Heaven Preserve Us: A Home Crafting Mystery (A Home Crafting Mystery)

by Cricket McRae

  Toss one bag in the bath. First it will puff out and fizz, dispersing the oils (don't squeeze!), then it will float in the water. The longer you leave it, the more the herbs will steep, tinting and softening the water.

   

  AIR FRESHENERS A LA SETH

  The essential oils in these keep them fresh for a long time, but you can also add a drop of vitamin E oil to each one as an added preservative. Just as with commercial gel air fresheners, the scent is released as the gel dries. Each one contains a lot of essential oil, so they are quite fragrant.

  Makes four fresheners (4 ounces each).

  1 packet of unflavored gelatin

  3/ cup boiling water

  1/ cup cold water

  Coloring (food coloring is fine, or you can skip the color

  altogether)

  4 teaspoons essential oil or essential oil blend

  Dissolve gelatin in boiling water. Stir in cold water, coloring and essential oil. Pour into 4-ounce glass or plastic containers with lids- avoid using tins, as the oils may corrode the metal. Once the liquid is no longer steaming, five minutes or so, cap the containers and allow to cool at room temperature. When ready to use, uncap and enjoy!

  Some nice scents for these are lavender, cinnamon with clove, rosemary with peppermint, or fir needle.

   

  MEGHAN'S WINE JELLY

  This jelly can be made anytime, and provides a special accompaniment to meat. Earthy red wines like Cabernet Sauvignon or Shiraz are particularly good with lamb or beef; a sweet Chablis or dry Chardonnay is nice with chicken. Add a little Sherry to the mix for an interesting twist.

  Makes four 1/ pint jars.

  2 cups wine

  3 cups sugar

  2-3 ounce foil pouches liquid fruit pectin

  Mix wine and sugar in the top of a double boiler placed over boiling water. Stir four to five minutes, until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and immediately stir in pectin. Mix well. Skim off any foam. Pour hot jelly into heated 1/2 pint canning jars, leaving 1/ inch of space. Apply jar lid and ring, twisting tightly.

  Process jars for ten minutes in a hot water bath (190deg F). Remove jars from boiling water and allow to cool at room temperature.

   

  SOPHIE MAE'S FAVORITE WATERMELON RIND PICKLES

  These are sweet and sour and utterly delicious. They make a great addition to a holiday relish plate, and are yummy with cold roast beef... or eaten out of the jar by the light of the refrigerator at midnight. You might have to hunt for watermelon with a thick rind; so many recent hybrids have eliminated the light green or white interior rind as well as the seeds. Any heirloom variety should work. If you can't find a watermelon with a thick rind, keep a little of the red flesh on when you trim the pieces. They won't be quite as crisp, but the lovely color will make up for it.

  Makes four pints.

  8 cups watermelon rind cut in 1-inch cubes, dark green skin

  removed

  1/2 cup pickling salt

  4 cups cold water

  5 teaspoons whole cloves

  4 cups sugar

  2 cups cider vinegar

  2 cups water

  Combine salt with cold water and stir to dissolve. Pour this brine over the watermelon rind, adding more water if needed in order to cover. Weigh down with a plate to completely immerse the rind. Allow to stand for six hours. Drain and rinse thoroughly. Drain again. Combine vinegar, sugar and water. Tie the cloves in a cloth bag and add them to the vinegar mixture. Bring to a boil; simmer for ten minutes. Pour vinegar mixture over watermelon rind and let stand overnight. It's a good idea to use a plate to weight the rind down again.

   

  The next day bring all to a boil; check consistency of rind. If still hard and crunchy, cook until rind is translucent, five to ten minutes. This may not be necessary, depending on the thickness and kind of watermelon rind. Be careful not to overcook or your pickles will be mushy. Take out the bag of cloves, and pack the watermelon rind into hot, sterilized pint jars. Add enough hot syrup to leave 1/2 inch of room at top of jar. Apply jar lids and rings, twisting firmly. Process jars in a boiling water bath (185deg F) for ten minutes. Remove jars from water and allow to cool at room temperature. When cool, check to make sure jars have sealed properly.

