An Unthymely Death

by ALBERT, SUSAN WITTIG

  One day a few months back, I went over to the Emporium. Gretel Schumaker sells handcrafted candles in the front parlor, and I wanted to buy a dozen lavender candles, a popular item at Thyme and Seasons. Afterward, with the box of candles under my arm, I poked my head into Olive Carpenter’s Quilting

  You can buy your herbal candles from Gretel or next door at Thyme and Seasons, or you can try making your own, which isn’t as hard as you may think. Here are some simple directions for making four lovely lavender-colored, lavender-scented candles, using supplies you can purchase at a craft store or find at home :

  1 pound paraffin

  ½ pound beeswax

  4 (16-ounce) aluminum cans, washed, for melting wax

  Pan, large enough to hold all four cans

  Wooden chopstick (to stir the wax)

  4 tablespoons stearic powder (wax hardener, also called

  stearin, to make your candles burn longer)

  4 molds (plastic candle molds, or clean cardboard or

  plastic cartons)

  Candlewick

  4 wooden sticks or pencils (to secure the wick at the top of

  the mold)

  Duct tape or electrical tape (to secure the wick at the

  bottom of the mold)

  Lavender color chips (enough to color 1½ pounds of wax)

  Essential oil of lavender (about 60 drops for 4 candles)

  1. Cut the paraffin and beeswax into one-inch chunks, using a knife and exerting a strong downward pressure. If you work on a dishtowel, you’ll be able to scoop up the pieces more easily.

  2. Put a couple of inches of water in the large pan and begin heating it. Divide the paraffin and beeswax chunks equally among the four cans. Place the cans in the water and bring it to a gentle simmer. As the wax melts, stir it frequently, using the chopstick. When it is melted, add 1 tablespoon of stearic powder to each can.

  3. To prepare the molds, begin by cutting four wicks to the proper length, long enough to extend through the bottom of your mold about one-half inch, and to tie around the pencil or stick that will rest across the top of your mold. Punch a hole in the bottom of each mold and pull the wick through. When you’ve pulled a half-inch through, tape it with a piece of duct or electrical tape, securing the wick and covering the hole. Tie the free end of the wick to the pencil or stick, making sure the wick is centered and taut.

  4. When the cans are full and most of the wax is melted, use tongs or a hot pad to remove the cans to a non-scorchable surface. Cut the color chip in four pieces and add one to each can. Add 10 to 15 drops of lavender oil to each can. Stir. Pour the melted wax into the candle molds, reserving a few ounces from each to fill in the top of the candle when it has set.

  5. When the candles have hardened, check to see if there is a depression around the wick. If so, remelt some wax and fill in the sunken area. Let the candles set overnight. Then cut the wick below the stick, and remove the candle from the mold. Trim the wick to one-quarter inch. Light, and enjoy the lovely lavender fragrance!

  Bee, which occupies the dining room, and said hello to Olive. Then I stopped in to browse at Delia Murphy’s Bead Boutique across the hall, and waved at Annie Walters, who has cleverly filled the old kitchen with antique cookware.

  Most of these shop owners do pretty well, for the Craft Emporium is only a couple of blocks from Courthouse Square, close enough for even the most befuddled tourist to find it without a map. But I can’t say the same for Constance Letterman, who reminds me of a small woman who has a very large and rowdy tiger by the tail. And to make things even more difficult, Constance (who is certainly not the best-organized person in the world) has an imagination that tends toward the titanic. In her mind, small problems grow to catastrophic proportions in the instant it would take somebody else to say, “Oh, it can’t be as bad as all that.”

  Which is why I was not at all surprised to find Constance in the crowded broom closet that is her office, tugging at her hair in a state of near-hysteria.

  “This is impossible, China!” she cried despairingly, wadding up adding machine tape and slam-dunking it into a plastic mop bucket. “Real estate taxes have flown through the roof, the plumber wants a fortune to fix a few leaks, and the property insurance has skyrocketed.” Her voice rose to a wail. “And Olive just told me she’s moving out by the end of the month! She says she needs more space.”

  “I’m sorry to hear about Olive,” I said soothingly, putting down my box of candles. “But I’m sure you have a waiting list of people who are anxious to move in.”

