The Grim Steeper: A Teapot Collector Mystery (5 page)

That wasn’t a huge surprise. Laverne had so many nieces and nephews, she always said it was a good thing she didn’t have children herself, what with so many other children who needed a maiden auntie to knit and crochet for them. “Admissions,” Sophie mused. “Would she know about this grading thing?”

“She might. Why? Are you snooping again?”

Sophie shrugged and wiped her hands on a towel, then flung it over her shoulder as she sat down opposite Laverne. “I’m worried for Jason. Julia Dandridge said the dean and him have clashed before, and that’s why Dean Asquith might not protect him and could try to pin the blame on him, to get the scandal over with and move on. But if Jason gets fired, he could damage his reputation and have a hard time getting another job at a university in the US.”

Laverne patted her hand across the table, “Now, honey, don’t go borrowing trouble.”

“Borrowing
what
trouble?”

Nana was at the bottom of the stairs, dressed in one of her favorite jewel-toned velour tracksuits, this time in a sapphire that made her blue eyes twinkle. Sophie jumped up and went to hug her. “Doctor’s visit this morning, right? Laverne’s going to drive you?”

Nana eyed her. “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing, deflecting attention. Yes, Laverne is going to take me to see my handsome young doctor, then I am going to come back,
have lunch, and work for a sensibly short period in the tearoom, which means I’m going to sit by the cash desk for most of the day like Thelma and watch you both work your tailbones off. But before then, you are going to tell me what it is you’re not supposed to borrow trouble over.”

Sophie stifled a chuckle. Nana was back in rare form. She sat her grandmother down, brought her a cup of tea and a biscuit with homemade seedless raspberry jam, and talked as she worked on the soup, telling her grandmother what she had told Laverne. After discussing it at length, she said, “Oh, and Nana, Julia Dandridge is going to come around to pick our brains about SereniTea and the Fall Fling. I said you might be able to give her some info.”

Laverne and her exchanged a look. “So when did you decide Julia wasn’t a devil woman set to steal young Jason away from you?” Laverne asked.

Sophie shrugged. “I know, I’m an idiot. They’re just friends.” She hesitated, then added, “She and her husband are having a baby, but don’t tell anyone.”

“Who would I tell?” Nana asked. “The doctor?”

The phone shrilled in the peaceful kitchen, and Sophie hopped over to get it. “Hello?” Nothing but heavy breathing. “Mrs. Earnshaw, you’ve dialed out again!”

No answer, then a click.

*   *   *

T
helma Mae Earnshaw sat and stared down at the screen of the tiny thing in her hand, not much bigger than a credit card. Just then Gilda, her only steady employee at Belle Époque, came back from doing the shopping, laden with about ten plastic bags from the bargain store and the dollar store.

“This thing is broken!” Thelma groused, banging it on the table surface.

Gilda struggled through the door, lugged the bags through to the kitchen and plopped them down on the floor near the fridge, panting and moaning about her sore shoulders and aching feet.

“Get me a cup of tea while you’re there,” Thelma hollered, staring down at the screen and poking at it halfheartedly. How could a million kids get this so easily and not her? It had to be defective, that’s all there was to it. “Cissy got me a lemon,” she said about her granddaughter, Cissy Peterson, who ran Peterson Books ’n Stuff, the “stuff” being note pads and stationery, candles and crystals, and all manner of New Agey crap, as Thelma thought of it. Still not as bad as that new tearoom down the street in the old Sinclair house. What the heck did they call it? Sireny Tea? Sore End It Tea? Something like that. Yogurt and tea; whoever heard of such a foolish notion?

“Gilda, you coming with that tea? I asked a half hour ago.”

Gilda thumped a mug down in front of her. “I haven’t been home ten minutes, and you didn’t ask, you demanded!”

Thelma glared up at her frizzy-haired factotum, then chuckled. “You look like one of them fuzzy-headed chickens that squawk around the barnyard in a fluster. Don’t go getting your knickers in a knot,” she said affably. “Sit down and have a cup with me, and thaw a couple of those pumpkin spice muffins Sophie sent over while you’re at it.”

Minutes later, soothed by the buttered muffins and tea, Gilda said, “You’ll never
guess
what I heard at the market.”

“No, I couldn’t guess,” Thelma said, still glaring at the cell phone on the table. “Why don’t you just tell me without a whole bunch of roundaboutation?”

