Killing Thyme (2 page)

My mother walked slowly around the shop, taking in the changes. “That apothecary is exactly right for the tea things. And to think Tag wanted you to leave it for the junkman.”

Actually, my ex had called
me
the neighborhood junkman. Not that he was wrong.

She paused in front of the registry and gift display, a video of brides, grooms, and idyllic settings looping across the computer screen. “I can't believe what the wedding business has become. Brilliant of you to find a niche of your own within it.”

“Any new thing takes time, but it's starting to pay off.” Behind my back, I crossed my fingers.

She took my arm. “Lunch at the Pink Door? I'm desperate to drink the city in.”

The dog and I made a quick trip to the alley, then Mom and I headed out. My tote over my shoulder and the box of borrowed pottery in my arms, we wove through the crowds of tourists and downtown workers who'd dashed to the Market to grab a quick lunch and shop for dinner. Pike Place is the main thoroughfare, a curious L-shaped street paved in ancient cobblestones. Only the brave or the lost drive down it after opening bell. And a late delivery van or two. We cut between two idling trucks, my mother's hand on my shoulder, the hot diesel-y exhaust from a tailpipe whipping the leg of my black yoga pants.

On the other side of the street, we stepped into the North Arcade, a covered walkway lined with two long rows of wooden tables painted green. To our left, where the farmers and other growers cluster, early-summer produce filled the four-foot allotments, and flowers burst out of buckets. My mother kissed Angie and Sylvie Martinez, aka the orchard sisters, and asked about their grandmother, an old friend from the farm boycotts and protest lines.

“Down this way.” We took a right and headed north-ish—directions are iffy in the Market. The box of pottery was awkward, and I had to be careful in the crowd. Finally, we stopped at a display of hand-thrown bowls, vases, and crocks. Behind the table, a wiry woman bent over a box, her graying blond ponytail falling forward to hide her face.

“You must be Bonnie Clay,” I said. “I'm Pepper Reece, owner of the Spice Shop, and this is my mother.” The woman straightened and turned to face us.

The Market is not a quiet place. Thousands of people stroll the streets and sidewalks, chattering and calling to
each other. Trucks and delivery carts rattle across the cobbles. Bicycles whiz by, and motorcycles zoom up the hills. Street musicians sing and play guitars, violins, cellos, even a piano on wheels. Vendors proclaim their wares, and customers barter for better prices on beans and broccoli. Traffic rumbles down First Ave, and out on Elliott Bay, ferries sound their horns.

For one long moment, it all stopped, sucked up by my mother's sharp intake of breath.

“Peggy Manning,” she said. “I thought you were dead.”

The human brain can differentiate hundreds of odors, far more than it can verbally identify.

—psychologist Frank Schab, in
Memory for Odors

The dark rims around the woman's pale blue irises seemed to flash and flare. They reminded me of the cobalt-streaked glaze on her salt pig.

They reminded me of something else, too. But what—and where?

My mother glanced from the woman to the pots to the name on the hanging sign. “A nom de kiln? How clever.” She held out a slim hand, the nails neatly trimmed. The potter hesitated, then wiped a hand on her apron and extended it. A dark vein throbbed against her rough skin.

Something unspoken filled the air between them as they touched, something thick and impenetrable. As though a private history was written in the dust motes and could never be fully read, or understood, by anyone else.

“Lena Reece. Good God. I thought you'd moved to Guatemala.” Her voice was low and a little creaky, as if it didn't get used much.

“Costa Rica. Just home for a quick visit. Peggy—Bonnie—you remember my daughter, Pepper. She was a kid the last time you saw her, back in the Grace House days.”

That must have been where I'd seen those eyes.
Around the communal table, or in the third-floor yoga and meditation room.

I set the box down. “So nice to meet you. Your work is terrific. But you're new—you may not have known that daystallers can't also sell through the shops. I'm sorry.”

Her eyebrows rose, and she lifted her chin a fraction, her head tilting a few degrees. “This place sure does have a lot of rules.”

The Market is a city within a city—three hundred shops and restaurants, two hundred vendors renting daystalls, and more than three hundred residents. Not to mention ten million visitors a year, all in nine acres. “The rules” had rubbed me the wrong way a few times, mostly over updated signage, but we need them. Some, like the rule against dogs in shops, are honored in the breach. But much as I liked this woman's work, I wasn't about to cross the line separating the shops from the daystalls.

“I can put a few pieces in our display case and send customers to you. If you expect to be around for a while. Meanwhile, I'll take the pig, for myself. Your blue glaze is spectacular.”

Her lips twitched. She shot my mother the briefest of looks. “Oh, I'm here to stay.”

