Rosemary Remembered - China Bayles 04 Read online

  Rosemary Remembered

  A China Bayles Mystery

  Susan Wittig Albert

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK

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  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE: The recipes contained in this bouk are to be followed exactly as written. The publisher is not responsible for your specific health or allergy needs that may require medical supervision. The publisher is not responsible for any adverse reactions to the recipes contained in this book.

  ROSEMARY REMEMBERED

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author Copyright © 1995 by Susan Wittig Albert. All rights reserved.

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  ISBN: 1-4406-6629-6

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  acknowledgments

  To all those herbalists upon whose assistance I so often rely and who are so generous with their encouragement, many thanks. To Sisters and Brothers in Crime, thanks and thanks again for advice, help, and support; without you, the business of murder wouldn't be half as much fun. And to my husband and coauthor, Bill Albert, who reads copy, repairs computers, and remains calm when the roof is tumbling down around our ears—well, what can I say?

  author's note

  This novel is set in the imaginary Texas town of Pecan Springs, which incorporates a variety of fictitious elements, such as the campus of Central Texas State University and The Springs Resort Hotel. If you're familiar with the central Texas Hill Country, please don't confuse Pecan Springs and its inhabitants with such real towns as San Marcos, New Braunfels, Wimberley, or Fredericksburg, or CTSU with any local university. You will also forgive me, I hope, for inserting Adams County between Travis and Bexar and adding the Pecan River to the eastern edge of the Edwards Aquifer. The fictional characters and events of this book are created entirely for pleasure; the occasional references to real people, places, and events are intended only to lend depth and verisimilitude to the fiction and fool you into feeling that Pecan Springs is part of the real world.

  Chapter One

  Most of the herbs we use every day have a wonderful tolerance to heat and drought. In fact, it is often claimed that a dry, hot climate is ideal for herbs. The heat and aridity concentrates and intensifies the aromatic oils in the plants' foliage, so that the fragrance is clearer, the taste sharper.

  China Bayles

  A Book of Thyme and Seasons

  For the past couple of weeks, Pecan Springs had been sizzling in a Texas-size heat wave. The red-orange sun skittered like a ball of flame across the cloudless morning sky, afternoon temperatures nudged one hundred, and the night air was a smothering blanket, hot and heavy. In this kind of weather, you never know what will happen. People burn down to a short fuse.

  Take Constance Letterman and Ruby Wilcox, for instance. On this Thursday morning, Constance was standing at the counter in my herb shop, fanning her rosy face with a piece of junk mail and complaining about the heat. Constance is short and round, a Hershey bar or two away from Weight Watchers. She's usually as bouncy as a beach ball, but on this hot morning her tight brown curls were coming unfurled around her scowling face. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

  "Hot 'nough to toast the toes off a horny toad." She spoke accusingly, as if Ruby and I were somehow to blame for this persistent meteorological phenomenon. "How people're supposed to live in this heat is beyond me. Cooks the soul right out of you."

  Ruby Wilcox looked up from the box of herb conference programs she was unpacking for me. "I never saw the day that got one degree cooler because somebody bitched about it." Her tone was snappish. "And there aren't any more horny toads in this part of Texas, Constance. The fire ants ran them off."

  Constance fanned harder, and her rosy face got rosier. "No need to get your back up, Ruby." She raised her chin and addressed a chili pepper wreath hanging from the ceiling. "Far as horny toads go, some folks jus' take things too literal."

  I put down a large, fragrant bowl of just-clipped mint on the counter next to the phone. My name is China Bay-les. Ruby Wilcox is my best friend and tenant, and this was probably the first time in Ruby's life that anybody ever accused her of being too literal. Her Crystal Cave shares space with my Thyme and Seasons in the century-old stone building I own on Crockett Street, a few blocks from Pecan Springs' town square. As you might guess from the name, The Crystal Cave is a New Age shop, filled with incense and rune stones and space music and books on how to read your horoscope. As you might also guess, the Cave is Pecan Springs' only New Age shop, which makes Ruby something of a rarity. But she's a rarity on other counts, too. She's just over six feet tall (depending on which shoes she's wearing), with carroty, every-which-way hair, freckles, and wide eyes, green or gray or brown (depending on which contacts she's wearing). This morning, her eyes were green and her orangy frizz was snugged back from her forehead with a green band. She was wearing a loose, lacy top, cream-colored; a flowing, ankle-length skirt in various shades of green; and flat, green sandals. Her toenails matched her hair, and her fingernails matched her toenails. Ruby is a real treat.