She couldn’t avoid the hesitations and meandering, but Gilda eventually told Thelma a tale about Cruickshank College, which Thelma didn’t care about one way or the other,
and some kind of scandal attached to Sophie’s young fellow, Jason Murphy. But then it appeared that that wasn’t at all what she meant when she had challenged Thelma to guess what she overheard.

“And you know that professor woman who owns the new tearoom? Girl at the bargain store, her sister cleans at that new tea shop, and says the professor told her this morning that she’s going to be ganging up with Rose next door to take over the Fall Fling tea walk thing and leave you out of it. We’ll be left in the dust!” Gilda said, her eyes bugging from her head. “Going to squeeze us right out!”

Thelma straightened to attention. “What did you say?” she said.

Gilda repeated herself.

“And she told her cleaning lady all this?”

“Well, not exactly,” Gilda said, and goggled slightly, her protuberant eyes wide. “I think . . . I suppose the cleaning lady overheard it when the professor woman was telling it to that scrawny manager girl I’ve seen jogging around the neighborhood.”

Didn’t matter who she said it to, she supposed; Thelma saw red. No one was going to sideline her, not a soul. She’d do whatever it took, and if that meant dirty tricks even though she and Rose Freemont had made a kind of truce, then so be it.

“Fall Fling, my great aunt’s patootie,” she muttered, as she heaved herself to her feet. “I’ll fall fling ’em right to kingdom come.”

Chapter 5

A
clean bill of health and the okay to work a few hours every day had put a spring in Nana’s step and a twinkle in her eyes. She behaved herself, and only spent a few hours working in the tearoom each afternoon. But Friday had been especially busy, so Sophie sent her grandmother upstairs to rest and Laverne home to look after her nonagenarian father. She shared leftover soup with her grandmother for dinner, then nipped back downstairs to set up the tearoom for the last Silver Spouts meeting—the Spouts was Nana’s teapot collecting group—before the Fall Fling tea stroll on Sunday.

The tearoom was kept mostly spotless by Laverne and Sophie, with a little heavy-duty cleaning help once every couple of weeks from a local woman, for a reasonable fee. But to Sophie, the tearoom was showing its age. The carpeting was worn in spots, and even the rose toile wallpaper, above white
wainscoting, looked tired. The tiny shop off the tearoom proper was still fine; it held all the wares that Auntie Rose’s sold, from Fitz and Floyd teapots to Grace’s Teaware’s pretty teacups and saucers, as well as books on tea, tea-scented candles, children’s tea sets, “tea” shirts with tea-themed sayings, and last but not least, Auntie Rose’s Tea-riffic Tea, blended for them by Galway Fine Teas in Butterhill. Rhiannon, her friend and the proprietor, was going to have a booth in Barchester Hall at Cruickshank for the first night of the Fall Fling. Sophie had already texted her to bring a box of their tea with her.

Sophie moved tables aside and made a ring of ten or so chairs facing the tea-servery area that looked out onto the kitchen. Once she had arranged the seating, she looked around at the room again. One thing that was very right about Auntie Rose’s was Nana’s amazing collection of teapots. Antique sideboards and buffet hutches filled with teapots of all kinds lined the walls. An ornate Eastlake buffet held floral teapots, while a heavy Victorian held chintz designs. On floating shelves in between there were animal shapes, people, royal family tributes, red hat society teapots and too many more to name.

But on a separate shelf, right near the door where everyone would see it, was her Nana’s favorite . . . a shelf entirely devoted to Old Country Roses teapots and teaware. Sophie crossed the dimly lit tearoom and examined the shelf of teapots. OCR, as it was known by enthusiasts, was a classic Royal Albert design featuring red and gold roses with gold trim on a white background. It continued to be so popular the company was always coming up with lovely new designs, so Nana was still collecting. There were OCR teapots in different shapes, as well as the novelty teapots: a set featuring bunny teapots with the OCR pattern on them, another one
with a raised pierced rim that was highly sought after, and a whole array of figural ones shaped like a table with OCR teapots and teacups atop them!

“You’re so quick, my Sophie!” Nana said.

Sophie whirled and eyed her grandmother. Nana stood in the doorway to the tearoom and appeared rested and fresh in a pale blue tunic over rose-colored pants. “It would have taken Laverne and me a while to do all of this.”

“It’s nothing, Nana. I told you I was good to do it on my own.”

“You always were the little girl who said that,” Nana said with a fond smile. “
I can do it on my own!
”

“Are you expecting the whole group tonight?”