My mother's shoulders stiffened.

Bonnie wrapped the pig in brown paper. “Grace House. I bet it hasn't changed in thirty years.”

“Oh, but it has,” I said. “Kristen and her husband own it now. You won't believe the place, Mom. That reminds me, she's got a surprise for us. Something they found in the basement.”

Bonnie-Peggy handed me the pig and took my cash, her
eyes hooded, her lips unsmiling. “Kristen? The little blonde? You two ran around like each other's shadows.”

“We still do. She works in my shop.” I felt my mother tugging at me, though she hadn't touched me.

Next to me, a woman reached for a vase, the same pale green as the lidded salt jar Sandra had admired.

“Porcelain,” the potter told her. “Fired at a very high heat. Nonporous—it won't leak.”

“It's so light,” the woman said.

“Why don't you choose three pieces to display,” I told the potter. “And give me a stack of your cards.”

She nodded, wordless, but those extraordinary eyes were on my mother.

“Good to see you, Peggy,” my mother said, her tone steady and kind.

“And you, Lena.”

I didn't believe either one of them.

*   *   *

The door really is pink. Not a bold raspberry pink, but the pink of a young girl's ballet slippers, or her first lip gloss.

The door is the only understated thing about the place. For years, there was no sign, and even now, people miss it. In good weather, they spot the rooftop deck, ripe with food and drink, Puget Sound sparkling beyond, and stop anyone strolling by for directions.

It's worth the effort. Our waiter poured the Prosecco and vanished like the mist that had hung over the Sound this morning.

“Ahhh.” My mother leaned back. A touch more gray—she calls it sparkle—shone in her hair than when we'd last seen each other, and when her face relaxed, lips upturned, eyes closed, I saw a few more fine wrinkles. “How I have missed Seattle.”

“Tell me about Bonnie. Or Peggy. I don't remember her.” I reached for the bread basket.

“Some other time, sweet pea. Your hair's cute, by the way. Now that I'm used to it. I want to hear about the shop. And your love life.”

I felt my cheeks warm and hoped the awning kept my embarrassment in shadow.

“Shop's great,” I said. “Matt and Cayenne fit in well. It's a relief to have a solid crew in place again.”

“You were worried about losing customers over the last—incident.” She avoided the word “murder.” I'd be happy to avoid it for a good long while myself.

“Yesterday's news. When the connection to the shop hit the paper, people came in all wide-eyed. ‘Oh, you're that Pepper.' But the talk faded fast, and we didn't lose any commercial accounts over it.”

“Good. You've infused the shop with such a positive spirit. Jane's a dear, but her vibration's been slowing the last few years, and the energy had drained out of the place. I'm looking forward to meeting your young man. Although he's probably not so young, is he?”

I snatched up my glass so the waiter could set the Italian chopped salad in front of me. She meant to point out that I was no longer so young myself, but it was funny. Both Ben and I are blessed—or cursed—with youthful faces, and we'd hesitated over our mutual attraction, unsure about dating someone so much younger. Then we'd discovered that wasn't the case. “We're two years apart—he turned forty-one in March. You'll like him.”

My mother pointed her flute at me. “The question is, do you like him? What's his sign?”

I picked up my fork and speared a chickpea, described on the menu as raised on the wild grasslands of the Palouse country in eastern Washington. “I'm not sure. I'm so glad you're here. And I can hardly wait to see Dad.” My father
had flown to Vancouver to meet Kristen's dad for their annual sailing trip up the Canadian coast. They'd be back in Seattle in a few weeks.

“You don't know the man's birthday, let alone his moon and rising signs? Pepper, what are you thinking?”

I was thinking that I didn't want to have this conversation. After the debacle that had been my previous relationship, I'd plunged into the tidewater of timidity and the cesspool of self-doubt. Kristen had urged me to flirt, have fun, go bowling, and stop worrying about my judgment in men. Ben fit the bill. Reading the stars too closely meant investing too much in the future.

I'd told him I wanted to take things slowly, and he'd agreed. I got the impression his last relationship had been pretty volatile, one of those off-and-on things that can take a while to recover from.

She sighed. “Remember, you're a Gemini, but you have strong grounding influences. That's why you manage to accomplish so much. You need someone who can complement that.”

“Is that the secret to your happy marriage?” Forty-five years of true love, far as I could tell.

“Hmmm.” Her eyelids drifted shut, then opened, and she fingered the bright floral tablecloth where it draped and formed a soft pleat. Vinyl, the modern substitute for oilcloth. “I think so. Along with honesty and flexibility. And trust in the other to make choices for the well-being of all.”