   

  If you enjoyed reading Heaven Preserve Us, stay tuned for the next Home Crafting Mystery

  Spin a Wicked Web

  COMING SOON FROM MIDNIGHT INK

   

  ONE

  "WE HAVE TO TALK."

  Ah, those four magical words. They strike dread into the most manly of hearts, and as a woman, it was an interesting experience to be on the receiving end. Interesting, but not particularly pleasant.

  "Okay." I buckled my seatbelt. "Talk."

  Barr flipped his turn signal, carefully checked both ways, and turned right onto Highway 2.

  "There's something I have to tell you, Sophie Mae."

  Oh, for heaven's sake, enough with the preamble. I began to regret the super spicy Thai curry I'd had for dinner in Monroe. Barr knew I loved Thai food. Had he been buttering me up?

  "Lord love a duck. Will you just say it, whatever it is?"

  He nodded. Paused. Opened his mouth to speak.

  A flashing cacophony bore down on us from behind. I twisted around to see what was going on as Barr quickly pulled to the side of the road. The screaming sirens and blaring horn nearly deafened us as they passed, and I put my palms over my ears like a little kid. One after another they raced by: an ambulance, a fire truck and a Sheriff's vehicle, all nose to tail and heading toward Cadyville at engine-roaring speed.

   

  As soon as they were past us, Barr floored it. His personal car, a normally sedate white Camry, left rubber on the shoulder of the highway, and we trailed closely behind the emergency entourage.

  "What are you doing?" I shouted over the din.

  "Finding out what's going on. Whatever it is, it's not good."

  A thrill ran through me. I watched, wide-eyed, as Barr maneuvered around traffic at high speed. I grabbed the edge of the door and tried not to grin. I should have been scared, but it was kind of fun.

  Even if he was avoiding the issue, which I knew darn well he was.

  What had he been going to tell me?

  Someone honked as we veered around them. Barr ignored them. In another mile we rounded a curve and discovered the reason for all the emergency equipment. My urge to smile quickly retreated. Ahead, a car had left the road and traveled fifty feet before crashing head-on into a telephone pole. Dark smoke rose from the vehicle, and uniformed personnel ran toward it.

  We parked behind the Sheriff's SUV. Then I saw the light bar on top of the wrecked car. The logo on the side.

  I turned to Barr. "Oh, my God."

  His door was open, and he was halfway out of the car, looking grim. "It's one of ours," he said.

  I scrambled out and down the shallow ditch embankment behind him, falling behind as the slick soles of my flip-flops slid around on the long grass. More grass poked at my legs, bare below the knee. Then I hit brown dirt and was able to run at full speed.

  When I reached him, Barr held his arm out, preventing my further approach. A cloud of chemicals whooshed from a fire extinguisher as someone emptied it all over the engine compartment. The black smoke stopped. Peering around Barr, I could see the driver's door was open to show part of a man's foot, but then he turned and walked me backward, away from the scene.

   

  "Who is it?" I asked, breathless. "Why aren't they trying to get him out?"

  He stopped and closed his eyes. When he opened them, I knew it was really, really bad.

  "It's Scott," he said. "He's dead."

  "Oh, no," I said. And again, "Oh, no. Who'll tell Chris?" I knew Scott's wife better than I knew him. We were both members of the Cadyville Regional Artist's Co-op, or CRAG, a somewhat recent addition to our little town's growing artsy-artsy scene.


  Barr nodded toward a rapidly approaching pickup. It skidded to a stop on the highway, and Chris Popper got out. She stared toward the wrecked patrol car, hand over her mouth.

  He said, "She has a scanner."

  Together, we hurried back across the field to Officer Popper's wife.

  "Slow down. It isn't a race," Ruth Black said. "Spinning yarn is about process as much as result."

  I reduced the speed with which I was pumping the treadle on the spinning wheel. "Sorry. I guess I'm bleeding off some nervous energy."

  "Oh, I don't doubt it, after what happened to Scott Popper last evening. But that's the beauty of it," she said. "I find spinning allows me to let go of all the other stuff in my life for a while."

