Killing Thyme (7 page)

Like buying a spice shop with zero experience. With nothing but guts and a small-business loan.

The kind of craziness that keeps a woman up late at night and gets her going early in the morning. The kind of craziness I hope everyone finds, at least once in their lives.

“I dreamed of owls last night.” The fused glass artist folded her arms over her heart and bowed her head. “Told myself it didn't mean anything, but I knew better.”

The soap maker squeezed into her neighbor's space and folded her into an embrace.

“Bonnie hadn't been here long,” the Rasta-haired photographer in the next booth said, “but she did good work. She'd have done well.”

“She mention any problems, any worries?” I'd vowed to not investigate. But in a brief moment between surges of the
crowd, when I had the vendors' attention, I couldn't help myself.

“Not to me.” The soap maker slipped back to her own stall where a customer fingered heart-shaped goat's milk soaps.

“Oh, remember? She and some woman were yelling—what day was that?” The glass artist held her hand below eye level. “Short, gray-brown hair, great tan. But I don't know who she was. Or who started it.”

Wednesday
, I didn't say, and,
That was my mother
.

The jewelry maker beckoned me over. I'd given her the five-gallon bucket full of rusty hardware my builder and I filled during the loft build-out. The necklace she made of tiny locks and keys is one of my favorites. “She was worried that she might have to move. She had a sublet, and the woman was making noises about wanting the place back.”

Hannah? Bonnie hadn't mentioned that to me. But then, she hadn't said much last night. “What did she say?”

The jeweler's expression grew distant, one small hand fingering her chin. “She said she felt like she'd been on the move for thirty years. I said, you need a place of your own. We're not like people who work regular jobs. We can't just pick up all this”—she swept a hand over her display of earrings, bracelets, pendants, key fobs, and more—“and our materials and equipment and move on a whim.”

I pictured the shelves of greenware, the boxes of clay, the wheel, the kiln.

“You have to protect your art and your space, I told her,” the jeweler went on. “But she said—how did she put it? She said that was a trap. You put down roots and you get stuck, and before you know it, your creative spirit dies.”

Ah, humans. We don't always make the best choices, despite thinking we know what we need. On the other hand, the Universe doesn't always offer us the best options. In recent years, Seattle rents had rocketed higher than the Space Needle.

“Those are cut from the passenger door of a 1957 Hudson.” She spoke to a woman holding a pair of robin's egg blue earrings in a teardrop shape. Or maybe it was a raindrop. “Original paint.”

The jeweler turned back to me, her voice low. “You are going to investigate, aren't you?” The customer held an earring to her face and consulted a mirror hanging on the pillar between stalls. I glanced at her reflection and saw her watching me, as if wondering what kind of fascinating mess she'd wandered into.

“Nothing to investigate. Whatever happened, it has nothing to do with the Market.” A premature conclusion, but I didn't want the customer to leave with her tongue wagging.

“I'll take them.” She handed over the earrings and opened her purse. “They're too fun. The perfect souvenir.”

Now that's what we like to hear.

There's no more exotic plant out there. It's a member of the orchid family. It's a hard plant to grow; from start to finish, it takes eight years to get a finished product.

—Spice expert and merchant Patty Erd, on why vanilla is anything but “plain”

“Tell us again why you think Bonnie Clay's real name is Peggy Manning,” Detective Spencer said. We were standing on the sidewalk alongside the shop. On my way back from the artists' stalls, I'd detoured to pick up Turkish delight for the staff and seen the familiar unmarked car.

“My mother told me. They knew each other decades ago.”

Spencer and Tracy wore matching skeptical looks on their polar-opposite faces. Though we were practically standing on the spot where I'd found a man dead last September, seeing Bonnie-Peggy dead had been a shock. Heaven help me if I ever get comfortable being in close proximity to murder.

“Did you figure out how she died? Or who or why?” I said.

Tracy's eyes strayed to the white paper bag in my hand. “Let's go in and sit down.”

The shop's spicy-sweet aroma—notes of cinnamon and
chile punctuated with crystalized ginger and a hint of that spilled Italian blend—enveloped me.
Home
.

Spencer poured tea. I set the treats on a tray and slid into the nook across from them for the familiar process of giving a formal statement.

Familiar, but still full of squirm potential.

“We're not quite clear,” Spencer said, “how you knew her. Or why you went down there.”

My vision fixed on a spot on the butcher-block work top, I massaged my forehead. “You never saw her eyes. They had an intensity I can't explain.”

“And what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?” Sarcasm was among Tracy's more obvious talents.

“I met her on Wednesday. As an adult, anyway. I knew her eyes right away, but not her face, or her name.” I explained my mother's arrival and our visit to Bonnie's table in the North Arcade, when my mother identified her old friend. I did not mention the phone call I'd overheard outside the Pink Door or my mother's obvious discomfort. Or about hearing her and Bonnie shouting. They would interview her before long; she could explain herself better than I could.

