Widow's Tears (12 page)

When you go out the front door, turn left and follow the path around the corner. There you'll find racks of herbs for sale in six-inch and one- and two-gallon pots—all the usual culinary herbs (parsley, sage, rosemary, thyme, bay, chives), plus a good selection of medicinal and native plants. Follow the path, and it will take you through the theme gardens: the kitchen garden, the fragrance garden, the apothecary garden, the zodiac garden, and the dyers garden (the coreopsis is in bloom right now—the flowers yield a yellow, orange, or brown dye, depending on the mordant you use). Keep going and you'll find your way to the cottage where Kathleen Gips led her Language-of-Flowers workshop the week before.

Thyme Cottage began life, back in the horse-and-buggy days, as a stone stable. But the previous owner, an architect, reincarnated the building (by then a garage) as a lovely one-bedroom guesthouse with a fireplace, a built-in kitchen, and a hot tub in its own private patio garden. Ruby and Cass and I schedule workshops there, since the main room—we call it the
Gathering Room—is large enough to accommodate a crowd, and the open-plan kitchen is ideal for cooking and crafting demonstrations. When there's no workshop on the calendar, the cottage is available as a guesthouse, which I advertise on the Internet and in the
Pecan Springs Bed-and-Breakfast Guide
. It's a good source of extra income, and only a little extra work.

I had just got the last lunch customer out the door and settled down to a few housekeeping chores when Ruby's sister phoned with a problem—a big one. Ramona was calling from the Castle Oaks Nursing Home, where Doris (Ruby's and Ramona's mother) lives in the Alzheimer's wing. Doris was one of those mothers who like to call the shots in the family. For instance, when Ruby was nineteen, pregnant, and unwed, Doris insisted that she give up the baby for adoption. It was a long time before Ruby could forgive Doris for interfering—and forgive herself for letting her mother bully her into doing something she didn't want to do. But a couple of decades later, the long-lost daughter found her way back into Ruby's life. Things were a little…well, tumultuous for a while, but Amy has made Ruby a proud grandmother. Both of them are still busy making up for lost time.

Meanwhile, Doris is no longer calling the shots. Instead, she has lost her marbles. After an agonizing few months trying to cope with distance care (Doris was living an hour's drive away, in Fredericksburg), Ruby and Ramona made the decision to move their mother to Castle Oaks, here in Pecan Springs. The nurses give her good care, and the facility tries to keep its patients under lock and key. But like many dementia patients, Doris has a tendency to wander. What's more, she's a wily old lady. Not long ago, she filched a coat and slipped out the front door with a gaggle of visitors. At the neighborhood supermarket, she liberated a bottle of apple juice and some Hershey bars. When a clerk asked for money, she told him that she
had twenty-three million bucks in the bank but she couldn't remember where she'd left her checkbook. The clerk called the cops, and Doris got an armed escort back to Castle Oaks, which pleased her no end.

Doris was on the lam again today. Sightings had been reported from the H-E-B grocery; Walgreens, where Doris made off with a box of Clairol Ultra Light Natural Blonde and a giant-size bag of Cheetos; and Wag-A-Bag, where she dumped her Cheetos down the toilet, causing a flood in the ladies'. The Pecan Springs PD had been alerted and a Silver Alert posted. (The Silver Alert is modeled after the Amber Alert and lets people know that a senior with mental impairment has gone missing.)

Ramona, meanwhile, was about to go cruising, on the lookout for her errant mother. She was phoning to tell me that she hadn't had any luck reaching Ruby via her cell phone. She wanted a phone number for the place where Ruby was visiting so she could call and let her know that Doris had gone AWOL again—but that everything was under control because Ramona was in control. Ramona resembles her mother in that regard. She likes to call the shots.

“I don't have a number because Claire Conway doesn't have a phone,” I said. “You could try texting.”

“I don't know how,” Ramona said. “I just got this phone, and I'm lucky to be able to turn it on. This thing is smarter than I am.” She sighed, not bothering to conceal her vexation. “Well, if Ruby calls in, tell her not to worry—I'll find Mother. She doesn't try to conceal her whereabouts. It's just a matter of following the clues.”

“Go get 'em, Sherlock,” I said.

