Stirring the Plot (A Cookbook Nook Mystery) (4 page)

“This way, y’all,” Maya said with a subtle Southern accent. She was born in South Carolina but had migrated to California after college. As she led the way, she rubbed her hands like a witch beckoning Hansel and Gretel into her cottage, which made me giggle. All part of the act, I assumed. “On your right, you’ll see a number of unique plants that might benefit you, should you be so inclined. Jacob’s Ladder, otherwise known as Ladder to Heaven, can increase your mental abilities as well as your joie de vivre. Lavender, I’m sure you all know, attracts affection. It is especially good when used in love-type potions.”

A few of the visitors giggled.

“Think about adding some dried lavender whenever you’re writing a love note. Y’all still do that, don’t you? Write?”

More laughter.

“In addition, the aroma of lavender encourages long life. Some people carry lavender in order to see ghosts. Have any of you seen a ghost?”

No hands shot up.

Maya grinned. “Me, either, but I hope to someday. Now, sage”—she fingered a grayish-green plant—“is wonderful when added to a bath. It can purify you of all past evils and negative deeds. If you burn sagebrush, sort of like burning incense, you can drive away malevolent forces.” She moved on to a section of trailing plants. “Rosemary, when burned, is powerful, as well. Pay attention: if you place a sprig of rosemary beneath your pillow, you’ll get a good sleep. It also”—she beckoned us near, then whispered—“attracts elves.”

“Jenna has seen elves,” Rhett joked. “The Keebler kind.”

I knuckled his arm.

Emma, who had been hanging back with Pearl and Bingo, sidled up to Maya. “Tell them about the history of this place.”

“Didn’t you tell them, Vera?”

My aunt shook her head.

Maya offered a mock scowl. “Fine. Leave the heavy lifting to me. The main building of The Enchanted Garden was erected in 1901. The garden shop was passed down from generation to generation, until the last of the family died, with no survivors. Some believed the original owners were witches.”

“No,” someone from the back of the pack said.

Maya raised a finger. “Aha, I hear disbelievers among you. It’s true. Witches dwelled in Crystal Cove. The bay has mystical properties.”

My aunt clucked her tongue and winked at me.

“Really?” a teenage girl asked, not the same one who had yowled in the cemetery.

Maya nodded and waved a hand dramatically. “I purchased the garden site specifically to draw on these properties. I have dedicated my life to finding just the right herbal potion for everyone who asks.” Maya was the herbalist I had scheduled to teach our customers how to make potions. “Now, follow me for more of the tour.” She crooked a finger. We trailed her until she came to an abrupt halt. “Can y’all hear me?” She motioned to a lush pot of herbs. “In this pot you will spy sweet basil. Sometimes it’s known as St. John’s wort. It’s often used in protection spells. In addition to basil, you might notice hyssop, peppermint, and sassafras.”

Emma said, “Sassafras is used in root beer.”

“That’s right,” Maya responded. “By the way, witches often decorate their herb pots with unrefined gemstones like bloodstone and tiger’s eye.” She held a finger to her mouth and said, “Shh. That’s insider information. As a side note—”

My aunt cleared her throat and twirled her finger. “Wrap it up, Maya. You’re losing them.”

Maya laughed. “Yes, I’m afraid that’s a bad habit of mine. Too much information.”

“Eek,” a woman in the crowd shrieked.

A large, ebony-colored cat bounded through the tour members and lurched at Maya. It stopped at her feet, and then, as if reconsidering, it leaped upward. At Emma. She caught the cat just in time and wedged her thumbs beneath its forearms.

“There, there, Boots,” Emma said, while scratching his ears. “What spooked you?”

“He probably saw a ghost,” Maya retorted.

I recognized the cat. I’d seen him around The Enchanted Garden on previous occasions. I couldn’t tell if he was a Bombay or Burmese, but he had no markings on him. Certainly no white
boots
, as his name inferred. I glanced at Maya, who was twirling a curl of her hair, a gamine smile tugging at her lips. Had she enticed Boots to dash in and scare everyone?

