The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Cafe

by Mary Simses

They are beautiful, I thought, my hands trembling as I turned over a canvas showing six horses in a thick green field and another depicting three children fishing on the bank of a quiet river. We looked through the rest of the paintings.

  “I can hardly believe this,” I said, turning to Hayden. “All these paintings in one place. Now we just have to figure out the best way to get them out of here.” I began a mental calculation, trying to determine what kind of a vehicle I would need to rent to take the paintings to my mother’s house. “I guess I’m going to have to rent a van or something.”

  Sugar, who had been standing off to the side, moved closer. “Get what out of here? What do you need a van for?” She smacked a spider crawling up the wall.

  “To take these paintings.”

  Sugar’s eyes dissolved to pebbles. “You’re not taking these paintings anywhere.”

  I froze. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not taking them. That’s what I mean.”

  “Why not? They belong to my family, to my mother.” I looked at Hayden.

  The lights flickered and dimmed for a moment, and a roll of thunder spread over the house. “Because I’ve sold them,” Sugar said.

  I felt the ground shift under me. “You what?”

  She repeated the words slowly, one at a time. “I. Sold. Them.”

  “How could you do that? They belong to my family.”

  “Hah.” Sugar threw back her head. “Where’s your family been for the past sixty years, then? How come they never came for these?”

  Hayden stepped forward. “What are you talking about? Her family didn’t even know these paintings were here.”

  Sugar pointed at me. “Her grandmother gave them to my mother.”

  I took a step closer to Sugar. “Look,” I said. “I’m sure my grandmother didn’t give them to your mother. There’s obviously some mistake.”

  “Oh, there’s no mistake,” Sugar said. “Your grandmother didn’t want them. She wanted to get rid of them.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

  Sugar smiled, her gray tooth glowing. “Sugar doesn’t lie. And yep, I’ve sold them. I’m getting ten thousand bucks for the whole heap.” She swept her arm over the stacks of paintings. Then she put her hands on her hips and raised a finger. “Unless, um…”

  “Ten thou—” I couldn’t even finish the word. How could she let these go for only ten thousand dollars? It was insulting. It was crazy. “For God’s sake, you said there are twenty-five paintings here, and—”

  Hayden put a hand on my arm, his signal for me to watch my temper. “Excuse me, Ellen,” he said. Then he turned to Sugar. “Unless what?”

  “Well…Mayflower…” She pointed at Hayden and almost touched him, causing him to take a step back. “I was just thinking you two might want to make me a better offer, in which case—”

  “How much? What do you want?” I began to dig for my checkbook again.

  Hayden stopped me. “Wait a minute here.” He turned to Sugar. “We’re not just going to write you a blank check.”

  I glared at Hayden. “What he means is that the amount needs to be…somewhat…reasonable. That’s all. What were you thinking?”

  Hayden waved his hands. “Hold on, hold on. You said you’ve already sold these?”

  “Well, yeah,” Sugar said. “He took one painting already and paid me for it.”

  “Who took one?” I asked.

  Sugar shrugged. “An art dealer from Boston.”

  “Well, did you sign anything?” Hayden asked. “Put anything in writing?”

  I held my breath.

  “Sure. I signed some paper he gave me.”

  “Some paper,” Hayden echoed. “Do you have it? Could we see it?”

  Sugar left the room and came back with a sheet of paper folded in thirds.

  Hayden read it and then looked at me. “She’s sold them to some place called the Millbank Gallery in Boston.”

  He turned to Sugar. “Mrs. Hawley,” he said. “As lawyers we can assure you that these paintings were not yours to sell. They were being stored here by your mother, and she wants Miss Branford to have them. We intend to stop any further so-called sale of these paintings to this Millbank Gallery.”

  Sugar crossed her arms and pursed her lips. “Well, we’ll just see about that, won’t we?”

  Sugar’s cat crept into the room, hovering around a collection of empty jelly jars piled in a three-foot-high pyramid in a corner. The cat looked as though it wanted to leap to the top.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Hayden whispered. “We can’t get the paintings out today, but I’ll get them for you. Don’t worry.”

