and awake as if I’d slept a full eight hours.
Well, sort of.
Inside Scents & Nonsense, I fed Nabby and fluffed his bed. I set out the rest of Astrid’s cookies by the coffee urn and arranged the mismatched rocking chairs in front of the plate glass window that looked out on the Enchanted Garden. I dusted the displays of scented bath products, replenished the stacks of soap, and put a batch of newly labeled cinnamon lip balms out with the other flavors. The kids’ section needed a quick tidying, and then I turned on the cool LED lights in the glass-fronted case where I displayed my custom perfume blends in the tiny, elaborately scrolled bottles I collected from wherever I could find them.
The soft light shining through the colored glass made me smile as I turned my attention to concocting a scentual remedy for Maria. When I felt like I had the right blend—a bit of calming rose oil added to the neroli and sandalwood I’d been thinking of the night before—I set the bottle aside and texted her.
I have something for you but can’t leave the shop until Maggie comes in this afternoon. If you’re out and about, drop by.
At ten o’clock, I unlocked the front door and flipped the sign in the window to OPEN. As soon as I did, the door to the Kneadful Things Bakery on the other side of Corona opened, and Tanner Spence exited with a paper bag in his hand. He waved to me and jogged across the street.
Despite being nowhere near a beach, Spence looked like a California surfer dude through and through. His streaky blond hair was blunt cut and just long enough for him to pull straight back into a stubby ponytail, and he wore board shorts and flip-flops most days unless the temperature dipped below forty degrees. His green eyes flashed as I opened the door for him.
“Hey, Ellie. Want a bagel?”
I half smiled. “Because you just happen to have an extra, right?”
A grin spread across his face. “Well, sort of. I’ve been waiting for you to open the shop.” He thrust out the bag. “Cinnamon with extra cream cheese. Just the way you like.”
The thick paper of the bag crinkled as I opened it and stuck my nose in for a heavenly sniff of spicy goodness. “Mm.” I carried it over by the register, where Nabby was snoozing the morning away in his red velvet bed.
“And to what do I owe this treat?” I asked, not mentioning that I’d already eaten two cookies.
“Just you being you,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “Be serious.”
He leaned his elbows on the glass top of the display counter and gave Nabby a scritch under the chin. “I heard you might be feeling kind of wiped out this morning.”
I paused with a bite of cream-cheese-lathered bagel halfway to my mouth. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“What happened to Eureka,” he said. “It’s all over town.”
“Yeah. I guess it would be.” I popped the bite into my mouth and chewed, considering what Chief Gibbon would want me to tell him.
“Jeez, Ellie. I leave for a three-day photo shoot at El Capitán and come back to this.” He shook his head.
“What did you hear?” I was curious about how well Poppyville’s grapevine was working.
“That she was killed at Heritage House with an axe.” He grimaced.
“It was a mining shovel, actually.”
He pointed at me. “Which you know because you found her.”
I made a face.
“At two o’clock in the morning? Jeez.”
“A bit earlier than that, but yeah. I found her.”
His mouth turned down. “Well, okay, but it was still the middle of the night, right? Kind of a weird time to be at the museum. Why were you there? And all alone?” He shook his head again.
“Dash was with me.”
“You know what I mean. You put yourself in danger. I hate that.” He took his elbows off the counter and straightened, waiting for me to explain myself.
Spence had accompanied a journalist to Poppyville a few months back, as his photographer. The journalist had been going to interview me about my tiny house for a conservation magazine, but was killed before he’d had the chance. My half brother had just come back to town with Larken, who had immediately become the prime suspect in the murder—thanks to Detective Max Lang—so I’d had to step in to try to clear her name. For a while I’d even wondered if Spence had had a motive to kill the guy. Enough motive, I should say. It seemed like everyone had disliked the guy, including me.
Spence and I ended up being pretty good friends. He’d asked me out at first, but I’d made it clear I was involved with Ritter—long-distance relationship notwithstanding. Astrid had hinted that my friendship with Spence was more than that. That he’d moved from Sacramento to Poppyville didn’t help dispel her delusion, but he’d told me he really liked small towns and that, as a photojournalist, he could pretty much make his home base anywhere he wanted. I utterly adored Poppyville and would never want to live anywhere else, so how could I blame anyone else for wanting to live here?
However, now I faced a quandary I seemed to encounter more and more: how to explain the curious feelings that sometimes came over me, or the things that I alone seemed to sense? How someone was feeling when they entered my shop, or the wordless messages that plants sometimes broadcast in the Enchanted Garden—not only messages Gamma had taught me from the Victorian language of flowers, but also what I could only describe as a kind of botanical telepathy.
We need more acid in the soil over here. Or: Cutworms on the move—help!
That kind of thing.
Spence was a good guy, but like a lot of my friends, if I tried to explain those things—or, in this case, the zing! I felt from an old manuscript that I understood despite not knowing the language it was written in—well, he’d think I was nuts. So I ended up answering his question the same way I’d answered Chief Gibbon’s—that I hadn’t been able to sleep, Dash wanted a walk, and I was curious to see how the time capsule display in the museum had turned out.