While I was talking to Ramona, a couple of customers had come in. I put the phone down, rang up
The Herb Society of America's Essential Guide to Growing and Cooking with Herbs
($29.95, but worth every penny), two bars of home-crafted lavender-oatmeal soap ($1.25 each), and a very nice
eighteen-inch-tall bay plant that would more than pay back its cost ($5.95) when the leaves were harvested next fall, and every fall thereafter.

I had just thanked the customer and said good-bye when Cass Wilde, looking warm and sweaty, came in from the tearoom. Cass has a personal style that's every bit as outrageous as Ruby's, and until last autumn, there was quite a bit more of her, so there was quite a lot more outrageousness. Since then, though, Cass has been on a personal weight-loss campaign. She's lost about twenty pounds with another twenty-five to go—for health reasons, she says, not because she thinks skinny looks better. “I believe in curves,” she says. “I love soft. Angles and bones just don't do it for me.”

She's also doing it for business reasons. Quite a few of Cass' customers are upscale singles who commute for a couple of hours a day, don't have time to cook, but want to improve their eating habits and keep their weight down. So she has developed a line of low-calorie, heart-healthy, home-delivered vegetarian gourmet meals, made with Texas-grown vegetables, many of which come from Mistletoe Creek Farm on Comanche Road, south of Pecan Springs. The farm's owner, Donna Fletcher, delivers Cass' order right to the kitchen, which ensures that the veggies are as fresh as they can be—another selling point. Unless people hang out at the Pecan Springs Farmers' Market on Saturday mornings or subscribe to Donna's weekly CSA baskets, they won't find fresher vegetables.

“I figured I'd better slim down some to advertise the new line,” Cass says with a frank grin. Today she was wearing blue denim capris and tennies and a loose, blue cotton tee with pushup sleeves, her long blonde hair hanging loose under a blue denim baseball cap with a button pinned to it:
Eat Healthy or Die Early
. She's a good advertisement. Customers who knew her “before” can see the “after” difference.

“All done,” she announced cheerfully, wiping her round face on her
sleeve. “The kitchen is clean and tomorrow's lunch is queued up. And Big Red Mama is loaded and ready to rock and roll.”

Big Red Mama is the beat-up red van we bought to replace our beat-up blue van a couple of years ago. Cass uses it for deliveries, Ruby uses it for the catering business, and I use it to haul plants. Mama's former owner was a Wimberley artist named Gerald, who got himself arrested for cooking crystal meth, which doesn't belong on anybody's menu. The Hays County sheriff confiscated Mama and put her up for sale in the semiannual sheriff's auction. When Ruby and I saw her, we fell in love with the wild designs that Gerald, perhaps under the influence of a certain mildly hallucinatory herb, had painted all over her squat red body. Cass says that Mama looks like a cross between a Crayola box on wheels and a Sweet Potato Queens' parade float.

“Sounds good,” I said absently, making a note to call the nursery. The bay plant I'd just sold had been the last one. I hoped to reorder, but bay isn't the easiest plant to propagate, and the nursery always sells out early. “Safe travels, Cass. Oh, and better check Mama's right front tire. It looked a little low this morning.”

*   *   *

I waited on several more people, then helped Dawn locate Ruby's last deck of Motherpeace tarot cards for a customer. I left her explaining the principles of the tarot to the woman, who had a great many questions, and began reshelving the herb and garden books. I try to keep them organized, more or less, to make restocking easier. I was jotting down a list of titles to reorder when the phone rang.

It was Hark Hibler, the editor of the
Pecan Springs
Enterprise
and Ruby's current flame. That is, Hark has a flame thing for Ruby. Her feelings for him are considerably less incandescent. He got right to the point.

“If you're in touch with Ruby, please let her know that the little tropical wave out there in the Gulf has blown up into a full-fledged tropical storm. NOAA has just put out a warning.”

“Really?” I was surprised. This was a little unusual. “It got promoted from wave to storm without sitting around for three or four days as a depression?”

“She.”

I frowned. “She what?”

“
She
got promoted. Her name is Amanda, and she's already made landfall a little north of Corpus Christi. I thought Ruby should know. Just in case, I mean.”

“I'm sure Ruby will be thrilled,” I said drily. “But really, Hark, this place where she's gone to visit—it's nowhere near the coast.”