  He hobbled down the hall, one hand on the wall for support. Just before we got to the door, he addressed Sugar one last time. “Mrs. Hawley, I suggest you make sure these paintings stay right where they are, unless you want to be involved in a very expensive legal battle.”

  Sugar stood in her spot, her mouth slightly open. “You don’t scare me, Mayflower. Nobody talks to Sugar that way.”

  “You’ll be hearing from us,” Hayden replied as I opened the door.

  It was still pouring outside, cold sheets of rain that pelted the cracked gray driveway and sent streams of mud from Sugar’s yard out to the street. We stood under the overhang and then dashed to the car as fast as we could, Hayden listing with his bad leg like a wind sock in a hurricane. The last thing I heard, as we stepped away from the porch, was a loud crash from inside the house, as though a hundred Welch’s jelly jars had gone smashing to the floor.

  Chapter 16

  It’s Just Like Cici Baker

  Hayden was right, I thought as I sat on the bed in our room the next morning. Sugar Hawley was crazy. And because of that, despite his confident assurances that he would get those paintings for me I knew it wasn’t going to be that easy. I glanced around the room, stopping at the crack in the ceiling, as I listened to him talking on his cell in the bathroom.

  “I think we’ve got a good shot at winning the motion,” he was telling another attorney from our office. “And that’s what I told Elizabeth. She understands, but they’ve got a new regime over there now and everything’s up for grabs.”

  I poked my head into the bathroom and pointed to my watch. It was eleven fifteen. We were supposed to be at the Porters’ house at eleven thirty so I could show Hayden the painting and take some photos of it.

  He put his hand over the phone and whispered, “You’d better go without me. Ashton Pharmaceuticals. Another mess.”

  “Are you sure?” I whispered back, disappointed.

  He nodded. “Take lots of pictures. The people from the Times might want to see them, too.”

  The people from the Times. Oh, God, they were arriving tonight and had scheduled Hayden and me for an interview and photo session tomorrow morning. I picked up my camera and walked downstairs, trying to think of other things.

  I sat in the car for a minute, staring at the dashboard. Then I began browsing through my music selections, looking for something to distract me. Finally, I chose Ella Fitzgerald singing “Skylark” and let her honey-layered notes drift out the window as I headed toward the Porters’ house. Gran loved Ella; I loved Ella. Her voice and the comforting sounds of the Nelson Riddle Orchestra were perfect medicine for my nerves.

  I spent about a half hour at the Porters’, talking to Susan and her husband and then photographing Gran’s painting. It was just as I remembered—vibrant and almost magical, lovingly depicting Gran and Chet, the oaks and the barn. By the time I left I was in a much happier mood.

  On my way back to the inn, I drove past Kenlyn Farm and, seeing the opening in the wall and the dirt road leading inside, found myself turning in. The sun flickered off my car as I kept my wheels in the flattened-brush path that Roy’s tires had made the day before. Parking near the wall, I began to walk up the slope where Roy had driven, my feet in the trail of the truck tires.

  At the top, I p
ut the camera’s viewfinder to my eye and slowly turned, the way my grandmother had taught me. From every vantage point something remarkable filled the screen—clusters of wild red columbine, fallen boulders forming geometric designs against the wall, crusty green lichen gnawing on rocks, a Baltimore oriole popping from a thicket of brush, and, at my feet, a grasshopper clinging to a stem of purple aster. I could spend a day here and barely scratch the surface.

  The sun felt warm on my shoulders as I bent down to capture the blossoms of yellow star grass, the feathery purple petals of spotted knapweed, and the lacy wings of two yellow jackets as they alighted on tiny white blooms of Labrador tea. By the time I finished taking photos of a monarch butterfly resting on milkweed, I realized an hour had passed.

  I began to walk back down the slope to the car, enjoying the conversation of birds, the aroma of lanky grass and wildflowers, the earthy scent of the ground under my feet. To my right I saw the grove of trees and the lone oak against whose trunk Roy had stood two days before.