  Constance Letterman owns and manages the Craft Emporium, next door on the corner of Crockett and Guadalupe. The Emporium is housed in a huge old Victorian that somehow reminds me of an eccentric but charming maiden aunt, laden with bandboxes and wicker baskets, wearing a floppy straw hat heavy with cabbage roses, and smelling faintly of lavender and lilies of the valley. It's crammed to the rafters with craft shops and boutiques: Gretel's CandleWorks, Peter Dudley's antique dishes, The Vintage Boutique, and Blanche's Buttons & Laces. The next time you're in Pecan Spri
ngs, you really should stop and browse. And while you're in the neighborhood, drop in at Thyme and Seasons as well.

  Even under the best of circumstances, Constance and Ruby are equally volatile, and when they rub up against one another, they heat up. Today, they were like a pair of prickly pear cacti trying to dance on a hot rock. I changed the subject.

  "Did you go to the fireworks last night, Constance?"

  Every Fourth, the Pecan Springs Chamber of Commerce sponsors a fireworks display at the Little League Park out at the end of LB J, behind the fairgrounds. Families sprawl on blankets on the grass or relax in lawn chairs in the backs of pickup trucks that flaunt the Texas star and bars and bumper stickers that say, "Buy American or Go on Japanese Welfare." The Lions Club sells chili dogs and nachos blanketed with jalepeno cheese and sweetened iced tea in white foam cups, while carnival honky-tonk blares in the background and everybody oohs and aahs at the cascades of fiery sparks that shower through the night sky. When the last Roman candle scorches the stars, it's time to dance country-western to a local band. Last night it was The Possum Brothers. They started with "Blue Eyes Cryin' in the Rain." We wished. Anything to cool us down. A gully washer, a frog choker, even a hurricane.

  Well, we got our wish. A passing shower had dampened us this morning, but the rain didn't bring down the temperature more than a degree or two. In fact, the leftover humidity was only turning up the scorch factor and making everybody more touchy.

  "O' course I went to the fireworks." Constance answered me indignantly, as if I'd accused her of missing her mother's birthday. "Nobody stays away from the Fourth."

  Constance is right. In Pecan Springs, the town turns out en masse for the holidays. Fireworks on the Fourth, the parade of homemade floats on Labor Day, the Pecan Festival every October, "Silent Night" around the Christmas tree on the square, taps at the cemetery on Memorial Day. If you come from New York or Chicago, these probably seem like small-potato pleasures. But people around here grew up on them, find them nourishing, and want to pass them on to their children. The Fourth and Labor Day and Pecan Festival Weekend are big events in the life of a small town, and we celebrate them together, knowing that we aren't really celebrating the occasion, we're celebrating each other and the hope that holds us together.

  This sense of quiet community is a strong contrast to the competitive life I used to lead as a criminal defense attorney in a big Houston law firm. I once knew a famous defense lawyer who bragged that he went to court armed for hand-to-hand combat. When he walked out of the courtroom, he expected to leave the other guy stone cold dead on the floor. A metaphor, maybe, but not by much. Our adversarial system may not be literally bloody, but that doesn't make it any less murderous. As one of the adversaries, I whipped the prosecution in my share of battles, and got whipped in the rest. I lived like a junkie on the adrenaline rush of legal skirmishes and courtroom battles. But the job was a good one, the best in the city, at least according to my friends, who kept telling me how lucky I was to have it. My work pumped up my ego, paid mucho dinero, and promised to promote me to senior partner sometime before menopause.

  I didn't quite make it. A few months short of forty, I realized that I was deeply disgusted with the whole thing, with the sleaze and the lies, with the criminals and, yes, with the courts.

  Nine out of ten of my clients were guilty as sin, which meant that if I was good enough, smart enough, and aggressive enough to win ten acquittals, nine guilty people went free. I began asking myself whether I felt morally good about this, and when the answer began to come up no more times than it came up yes, I turned in my resignation and moved to Pecan Springs, where I used my ill-gotten gains to buy a small herb shop in a century-old stone building with living quarters in the back. I make a decent living, I love what I do, and I'm happy.

  But I couldn't spend the morning congratulating myself for escaping the rat race. This was the weekend of the annual conference of the Texas Herb Growers and Marketers Association, which was being held at The Springs Resort Hotel just outside of town. I was on the planning committee, and there were still a couple of hundred loose ends to tie up. But before I could tend to any of them, I had to pick up McQuaid's truck, affectionately known as The Blue Beast. Yesterday evening, he had loaned The Beast to Rosemary Robbins so she could move a file cabinet and chair she had bought. I was driving over to her house this morning to get the truck so I could use it to haul rental tables to the hotel.

  But first things first. I frowned at the stack of conference programs Ruby had unpacked. "That doesn't look like a hundred and fifty programs, Ruby. There must be another box somewhere."

  Ruby shook her head. "That's it. The printer must have shorted you."

  I sighed. Another problem to add to the list, as if it weren't long enough already. Setting up a conference for 150 people isn't a picnic. Other members of the committee were handling the awards banquet, the trade show vendors, the workshops, seminars, and round table discussions, and the herbal spaghetti sauce contest that was always the high point of the annual conference. I was supposed to handle the Herb Bonanza Bazaar, which would be open to the public on Saturday, and work with the hotel to make sure that everything went smoothly.

