“Best chocolate I’ve ever had,” Hannah said. “The Germans know what they’re talking about.”
“Good. Good. Good.” Sam wiped the glass at the counter where he kept his postcard collection. I walked over to grab some napkins and caught a glimpse of the picture on one of the postcards. I had seen it before. It was the beach from Señora Perez’s photo.
I sat back down and Darbie said, “It’s really good, but chocolate is chocolate to me.”
“No way,” Hannah said. “All chocolate is not created equal.”
“Wait,” I said. I stared into the distance as my brain cranked at warp speed.
“Brain freeze?” Darbie asked.
“No.” I looked at Hannah. “What did you just say?”
“I said that all chocolate is not created equal.”
“That’s IT!” I yelled, and slammed my fist onto the table. “Hannah, you’re a GENIUS!”
“I am?” she asked.
“She is?” Darbie asked.
“You have solved the puzzle of the Book!”
“What did I say?” she asked.
“All chocolate isn’t the same. Neither is vanilla bean, or ginseng, or mint,” I said. “Mexican mint is different.”
“So?”
“That’s why the Fresh Citrus Squeeze didn’t work for Mrs. Silvers. I used mint from my house, from the supermarket. The recipe in the Book called for Mexican mint. You were completely right about Mrs. Silvers’s operation. It was planned. It had nothing to do with me.”
“I’m glad to see you’ve finally come to your senses,” Hannah said. “This is what I’ve been trying to convince you of for days.”
“I didn’t cause any strife because I didn’t use the right ingredients. In the Keep ’Em Quiet Cobbler, the Hexberry Pie, and the Love Bug Juice we used the right ingredients—special ingredients.”
Hannah blew her bangs out of her face and asked, “And now is this when you’re going to tell us how they’re special?”
I ignored her sarcasm. “All the other ingredients were from La Cocina. They were from Isla de Cedros.”
“Isla de what?” Darbie asked.
I walked over to the counter. I pointed to the postcard through the glass. “Sam, may I borrow this for a second?”
“Sure, Kelly. Just be sure to give it back. My friend Ida Perez sent it to me last time she visited her home. I really like that picture,” he said.
“Her home?”
“Yes, she’s from an island near Mexico called—”
“Isla de Cedros?” I finished his thought.
He asked, “How did you know that?”
“Lucky guess.” I gently slid the postcard out from under the glass. I turned it over and read the back.
Dear Sam,
Gracias for looking after the store.
See you when I get back.
Ida Perez.
Her signature was big, wavy, and flowy. The I in “Ida” was huge, followed by a huge P in “Perez.”
“What’s that?” Hannah asked as I walked back over to her and Darbie.
I showed them the picture. “This is Isla de Cedros. It’s a Mexican island in the Pacific Ocean. It used to get attacked by pirates until the farmers and the shaman worked together to grow spices with protective powers to guard their families and villages. They also grew spices to pack with their treasures. The next time the pirates attacked, their ships sank and they all drowned.”
Darbie said, “Now, that’s one heck of a hex.”
“You ain’t kidding,” I said.
Hannah said, “And you think vetivert, rue, and ginseng were all from this island, and that they somehow found their way to our cooking club in the small, East Coast town of Wilmington, Delaware. Kind of unlikely, donchathink?”
“Not if someone in Wilmington is from Isla de Cedros,” I said.
They didn’t know who I was talking about.
“And if this someone wrote a Secret Recipe Book,” I added.
They were still confused.
I took a napkin, snatched a pen off the counter, and doodled “IP.”
Darbie asked, “It all comes back to ip?”
I said, “It’s not ip. It’s an I and a P. They’re initials.” I turned the postcard over and showed them the signature line. ‘IP’ is Ida Perez. Señora Perez is from Isla de Cedros. She knows that the herbs grown on the western coast of the island are special. She sells them at La Cocina. The spices we bought from her have special powers.”
Darbie said, “It’s the ingredients that make the recipes into potions.”
