Blood Orange: A China Bayles Mystery Read online

  China Bayles Mysteries by Susan Wittig Albert

  THYME OF DEATH

  WITCHES’ BANE

  HANGMAN’S ROOT

  ROSEMARY REMEMBERED

  RUEFUL DEATH

  LOVE LIES BLEEDING

  CHILE DEATH

  LAVENDER LIES

  MISTLETOE MAN

  BLOODROOT

  INDIGO DYING

  A DILLY OF A DEATH

  DEAD MAN’S BONES

  BLEEDING HEARTS

  SPANISH DAGGER

  NIGHTSHADE

  WORMWOOD

  HOLLY BLUES

  MOURNING GLORIA

  CAT’S CLAW

  WIDOW’S TEARS

  DEATH COME QUICKLY

  BITTERSWEET

  BLOOD ORANGE

  AN UNTHYMELY DEATH

  CHINA BAYLES’ BOOK OF DAYS

  Cottage Tales of Beatrix Potter Mysteries by Susan Wittig Albert

  THE TALE OF HILL TOP FARM

  THE TALE OF HOLLY HOW

  THE TALE OF CUCKOO BROW WOOD

  THE TALE OF HAWTHORN HOUSE

  THE TALE OF BRIAR BANK

  THE TALE OF APPLEBECK ORCHARD

  THE TALE OF OAT CAKE CRAG

  THE TALE OF CASTLE COTTAGE

  Darling Dahlias Mysteries by Susan Wittig Albert

  THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE CUCUMBER TREE

  THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE NAKED LADIES

  THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE CONFEDERATE ROSE

  THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE TEXAS STAR

  THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE SILVER DOLLAR BUSH

  THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE ELEVEN O’CLOCK LADY

  With her husband, Bill Albert, writing as Robin Paige

  DEATH AT BISHOP’S KEEP

  DEATH AT GALLOWS GREEN

  DEATH AT DAISY’S FOLLY

  DEATH AT DEVIL’S BRIDGE

  DEATH AT ROTTINGDEAN

  DEATH AT WHITECHAPEL

  DEATH AT EPSOM DOWNS

  DEATH AT DARTMOOR

  DEATH AT GLAMIS CASTLE

  DEATH IN HYDE PARK

  DEATH AT BLENHEIM PALACE

  DEATH ON THE LIZARD

  Other books by Susan Wittig Albert

  WRITING FROM LIFE

  WORK OF HER OWN

  A WILDER ROSE

  LOVING ELEANOR

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  This book is an original publication of the Berkley Publishing Group.

  Copyright © 2016 by Susan Wittig Albert.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME design are trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  For more information, visit penguin.com.

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-698-19026-9

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Albert, Susan Wittig.

  Blood orange : a China Bayles mystery / Susan Wittig Albert.—First edition.

  pages ; cm.—(China Bayles mystery ; 24)

  ISBN 978-0-425-28000-3 (hardcover)

  1. Bayles, China (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Texas—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3551.L2637B575 2016

  813'.54—dc23

  2015034286

  FIRST EDITION: April 2016

  Cover illustration by © Joe Burleson. Cover art: Shattered Glass © by Carlos Caetano/Shutterstock.

  Cover design by Judith Murello.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author’s use of names of historical figures, places, or events are not intended to change the entirely fictional character of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE: The recipes contained in this book 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.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Also by Susan Wittig Albert

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  To the Reader

  Resources

  Recipes

  Chapter One

  Today’s commercial beers are almost exclusively brewed with hops, the female flowers of the hop plant (Humulus lupulus). The result is a uniform, easily controlled flavor.

  But before hops began to be widely used (around the ninth century), beer was flavored, bittered, and preserved with an herb mixture called gruit. A brewer’s gruit depended on what was locally available; hence, it was distinctive and often unique. The most important herbs in gruit might be sweetgale (Myrica gale), mugwort (Artemisia vulgaris), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), ground ivy (Glechoma hederacea), horehound (Marrubium vulgare), and/or heather (Calluna vulgaris). Other herbs and spices might include chile peppers, juniper berries, black henbane, ginger, caraway seed, aniseed, nutmeg, cinnamon, vanilla, woodruff, cardamom, anise, and hops. Local beers were also flavored with seasonal fruits, such as raspberry, cherry, sweet and bitter orange, blood orange, cranberry, strawberry, peach—and even banana!

  Modern artisanal beers—brewed to appeal to local tastes and traditions, using locally preferred flavorings—are a return to the distinctive, unique beers of the past and a popular alternative to commercial beers. Blood orange beer, anyone?

  China Bayles

  “Botanical Drinkables”

  Pecan Springs Enterprise

  “Excuse me.” I put down my teacup. “I don’t think I heard that right, Ruby. I thought you said that Ramona has bought a brewery.”

  “That’s exactly what I said.” Ruby sank into the chair opposite mine at her kitchen table and ran her fingers through her frizzy red hair. “My ditzy sister has just bought a controlling interest in the Comanche Creek Brewing Company, out in your direction.” She made a face. “You know the phrase, ‘more money than sense’? It fits Ramona perfectly.”