  So, sometime in the next few hours, I had to check out a list of details with the hotel, pick up extra tables for the bazaar, and chase down a gross of green tee shirts bearing the guild's logo, last seen on the wrong UPS truck, heading into the sunset at top speed. And on a weekend when hordes of out-of-town herbalists would be stopping in to see Thyme and Seasons, the shop's ancient air conditioner had begun to gasp and rattle as if it were dying of pneumonia. But herbalists are an understanding lot, the air conditioner was still wheezing out a few asthmatic BTUs, and UPS had phoned to say that the vagrant tee shirts had been apprehended in Lubbock and were being extradited to Pecan Springs. I could see light at the end of the tunnel.

  I turned to Ruby. "I have to get moving, Ruby. Will you watch the store until Laurel shows up?"

  Laurel Wiley gives me a hand when I need her, which has been pretty often lately, what with the conference and everything else. She's more than just a store-sitter, though. She's an expert on Southwestern herbs, and I rely on her for a lot of things I'm still learning about. If you're puzzled about Lippia graveolens or Poliomintha longiflora or Coriandrum sativum, Laurel will clear away the mystery.

  "Sure," Ruby said. "Anyway, I owe you one. You subbed for me a couple of times last week."

  "That's what's nice about having two shops under the same roof," Constance said. "You can trade off."

  "Yeah." Ruby stood up. "We can have a life while we make a living."

  Until a few months ago, Thyme and Seasons was crowded into one twenty-by-twenty room and I lived in four rooms in the back. It was a large, lovely living space, but there wasn't much shop room. Then I moved into a house outside of town with my friend Alike McQuaid and his eleven-year-old son Brian, and expanded the shop into the space where I used to eat and sleep. I still have to own up to some fundamental uncertainty about living en famille, but if I've traded away some of my personal freedom, I've gotten some great shop space in return, not to mention a reliable relationship that's always there to come home to. I'm now trying to decide whether to turn my former kitchen into an herbal tea room.

  With the added space, Thyme and Seasons is just about perfect—or will be, when the remodeling is finished. Wooden shelves along the stone walls hold large jars and massive stoneware crocks full of dried herbs, small bottles

  of herb tinctures, and tiny vials of essential oils and fragrance oils. There are herbal seasonings, vinegars, and jellies to bring new life to any cuisine, and herbal soaps, cosmetics, and aromatic oils to bring new life to body and spirit. Books line one wall in a cozy reading corner, baskets of pomanders and sachets sit in the corners, dusty-sweet bunches of yarrow and tansey and salvia hang from the ceiling, ropes of pungent peppers and silvery garlic braids festoon the walls, and wreaths of artemesia, sweet Annie, and delicate d
ried flowers are everywhere, lending a sweet, spicy fragrance to the air.

  Outside, Laurel's sister Willow and I put in many long hours last spring transforming the entire yard, from Crockett Street back to the alley, into a collection of theme gardens: a silver garden, a tea garden, a butterfly garden, a dyers' garden, a kitchen garden. The work won't be done for a few more months — probably never, actually, since herb gardens have a way of inviting you to do just a little more here and a little more there. But the gardens are already paying off in increased plant sales, and they look lovely.

  Constance stopped fanning and pushed her damp hair out of her eyes. "I'd better get back to the Emporium." She went to the door. "Rosemary Robbins is coming this morning to go over the books."

  Rosemary Robbins. The same Rosemary who borrowed McQuaid's truck. She did my accounting work too, as well as Ruby's and Constance's and McQuaid's.

  Speak of the devil. The phone rang as I was waving good-bye to Constance, and I reached for it, moving the bowl of mint aside.

  "Hi," McQuaid said. "Have you collected The Beast from Rosemary yet?"

  "I'm leaving this minute," I said.

  "Okay." There was something different about Mc-Quaid's voice. "But be careful."

  I laughed shortly. "Be careful? You're worried I'll put another dent in the poor old Beast?"

  My half-sarcastic reply requires a bit of explanation. Mike McQuaid and I met when I was a defense lawyer and he was a Houston homicide detective — not exactly a match arranged by your average dating service. Although I was immediately attracted to him, I pushed the temptation out of my mind. I wasn't into relationships. They took too much time, and I was too busy being a defense lawyer, which made a relationship with a cop very much out of the question.

  It wasn't long after I left my career and moved to Pecan Springs that I saw McQuaid again. He'd recently resigned from the police force, for some of the same reasons I had left the law. He was working on his Ph.D. and teaching in the Criminal Justice Department at Central Texas State University, on the north side of Pecan Springs. I still called him McQuaid, as I had when we worked on opposite sides of the judicial fence. But we weren't separated by our jobs any longer. One thing led to another, and we became lovers.