  “Not anymore, I don’t,” Constance replied in a dire Chicken Little tone. “Everybody on the waiting list has found another place—and who can blame them? The Emporium needs a paint job, the sidewalk needs patching, and the landscaping needs . . . well, there isn’t any landscaping. It’s just a bunch of weeds out there.” Her shoulders slumped and she shook her head sadly. “It’s all just too much for me, China. I’ve decided I’m going to take Mr. Trout’s offer.”

  I frowned. “Trout? Terry Trout, the real estate guy?”

  “That’s the one.” Constance pushed her chair back. “A couple of months ago, he told me he had somebody who was anxious to buy the Emporium—for more than twice what I paid for it. All I have to do is pick up the phone and tell him I’m ready to sell.”

  I know Terry Trout, and I don’t much like him. He has a local reputation for developments that are out of sync with the neighborhood—a big apartment complex on a street of single-family homes, a block of houses sacrificed to a chain grocery and parking lot. “A buyer?” I asked nervously. “What kind of buyer?”

  Constance’s eyes slid away. “Well, Mr. Trout didn’t give me the details,” she replied evasively. “But he did say that the buyer wanted to tear down the house.”

  “Tear down the house?” I was horrified. “And do what with the land?”

  Constance squared her shoulders defensively. “Build a gas station, I think he said.”

  “A gas station!” Right next door to Thyme and Seasons? “But . . . but that would change the whole neighborhood!” I sputtered. “Think what it would do to property values! Imagine the traffic! Picture the—”

  “Excuse me, China.” Constance clenched her fists. “But since you don’t have my headaches, I hardly see that you have anything to say in the matter.” Her voice became plaintively self-pitying, and a couple of tears squeezed out of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. “I don’t want to sell, heaven knows. I’ve put ten years of my life into this place. But no matter how many things I get fixed, there’s always something else that needs attention. You have Ruby to help you out, but I don’t have anybody, and I’m just tired of trying to juggle all these disasters all by myself. And now I have to find a new renter to take Olive’s place.” Her voice quavered. “I’m going to sell out, buy myself an RV, and head for the desert. Then I won’t have to worry about anything.”

  Somehow I couldn’t picture Constance living alone in the desert in an RV—for one thing, she’d be too far from Bobby Rae’s House of Beauty, where her curls come from—and I knew her well enough to know that she’d always be worrying about something. But I understood her motivation. And anyway, I’d done enough damage for one morning.

  “I’m sorry,” I said sincerely. “I know how you must feel.” Constance was right. She was the one who had to decide what to do, and it wasn’t fair for me to put pressure on her. “But I hope you won’t make up your mind right away,” I added with a shudder, thinking about the horrors of having a gas station right next door. “Would it help if I could come up with somebody to take Olive’s space?”

  “Well, it might help a little,” she replied. “Maybe then I’d be willing to put Mr. Trout off for a few months.” She gave me a hopeful look. “Who do you have in mind?”

  Now I’d done it. Of course I didn’t have anybody in mind, and I had raised her hopes. I muttered an apology, grabbed my candles, and fled back to Thyme and Seasons, where Ruby was minding both our shops.


  “You look worried,” she said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Constance is thinking of selling out to Terry Trout,” I blurted. “He has a buyer who wants to tear the Emporium down and build a gas station.”

  Ruby paled. “Terry Trout? That guy is a shark! He’ll take her to the cleaners! She can’t be serious!”

  On another occasion, I might have snickered at Ruby’s mixed metaphors, but this wasn’t the time for joking. “She sure sounds serious to me,” I said grimly. “In fact, even I might be tempted to sell out, if I had her headaches.” Constance was right about one thing—having Ruby as a partner in our tearoom has made all the difference. Even a small business can inspire some pretty large problems, and it’s a relief to have someone to share the challenges.

  “Headaches?” a woman’s voice asked. “Haven’t I heard that feverfew is good for headaches?”

  I turned around. “Hey, Ivy! Good to see you.”

