Bliss (9 page)

“Yes, you!” Rose said. “Step right up to the counter! We're serving two at a time this morning!” Miss Thistle shuffled up to the counter and stood beside Mr. Bastable. They looked at each other for a moment and smiled, then both turned away, red faced.

Rose had seen the same thing at the sixth-grade dances. The pairs that liked each other stood at opposite ends of the room, smiling at each other, then looking at the floor. She was surprised to find that adults did the same thing.

Miss Thistle tried to speak, but it seemed like her throat had closed. “I'd like a carrot-bran muffin,” she managed to squeeze out.

“Funny you should both ask for carrot bran, because we're out of those!” Rose fibbed. Her palms were sweating, and her voice felt weak and unsteady. “But we made a batch of zucchini muffins that are dynamite! Just out of the oven!”

She held up the two muffins, steam still piping out of the tops like chimneys. Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle both looked at the muffins, wide-eyed, then nodded in tandem.

“Good,” Rose said, plopping the muffins into separate white paper bags and handing them off to Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle. “It's on the house!”

Both walked mechanically out of the shop, then rushed off down the sidewalk in opposite directions, just as Leigh rushed back inside. She zigzagged among the legs of the rest of the customers, who at this point were tapping their feet impatiently and miffed that Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle had been offered free muffins.

Aunt Lily and Sage came rushing in after Leigh, who had already escaped up the stairs. Rose didn't mind the chaos in the bakery. She was having too much fun with her big brother.

“Rose! Come here!” called Ty from the kitchen.

When Rose popped through the saloon doors, she saw Ty holding a faded pink index card covered with grease stains and their mother's ornate handwriting. “Look at this,” he said. “It's a conversion chart. I found it in the freezer.”

It read:

Fist = half cup

Flame = 55 degrees Fahrenheit

Song = 4 minutes

Acorn = teaspoon

Walnut = tablespoon

Rose winced. “This means, when it said one fist of flour, it meant one-half cup, not a full cup!”

“Well, it sure seemed like it was working. If anything, they'll just love each other more.” Ty cringed and shivered at the thought of it. “Gross.”

Rose winked. “Well, there's only one way to find out.”

Three hours later, Rose and Ty sat crouched behind some shrubs on the lawn of Calamity Falls Elementary School, peering into the classroom where Miss Thistle taught her Magic of Science class at summer day camp.

“Where the heck is Mr. Bastable?” Ty spat. “We've been waiting an hour. They should be over at his place by now, slow-dancing in the middle of a frog tank.”

In Rose's head, Mr. Bastable would arrive and stand outside the window of Miss Thistle's classroom, wearing a handsome black pinstripe suit and a fashionable haircut. He would knock on the window and say, “Miss Felidia Thistle, I have loved you from the moment I saw you!” Her face would light up and her eyes would gleam with unshed tears of joy. She would climb through the window and walk off with him, arm in arm, leaving the first graders sitting with their jaws open.

The whole scene was very similar to what Rose wished would happen between her and Devin Stetson, if she ever found herself teaching science at a summer camp.

But Mr. Bastable was nowhere to be found.

Rose sighed. “I guess it was 'cause we messed up the measurements.” She felt like ripping out her hair, or crying. Or both. “But now that we know what all the measurements mean, we can get it right next time,” she ventured, hoping there would be a next time.

“Ech, I don't know,” Ty mumbled. “This seems like a waste of time. I just really wanted to show Aunt Lily that I—we—can do magic.” Ty stood up again. “And if we can't, then I have more important things to do. Like video games. Or sleep. Get Sage to help you.” He brushed the dirt and leaves off the front of his shirt and walked off.

Rose walked home behind him, sighing in defeat.

That night, Rose sat in the booth with an exhausted and filthy but happy Leigh on her lap.

Aunt Lily sat next to Rose and patted Leigh's head. “I was so worried about you!” she said.

Aunt Lily had prepared pizza for dinner—a beautiful expanse of thin, sweet dough, wonderful tomato sauce, and fresh mozzarella cheese and olives. Chip had opted to return home, exhausted from a day of manning the front room by himself.

Mrs. Carlson waved a finger in Leigh's face. “I'd have found her,” she said firmly. “I used to be a spy.”

Lily announced that she had to go to the bathroom and disappeared into her guest room in the basement, which was equipped with a tiny sink, shower, and toilet.

The phone rang, and Rose hopped up to answer it. It was her mother.

“Darling!” Purdy cooed.

Rose's pulse quickened. She wanted so badly to confess that she had been in the storeroom and cellar and had copied the recipes and played with magic and tried to get Mr. Bastable and Miss Thistle together. Most of all, she wanted to tell her mother about Aunt Lily's arrival, to ask if Lily was telling the truth about being part of the family, to ask if she was fishy.

But she realized she shouldn't. She could get all of them into trouble—and really, all Lily had done was help out and mind the shop while her parents were away. Was that so bad?

Still, she should say
something
to her parents, right?

Rose opened her mouth, but as soon as the name Aunt Lily popped into her mind, her tongue went limp, as if her mouth couldn't actually form the sentence. Then, before she knew it, the thought disappeared from her head altogether.

“Honey?” Purdy called through the speaker. “Rose? Are you all right?”

“I meant to say something about something, but it flew out of my head. Just tired, I guess.” Rose ended the conversation and hung up the phone.

Sage gnawed on his pizza crust like an animal. “Rose, speechless?
That's
a first!”

Lily reappeared and sat down in the booth. Leigh climbed into her lap, and Lily laughed. Rose watched as Aunt Lily joked with Leigh and her brothers, saw the way their eyes lit up whenever she tossed her head back and flashed a smile. It was difficult to imagine a time when Aunt Lily had not been there, helping at the bakery and polishing her motorcycle and softening Chip like you'd soften a stick of butter.