I nodded. “Exactly.”
Darbie said, “The ip in the Book is Ida Perez.”
Hannah didn’t nod, but she didn’t blow her bangs out of her face either. “It’s Señora Perez’s book,” she said.
I nodded again. “Right.”
“We need to go see that Señora,” Darbie said.
28
The Story of the Book
You’ll need:
3 BFFs
1 secretive Señora
1 island off the coast of Mexico
1 bunch of pirates
1 shaman
Directions:
Take it behind a curtain of beads, smoosh it all together
inside a mesh tea ball, and dunk it in mugs of steaming hot water.
It didn’t take long for us to walk to La Cocina. Señora Perez held open the string of beads. “Come back for tea, chicas.” Somehow she knew we were not there to shop.
We followed her to the world behind the sheet of beads. The room didn’t look anything like I’d imagined. I had expected heavy burgundy curtains, crystal balls, Victorian chairs with high backs, and other mysterious fortune-teller stuff.
Instead, the floor was linoleum, lifted up and torn in several spots. There was one piece of furniture—an old metal kitchen table with matching folding chairs. There was a small counter space with a hot plate, some silver canisters, and a vase filled with utensils. On the wall, a mesh metal tea ball hung from a hook. A small shelf above the counter held a few cracked tea cups, chipped plates, mismatched bowls, and a kettle. There was no crystal ball to be found . . . not even a honeydew melon.
Señora Perez motioned for us to sit and filled the kettle with water from an oversize utility sink. She set the kettle on the hot plate and sat herself in the fourth chair. I looked at her closely—the pineapple bun on top of her head, the multiple scarves around her neck, her pointy nose that resembled a bird’s beak. She didn’t frighten me anymore. “You have questions,” she began.
“Si,” I said.
“I wondered when you would come in with them.”
Darbie leaned forward, her elbows and forearms on the table as though she was taking charge of the conversation. “We think we found something that belongs to you.” Darbie said, like she was a TV detective mounting an investigation.
“My book,” Señora Perez said.
Darbie seemed too surprised by this admission to continue her line of questioning. So, Hannah picked it up. “You know about the Book?”
“Si. It’s mine.”
“Why didn’t you say something?” Darbie asked.
“I was not certain until just now, but I had my suspicions the first day you came in.”
“What did you suspect?” I asked in a tone more polite than Darbie’s.
“I thought you were up to something, but I did not know what.”
Darbie jumped in. “What made you think we were up to something? At that point we were totally normal customers.”
“The ingredients you chose weren’t the ones my normal customers buy,” Señora Perez answered evenly, implying that she did in fact have customers, and that she thought they were normal. “But I sell them to you, and I tell you: Quien siembra vientos recoge temtestades, in case you are up to what I thought you were up to.”
Darbie looked puzzled and paused, as if she was waiting for Señora Perez to continue her confession.
Señora Pere
z filled the quiet. “Then Kelly came in with a boy and bought shade-grown ginseng. Still, I wasn’t sure you had the Book. Anyone can buy shade-grown ginseng, but no one ever does. The bottle for regular ginseng is right in the front and it is much prettier. People buy that one all the time. It’s one of my most popular items. Everyone uses ginseng to make homemade love potions.” She turned to look at me. “But you knew about the shade-grown ginseng. So I warned you again. But did you listen?”
She pointed to Darbie’s legs. “You grow more bruises every day. I see,” she said, pointing to her eyes. “I see your bee stings, too,” she added, looking at Hannah. “And I know what Kelly has to do for the girl she does not like.”
Through gritted teeth I said, “Carry her books.”
“But you deserve that for what you did to her, no?”
I shrugged.
The kettle screeched. Señora Perez leaned into the metal table, got up, and turned off the hot plate. She brought over four mugs, a canister of loose tea, and a mesh tea ball.
Hannah asked, “How did you see Kelly carrying Charlotte’s books?”