“Poor little guy,” Emma cooed.

Rhett leaned into me. “He’s not so little. Looks to be about twenty pounds.”

I giggled, then turned to Emma. “He sure seems to like you.”

“Only because I’ve been carting him back and forth to the vet for the past few weeks for treatment. He’s got hot spots on his rear legs, and he keeps licking them.”

“Where was I?” Maya said. “Oh, right. For the farewell—” She paused, distracted by something to her right. “Oh no you don’t.”

While we’d been chatting, the rowdy teenage girl and her girlfriend started tiptoeing toward an exit door at the rear of the garden shop.

Maya sprinted toward them and blocked their exit. She raised her arms overhead. “Do not touch that handle. Pooh-pooh.” She blew out bad air. “Whatever were you thinking? You always exit through the door you came in. It’s a Southern tradition.”

Emma said, “I thought that was an Irish superstition.”

“Whatever it is, you simply don’t do it. It has something to do with entering and leaving this life as a good person, and y’all want that.” Maya steered the group toward the front, offering a few more words about herbs as we moved. When we neared the exit, she said, “Thank you for coming. As you exit, take the small pots of rosemary I planted for you. Set them to the right of your front door if you want to keep witches away. Unless you don’t believe. It is, after all”—she chuckled—“just a superstition.”

Outside the shop, a whistling wind kicked up. The teens, who were now wound up to a frenzy, howled along with the wind and hurled their teeny pots of rosemary on the ground. I wasn’t one to believe in superstitions, but as the clay shattered, the evening’s light mood and good vibes vanished, and I shivered with fear.

On the bus ride to Traveler’s Tavern, Rhett couldn’t stop laughing about the crowd’s reaction to the black cat at The Enchanted Garden. As we climbed off the bus, he said, “Working down at The Pier, you won’t believe the superstitions I’ve heard.”

“Like?”

“Don’t whistle on board a ship. Don’t leave port on Friday. Don’t bring a banana on board.”

“A banana?”

“Don’t even wear yellow on a ship.”

I giggled. “Darn. Yellow’s one of my favorite colors.”

“You two, get a move on,” Aunt Vera said. “No dilly-dallying.” She pushed me toward the front of the old restaurant.

Traveler’s Tavern, which was undergoing a shoring-up renovation, was established over 160 years ago. Walking in, I could sense the history. How many explorers had passed through the heavy oak doors? The walls and ceilings held signatures of all who had visited before us.

“Whoa.” Rhett stopped me from walking beneath the wooden scaffolding that stood in the center of the room. “You may not believe in superstitions, but that’s just flaunting skepticism.”

“Thanks.” Gazing at the signatures, I had completely lost sight of where I was.

Built entirely of stone, mortar, and wood, the tavern was chilly. The bar was set up for a ghoulish party. Eerie green candles set the mood. I could imagine bawdy nights back in the Gold Rush days when people, hungry for chunks of the precious metal that might change their futures forever, downed tankards of beer or whiskey. While the tavern’s colorful owner told us the history of the place, we dined on Halloween spiced popcorn, mini ghost cupcakes decorated with white icing and black licorice eyes, and Black Cat brew, which was a lusty mix of root beer laced with cinnamon.

As we were leaving, yet more black cats crossed our path. A few in the crowd shrieked; others laughed. Had the cagey tavern owner, like Maya, set the cats loose on purpose to scare us, or were they stray cats on the prowl? Whatever the reason, I was sufficiently shaken
and
stirred.

F
OR
THE
LAST
stop on the tour, we headed to Pearl Thornton’s place, an elegant two-story showplace that had been featured in many magazines. As we approached the house, which was set high on the mountain, the damp, foggy weather lifted. A full moon, like a beacon of hope, cut through the clouds and lit a path to the front door.