“To the well-being of all.” I raised my glass. For the next hour, we ate, chatted, and sipped, the sun dancing on the waves, our food fresh and well seasoned. My mother seemed to relish the very air, to be invigorated by the chit and chat around us. But I sensed something pensive about her, something guarded.

“Mom, why did you think Peggy Manning was dead?”

She pushed her empty salad bowl away. “Not now, Pepper. This has been the perfect afternoon.”

Put off the topic twice in one conversation. Why? My jaw twitched. I gripped the edge of my chair, to keep my fingers from rubbing the tight spot, and resisted the urge to fidget.

Amazing how your mother's arrival can make you feel four years old again.

We paid the bill, and as we headed into the dining room, its elegant tables off-limits until the next rainy day, I excused myself to visit with the chef. I like to let customers know when I've been in the house, that I put my mouth where my money came from. And sometimes I walk out with a spur-of-the-moment order.

When I emerged from the kitchen, my mother had disappeared. Figuring she'd already headed up the stairs to Upper Post Alley, I followed suit. One step out the door, I found myself face-to-face with a bewildered middle-aged man.

“Is this how you get there?” he said, pointing to the deck. In answer, I held the door and made a welcoming gesture while he called to his wife.

And that's when I heard my mother, out of sight but not out of earshot. “I can't believe you're telling me not to worry,” she said. No reply—she had to be on her phone. “I've got to run—my daughter doesn't know anything about this. But she won't like it.”

Right on both counts, Mom
.

*   *   *

“You've got work to do, so I'll wander around a bit,” my mother said when we returned to the shop. “See what's new.”

“You must have riotously good farmers' markets in Costa Rica,” Sandra said.

“The
feria
. We go every Saturday morning. We've learned to eat fish and tropical fruit we'd never heard of up here. Yuca, mangostino, guanabana. But this place is part of me.”

“It's changed a lot.” Sandra's words held a note of regret.
“More tourists. Fewer services, more gifts. Not so many locals doing their weekly shopping.”

“Shopping's changed,” I said. “Every suburb has its own farmers' market. Grocery stores sell arugula now.” The sped-up pace of modern life was another factor. The Market had responded by creating weekly pop-ups in public plazas downtown, taking the farmers' bounty to the office workers. Great idea, though it didn't help the merchants—the “stores with doors.”

“We can't let ourselves get stuck in the past,” my mother said.

“Never thought we'd be the older generation,” Sandra replied. She and my mother were kindred spirits—Seattle natives, of an age, who love food and taking care of people. When I bought the shop, they'd quickly discovered shared memories of shopping here with their immigrant parents in the 1950s. Historians may call that an ebb tide in the Market's chronicles, but not if they heard these two women recall the aromas of fresh fish and fried chicken, playing games on the cracked floor tiles, and the sounds of a dozen mother tongues clucking.

Was my mother considering coming home?

“Do you think your sister-in-law will mind if I pick up a few groceries?” she said.

“I think if you mess with her menu planning, you'll be living dangerously, but if you bring treats for Carl and the kids, they'll rally 'round you.” My sister-in-law is a lovely woman who firmly believes in the well-planned life. She is also a card-carrying member of the food police.

Mom had barely cleared the door when I pulled Kristen into the nook. “The weirdest thing happened. Do you remember a woman named Peggy Manning? She's got crazy blue eyes.”

Kristen's own eyes widened. “Go on.”

“On our way to lunch, we detoured through the Arcade
to drop off the pottery Cayenne brought in. And the potter, Bonnie Clay? She and Mom recognized each other in a flash.”

I described the encounter and my mother's refusal to tell me anything about Peggy, now Bonnie. The phone conversation in the alley I kept to myself. Something about it nagged at me, and I wasn't ready to spill. Being each other's shadows much of our lives didn't mean Kristen and I didn't keep a few things to ourselves.

People assume Kristen is an airhead because she's blond, pretty, and gets a weekly manicure. And because she lives in a great house in an old neighborhood and doesn't need to work. I knew better. I watched her turn thoughtful.

“That was a challenging time.”

“You mean during the war? When our parents met?”

“No. Later.” Kristen folded one arm across her body and rubbed her chin between her left thumb and forefinger.

I didn't remember any of that. Or rather, I didn't remember anything out of the ordinary. Talk about principles and commitments, intention, and deliberate action was commonplace in Grace House. “Was there something specific—?”

The door chimes rattled.

“Oh, good, you're both here.” Laurel Halloran headed toward us, her gray-brown curls trailing like a veil. “Don't forget about tonight,” she said to me. And to Kristen, “Lemon thyme shortbread.”