  That would make a nice photo, I thought—the single tree with its craggy bark and umbrellalike branches and the other trees clustered behind it, like children lagging behind a parent. I walked closer, placing the viewfinder to my eye, moving my head to the left, to the right, adjusting the aperture and zooming the lens in and out to compose the shots I liked the best.

  You have to look at a thing from all angles before you can really see it, Gran said. I moved around, taking photos of the tree and the grove from different vantage points, until I saw something that made me stop.

  In my viewfinder I had placed the lone oak tree on the left, with most of the grove behind it on the right. And in the far right corner I noticed something I hadn’t seen, couldn’t have seen, two days ago. Half buried in the wildflowers, I saw what looked like the remains of an old stone foundation. The position of the tree, the grove, and the foundation were lined up in exactly the same way the tree, the grove, and the barn were lined up in the painting in Susan Porter’s attic. I knew that was where the barn had once been, right there in front of me, where part of the foundation was still visible. The only things missing from the scene were Gran and Chet.

  The tingle going up my spine worked its way into my arms as I edged closer. Sections of three crumbled walls emerged here and there from the carpet of wildflowers. The boulders peeking through the growth were gilded with large yellow and green patches of lichen, as though someone had splashed paint over them in a moment of creative frenzy.

  I stood there, the field humming around me, and I thought about Gran and Chet Cummings. I could feel her spirit in the soil under my feet, in the sun-baked boulders that had once formed the base of the barn, in the stalks of wildflowers that brushed against my legs like memories calling out to me.

  I stepped into the foyer of the Victory Inn, camera in hand, excited to tell Hayden about my discovery at Kenlyn Farm. A woman in ivory pants stood across the counter from Paula, her ash blond hair neatly styled in loose waves, a pair of jeweled sunglasses perched on top of her head. She had a small ostrich suitcase by her side.

  I blinked in surprise. “Mom?”

  My mother turned. “Darling!” She headed toward me, arms outstretched, gold bracelets jingling as she kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Mom, what are you doing here?” I looked her up and down, not quite believing she was there.

  She took a step back, scrutinizing me. “You’ve changed your hair. It’s so…different.”

  I ran a hand through my hair. “Really?” I laughed. “I probably just forgot to brush it.” All of a sudden I was eleven again. My fingers scurried through my scalp, trying to create a part. “So why are you here? What—”

  My mother stared at me as though I told her I’d kidnapped her yoga trainer. “Sweetie, you’re getting married in three months. This isn’t the time to stop caring about your appearance.”

  Paula cleared her throat and Mom and I turned. “So do you want to put this on a card?”

  “Oh, yes, of course,” my mother said, opening her wallet.

  Paula took the card, a virtually clear piece of plastic, and held it to the light. She narrowed her eyes. “Never seen one of these before.”

  I turned to Paula. “They’re not very common,” I said, feeling the need to explain. “You don’t apply for it. Actually, you can’t,” I said. “The company chooses you.”

  Paula drew her head back in surprise.

  I pulled Mom aside. “Would you please tell me what you’re doing here?” I whispered. “What’s going on?”

  “I’ll need a driver’s license, too,” Paula added.

  My mother placed her license on the counter. Then she turned to me and crossed her arms. “Why am I here? Ellen, that ought to be obvious. You haven’t returned my calls for days.”

  I tried to avoid her gaze. “I sent you some text messages.”

  “I called you,” my mother said. “More than once. And I expected a call in return. You know, that old-fashioned custom where you actually hear the other person speak.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Things just got a little busy.” I tried to smile as she stared at me, doing her sixth-sense reconnaissance, attempting to figure out what wasn’t adding up.

  “So where is my mother’s room?” I asked breezily as Paula took one last look at the transparent credit card before handing it back to Mom.

  “I put your mother in room twelve,” Paula said. “Right across from you.”

  “Lovely,” Mom said, eyeing me. “We have so much to catch up on.” She wasn’t smiling.