  Ruby’s sister Ramona has her good points, I’m sure. (Don’t we all?) But I have to confess that her name doesn’t appear among the top ten on my friends list. In fact, I think of her as Ruby’s “evil twin,” and I usually agree when somebody says snarky things about her. Not this time, though.

  “Comanche Creek does craft beer,” I said, “and craft beer is hug
e right now. People like it because it has much more flavor than mass-produced beer. And much more variety. I read the other day that there are almost four thousand small breweries in the U.S. and over a hundred right here in Texas. Ramona could be onto a good thing.”

  “But she doesn’t like beer, China,” Ruby protested. She poured herself a cup of tea. “She hasn’t drunk enough of it to understand it.”

  “That’s a good point,” I conceded. “But most of us don’t understand how the transmission works when we buy a new car. I doubt if many investors know the first thing about the nuts and bolts of the business they’re investing in. They’re just looking for a place to put their money to work.”

  “I suppose,” Ruby said slowly. “But you know Ramona. She is a hands-on kind of person with very definite ideas. I can’t imagine her not being totally involved in a business she’s put her money into. And she’s had such a hard time making up her mind. Remember when she wanted to buy into the children’s bookstore next door to the shops? Then she was all gung-ho about the cupcake business. After that, it was the florist shop. And then she decided she’d buy me out.”

  “That’s another good point,” I agreed. The previous summer, Ramona—who had gotten a substantial divorce settlement from her philandering doctor husband—had decided that her sister needed a rest. She was going to buy Ruby’s shop and her share of our tearoom and our catering businesses and go into partnership with me. That idea panicked me, until Ruby assured me that she wasn’t selling out to anybody, much less to Ramona. I have learned to be cautious about Ramona’s great ideas.

  “You bet it’s a good point,” Ruby said. “This brewery is just another in a long string of impulses. Ramona has a habit of jumping into things without looking, and it gets her into trouble.” She picked up her teacup and looked at me over the rim. “I have a bad feeling about this, China. My sister could be in for a hard time. And I don’t know what to do about it.”

  I have learned to pay serious attention to Ruby’s bad feelings. She is highly intuitive, especially when it comes to reading people’s fears and motivations and anticipating what lies ahead for them. She tries very hard not to poke her psychic nose into the private affairs of people she cares for, but sometimes she can’t help herself.

  So I wasn’t going to argue. Something was wrong, and Ruby sensed it. But both of us knew that there wasn’t any point in trying to get Ramona to change her mind. When she decides to do something, she is going to do it, come hell or high water. Or both.

  “How did Ramona happen to get involved with the brewery?” I asked curiously. “Seems kind of strange.”

  The oven timer went off. “It’s a long story.” Ruby put down her teacup and pushed her chair back. “I’ll get our muffins out and tell you while we eat.”

  While Ruby goes to the oven to pull out the batch of muffins she’s been baking, I’ll take the opportunity to give you a little context for what’s happening here. It is early morning on the second Monday in April, and Ruby Wilcox and I (we’re business partners as well as best friends) are having our monthly planning session. Our shops—my herb shop, Ruby’s Crystal Cave, and our tearoom—are closed on Mondays, which gives us a chance to catch up on business matters without having to tend to customers. Last month, we met at my house. This month, we’re at Ruby’s. Both of us have brought our laptops and a list of topics we want to talk about.

  I love coming here. Ruby’s Painted Lady—a gaudy old Victorian on Pecan Street—is dazzling, outside and in. The exterior is a wonderfully wild palette of smoke gray, spring green, fuchsia, and plum, and the wicker porch furniture is daffodil yellow with red tropical-print cushions. Indoors, Ruby has polished the pine floors to a shimmer and painted the walls in bright orange, yellow, and blue. The kitchen is a warm red, with a watermelon wallpaper border above a yellow-painted beadboard wainscot. A lamp with a green shade hangs over a red-painted table and four green and red chairs. Vintage tea-towel curtains hang at the window, and clay pots of red geraniums bloom gaily on the windowsill. Ruby’s house will make you blink.

  Ruby makes you blink, as well. This morning, she had just gotten back from her extra-early yoga class and was wearing multicolored leggings vividly striped in a yellow and purple Aztec pattern, a loose purple tunic, and yellow open-toed sandals that displayed purple painted toes. Ruby has mile-long legs (she’s six-feet-something in heels) and Orphan Annie–red hair, and the sight of her makes me smile. But Ruby makes everybody smile, whatever she’s wearing. We’re all just responding to her natural exuberance and love of life, and her ability to live fully in the present.

  Ruby owns the Crystal Cave, the only New Age shop in Pecan Springs, which is adjacent to my herb shop, Thyme and Seasons. At the Cave, Ruby sells incense and rune stones and tarot cards and books; teaches classes in astrology and meditation and the tarot; and offers birth chart readings and Ouija board sessions. As partners, the two of us own and manage Thyme for Tea (our tearoom, directly behind our shops) and Party Thyme (our catering service). With our friend Cass Wilde, we jointly own the Thymely Gourmet, a meals-to-go food delivery service that Cass manages. She also manages the tearoom kitchen and helps with the catering.