  Maybe that was why she did it so much. And why I was rapidly becoming obsessed with spinning fiber into yarn. Today Ruth was teaching me how to take the two spools of single-ply yarn I'd gradually managed to make over the last three weeks, and spin them together to create a two-ply yarn. A short and spry seventy, Ruth wore her crop of white hair spiked to within an inch of its life. She leaned close, head bent as she watched me work. Her claim to fame at CRAG was fiber art. I'd always known she was an inveterate knitter but had only realized since joining the co-op that she was also an expert in spinning, weaving, felting, and crochet.

   

  "Now, see how your yarn is getting too much twist in it? When you ply the yarns together, you need to make sure the wheel is spinning the opposite direction from the one you used to spin the singles. The first way gives it an "S" twist. The second utilizes a "Z" twist so the yarn unspins just slightly as the two strands twine together."

  "Um. Okay." I stopped the wheel and tried it the other way. "This is hard after spinning in the other direction all this time."

  "You'll get used to it."

  The jingling of the bell over the door signaled a possible customer, and Ruth and I both half-stood to see over the cashier's counter. We were watching the retail shop on the ground floor of CRAG. It was ten in the morning, and upstairs the supply area and co-op studio spaces were still empty.

  Ruth had invited me to join about six weeks before. I'd protested that the handmade soap and toiletries I manufactured for my business, Winding Road Bath Products, hardly counted as art, but the other members insisted they did. In truth, they needed as many participants as possible to generate momentum for the co-op. Chris Popper, who had bought the old library and renovated it as a place for artists of all kinds to make and sell their creations, had been quite enthusiastic about adding me to their roster.

  The bell hadn't announced customers, but three of the core members of the co-op. First through the door was Irene Nelson. Mousy. There was just no other word for Irene. Thin hair, colorless eyes, nondescript features, wearing beige on beige on beige. I had yet to hear her say more than a dozen words in a row, though I saw her nearly every time I came to the co-op. Her sculptures were what I thought of as "menopause art"-lots of chunky naked women shown in varying positions of prayer and/or power. We are women, hear us sing.

   

  Next was Jake Beagle, a doctor who looked like a lumberjack. He specialized in family medicine, which is to say that he didn't really specialize in anything at all. I suspected Jake's real passion lay in the nature photography he considered a hobby. He was certainly talented. But art didn't help pay the bills, and though I'd never met her, I had heard that Jake's second wife, Felicia, ran up quite a few bills for him to pay.

  Then came Ariel Skylark: blonde, small-boned, tan and supple as only a twenty-three-year-old can be. She had big brown eyes, full lips, and a bizarre winsomeness that men seemed to find irresistible. Her oversized canvases, all of which sported untidy splotches of black and white and red paint, took up most of one wall of the co-op.

  The only missing member of the core group was Chris. Barr and I had managed to get her home the evening before, and Jake had come over, as both friend and doctor. He said he'd prescribe something to help her sleep, but she had refused to call anyone to stay with her.

  The bell jingled again, and Irene's son, Zak, trailed in, all elbows and knees ranging under long, stringy dark hair and a lovely arrangement of hoops piercing his lips and nostrils. He managed to look bored and uncomfortable at the same time.

  Zak and Jake both seemed hyperaware of their spatial relationship to Ariel, situating themselves near her, but not touching. Irene watched her son's antics with a look of unadulterated disgust. I was surprised that he didn't seem to notice. Ariel did though, and smiled broadly at Irene, who turned quickly away.

  "I just checked in on Chris," Jake said.

  "How is she?" I asked.

  "Holding up. It's hard," he said.

   

  "She knows we're all here for her," Irene said.

  Ariel waved her hand in the air. "Oh, she'll be fine. My parents died when I was sixteen, and I'm okay."

  We all stared at her.

  "What? I'm just saying, people get over stuff, you know? It doesn't help anyone to make it into a big deal."

  "Time is indeed a great healer," Ruth said, ever the diplomat.

  Wow. I mean, some people call me insensitive and tactless, but those people had apparently never met Miss Ariel.

  "Sophie Mae, watch your tension," Ruth said, and I turned my attention back to my yarn.

   

  TWO

  SCOTT POPPER LOOKED GOOD dead.