She stuffed the tea ball with leaves. “Does it surprise you that I go outside? I go around the neighborhood. Sometimes I chat with the neighborhood ladies.”
Our eyebrows lifted a notch. “Really?” Darbie asked.
“Really,” she said. “And I go to the store and the movies, and sometimes I make deliveries for special customers. Just yesterday, a lady who had an operation needed sea salt to soak her wound. Well, I have special sea salt from the Pacific Ocean. It is very good for healing. I brought it to her house.”
I wondered if she was talking about Mrs. Silvers.
“I even went to your school to help organize in the library.” She brought the kettle over and filled our mugs. She dangled the tea ball in Hannah’s cup. The steamy water turned brown.
Darbie was determined to keep Señora Perez on the subject. “Why didn’t you tell us about the Book the next time we saw you?”
“That was when you came in asking about the Law of Returns. You did not tell me where you learned about it. If you had said it was on a piece of paper in a book that looked like an encyclopedia, I would have known. But the idea of the Returns has been around for centuries among witches and even scientists.”
Hannah asked, “You’re saying that scientists believe in the Law of Returns?”
“There was a famous scientist who said ‘to every action—”
“There is an equal and opposite reaction,” Hannah interrupted. “That’s Sir Isaac Newton.”
“Si.”
Hannah took the tea ball out of her mug and carefully swung it over to mine. She blew on her steaming liquid and took a sip. “Mmmm,” she said.
“By the way, how did your good deeds work to reverse your bad luck?” Señora Perez asked.
“Mine did,” Darbie said. “But, for the record, it sucked, pardon my French.”
“If it was easy, it wouldn’t have restored balance in nature.”
Hannah completed the Señora’s thought. “It wouldn’t have had an equal reaction.” She sipped her tea again. The reference to Newton seemed to have piqued Hannah’s interest.
Señora Perez smiled at Hannah. “And what about you, niña? Did you do something good to stop the flying insects from stinging you?”
“I did something, but I don’t think I’m finished. No more stings. But the mosquitoes have been eating me.” She showed Señora Perez her arm.
Darbie and I glanced at each other because Hannah had been strange about keeping her good thing private. We used to share everything. We each had our own hot mug to stare into now that the tea ball had been dunked into everyone’s water.
“What was your next clue that we had the Book?” I could practically see the invisible wall of tension between Hannah and us melt like a Swirley in a convection oven.
“I was quite positive when Kelly asked for vanilla bean from Isla de Cedros. Very few people know about the herbs from Cedros. The few people who come in here asking about Cedronian spices found information on the Internet computer.”
Darbie tilted her head and narrowed her stare at Señora Perez. She pursed her lips and made a tough, serious face. “With the herbs from Cedros, people can make potions?”
“Si. People could.”
Darbie said, “You could and you did. You wrote it down in the Secret Recipe Book.” She would have made an excellent special guest star on a TV crime show.
“Niñas, let me tell you about the Book. It is a story that starts a long time ago. I came to the United States when I was about your age. We brought many spices from Isla de Cedros. My parents were farmers—they used the Cedronian herbs to bring good luck to their crop.”
Hannah asked, “Did they grow the special herbs at their farm in Delaware?”
I wanted to smash into Hannah and give her a big bear hug because, finally, she believed this was all real. I smiled broadly. Darbie couldn’t take her eyes off Hannah. It was like she couldn’t believe that Hannah was finally with us on our quest for the truth.
Darbie leaned over and squeezed Hannah’s cheeks between her hands until Hannah’s lips were all smooshed together. “Welcome back,” Darbie said. “I missed ya.” She released Hannah’s face and put her fist up for a bump. Hannah bumped it.
Señora Perez looked confused by this behavior.
“Sorry,” Darbie said. “Tell us the rest of the story.”
“You cannot grow the special herbs in Delaware because you need a shaman,” she said.
“Yeah,” Darbie said. “There’s a shortage of them around here.”