The look that Spence gave me was pretty much like Gibbon’s, too.
“You can’t go wandering around at night like that, Ellie.” He reached out and took one of my hands in both of his. “Promise me you won’t do that anymore.”
“Spence—”
The bell over the door jingled as it opened, and I looked up to see a handsome mountain man standing in the doorway. His hair was a deeper chestnut than the last time I’d seen him, and the short beard was new, but he was the same gorgeous guy I’d fallen for back when he was just Thea’s older brother in high school, and then fallen for all over again after Harris and I had divorced.
Our eyes met, and the electric attraction I felt every time I saw him arced across the room. Then his gaze fell to where Spence was still holding my hand. I yanked it out of his grasp as if it were on fire, but not fast enough to stave off the surprised hurt that flickered across my boyfriend’s face.
Spence frowned and turned to see who had interrupted us.
“Ritter!” I rushed out from behind the counter and threw my arms around him. He smelled of leather and green moss.
After a second’s hesitation, he returned my embrace. When I let go and looked up at him, though, I saw he was watching Spence instead of looking at me.
“You’re home early!” I said, a little too brightly. This shouldn’t feel so awkward.
“Surprise,” he said, finally directing his gaze at me. When he spoke again, his voice was lower. “It’s good to see you, Elliana. You look fantastic.”
Elliana. Ritter always called me by my full name. However, considering that I hadn’t done
more to my hair than jam it into a high ponytail and hadn’t bothered to cover the dark circles under my eyes with concealer that morning, I highly doubted I looked anything near fantastic. Still, his smile was so genuinely appreciative I felt myself blush.
Clearing my throat, I said, “That last text of yours . . .”
“A little lie so you wouldn’t worry if you couldn’t get a hold of me while I was traveling. I hope you’ll forgive me.” The corners of his eyes crinkled.
Spence stepped forward. “You must be Ritter Nelson. Ellie told me all about you.”
Ritter regarded him. “Has she now. I don’t think she told me anything at all about you.”
“Sure, I did. This is . . . was . . . Blake Sontag’s photographer,” I said.
“Who lives in Poppyville now. Right. Spence something?”
“Tanner Spence. My friends call me Spence.” The way he said it implied that the jury was still out regarding whether Ritter qualified.
They shook hands. On the surface it looked civil enough, but I could feel the enmity rolling off Ritter. Off Spence, too, for that matter.
Men and their testosterone.
So why did I feel so uncomfortable? And guilty? I hadn’t done anything wrong. But I needed to explain to Ritter why Spence had been holding my hand when he walked in.
Yeah. No problem.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were coming home,” I said, again too brightly.
He half smiled. “Maybe I should have.”
“Ritter . . .” I trailed off.
“I missed you,” he said with a sudden, brilliant smile that left my knees feeling a little wobbly. “So I left the research project a couple of weeks early. They’ll just have to finish it up without me.”
Warmth swelled from my chest all the way down to the tips of my toes. “That’s . . . wow.”
“Drove in from the airport this morning. Not telling you was Thea’s idea. She was going to invite you to dinner at the Sapphire Supper Club tonight,” he said. “Only I’d be there instead of her.” He looked pointedly at Spence. “That was where Ellie and I had our first date.”
“Nice place,” Spence said.
“It is,” Ritter said, then returned his attention to me. “But this morning I heard about the professor being killed, and that you were the one who found her. I couldn’t wait until tonight to see you. It must have been terrible for you, finding her like that.”
“See?” Spence said. “I’m not the only one who’s worried about you.”
Ritter looked past me again. “Well, I’m back now.”
The smile Spence gave him didn’t quite reach his eyes. “And I’m still here.” He nodded to me. “I’ll let you two catch up. Give me a call later. I brought you something from El Capitán.”
“Um . . .” I was flustered by the tension in the atmosphere, none of which Spence was helping one little bit. “Good-bye,” I said firmly.
“See you,” he said, walking toward the door. He made it sound almost intimate.
Baffled, I wanted to clear the air right then and there but sensed it would only make things worse. So I ignored his exit altogether and pulled Ritter over to the counter to give him a proper hello kiss.
What should have been a romantic interlude after a five-month absence turned out to be awkward and fumbling. Our noses bumped not once, but twice. I stepped on his toe only one time, though. At least we were able to laugh at ourselves—sort of. Still, I felt a thread of disappointment at our very un-movie-like reunion.
After we’d made a start at reconnecting, I poured us both coffee and, between customers, told Ritter all about the night before. Even if we hadn’t seen each other for months, we’d communicated regularly via satellite telephone and e-mail, and by now I felt confident that he understood what Astrid called my superpower, but what he simply termed intuition. So I didn’t hold back on the baffling effect the Xavier manuscript had on me.
“Huh. That’s pretty strange,” was all he said when I was finished. We were sitting in a pair of rockers looking out at the Enchanted Garden from inside the shop.