Still, Rose felt a little flutter of unpleasantness in her stomach. It had been there since Lily arrived.

Yes, there was definitely something not right about Lily. Rose felt it in a place in her gut so deep, she'd never known it existed before now—and yet there it was, panging away, sounding an alarm.

This woman had a secret. Something dark, if not outright sinister. And Rose was determined to find out what it was.

CHAPTER 7

Recipe the Second:
Cookies of Truth

A
fter all the lights were out, Rose went down to the guest room in the basement to say good night to Aunt Lily—or at least she told herself that's what she was doing. Really she was going to rifle through Aunt Lily's bags to confirm her suspicions of, well … suspiciousness.

Rose tiptoed down the carpeted steps and saw a ribbon of misty yellow light from beneath the door of the tiny bathroom. The whole basement was filled with steam and the scent of lavender body wash. No wonder Aunt Lily always smelled like a garden.

Lily's suitcase sat open on the little yellow chair in the corner. Rose padded over and looked into the bag. There were a red leather jumpsuit, a blue lace dress, and a tall black bottle labeled magic potion.

Bingo! The secret to Aunt Lily's mysterious charisma: She was a witch.

Rose hated to think what was in that magic potion—maybe something even worse than a warlock's eye. She carefully uncorked the bottle and cringed, fearing that something horrible would waft out—a howling demon spirit, perhaps? A ghost? A talking bat?

But nothing wafted out except the mild scent of chemicals.

Rose peered over the rim of the bottle. Inside was a goopy white substance. She shook the bottle so that a bit of the stuff landed in her palm. She sniffed it again—Rose had definitely smelled it before, whenever she got close enough to Ty to smell his cheeks. There was no mistaking it: the
MAGIC POTION
was, in fact, acne medication.

So much for Aunt Lily being a witch.

A muffled
thud
came from the front room on the first level of the house.

Rose jumped in the air, threw the bottle of cream back into Aunt Lily's suitcase, and tiptoed back up the stairs to see who, or what, had caused the thud.

The kitchen was still and cold in the gray moonlight, and Rose felt very much alone in her blue nightgown and fuzzy white socks. Rose froze with fear whenever she found herself alone in the dark, so she tended to stay upstairs at night, where there was always some sister or brother or parent nearby. Leigh slept with a night-light, a little smiling ladybug that glowed orange from the wall, and Rose was secretly glad she shared a room with her younger sister—even though she'd never admit it to her parents.

Rose shivered as she remembered the sleeping dwarf in the jar somewhere beneath her feet and wondered whether he ever woke up.

Then the sounds happened again: three of them.

Rose peered over the top of the swinging saloon doors to the front room and saw someone rapping frantically on the front window of the bakery.

Ty plodded downstairs into the darkened kitchen. “Who's outside?” he whispered. “And where did you go after we brushed our teeth?”

“I—I—I—” Rose stuttered, “wanted a glass of water.”

“There's water in the bathroom sink,” he reminded her.

“The kitchen water tastes better,” she said, which was true, but that had nothing to do with why she was currently standing alone in the kitchen. Rose couldn't let her brothers know about her suspicions—they were both too enchanted by their marvelous Aunt Lily.

“Whatever,” he said. “I'm gonna go see who's banging on the door.”

Rose followed Ty into the front of the bakery.

“Oh no,” Ty grumbled. As Rose flicked on the light switch, she could see why: The frantic figure of the local dressmaker, Mrs. Havegood, was tapping on the window, her eyebrows raised so high that they looked like they were trying to crawl into her hair. She was wearing a little red dress with chickens printed all over it and clutched at her purse, which was too tiny to hold anything but a thimble.

“What does she want
this
time?” Ty muttered, opening the door.

Mrs. Havegood stumbled into the room, panting. “Thank goodness you answered! I'd worked myself half into a frenzy!” She was speaking with a proper British accent, which Ty and Rose both knew to be fake. Mrs. Havegood had been born and raised in Calamity Falls, but her accent shifted according to which foreign city she pretended to have lived in the longest. Some weeks it was Paris, sometimes Berlin, and once Tokyo, which had been awkward. Mrs. Havegood's past was like a kaleidoscope: very colorful, always changing, and a complete illusion.

“I know it's the middle of the night, but I am in crisis!” she cried. “I just found out that I am receiving a very important visitor tomorrow morning!”

“Who? The
president
?” Ty asked, dripping with sarcasm, knowing that whatever answer Mrs. Havegood gave was sure to be a lie.

“Of Cambodia! Yes! However did you know?”

Ty stared at her blankly. “The president of Cambodia is coming to your house for breakfast tomorrow morning? Does Cambodia even
have
a president?”

“Yes, of course!” she retorted. “He and several other
very important
heads of state will be coming over just after breakfast. We shall have tea. And cookies. I need snickerdoodles! Dozens of snickerdoodles! And I need them to be ready by morning!”

“Why are they coming to your house?” Ty asked, egging her on.

Rose turned back to him and whispered, “Stop!” but it was too late.

Mrs. Havegood patted down her messy hair. “I am so glad you asked,” she began. “You see, my father was a stunt master, and he once had a television program wherein he traveled the world and communed with dangerous animals. I used to travel with him. One year we went to Cambodia and attempted to tame the rare and lethal black-bearded lynx, which is a very ferocious jungle cat. My father was able to get the lynx to purr on his lap like a little kitten. The Cambodian president was so impressed that he and my father became good friends and hunting partners. He visited us every seven years. And now the time has come for the Cambodian president to again tour the United States, so naturally he will be stopping by for a good old chat and baked goods. So there.”