  “I thought I’d have lunch in your tearoom,” Ivy O’Toole replied with a smile, “and I was hoping you would join me.” She put down a large cardboard portfolio and bent over to pick up Khat, who had roused himself from his nap on the windowsill when he heard her voice. “How’s my hero?” she whispered against his fur. Khat purred and gave her nose a quick lick, which is a remarkable tribute, from him.

  Ivy O’Toole was the woman I had found when I went looking for Khat, who had gone missing six weeks before. Ivy had just moved into the long-vacant Gillis house, and had suffered a bad accident that might have been disastrous if I hadn’t found her when I did. I’d given her a ride home from the hospital, and Ruby and I had taken lunch to her house a couple of times. Ivy looked a great deal better than she had back then. She’d lost some weight, and she was wearing her blond hair long, so that it brushed her shoulders.

  “Feverfew is good for a migraine,” I said, going back to Ivy’s first remark, “but I don’t think it’ll cure what ails Constance Letterman.” I told Ivy what Constance had told me.

  Feverfew (Chrysanthemum parthenium) is a perennial that produces mounds of white flowers that look like tiny chrysanthemums. It offers an interesting answer to the question, “What’s in a name?” In the Middle Ages, the plant was known as featherfoil , because of the feathered edges of its leaf. Over the years, featherfoil was corrupted to featherfew, and finally became feverfew. Because of this name, some people thought the plant might be effective against fever, especially malaria, and it began to be used for that purpose. However, when cinchona bark (quinine) was discovered to be a superior remedy, feverfew was more or less forgotten. It wasn’t until the 1970s that the herb was discovered to be an excellent remedy for certain kinds of migraine. Its active chemical ingredient, parthenolide, appears to inhibit inflammation. Researchers are finding it of use, as well, in the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis. For a full description of this useful herb and many other medicinal plants, see Michael Castleman’s The New Healing Herbs (Rodale Press, 2001).

  “I certainly sympathize,” Ivy said philosophically. “I’ve had my hands full with that house I just bought. But I located a contractor who seems to know what he’s doing. The big stuff should be finished in another week or so, and I can do the rest as I go along.”

  “I don’t think it’s the actual work that bothers Constance,” Ruby said. “The problem is that she’s not very well organized.”

  “And she goes around looking for things that are wrong,” I added. “If Constance doesn’t have a disaster every day, she thinks she’s not living right. The trouble is, you can’t always tell whether the sky is really falling, or it’s just another bad-hair day.”

  Ivy glanced at me. “You say that one of the Emporium’s tenants is moving out?”

  I nodded. “I got the feeling that Olive’s departure was sort of the final straw. Now Constance has to find somebody else to move into the dining room, and all of a sudden it feels like the San Francisco earthquake.” I sighed. “But it’ll be a disaster for the entire street, if Terry Trout brings a gas station into the neighborhood.”

  Ivy looked thoughtful. “Maybe I should drop in and take a look at that dining room.”

  “Why?” Ruby asked curiously.

  In answer, Ivy picked up her portfolio, placed it on the counter, and opened it.

  “Oh, wow!” Ruby gasped. “Ivy, these are beautiful!”

  I pulled in my breath. Before us lay a dozen different botanical prints, in exquisite shades of greens and pastels, all on fine ivory paper. “Ivy,” I said, “you didn’t tell us that you’re an artist.” I picked up a print and studied it carefully. “Why, this looks as if it were made from an actual sprig of yarrow!” I picked up another. “And here’s thyme!”

  “And lavender,” Ruby said. “Look, China! It’s lavender, with purple blossoms! Ivy, how gorgeous!”

  “Do you think so?” Ivy asked, looking pleased. “I really enjoy making them. And yes, they’re plant prints, made by inking the plant material and pressing it on paper. It’s a very old art—the earliest example I know of is found in one of Leonardo da Vinci’s books. He made an inked impression of a sage leaf, and within a few years, lots of people were making prints of natural materials, primarily for scientific purposes.”

  “I can see why,” I said, looking closely at the print of a sprig of sage, which clearly showed the delicate veining and the pebbly texture of the leaf. “For a scientist, the actual print of a single leaf would be worth a dozen artists’ drawings. And the plants could be collected in the field and used immediately to make the print—especially important before photography came along.”