“But you remembered her eyes,” Spencer prompted. “From her visits to your childhood home.”

“I always notice eyes,” I said. “We took a course once, when I worked in HR, on making a good first impression. The trainer suggested noticing a person's eye color as a way to be sure you make eye contact.” Though apparently my interest in eyes—windows to the soul and all that—had started much earlier.

“And so you left your shop on a busy summer day and drove all the way down to Beacon Hill to check on this woman you barely knew. Why?” Tracy wasn't quite playing bad cop; call it dubious cop. He reached for a piece of candy, then stopped himself.

“Summer weekends in the Market are huge for the artists,
and she was psyched about it. So when she didn't show up, I called. And when Josh said there was trouble, I ran down.”

“Of course,” Tracy said. “Who wouldn't?”

I didn't know how to explain that it had been more than instinct, more than a hunch, that convinced me something had gone terribly wrong.

It was those eyes.

“Pepper? I hate to disturb you, but it's Kristen. Again. She says it's urgent, and I figured, well . . .” Cayenne held the phone against her chest, glancing from me to the detectives and back.

Ugh. Bad timing
. I thanked her and took the phone. “I've been trying to reach you. I'm so sorry you had to hear—”

There is no getting a word in edgewise on Kristen Hoffman Gardiner.

I listened. Frowned. “What do you mean, it's gone? Are you sure that's where you left it?” She was sure. “Our detective friends are here right now. Make the report, and they'll pass it on to whoever.”

I handed Tracy the phone. He listened intently and started scribbling. I filled Spencer in. “Kristen lives on Capitol Hill in a house her great-greats built in 1895. The house we grew up in. They just did an attic-to-cellar remodel, and she found a fabulous diamond and sapphire bracelet. She wore it for a few hours last night, but it was heavy and got in her way, so she took it off and left it on her dresser. Now it's vanished.”

One eyebrow rose slightly, a sign of the wheels turning in Detective Spencer's brain.

We both looked at Tracy, still on the phone. “And you think this is linked to Bonnie Clay's murder?”

Tracy and I have our moments. He and Tag have their moments. Those moments had become less unpleasant since revelations a few months ago cast new light on an old conflict. And though I have done my share of griping and grumbling
about Detective Michael Tracy, I have never thought him cruel, callous, or incompetent.

But he had stepped in it big-time. And his gaffe had been my fault.

“She didn't know?” Spencer whispered to me. Fingers over my lips, I shook my head. I should have made her slow down, stop, and listen long enough to tell her the news Tracy was repeating now.

“I don't know whether there's a connection,” he said. “After Detective Spencer and I finish down here, we'll come interview you and your family. Meanwhile, I'm going to call this in and send up the burglary squad and the CSU. Any photos?”

I grubbed in my apron for my cell phone and started scrolling.

“While you're waiting, please make a list of all party guests, their addresses, and their phone numbers.” He listened. “Mrs. Gardiner, I'm not accusing your guests of theft. The sooner we can rule them out, the sooner we can find the real culprit.”

He handed me back the shop phone and nodded toward the cell phone Spencer and I were studying. “Party pictures? Send them to us.”

“I don't see any showing the bracelet,” I said.

“Send them anyway. So we can confirm who was present when, and match names to faces.”

“You think there's a connection.” They didn't actually shrug. They didn't have to. Two major crimes touching the same group of people in less than eighteen hours?

Doesn't take a degree in criminal justice to make that link.

“Baby Beluga, in the deep blue sea. Swim so wild and swim so free!” The lyrics, punctuated by giggles, spilled from a trio of unlikely sources whom I recognized before they tumbled into sight: my mother and her grandchildren.

“Hey, Aunt Pepper. We went to the Aquarium.” She'd
stopped singing, but my twelve-year-old niece swayed to the music in her head as she leaned in to kiss me. Her ten-year-old brother reached over the back of the booth to wrap his slim brown arms around my neck.

“Glad you aren't too old for that.”

“Never!” Two young voices rang out. My niece added, “Grandma loved it as much as we did.”

My mother glanced from me to the detectives and back. Though she had never met them, they carried a somber air that had wiped the carefree joy off her face.

“If you promise not to tell your mother,” I said, “I'll spring for ice cream.”

My niece held out her hand while I pulled cash out of my apron pocket. “I don't know why you're bribing us,” she said, “but I'm happy to help.”

“Let's get doughnuts! Baby Beluga doughnuts,” her brother said as they headed for the door. “And go Down Under to the Magic Shop.”

“You're the baby,” my niece said. “Can we take Arf?”

