Tempest in a Teapot (A Teapot Collector Mystery) (2 page)

Chapter 1

T
helma Mae Earnshaw peeped through the lacy curtains that adorned the side window of La Belle Époque, her quaint(ish) inn and tearoom. She was trying to figure out what had her archenemy and business competitor, Rose Freemont, in such a fuss. Rose had already, several times that morning, gone to the front door of Auntie Rose’s Victorian Tea House and paced the narrow sidewalk. She had scrubbed that front door, polished the teapot-shaped brass knocker and washed the windows as high as a woman too old to climb a ladder could.

If Thelma didn’t know better, she would have speculated Rose was waiting for a visitor as important as Queen Elizabeth, with Philip, Charles, Camilla, Will, Kate, the baby and handsome Prince Harry in tow! But such a string of luminaries would never brighten the modest streets of Gracious Grove, New York, “Prettiest Town in All the Finger Lakes.” Folks were always surprised to find out that it wasn’t just pretty, it was “dry,” and perhaps the ban on alcohol had a positive influence on the prettiness, who could judge?

But back to Rose: Thelma gathered her thoughts, which had a tendency to scatter like chickens from a barking dog. It had to be someone important Rose was expecting. Who? Or was it
whom
? Thelma could never remember the right usage, and hadn’t even seventy-some-odd years ago when she and Rose were pigtailed schoolgirls sharing secrets at Gracious Grove Elementary. That was years before the fateful Methodist Church pie social where Rose Beaudry had stolen Harold Freemont from Thelma.

Rose exited her tearoom again and this time walked right out into the street, wringing her hands and looking anxious. Well, now, what had her knickers in a knot?

That very minute a rattletrap van came tootling down Seneca Street. It screeched to a halt in front of Auntie Rose’s, and a youthful figure leaped out of the passenger side and ran at Rose. It was like one of those home invasion attacks you heard of happening in Buffalo or Rochester, the ones that were so common on the news, Thelma thought, one hand over her heart and one on the telephone, in case the police were needed. But in another second she realized who the youthful figure was . . . Sophie Taylor!

While still watching the girl and her grandmother in a tight, long-lasting embrace—the proceedings were complicated by Pearl, Rose’s gorgeous chocolate-point Birman cat, winding around their legs—Thelma quickly dialed a number she knew by heart. Her granddaughter answered the phone with her customary “Peterson Books ’n Stuff . . . Cissy Peterson speaking. How can I help you?”

“Cissy, you’ll never guess who’s come home to Gracious Grove!” Thelma kept watching out the window as Rose propped open the front door of the tearoom and some young fellow started lugging boxes labeled
TEAPOTS
out of the back of the van. Thelma might be old, but her far vision was sharper than ever!

“Who, Granny?” Cissy said, her voice sounding as bored as it always did nowadays.

“Sophie Rose Freemont Taylor, that’s who!” Thelma stated. “And it looks like she’s come to stay!”

• • •

T
hree days had already passed since Sophie arrived, Rose Freemont fumed, and still she hadn’t so much as dipped her toe in the local friendship circles. Rose figured that’s the first thing she would want to do, get reacquainted with all the kids she used to be friendly with when she came to stay in Gracious Grove every summer. She hadn’t been back in years, too busy trying to shore up a dying business, her restaurant in the garment district in New York.

Rose stood at the door of Sophie’s sitting room, one of three rooms in her attic apartment above Rose’s second-floor quarters, which were, in turn, above the tearoom, her beloved business for the last forty years. Sophie, screwdriver in hand, was eyeballing a shelf she was mounting on the only straight wall in the room. As in most attic apartments, many of the walls were slanted, with dormer-style windows that had a gorgeous view of Seneca Lake, two miles distant.

“Nana, is this level, do you think?” Sophie asked, holding the shelf in place with one hand and trying to lean back to judge.

“Looks like it,” Rose answered. As level as the other six shelves that held Sophie’s collection of art deco, art nouveau and modernist teapots. But after twenty years, the white-Persian-cat-on-a-cushion teapot, which Sophie had begged to keep when Rose was going to reluctantly chuck it after it got chipped while cleaning, was still in the center, the heart of the collection.