  “Exactly,” Ivy said. “I collected some of these plant materials from my garden, but weeds are actually my favorites. And you can use lots of different things, not just plants, to make nature prints.” She picked up an imprint of a large goldfish, perfect down to the fins and scales. “This is Sushi. He jumped out of his goldfish pond, unfortunately. I tried to revive him but it was too late, so I printed him. The Japanese have been doing fish rubbing since the early nineteenth century. They call it gyotaku.”

  I gawked at Sushi. “Amazing,” I said.

  “These are watercolor prints?” Ruby asked.

  Ivy nodded. “But you can also print with colored inks. When you’re just getting started, ink is simpler. And of course, you can make all kinds of things—notecards, giftwrap, calendars, fabrics. I’ve even used large leaves and fern fronds to print wall borders.”

  “I am definitely impressed,” I said, looking first at one print, then another. “Are any of these for sale?”

  Ivy cleared her throat. “I’ve always made them for my own pleasure. But lately, I’ve been thinking about selling them. Do you think they’re good enough?” She hesitated. “Be honest, now. If you don’t think so, say so. I can take it.”

  “They’re wonderful!” Ruby said enthusiastically. “I’m sure you’ll be able to sell them.” She frowned. “The question is where.”

  I looked around. “I certainly want some cards,” I said. “And I’d like to hang some of the prints here. But I don’t have enough room to do your work justice. What you need is some gallery space, where the framed prints can be hung at eye level. And where you can display some of your other things—cards, fabric, giftwrap.”

  “Do you think,” Ivy asked hesitantly, “that the Emporium might work for me?”

  “It would be perfect!” Ruby said. “The walls are white, the floor is polished wood, and there’s lots of natural light. It’s ex- actly what you need to display your prints.” She paused and cast a questioning look at Ivy. “But I don’t know how much the rent might be,” she added.

  Nature printing is a lovely way to preserve plant images. To get started, you’ll need to collect some garden plants and weeds and press them (a telephone book makes a sturdy plant press). When you’re ready to print, assemble the pressed plants (make sure they’re clean), some newspapers, a few sheets of printmaking paper, newsprint, a flat glass plate, water-soluble ink su
ch as Speedball (it’s best to start with one color, say, green), an artist’s brush, tweezers, and a few sheets of nontextured paper towel. Squeeze or scoop a small blob of ink onto the plate and brush it out evenly. Lay the plant material on the newsprint, veined side up. With the brush paint the ink evenly on the leaf, beginning at the center and working outward. Use the tweezers to gently lift the inked leaf and place it on the printing paper, veined side down. Place a paper towel over the inked plant and gently press outward from the center. (Don’t rub—you’ll move the plant and smear the ink.) Remove the paper towel and use the tweezers to lift the plant. Let your print dry, frame it, and hang it where others can admire it. For examples, ideas, and detailed instructions for creating stationery, cards, and printed fabric, read Nature Printing with Herbs, Fruits, and Flowers, by Laura Donnelly Bethmann (Storey Publishing, 1996).

  “Money isn’t really an issue,” Ivy replied. “My husband died two years ago and left me pretty well off. I can do just about anything I want to do, except bring him back, of course.” Her smile was just the slightest bit crooked. “If I want to hang out my shingle as an artist—well, that seems pretty reasonable to me, if maybe a little brazen. I’m not sure I’m that good.”

  “Not brazen,” Ruby amended. “Brave. Anyway, you’ll never know whether you’re good until you put your work out where other people can see it.” She began to put the prints back into Ivy’s portfolio. “Come on—we’ll introduce you to Constance, and you can take a look at the Emporium.” She gave a little laugh. “If you promise not to turn up your nose at the peeling paint.”

  “And watch those porch steps,” I cautioned.

  The Emporium’s cosmetic problems didn’t seem to bother Ivy, and within the hour, the arrangements were made. To my surprise, Ivy and Constance hit it off amazingly well. Ivy chuck-led at Constance’s jokes, and Constance was visibly awed by Ivy’s botanical artistry. By the time the deal was consummated, the two seemed well on their way to becoming friends. Ivy signed a six-month lease and gave Constance a check for the first and last months’ rent.