The interior of the home was exquisite, with high ceilings and expansive rooms, although the extensive use of the color ecru was a little bland for my taste. The view through the plate-glass windows of the living room matched my father’s view—the twinkling lights of Crystal Cove below and eons of miles of ocean. Beautifully carved jack-o’-lanterns flickered on various antique tables. Glossy black bats hung on clear thread that had been slung between the rafters. Actors dressed as vampires or ghouls moved among us. A red goblin rounded the corner and screeched at a pair of women. The women tittered and fanned themselves.

Similarly to our other stops on the journey, we were invited to take a tour of the house. Pearl acted as guide.

“Let’s start with the kitchen,” she said. “That’s where I’ve set up the bar. We’re serving a Witchy Woman cocktail. Demon rum is the secret ingredient.”

The kitchen was fitted with state-of-the-art appliances, hand-painted tiles, and top-of-the-line granite counters.

Rhett handed me a sugar-rimmed martini glass filled with a frothy, bloodred beverage. “Happy early Halloween.”

“Cheers.” We clinked glasses.

As I took my first sip—the drink was deliciously sweet—the kitchen door leading to the garage opened. A woman in her early twenties stormed through the doorway, her umbrella still open.

Pearl yelled, “Trisha, close that umbrella now! It’s bad luck.”

“Bad luck, Mother?” Unlike her plump mother, Trisha was angular and rangy and had possibly the worst skin I’d ever seen. I couldn’t tell if it was a dietary issue or a nerves thing. Her loose clothing did nothing to enhance her figure. She hoisted her crocheted purse and raggedy backpack higher on her shoulder and pushed her hank of black hair that reminded me of furry yarn away from her face. “I’ve already had twenty-three years of bad luck being your daughter.”

Ouch!
The ten or so people in the kitchen gasped.

“What’s up with my cell phone?” Trisha shook the umbrella free of moisture and snapped it closed. “I can’t get the darned thing to turn on. Did you cancel the contract?”

“That’s it, young lady. Into the pantry.” Pearl muscled her daughter into a small room at the far end of the kitchen. Sadly, the room wasn’t far enough away. We could still hear every word the two said.

“You did, didn’t you?” Trisha shouted. “You canceled the contract. How dare you.”

“Your expenses are mounting up,” Pearl responded, her voice raspy with anger.

“I’ve got to live.”

“Within a budget.”

Aunt Vera whispered to me, “Trisha is taking a year off between college and grad school. She goes to UCSC, her father’s alma mater.” UC Santa Cruz, a branch of the University of California, was situated in Santa Cruz, a short hop north of Crystal Cove.

“Is Pearl paying all her expenses?”

“It would seem so.”

“That’s pretty gracious.”

“You and your budgets,” Trisha continued, her voice shrill and unkind. “Why don’t you admit what’s really irking you? It’s my boyfriend. You don’t approve of him. I heard you talking to Bingo when she was over the other day. You called him a lab rat.”

Pearl said, “I never said that.”

My aunt and I peeked at Bingo, who flushed red, confirming that Pearl had, indeed, said that. Oops.

“Daddy liked him, Mother,” Trisha countered.

“Your father is no longer alive.”

“Because you drove him to his grave.” Pearl’s husband, a respected geologist, met an early demise. Thanks to foggy conditions, he accidentally drove off a cliff. “You and your witches and your crazy people, and your—”

“That’s enough. Hush.”

“Or what, you’ll cut me off completely? You’ve been threatening to do that ever since I moved home. I want my phone turned on, Mother. Do you hear me? Sean has to be able to get hold of me.”

Bingo cleared her throat and waved a hand at the gawking crowd in the kitchen. “Ahem, everyone. Let’s not eavesdrop any longer. Let’s convene in the den.”

Aunt Vera latched onto Rhett’s and my elbows. “What a shame,” she said as she accompanied us from the room. “Privacy is so hard to preserve.”