  Paula’s eyebrows rose like a pair of trained dogs. “I guess so,” she muttered.

  My mother took out a gold compact. “I’m going to my room to freshen up,” she said, looking in the mirror and fluffing the back of her hair. “Then you can take me out for a latte, which I desperately need, and you can tell me all about what’s really going on here.”

  What’s really going on, I thought. That would take a lot more than a latte. “I’m going up, too,” I said. “I need to talk to Hayden. I’ll tell him you’re here.”

  “Hayden?” My mother’s gaze turned from the mirror to me. “What a surprise. I didn’t know he was here.”

  “He settled a case,” I said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Wonderful,” my mother said. “Let’s go say hello.”

  Paula handed my mother the receipt. “Actually, Mr. Craft’s not up there. He went out a little while ago with two other guests. A man and a woman. A looker, too,” she said, glancing at me.

  “It’s Croft,” I said, correcting her.

  A man and a woman. She had to be talking about the Times people. “Are they from New York?”

  “Sure are,” Paula said, glancing at her guest register.

  “Those are business associates,” I said. “From the New York Times.” A looker, indeed. I wondered what Paula’s imagination was churning up. She had too much free time on her hands.

  Mom closed her compact and then leaned in and whispered, “Why is Hayden talking to someone from the Times?”

  “That’s a long story, too.”

  “Great. I’d love to hear it.” She pointed to her overnight bag. “Can someone please take that up to my room?” She glanced back at me. “And I wouldn’t mind a scone or a croissant or something like that. I’m famished.”

  “I’ll take you to the Three Penny Diner.”

  “A diner?”

  “They have great apple cider doughnuts.”

  She cocked her head. “Since when do you eat doughnuts?”

  The diner was practically empty when we walked in. I led the way to a table by the window. “Isn’t this pretty? You can see the ocean.”

  Mom pulled out one of the worn wooden chairs and sat down. She eyed the mini jukebox and green Formica table. “Interesting,” she said, taking in the vinyl phonograph albums on the walls and the black-and-white photos of Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Platters, and other 1950s bands. “I feel like I�
��ve gone back in time. Do you suppose that’s the intent?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Mom. I guess the owner just likes it this way.”

  A waitress with thick gray hair, almost like animal fur, handed us menus and disappeared.

  “No latte?” my mother asked as she scanned the choices. “And no croissants, either.”

  As she studied the menu, I watched a cluster of children on the beach, playing with shovels and pails, and a group of teenagers congregating by the wall. I thought about Gran and wondered if she had run along that beach under the Maine sun as a child or sat under the moon on the seawall with Chet.

  The waitress returned and Mom closed the menu. “I’ll have a cup of coffee and one of your blueberry muffins.” She sighed and looked at me. “Your grandmother was such a good cook. Her blueberry muffins were extraordinary.”

  “Yes, they were,” I said, and I was back on Steiner Street again, Gran and I taking muffins from her tins and placing them on a wire rack to cool, the smell of baked sugar hanging in the oven-warmed air, the muffin tops covered with rivers of blue where the berries had melted from the heat.

  I turned to the waitress. “I think I’ll have a muffin, too,” I said.

  Mom clasped her hands and placed them on the table. “Ellen, since we’re talking about your grandmother, there’s something I wanted to tell you.”

  I looked up.

  “It has to do with the trust.”

  The trust. Gran told me a long time ago that she’d set up a trust for me, but I didn’t know the details or whether it even still existed. “There is a trust?” I said.

  “Yes, of course,” Mom said. “In fact, I met with Everett a couple of days ago.” Everett was Gran’s estate lawyer. My mother leaned across the table. “There’s a fair amount of money in that trust, Ellen.”

  The waitress set down our coffee mugs. I caught the faint scent of pecans.

  “It’ll be just a minute on those muffins,” she said. “They’re coming out of the oven now.”

  I poured some milk into my coffee and began stirring it. “What do you mean?” I asked my mother.