Sophie bent all her strength to fastening the seventh and final shelf to the wall then stood back, eyeing the display. She unpacked her last box of teapots and began to arrange them on the shelf. The Silver Spouts, Rose’s teapot-collecting group, would be fascinated by Sophie’s collection. The next meeting was in just a few days, and Rose hoped Sophie would bring some down to the tearoom to show them off to the other collectors.

“I’m so happy to have you here, Sophie dear. I’m not getting any younger; neither is Laverne,” she said, of her only employee. “I was just saying to her the other day, I wasn’t sure how we’d manage everything with the bridal shower season upon us and more reservations than I know what to do with. When you called and asked to come home to stay, it was like the answer to a prayer.”

Lovely Sophie, twenty-nine, dark haired and blue eyed, was across the room in two long strides and hugged her. “No, you’re the answer to
my
prayers, Nana. It was like a voice told me to come home to Gracious Grove! Well, I know it was never
really
my home,” she said, squeezing and releasing. “Just my favorite place to be during summer holidays and at Christmas and Easter.”

Rose gazed up at her gorgeous granddaughter, feeling a swell of pride. She was vivacious, smart, beautiful and . . . a little downhearted. She cocked her head to one side as she looked up at the child. There was a hint of self-doubt in her manner since the lingering death of her restaurant.

“This
is
your home!” Rose stoutly insisted. “Your brothers hated it here in Gracious Grove; nothing to do, they said. So I just let them go off and hunt and fish and wander the woods. But I could always count on my little helper to dust and polish and serve the guests. And now I really need you to do all that, and probably more.”

“I’m happy to help, Nana.”

Help
. Hmm. Probably best not to drop the whole load of her plans on the child right away. Start small: “I had a teeny bit more in mind for you than just helping, my dear. You remember Cissy Peterson?”

“
Do
I!” Sophie said, fervently, crossing her eyes and making a face. She went back to placing teapots, talking over her shoulder. “What a pain she was! She never wanted to do anything fun. No tree climbing because she’d get her dress dirty. No mud pies, ditto. I kind of felt sorry for her, stuck with old Mrs. Earnshaw as a grandmother. Is she still as cranky as ever? I’ll never forget her chasing me off her front porch when I came trick-or-treating that time I was staying here over Halloween weekend!”

“Thelma was born cranky,” Rose declared. “She insists that I stole your Grandpa Harold away from her, when she knows I saw him first!” She shook her head, in disbelief. Thelma had married a lovely man who adored her, and they had a sweet daughter who had loved Thelma more than she deserved. Though her daughter had died too young, Thelma still had Cissy and Phil, her grandkids; both loved their grumpy grandmother.

Rose’s supposed “snatching” of Harold Freemont away from Thelma during the Methodist Church pie social had driven a wedge between the former best friends that had never been removed. Despite living and working right next door to each other for all these years, they rarely spoke. It was sad, really.

“So, what were you going to say about Cissy, Nana?” Sophie asked, perching on the arm of the overstuffed armchair to bring herself down to her grandmother’s eye level. Pearl wanted in on the conversation, and leaped gracefully up on the back of the chair, so she, too, was eye level with the humans. Sophie took the fluffy cat in her arms, cradling her like a baby. The cat purred, a throaty hum like a distant boat motor on the lake.

Rose smiled at the cat and girl; it made such a pretty picture, both of them so beautiful, both blue eyed. Pearl was a Birman, with a dark mask, ivory ruff and chocolate brown legs, and the mandatory pale socks required by breed specifications. Birmans were supposed to be one-human cats in their single-minded devotion, but Pearl made an exception for Sophie, perhaps sensing the bond between grandmother and granddaughter. She treated Sophie like she did Rose, with sweet adoration and affection.

“Nana? What about Cissy?”

Rose started. “What? Oh! My mind wandered for a moment. Cissy’s engaged to be married, and nothing will do for the girl but to have her bridal shower here, in Auntie Rose’s Victorian Tea House!”

Sophie gasped and said, “How does her grandmother feel about that?”