“Yes, but no treats for him,” I said. She hooked up his leash, and the chime rattled against the glass as the front door shut behind them.

I wasn't sure how my sister-in-law would feel about me letting them wander the Market alone. With any luck, she'd never know.

“What's going on, Pepper? Do these people have something to do with the messages you left?”

The messages you didn't answer.
But she'd been busy with the kids. I gestured for her to sit and made the introductions. “The detectives are here because this morning—I'm sorry, Mom. No easy way to say this. Bonnie is dead.”

She stared at me, her face shockingly still. Finally, she said, “You'd better tell me the whole story.”

I did. She listened without visible reaction. I finished with
the jewelry maker's comment that Bonnie was worried about moving again, and my mother lowered her gaze.

After a long moment, she turned to Spencer and Tracy. “Peggy—I can't get used to thinking of her as Bonnie—and I met in college. We even shared an apartment for a while, with Ellen—Kristen's mother. The year the girls were born, we formed a household, a peace and justice community. Peggy was part of the group—on the fringes. But we made different choices, and until this week, I hadn't seen her in thirty years.”

“She went to the party at the Gardiner home,” Spencer said.

“Kristen invited her, and I'm glad. That house was home base for some important friendships. Movements were hatched there that changed this city, in small but significant ways.” She reached out to touch my arm. “Children were raised there who are still changing this city, in small but significant ways. It was a house with open doors and open arms.”

“And yet, your daughter claims not to remember anything about her. Except her eyes,” Tracy said.

“Detective, do you remember all your parents' friends from when you were twelve?”

“Point taken,” Tracy replied. “On another note, a valuable bracelet seems to have gone missing from the Gardiners' house. Did you see Kristen wearing it last night?”

“What? It's missing? Did someone break in?” She whipped around to face me. “Kristen and Eric? The girls?”

“Everyone's fine,” I said.

She let out a breath. “No, Detective. I heard her mention it, but I didn't see it. A family piece, I presume. You may have gathered, Kristen comes from an old Seattle family. Moneyed, at one point. Not that money prevented tragedy. Ellen died of breast cancer, five years ago.”

“Thank you, Mrs. Reece,” Spencer said. “We can all hope the bracelet turns up in the house. If not, we'll find it.
Now, if you don't mind, we have a few questions for you about Ms. Clay. Or Ms. Manning.”

A voice ripped through the shop. “She called to order the thirty-six jar set with all the spices and the spinning wire display rack, and you told her I wasn't registered. I was your first bride. Your owner signed me up herself at the Bridal Fair at the Convention Center.”

The high-pitched complaints came from a tall blonde in a black silk tank, tight white capris, and platform sandals. One wooden heel made a loud clap on our plank floor as she stomped her foot.

“Excuse me.” I slid out of the booth and sped to the registry. “I'm Pepper Reece. Nice to see you again.” Bridezilla ignored my outstretched hand. “I'm afraid we don't carry any racks like that. Let's see what you registered for.”

I peered at the computer screen. Reed had brought up her page, featuring an airbrushed engagement photo of the happy couple with their names and wedding date.
Two more weeks.
I gave Reed a quick nod to let him know I had this. Visibly relieved, he fled.

“Are you calling my maid of honor a liar?” Her heel thumped the floor again.

“Have a seat,” I told Bridezilla, then scrolled through the items she'd selected. “The closest we have to what you're describing is a twenty-four jar starter set with a wall-mounted rack—”

“I chose the free-standing chrome rack. And no starter sets.” She spat out the phrase as if she'd found an earwig in her coffee. She reminded me of those first-time home buyers on TV who insist on commercial-grade appliances and granite countertops, and who can't believe the audacity of their agent in showing them a home without a master suite and a jetted tub.

My jaw began to throb. I clicked to another screen. “A revolving rack like this? We can order a thirty-two or a forty,
if you have the counter space.” Hard to imagine her knowing what to do with forty spices, but I was letting my irritation influence my judgment. Maybe her fiancé was a serious cook. Heaven knows, he was going to need a good hobby, married to her. And he might want to keep the sharp knives well hidden.

“Our kitchen is spacious. Custom natural marble countertops. Order the forty-jar rack. My maid of honor will call you.” She snatched the printout from my hand, and stomped out.

Difficult customers are the cost of doing business. While I was occupied, the detectives had finished questioning my mother and left. I updated Bridezilla's entry and placed the order, then plucked a rosewater-flavored square off the tray. The fruit and sugar melted in my mouth.

Time to attend to the business of selling spice. My mother emerged from the back room, face drawn, eyes wary. At one point, she and Sandra huddled in the nook, deep in conversation. My mother reached across the table and laid her hand over Sandra's. Then she spoke, and Sandra slid her hand out and covered my mother's.