“I think so. We may need more chairs, if everyone makes it.” She gazed at the semicircle of chairs and counted, then said, “Yes, another five, if all show up. Gilda has taken to coming over with Thelma, now that she lives upstairs at Belle Époque. And Laverne is bringing her niece Cindy; you remember Cindy.”

“I do.” Cindy, the youngest of Laverne’s many nieces and nephews, was tall for her age, an exceptionally pretty girl with a demure demeanor and green lovely eyes. “Does that mean Josh will be here, too? I hope so; I haven’t seen him since I got back.”

Josh Sinclair was the youngest official member of the Silver Spouts, having just turned seventeen. He had a crush on Cindy, but Cindy’s parents thought she was too young to date, so the two teens had merely been friends.

“Oh, I do think he’ll be here,” Nana said with a slight smile. “Cindy turned fifteen a few weeks ago. I have a feeling Josh is going to ask if she can go out with him now.”

They worked in silence for a few minutes, with Nana
mostly focused on the teapots she intended to talk about, and some notes on the Fall Fling Townwide Tea Party, or “tea stroll,” as she called it, since folks would be walking from tearoom to tearoom. Sophie pulled up more chairs, spaced them and made sure everyone would be comfortable.

“I like that Julia,” Nana said, finally sitting down in one of the chairs.

The new tearoom owner had indeed dropped in and picked Nana’s brain about running SereniTea, three doors up the street from Auntie Rose’s. The house had been Josh’s grandmother’s home before Julia and her husband bought it. They had done a quick makeover in a modified Japanese style, with shoji doors and screens, a space for meditation, a Zen garden in back and a large room for yoga classes. It was so completely different from Auntie Rose’s and Belle Époque that it didn’t count as competition. Nana was able to advise her on some of the nuts and bolts of running a tearoom. Julia had a manager, a young woman who was also the yoga instructor, but neither had retail experience, and both were struggling.

“I do, too,” Sophie said. “She’s trying to help Jason get past this grading thing. I hope they figure out what happened.”

Nana reached out and took her granddaughter’s hand. “It’ll all work out, sweetheart. I believe in Jason.”

“I do, too, but that isn’t always enough.”

*   *   *

R
ose watched as her granddaughter leaped up to work some more, dashing into the kitchen to prepare snacks and set up trays for the Silver Spouts. Sophie had been hurt deeply by the death of her restaurant, but had been
recovering nicely over the spring and summer in Gracious Grove. Then Rose’s daughter Rosalind showed up, tempting her daughter with the offer to go back to her career as a chef in a fashionable restaurant in the Hamptons. The mother and daughter’s relationship had never been smooth, since their ideas of what would make Sophie happy were many miles apart. Sophie had hoped that going to the Hamptons to work and be near her mother would help their fragile relationship, but what she saw as her mother’s betrayal had hurt her deeply.

Rosalind had called and offered to come when Rose was sick, but she hadn’t a lick of good bedside manner; they both knew that. And with Sophie and Laverne to help, she wasn’t necessary. Maybe that was the problem; Rosalind was
never
necessary. Being needed was one of the great gifts of life, and Rose’s daughter had been denied that for most of her life. Or had she managed her life so she would never be counted on? It was an interesting thought.

Regardless, that had to change. Whether either of them knew it or not, Sophie needed her mother, and Rosalind needed her only daughter. Rose would give anything to see the two mend their rift.

The Silver Spouts arrived, and the volume of chatter in the room rose. They had their talk and discussed the Fall Fling Townwide Tea Party. Snacks were served, and the most enjoyable part of the evening for many commenced, with several of them breaking off into smaller groups to chat. Horace Brubaker and Laverne’s father, Malcolm Hodge, both nonagenarian but active and busy, sat apart at a table with two of Rose’s friends, Annabelle and Helen. Thelma and Gilda sat at the table right next to them and shamelessly eavesdropped on the foursome.

Rose and Laverne were enjoying a cup of tea with Cindy and Sophie when Josh, who had had his reddish-brown hair closer cropped so he looked older and more mature, approached. He said hello to each, then turned to Laverne.

“Miss Hodge, I was wondering, now that Cindy is, uh . . . has turned fifteen, if it would be okay if she accompanied me to a natural sciences exhibit at the college.”

Seventeen going on forty
, Rose thought, smiling at the boy. He had an old-fashioned air about him, as would any teenage boy who collected teapots. Cindy blushed and looked down at her cute shoes, a pair of Mary Janes in light blue.

Laverne regarded him sternly, her handsome face set to avoid smiling too broadly. “Well, Mr. Sinclair, I’ve discussed this with her parents and we’ve decided that since she is now fifteen, it’s up to Cindy, so you will have to ask her yourself.”