The crowd followed us into what turned out to be not just a den but also a grandiose display room. I’d heard of the Thornton Collection, but I had no idea of the collection’s vastness. Glass cabinets lined the walls. Each was internally lit, the lights illuminating large irregularly shaped masses of rocks and minerals. A small placard identified each:
azurite from Arizona
,
topaz from Russia
,
hematite from Switzerland
. Among the mix were a number of large gray rocks called
Thorntonite
, named after Pearl’s husband, Thomas Thornton, who discovered the rock a mere week before he died. Where the specimen had come from was anyone’s guess. His last trek had taken him from Yosemite all the way to Mt. McKinley.

The pièce de résistance of the Thornton Collection, a large blob about the size of a tennis ball of grayish indigo stone, stood inside a glass box mounted on a pedestal at the center of the room. Its placard read:
rough sapphire, Kashmir
. What quality of gem lay hidden inside the blob had to be worth millions. A half-carat cut sapphire ran in the neighborhood of eight hundred dollars. My husband had wanted to buy me a sapphire for my thirtieth birthday. We’d laughed out loud when we heard of the sale of a twenty-two-carat sapphire going at auction at Christie’s for over three million dollars. Of such dreams are memories made.

“Wow,” I uttered under my breath and moved closer for a better look.

“Copy that,” Rhett said.

“Ditto.” Maya, who had closed The Enchanted Garden and joined the rest of the Winsome Witches for the party, drew near. “Can you imagine how many hours it would take to polish that stone?”

Emma said, “The veterinarian I assist would give an arm and a leg to get her hands on some of the shavings.”

“Shavings?” I said.

“When a stone is polished, it leaves shavings,” Emma explained. “Sapphire, if worn or ingested, has been credited with the ability to cure all sorts of mental and physical conditions.”

I said, “But the shavings wouldn’t help, would they? Doesn’t it have to be the stone itself?”

“Maya, do you know?” Emma said. “Aren’t all aspects of minerals used in New Age concoctions?”

“I don’t know for certain, sugar. I work mostly with herbs.”

Emma nodded. “Yes, all aspects. I’m positive. My husband told me so. I’ve seen something like that mentioned in articles, too. At the library and online. Have you heard of
Paradigm Solutions
and
Aquarius Awareness
? Wonderful e-zines. I like to stay current, don’t you?” Like I said, Emma could talk up a storm. “Some pundits say stones are magical, right, Maya?”

Maya raised an eyebrow. “People believe what they want to believe.”

I grinned. “Which means we will never know whether they work or whether it’s a person’s mind doing the healing.”

Rhett elbowed me and whispered, “Don’t be a cynic.”

Pearl joined the group. She looked teary-eyed. Her cheeks were flushed. I gazed past her for signs of her daughter, but Trisha was not to be seen. Everyone welcomed Pearl, and then she joined the conversation, acting as if nothing untoward had happened. “I see you’re admiring the sapphire. Thomas was so proud of that find. He discovered it on a trek through the northernmost part of India.”

“It’s certainly not for every woman’s budget,” I joked.

“I have an amethyst necklace,” Emma said. “My husband gave it to me. Amethyst is supposed to stimulate psychic intuition.”

“I’ve heard that, too,” Aunt Vera said.

Pearl frowned. “Hogwash.”

“It’s true. Amethyst has healing properties,” Emma went on. “In Greek folklore, the story goes that the god of wine—”

“Bacchus,” Maya chimed in.

Emma nodded. “Bacchus was mad at humans. But the goddess Diana intervened and turned a young woman into amethyst to protect her. Bacchus, realizing his evil, cried, and the stone turned purple from his tears. Isn’t that romantic?”

“My, my,” Pearl said. “Aren’t you being emotive?”

“Don’t be dismissive, Pearl,” Maya said. “Many of our superstitions come from folklore. I noticed you have all the chairs on your patio facing the ocean. Why is that? Feng shui?”

Pearl said, “Uh, because the sun sets in the west, Maya.”

A cat yowled. A woman swore. Then a calico darted into the room and raced around in a circle, gazing upward as if searching for its owner. Trisha stomped in after the cat, a tall glass of something amber-colored in her hand. “Darned nuisance. I’ve told you to bell the cat, Mother.”