Señora Perez nodded and continued her story. “It was a very hot summer. I was twelve years old. I hadn’t been in the U.S. very long, so I didn’t have many friends. Usually, I worked at our farm stand. When I wasn’t working, I went to the library. That’s where I met two friends. One girl worked there filing books away. Another girl was a summer student studying chemistry. She wanted to be a doctor.
“One day they invited me to the pool. I was so happy to have friends. I told the girls about cooking. They didn’t know much about cooking and wanted to learn. So they came over to my house and watched me make dinner for my family. They were amazed. For the next several weeks we cooked. I told them about the herbs from the Isla de Cedros. Immediately they wanted to experiment with the spices, which we did all summer. We kept a record of our recipes and the strange results. Some of the strange things were good and some not good.
“Then we noticed something happening to us. It was the Law of Returns. Whoever added the Cedronian spice to a recipe got bad luck. It took us many weeks to figure out the good deeds that would restore balance in the universe.
“One day we made a recipe to hex a boy we did not like. Each of us added some of the Cedronian spice so that the Return would be equally divided. The next day he was missing. I cannot tell you how we felt. It was terrible. We didn’t mean to really hurt him.
“We did lots of good deeds to bring him back, but they were not enough. So we sacrificed something we loved. We stopped cooking. And a week later, he found his way home, but he could not see. We agreed that we must do a very difficult deed to create balance.
“We vowed not to make any more recipes. We pasted the pages of the Book into an old encyclopedia and put it away. School started a few days later. The science girl immersed herself in her studies. The library girl became involved in many school clubs and activities. Slowly, I made other friends. We three saw one another less each week. And slowly the boy regained a bit more of his eyesight. Eventually, when we three friends rarely saw one another, his eyesight came back completely.
“In our last conversation we decided the only way to put things right was for us to part as friends. And that is what we did.”
“What about the Book?” Hannah asked.
“You see, the Book is what brought the three of us together for a wonderful summer, and it was also the Book that broke us apart.”
“That’s so sad,” Darbie said with tears in her eyes.
The room was quiet for a moment and we searched each other’s faces, thinking about how we had nearly lost each other because of the Book—just like those girls did all those years ago. Then I saw through the small window above the sink that the sun had set and droplets of rain had begun to fall.
“What I don’t understand,” I said, “is that if you sell the Cedronian spices here, anyone can make potions.”
“It is possible. Someone can buy my shade-grown ginseng and make a love potion if that is the intention in their heart when they’re cooking. They may do it and not even realize it. They may be getting returns and not realize it. They may be undoing their returns with good deeds and not even know they are doing it.”
“But people can also make hexes—the mean kind,” I said.
“One herb can have many uses. I am certain that the spices I sell have more uses than I am aware of. I only know the ones that the girls and I used in our experiments. The sea salt from Cedros that I told you about earlier is a wonderful healer if it is boiled in water, but if it is baked on a ginger root . . . well, I’ll just say it can be bad.”
Hannah said, “Then maybe you shouldn’t sell them.”
“To do so would upset balance.”
This comment caused another silence. I wondered if people were walking around Wilmington not realizing that they were under the power of some potion. And every time thunder cracked, did it mean someone was mixing a Cedronian herb into a recipe?
I asked, “So, how did the Book end up in my attic?”
“That is another mystery, I suppose.” Señora Perez smiled.
I look at her with questioning eyes.
“Chica, you will have to figure that out on your own. On another day.”
29
Two Weeks Later: A Bet’s a Bet
The gang’s all here, as my dad says. But he wouldn’t notice that Hannah wasn’t there.
I did.
It was worse than I ever could have imagined. The entire neighborhood seemed to have come out to see the Barneys’ new Japanese maple tree that Rusamano Landscaping had just planted. In front of Charlotte Barney’s house stood Darbie; Frankie; Tony; Misty; Bud; Mrs. Silvers; Joanne; my dog, Rosey; and the Evil Maiden herself, Charlotte Barney.
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