I waited for more, but he didn’t elaborate.
“You’re mad at me.” I sighed. “Listen, I can explain about Spence. We weren’t holding hands when you walked in. He was just trying to comfort me after what happened to Eureka.”
Ritter’s eyebrows arched.
“Not like that,” I protested. “He’s just a friend.”
“If you say so. I get the feeling he sees things a little differently.”
Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t know why he was acting so weird. And believe me, I made it clear I was waiting for you.” Putting it like that made me sound like a wartime bride or something, and I grimaced.
He nodded slowly and reached over and took my hand in his. “I see. I’m just tired after the long trip. You know, Ellie, we’ve been apart a long time. Maybe we need to back up a little. Are you still up for that dinner tonight? Thea made reservations.”
I felt the tension in my shoulders dissipate and smiled. “Yes, Mr. Nelson. I’d love to have dinner with you.”
* * *
• • •
I SHOULDN’T have been in such a good mood after the events of the night before, but having the guy you’ve been dreaming about suddenly show up at your door can do that to a person. I caught myself humming as I stirred vanilla granules into powdered goat’s milk and colloidal oatmeal. Then I added baking soda and citric acid, so the mixture would fizz when mixed with bathwater. When I had the formula right, I began funneling the milk bath into old-fashioned milk bottles.
When I was nearly finished, I looked up and saw a sour-faced woman standing on the boardwalk in front of Scents & Nonsense with her hands on her hips. Next to her, a little girl who looked about five years old tapped on the window. Nabby was sitting inside on the windowsill, and when she did it again, he stretched and put his paw on the glass.
“Lookit, Mama,” I heard her say as her mother opened the door. “The pretty kitty wants to play.”
“Be careful. He might scratch.”
I hurried up to them. “Nabokov is a gentle cat. He’s never scratched anyone, so you go right ahead and pet him, honey.” I smiled at the woman. “Welcome to Scents and Nonsense.”
“My daughter wants to see the fairy gardens.”
“They’re right out back,” I began.
She interrupted me. “We know.”
They made a beeline for the Enchanted Garden, and I let them go. After filling the last bottles of milk bath, I moved to the rear window and looked out. The little girl was making the rounds of the fairy tableaus, while her mother followed at a slower pace. At first, she seemed impatient, but by the time she’d made a complete circuit of all the flower beds, the expression on the woman’s face was much more relaxed.
Dash whined at the door, and I let him out to join them. He ran to the little girl and flopped over on his back, begging for tummy scritchin’s. Her laughter sparkled through the air, and soon her mother joined in.
I smiled at the sound, too, and breathed out a murmur of gratitude to the universe for this place, my life, and the people—and animals—in it.
CHAPTER 8
A BIT before noon, Maria walked in. “Hey, Ellie.” Her voice was flat, and her eyes were bloodshot. I immediately felt a twang of her reflected grief deep in my solar plexus.
I moved out from behind my worktable, where I’d been decorating jars of fir-scented bath salts with sprigs of evergreen branches, and walked over to give her a hug.
“How’re you doing this morning?” I asked, my hands still on her shoulders.
She shrugged. “Okay, I guess.”
Nodding, I went back to the area behind the register and removed a small brown bottle from a shelf where I kept custom aromatherapy blends until clients came to pick them up.
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“Here. I made this for you. It should help you feel a little better.” I handed it to her across the counter.
Gratitude flooded her face as she took it. “Thank you, Ellie. Your blends always soothe.” She unscrewed the cap and took a deep whiff. “Mm. What’s in it?”
“Neroli and sandalwood, with a faint note of rose.”
“Oh, Ellie. It’s lovely.”
I felt my own shoulders ease and knew it was the right blend to help her feel less anxious and sad.
“I can’t believe she’s really dead,” Maria said, passing her hand over her face. “Last night seems like a bad dream.” She took another whiff of the sandalwood blend.
My chest loosened a little more in response.
She hitched herself onto the bar stool at the end of the counter. “Have you found out anything new?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t talked to the police today.”
“That’s not what I meant. Aren’t you going to look into Eureka’s death, Ellie?”
“It’s not exactly my place. Chief Gibbon will take care of it.” I went around to stand on the other side of the counter.
She waved that away like a foul odor. “Don’t even try that on me. It wasn’t your place when the last two people were murdered in Poppyville, either. But if it weren’t for you digging harder than the police and figuring things out—”
I interrupted her. “Then I might have gone to jail, or Larken might have. I really had no choice.”
“Eureka was my friend,” Maria shot back, making me blink. “She was a friend to the rest of you, too. She deserves justice.”
“Of course she does, Maria,” I said quietly.
“Do you think Chief Gibbon can solve this?”
“I honestly don’t know. But Lupe—”
“Is a terrific detective. Really good at her job. But last night when she walked me home, she told me the chief appears to be spearheading this investigation.” One side of her mouth pulled back. “She wouldn’t come right out and say it, but she hinted that he might be too busy being chief to be a detective, too.”
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