Emma clicked her tongue as a cue. The calico darted to her and leaped into her arms.

“Are you telling your guests how much everything costs, Mother?” Trisha continued. “Are you lording it over them like you lord it over me?”

“Trisha, please.”

“Hey, everyone.” Trisha tapped her glass with her stubby fingernails to get the crowd’s attention. “Did my mother tell you she has been approached by at least a dozen museums asking her to donate the Thornton Collection? No? She hasn’t? Surprise, surprise. Did she tell you that she won’t give it up? Not even a sliver. She claims my father wouldn’t have wanted her to. But he did.”

“He did not,” Pearl snapped.

“Yes, he did, Mother. He told me the night before he died that the rocks he hoarded were evil.”

“You’re lying.”

Trisha whirled around, her backpack swinging to and fro with the quick move, and glared at Maya. “You think they’re evil, too.”

Maya recoiled. “No.”

“Yes. I saw you at the history museum. Two months ago. You were with a little boy. Sandy hair, freckled cheeks. He was tugging you toward the rock room. That’s what he called it. But you wouldn’t let him enter.”

Maya glanced from Pearl to the rest of us. She looked helpless. “My nephew,” she conceded.

“Why didn’t you want to go in?” Trisha sneered. “I’ll tell you why. Because rocks are evil, that’s why. You know it. I know it.”

Maya shook her head. “He was being a brat. I don’t think they’re evil. I—”

“In the end,” Trisha interrupted, “my father believed the old saying,
Ashes to ashes
. What belonged to the earth should return to the earth. He wanted to get rid of the whole thing.”

Pearl sniffed. “He never said that.”

“Yes, he did. I told you, Mother, he confided in me. Why is that so hard to believe?”

“Because you and he were not close. This is a fairy tale you’ve made up in your mind. You miss your father and want to believe that he held the same beliefs you did. He didn’t.”

Tears sprang to Trisha’s eyes. She pointed an accusatory finger at Pearl. “Why do you keep them, Mother?”

“Because it’s all I have left of him.”

“Wrong. You have
me
, but I guess that’s not enough.” Trisha jutted her chin. “If you sold these collections and that ugly hunk of rock”—she pointed to the rough sapphire—“you could donate the money to charity or research. Heck, you could probably add an entire geology wing at UCSC. You’d even have enough to fund libraries across the country,” Trisha persisted. “But you won’t because you’re selfish.”

“Enough.” Pearl clapped her hands. “I know your endgame, young lady. You want the money for yourself. Well, you can’t have it. You are no longer welcome in this house. Leave.”

Trisha slammed her beverage glass on the display case. “Over my dead body.”

“Whatever it takes.”

“Witch,” Trisha muttered—or something very close to that—as she stomped out of the room.

Bingo hurried to Pearl and offered her arm. Pearl clutched it like a lifeline. Bingo said, “Why don’t we head outside? The moon is full, the weather temperate. It’s time for the Welcoming.”

The crowd murmured its relief. One of the guests lit the fire that was preset in the fire pit centered in the all-brick patio. Flames curled toward the sky in a plume.

Pearl, as the High Priestess of the Winsome Witches, took up a position on the opposite side of the fire. With the darkening ocean as her backdrop, she said, “Good evening to all. It is time to induct Emma into the fold. Put on your hats if you have removed them.”

Everyone obeyed.

Rhett leaned into me. “I didn’t think I was allowed to stay for this moment.”

“Remember, they’re not real witches. My aunt told me the ceremony is as harmless as bridging from a Girl Scout Brownie to a Junior. You have sisters. You must know what I mean.”

He held up three fingers and started to recite the Girl Scout promise: “On my honor—”

I laid a finger across his mouth to quiet him. He kissed it and a zing of passion ran straight to my toes.

“Emma, come forward,” Pearl said.

Emma, with her scarlet witch hat slightly atilt and her eyes glowing with excitement, hurried to Pearl. After righting Emma’s hat, Pearl patted Emma’s cheek.