Rose reached out to scruff her cat’s chin. “How would I know? The last time that woman spoke to me, Eisenhower was president.” She was exaggerating, but she truly was not on friendly enough terms to ask Thelma what she thought of anything. “Cissy apparently informed her matron of honor, Gretchen Harcourt—she married Hollis Harcourt, the lawyer, and has only been in town a couple of years—that Auntie Rose’s is where she wants it held. We’re to
go all out
, I was told.”

Sophie eyed her grandmother; what exactly was Nana trying to say? “I’ll be happy to help,” she said, slowly. “Do you need an extra hand in the kitchen? Making tea? Serving? Setting up? Cleaning afterward? I’ll do it all, if you like.”

“I want you to do the presentations.”

“Presentations.” Sophie’s mind was a blank. She gently set Pearl on the back of the chair and regarded the cat; she squeezed her blue eyes shut then opened them wide. Sophie looked back to her grandmother. “Nana, what do you mean by
presentations
?”

“I guess you’ve never been to one of Auntie Rose’s bridal showers. I do a talk about tea and the Victorian era, the history of teapots, highlights from the Auntie Rose collection, and the presentation of the ‘tea-a-ra’ to the bride. I would like you to take over for this one.”

“Nana, I couldn’t,” Sophie said, horrified. “Mom says you’ve become famous for what she calls your ‘tearoom shows.’ She sent me a newspaper clipping! I couldn’t do it justice.”

“Now you listen to me, Sophie Rose Freemont Taylor,” Nana said, her voice stern. “I don’t want you to do
my
presentation, I want you to do your
own
bridal shower presentation! And don’t tell me you can’t do it. You managed In Fashion for three years.”

“Managed it into bankruptcy,” Sophie said, feeling the familiar tightening in her throat when she thought of her beloved restaurant, shuttered and auctioned right down to the carpets. She turned to Pearl and lifted her gently to her lap again, burying her face in the Birman’s luscious mane of fur. Pearl nudged her hand and purred throatily.

“That’s the past,” Nana said, putting one warm hand on Sophie’s shoulder and squeezing, while she gently petted Pearl’s head. “I have faith in you. If you don’t do it, I’ll have to cancel.”

“Cancel? Why?”

“I need to scale back, honey,” she said, her shoulders drooping. “The showers just exhaust me. This last week we had a bridal shower, a birthday party and four bus tours, and the Silver Spouts meeting is coming up. I’m exhausted!”

Sophie was immediately stricken by guilt. She examined her grandmother’s careworn face, the wrinkles more pronounced than in bygone years. While she had been puttering around, Nana had been overworking herself. But there was something more there than the workload bothering her grandmother. “Nana, is there some reason you don’t want to do Cissy Peterson’s shower? I mean, other than the work?”

The older woman looked off into the distance for a moment. She walked over to the shelves, adjusted an art deco round teapot with Bakelite handle and knob. “It’s complicated. I know you see Thelma Mae Earnshaw as just an annoying old woman and she does drive me crazy. Did you know she has started serving a full-on cream tea, and is trying to start her own teapot-collecting club? I just don’t understand the woman. I exaggerated about her not talking to me since Eisenhower was president, but our relationship is strained. Always has been. And yet . . . she was my friend once.”

Sophie waited for her grandmother to get to the point. Pearl jumped down from Sophie’s lap and headed downstairs, perhaps to beg treats from Laverne, Nana’s only employee in the tearoom.

“It’s about the wedding,” Nana finally said. “Cissy is marrying Francis Whittaker Junior. Remember him?”

“Frankie, that . . . that putz? I sure do.”

“Honey, don’t call him Frankie. Or a putz. Frankie . . . uh,
Francis
is now an architect and still lives in the Whittaker house his daddy built. Vivienne—his mother—moved out to a modern home up in the hills. But you know what Thelma is like; she thinks that the Whittakers aren’t up to her standards. Thelma Mae Earnshaw has always stood on the dignity of her mama’s family being the first to settle Gracious Grove. She’s bad enough now, but you would not believe the way she put on airs when she was Thelma Mae Hendry!”