He looked a little shocked, and his freckled cheeks flushed pink, just as hers were. But he turned to her and said, “Cindy, would you like to go to the traveling exhibit at Cruikshank next week?”

With an unexpectedly shrewd look, she cocked her head to one side and said, “What kind of exhibit?”

“It’s uh, it’s amphibians and reptiles of the rain forest.”

Rose stifled a sigh. He was inviting her to go see lizards and frogs? Did he not know girls at all? She waited for the sniff of disgust.

Cindy hopped in her chair and said, “I’d
love
to go, Josh! I like snakes best. Will they have snakes? Pythons? Anacondas?” She paused and clapped her hands together. “
Boa constrictors
?” Her dark eyes were wide and sparkling.

Josh smiled broadly. “I hope so. I like lizards better than snakes. Do you mind frogs? Some girls don’t like frogs.”

Rose burst out laughing. “Well now, in my day if any boy had asked me to go see snakes and frogs with him, I would have bopped him on the nose.”

Josh and Cindy broke away and sat together discussing the exhibit, words like
herpetology
,
semiaquatic
,
neurotoxins
and
tetrapod
floating toward the adults.

“She’s interested in many kinds of animals,” Laverne explained. “Cindy wants to be a zoologist and travel to Africa someday. She may be the last kid to benefit from the Laverne Hodge college fund.” Laverne had always set aside some money for her nieces and nephews; those who needed it could apply to her for a school loan, which was eventually repaid, no interest needed, to benefit the younger nieces and nephews.

They chatted with some of the others about the Fall Fling tea stroll.

“I think we’re ready for it, aren’t we, Sophie?” Rose asked.

“We’re better than ready,” she said, with her special brand of brisk confidence, revitalized by being in charge of the menu at Auntie Rose’s once again. “We’re setting up a table outside for the strollers, with tea and snacks; I’ll be manning that. But the tearoom itself will be open, too, with you two inside for those who want to sit for a moment, or warm up.”

“This tea walk . . . yet another attempt by Cruickshank to improve relations between town and gown,” Horace, who had been listening in from the next table, croaked, his voice hoarse from a cold he was finally defeating. He cleared his throat. “I know Dale Asquith; his family had a home by the lake, and he spent summers at it. Even then, his parents insisted he keep up with his schooling. He was one of my troublesome piano students back when I taught. He always was a pain in the tush, and from what I hear, he still is.”

“Horace, people do change with time,” Rose said.

The elderly man tapped his cane on the floor and chuckled a rusty sound. “Now, Rose, you are too sweet and gentle a lady. Take everything I say about him and multiply it to the power of ten. One of his greatest faults is a tendency to not take responsibility for those faults. It was always someone else who kept him from practicing: his brother, the maid, a door-to-door salesman.” He glanced over at Sophie and his smile disappeared. “You make sure he doesn’t try to do that to your young man with this grading problem, because he will, if it will save his butt.”

The meeting broke up. Sophie sent her grandmother straight up to bed, and Laverne home, since she had to drop off Cindy first. She rearranged the tearoom for the next day’s business, but it was only nine when she was done and trotted upstairs. There was a text on her phone from Dana to call her, so she did.

It was odd, Sophie thought as she listened to it ring; Cissy Peterson was the one who had wanted to be friends when they were teens, and they were, but now that they were all adults it was Dana who Sophie gravitated toward. Dana Saunders had once been jealous of her, she had admitted, because of Sophie’s wealthy family, but recently they discovered that they clicked.

“Hey, Dana, what’s up?” she asked when the phone clicked.

“I’m so sorry, Soph. You must be worried sick!”

“Worried? What are you talking about? What’s wrong?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake; hasn’t anyone told you yet? It’s the article in the
Clarion
. I’ll send you the link.”

A few seconds later, Sophie looked at her phone screen and clicked on the link from the Cruikshank College newspaper, the
Clarion
.

PROF’S FRIEND ADMITS POSSIBLE GRADE HIKE FOR MAC

By Tara Mitchells

Sophie Taylor, instructor Jason Murphy’s “friend,” insists that while he would never knowingly do anything to jeopardize his position at the college, he could easily have hiked Mac MacAlister’s grade if he wasn’t aware how it would impact him. She further stated that the fun-loving prof, who as a wild youth was known to drink, smoke and steal on occasion, has cleaned up his act and is desperately trying to stay on the straight and narrow . . .