  And there’s Thyme and Seasons Cottage, a remodeled stone stable on the alley behind the shops. Ruby and I used to use it for workshops and classes, but we recently cleaned up the loft over our shops and moved our workshops into that space. Now, I’m renting the cottage as a bed-and-breakfast.

  In fact, it was rented right now. Kelly Kaufman, who works at our local hospice, has rented the cottage for the week—an unhappy family situation, she said, and mentioned that she was getting a divorce. Staying at the cottage would give her a breather while she got her act together and started looking for another place to live.

  There was a time when I knew Kelly fairly well. She used to be a member of the Pecan Springs herb guild, and we had worked together often. But that had been several years ago, and we’d lost touch. Checking in on Friday, she had seemed unhappy when she mentioned the family situation. But I didn’t pry. Kelly’s reason for taking the cottage was none of my business. I was just glad the place was available when she needed it and I could help her out.

  So there you have it: what Ruby and I do for a living. “A three-ring circus,” Ruby calls it, and she’s 100 percent right. Ruby, Cass, and I are ringmasters, jugglers, acrobats, tightrope walkers, fire-eaters, and lion tamers. Sometimes we’re the sideshow, too—and sometimes we’re the clowns. Running a small business is like that. Multiply it by several small businesses, all under one big top, and it’s even more so. To make this circus work, we all have to be very good friends.

  You know that old saying about opposites attracting? It’s certainly true where Ruby and I are concerned. She has a wild sense of style, while I am a jeans-and-sneakers kind of gal. She is highly imaginative and often uncomfortably intuitive. I, on the other hand, am much more methodical. Where Ruby boldly goes, I am cautious. Where she’s associative and leapfrogs to unexpected conclusions, I’m literal and linear, taking things step-by-step. Maybe it’s my training as a lawyer, but when I finally reach a conclusion, I know how I got there and can document my sources.

  My name is China Bayles. Some years ago, I cashed in my retirement account and left the large Houston criminal law firm where I was practicing. I moved to Pecan Springs, a friendly Texas Hill Country town halfway between Austin and San Antonio, where I bought an herb shop—Thyme and Seasons—in a century-old stone building surrounded by gardens. The business took several years of love, hard work, and long hours to build up, but now it’s something I can be proud of. Best of all, I recalibrated myself from the fast track to the slow, learned to appreciate real friendships, discovered who I was, and began to enjoy the work I do.

  A few years after I bought the shop, I married Mike McQuaid, a former Houston homicide detective, currently a part-time faculty member in the Criminal Justice department at CTSU—C
entral Texas State University—and a more or less full-time private investigator in partnership with Blackie Blackwell. Blackie, a retired Adams County sheriff, is married to Sheila Dawson, the chief of the Pecan Springs Police. This makes for some interesting dinner table conversation when the four of us get together: a retired criminal defense attorney, two ex-cop private eyes, and a police chief. McQuaid and I are the parents of two amazing kids: his son Brian, now in his second semester at the University of Texas at Austin, majoring in Environmental Science and minoring in girls; and thirteen-year-old Caitlin, my niece and our adopted daughter. Caitie plays the violin with a remarkably unchildlike virtuosity (which she certainly didn’t get from my side of the family!) and runs a chicken-and-egg business on the side.

  Ruby popped the muffins out of the tin and put them on a plate in the middle of the table with butter. We always have a little something to eat—usually a recipe we’re trying out for the tearoom menu—and catch up on each other’s personal news before we settle down to business. Our shops are so hectic that we don’t have much time to chat when we’re on the job, so getting together like this helps keep us connected.

  “Tell me what you think about the muffins,” she said. “And how about some more tea?” When I held up my cup, she filled it.

  I broke the muffin and took a sniff. “Orange!” I said. “Smells yummy.” I nibbled at one of the pieces. “Tastes yummy, too. Just enough orange. And there’s also—”

  “Rosemary,” Ruby said. She sat down, watching me to see how I liked it. “Do you think they might work as a menu item?”

  “Absolutely. Different, not too sweet. How about giving your recipe to Cass and see what she does with it?”

  “I’ll do it,” Ruby said promptly. “I think they’d pair nicely with her quiche.”

  “I agree,” I said. Cass’ signature lavender quiche is a favorite in the tearoom, especially for Saturday brunch. It comes with a salad (whatever is in season), and a muffin would be a lovely addition. I spread butter on my muffin and took a bite. “So tell me about Ramona,” I prompted, my mouth half full. “And how she got interested in the brewery.”

  “How do you suppose?” Ruby reached for a muffin. “She got interested in the brewmaster. A guy named Rich. A hunk, to hear her tell it, five or six years younger than she is and very, very sexy. On the one hand, they are madly in love.” She paused, frowning. “On the other hand, he’s married—although Ramona says that’s only a temporary problem. His wife is being stubborn about the divorce. Ramona is hoping she’ll change her mind soon, so she and her hunk can get married.”