“Oh.” There was a silence. “I thought Ruby said she was going to Houston.”

“No.” Hark may be in the news business, but he doesn't always listen when you tell him something. “Halfway to Houston. Off 281, south of Round Top.”

“Round Top,” he said thoughtfully. “That's in Fayette County, isn't it?”

“Yup,” I said, moving Jim Long's
Making Herbal Dream Pillows
back to the shelf where it belonged. It's a popular book. On the shelf, it tends to migrate.

“The
San Antonio
Express-News
ran a story yesterday,” Hark said. “It was about the oil companies buying up leases in Fayette County—all the land they can get their hands on. Looks like there's a fracking boom.” Another silence. “Well, tell her anyway. Sometimes a storm like this can be pretty rainy. It can cause a lot of trouble if it happens to stall somewhere. Like Allison. Remember Allison?”

Allison was the first storm of the 2001 hurricane season. She came
ashore at Freeport, then stalled over Houston, where she dumped thirty-five inches of rain overnight before she drifted back into the Gulf, then wound herself up and headed for Louisiana. Twenty-three people died in Texas; seventy thousand homes were flooded in Houston. On the Gulf, early-season storms can be nearly as bad as full-blown hurricanes. I had the feeling, though, that Hark wasn't really worried about Amanda. He was missing Ruby, and since he couldn't reach out and touch her, I was the next best thing. But I didn't say that.

“Of course I remember Allison,” I replied. “Do you remember Josephine?”

“Do I ever,” Hark said with a chuckle. “She was the hurricane that hit the weekend you and Mike got married.” Pecan Springs is a couple hundred miles inland, but Central Texas occasionally gets slammed, especially when a hurricane landfalls around Victoria.

“The wedding party was marooned by high water,” I said, remembering. For a while, all of us thought we were having fun—until the bridge went out. There was no champagne left at the end of that party. No food, either.

“Yeah,” Hark said. “That was one for the record books. Well, tell Ruby anyway,” he repeated. “Amanda, landfalling around Corpus, heading inland. She should keep an eye on the weather.” He paused, then added a little shyly, “Oh, and give her my love.” He hung up.

Twenty minutes later, just at two, the phone rang again. I picked it up quickly, thinking it might be Ramona reporting on the whereabouts of the fugitive Doris. But this time, it was Amy, Ruby's daughter, calling from the pediatrician's office. Grace's sore throat was worse, and the doctor had said that she needed to have her tonsils and adenoids out. Grace would be in the hospital overnight.

“It's not a terribly serious thing,” Amy said, sounding like the grown-up she had become since she gave birth to Grace. “I'm sure Kate and I can
manage. I don't want Mom to think she needs to come home—she's earned some time away from the shop. But she'll be upset if I don't let her know what's happening. I've tried her cell with no luck. Can you reach her, China?”

“Did you try texting?”

“No,” Amy said, “I didn't. I thought she'd like to hear my voice so she could be sure I'm okay with Grace being in the hospital.” There was a pause, and I could hear voices in the background. “Could you try, please? Oops, the doctor is looking for me. I have to go. Mega-thanks, China! I'll get back to you when we've got something definite.” Click.

Now, my fingers are not as nimble as those of your average nine-year-old (although I probably spell better). I prefer to talk to my kids rather than text, so that I know they've gotten my message and can't ignore me. What's more, the smartphone that McQuaid gave me for my birthday auto corrects my fat-fingered typing, which has resulted in some funny and embarrassing messages. (I'm not the only one that grumbles about this. McQuaid told me he texted Blackie, his partner in the private investigation business, and asked him to “come here for a sec.” His smartphone knew better: “Come here for a sex.” And a friend of Ruby's once texted her that they had “just bought a large condom.” It took a couple more messages to clarify that she meant “condo.”)

But I gave it my best shot:
Ramona says Doris escaped. Hark says watch for TS Amanda. Amy says Grace needs tonsils out. Tonight. But we can handle. Stay where you are. Don't come home.

I checked to make sure that the autocorrect genie hadn't taken the liberty of changing something, and hit send. Then I looked at my message again and wondered if I had been too blunt, too direct. Maybe I should've tried to soften it a little. Or split it up so there wasn't so much to read.