  I mean, he looked good when he was alive, too, but the nice folks at Crane's Funeral Home really did a fantastic job. Crashing his car into a telephone pole at high speed could hardly have been kind to his face, but two days later here he was, open casket and all, looking just as handsome as ever.

  And only a bit less animated than usual.

  Now, that was mean, wasn't it. I'd spent little time around Scott, and even that in fairly large groups. That's hardly enough to be able to form a studied opinion regarding someone's social skills. Maybe he wasn't always as dull as he'd been in my presence. Maybe he was just shy. Even if they don't always deserve it, I do try to give the dead the benefit of the doubt.

  In the pew beside me, Barr's attention flicked from funeral attendee to funeral attendee, ever watchful out of habit, more than any other reason. Scott lay in peaceful repose at the front of the room. Low music seeped out of speakers hidden behind tapestries in the apse of St. Luke's Catholic Church, the droning organ underscoring whispered voices and the rustle of clothing as people settled into their seats. The warm June air smelled of greenery and Murphy's Oil Soap. I eyed the gleaming wood pews. It must take hours to wipe them all down.

   

  I sighed inwardly. This probably wasn't the best time to ask Barr what he'd been going to tell me before Scott's accident. I watched him out of the corner of my eye, admiring how he looked in his dress uniform while trying not to look obvious. I loved how his chestnut-colored hair was streaked gray at his temples, how his slightly hooked nose looked in profile, how his dark brown eyes could be warm and inviting when he looked at me but hard as obsidian when the occasion called for it.

  Barr frequently darted looks at Scott up in the glossy walnut casket, then jerked his gaze away as if it were painful to look upon the dead for long. His eyes rested on Scott's wife, and the muscles of his jaw slackened; he'd been clenching his teeth. Raw pity flashed across his face for a moment, then was gone, replaced with a mask of easy-going stoicism.

  I touched his arm. He squeezed my hand in return.

  Chris was a decorative blacksmith. You probably don't have to be a bigboned, muscular gal in order to form the elaborate metal pieces that she created, but it couldn't hurt. Nearing six feet in height, shoulders like a linebacker, muscles rippled down her arms, fully exposed in the black sheath she wore to her husband's funeral. Her straight, peanut-butter-blonde hair, parted in the middle, hung lank on either side of her wide cheekbones, framing an expressionless face that was notable more for its precise symmetry than for classic beauty.
Her blue eyes stared forward, unseeing.

  Remembering how I'd felt when I'd attended my own husband's funeral almost six years previously, I could understand the confused numbness that must have been swamping her. My heart ached with empathy. At least with Mike's lymphoma, I'd had a little time-far too little time, but still-to prepare for his death. But dying in a car accident is a sneak robbery, an unexpected blow to those left behind, for which there is no preparation. Suddenly, the rest of Chris Popper's life looked different than she ever could have imagined.

   

  She was surrounded by Ruth Black, Irene and Zak Nelson, and Jake Beagle. Jake's wife, Felicia, coifed and dressed to the nines, stood a little ways away, talking with Ruth's ninety-year-old Uncle Thaddeus.

  But someone was missing. "That disrespectful little wench," I whispered.

  Barr glanced over at me. "Who?"

  "Ariel. Ariel Skylark. From the co-op. Tiny, blonde, sticks blobs of paint on great big canvases, then calls it modern art? She's not here."

  He shook his head. "Sorry. Have I met her?"

  "I guess not." I was pretty sure any man who met Ariel remembered the occasion.

  Her absence was conspicuous, though. CRAG was closed for the funeral, so there was no need for anyone to mind the store. It was downright rude of her not to show up.

  The priest appeared. The door to the street slammed shut. Daylight winked out save the dim glimmer of the stained glass windows arching above. The funeral had begun.

  When we walked out of the church my dark linen suit smelled so smoky I felt like I'd been in a casino bar. Father Donegan had not stinted with the incense, and if the idea had been for the rising tendrils to raise Scott's soul up to heaven, he was already well ensconced. Barr, a closet Catholic, had explained some of the service to me. I had to admit, I really liked the ritual aspect of it. My parents being dyed-in-the-wool, intellectual agnostics, I hadn't grown up with any formal religious training. I could see how it might be nice in situations like these.