[SS01] Assault and Pepper (7 page)

Egyptian morticians stuffed pepper up Ramses’ nose to guarantee him eternal life.

Laurel’s words followed me back to the Market. Did I honestly have a responsibility to the family I’d never met of a man I barely knew, just because he’d had the misfortune to die on my doorstop?

But I take seriously the point of view of people who’ve been where I haven’t. Laurel knows what it’s like to lose someone you love unexpectedly and get no resolution. No justice. No closure, in modern terms.

The haunting harmonies of my mother’s beloved chants began to play in my head, a sure sign that I’d made up my mind.

The early-afternoon lull had settled on the shop by the time I returned. I made a few phone calls, updated our Facebook status, twipped through our Tweets, and flipped through Fabiola’s fuchsia folder.

The more I saw, the more her ideas grew on me. But they also made me nervous. They screamed “Hip! Modern! Eat this, love this!” And that was great. But they were a
looong
step away from our image. Our tradition.

The flip side of classic is boring, and the dark side of tradition is stuck-in-a-rut. Which side you land on depends on your point of view.

And I wasn’t so sure about upending our customers’ view of us. Or my own.

“They’re good,” Reed said, shrugging one narrow shoulder when I asked the staff for their opinions. “But they don’t, really, like, rock.”

“Do-o-o it,” Sandra said, drawing out the words in an urging tone. My face showed my reluctance. She tucked her hands in her armpits, flapped her wings, and clucked her way to the front counter.

“What do you two think?” I asked Zak and Tory, busy refilling the spices on the wall. The job goes faster with two—one to climb the rolling wooden ladder and fetch extra inventory off the upper shelves, and one to refill the jar, note the date, and confirm the records generated by our point-of-sale inventory software. With bulk supplies, you’ve got to have an idea how much you sell over a period of time, so we were developing a baseline. A total pain, but Jane had tracked inventory on a yellow pad no one else could read, so anything was a vast improvement over nothing. We hoped to have all the info we needed after a full year.
Soon. Soon.

“Go for it,” Zak said, tucking the caraway back in place. He almost didn’t need a ladder to reach the shelf.

“Follow your heart,” Tory said, voice soft, eyes carefully trained on the iPad inventory screen.

What message was she sending me?

“Back in a flash.” Zak headed for the restroom.

“What’s next?” I asked Tory, my foot on the bottom rung.

“Brown cardamom.”

She still wasn’t looking at me, and that wasn’t like her. Not a lot of call for brown, also known as “bastard cardamom,” except in the Indian community. Even there, green cardamom outsells brown. Jane introduced me to the spice through her Indian Butter Chicken, and I love grinding the rough, ribbed pods in my flea market brass mortar and pestle to release the smoky, woodsy flavor.

I handed Tory the dark brown jar, Jane’s spidery script on the red-trimmed white label yellowed with age. Those labels we would never modernize, except when we couldn’t read them anymore.

“You told the detective you didn’t see Doc this morning. Did you see Sam?”

Her eyes widened, then quickly narrowed.

“He was here,” I continued. “His beret fell out of Doc’s coat when they picked up his body.”

Tory stared at me, speechless. As if the shock of the death had just hit her.

“But—Sam,” she said. “He couldn’t—he wouldn’t—”

“Brown cardamom,” Zak said, taking the jar from my hands. “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever sold that to anyone.”

Eyes still on Tory, I said, “You can count on us.”

“Boss,” Sandra called, and I headed to the front counter. She clutched the phone in both hands against her chest, muffling our conversation. “It’s Callie Carter. You used to work with her. Her toddler used her grandmother’s antique nutmeg grinder to make rocks into gravel, and her mother’s coming to visit next week. This is your department.”

I glanced at the spice grinders in the glass-front display case and took the phone. Five minutes later, I’d sent Callie, a librarian at my old firm, pictures of two possibles and one likely replacement, and she’d promised to come down on Friday to check them out. We spent a few minutes catching up—she still worked part-time with several of our colleagues. I also suggested she take the original grinder to the cutlery shop up the street; the wizards there can mend all manner of abused kitchen toolery.

A deep masculine grunt at the side door caught my attention and I trotted over to check it out. Before I reached the top of the landing, a broad-shouldered brown-clad back popped into view, jerking a heavily laden hand truck up the outside step and over the threshold.

“Figures,” the UPS man said, a teasing tone in his rough bass. “Biggest shipment of the year and your front door is blocked and I gotta haul it all uphill. Backwards.”

“Like Ginger Rogers, but without the heels,” I said.

His blank look said the joke went over his head. Too young, or too male? Or not a fan of old movies.

A few minutes later, stacks of boxes crowded the shop. I started unpacking a shipment of newly released cookbooks, resisting the temptation to cart the lot to the nook and drool.

“We can unveil the new designs for your anniversary,” Kristen said.

“I’m beginning to feel like you’re all ganging up on me.”

She was sitting on the floor, dusting and realphabetizing the bookshelves. You’d think books would pretty much stay where you put them, but no. They travel. An Italian cookbook ends up next to the oregano and a book on French bistro style cozies up with tarragon. In high school, Kristen clerked in a now-closed bookstore on Broadway a few blocks from our house, and always says the adventures of our cookbooks don’t hold a candle to the travels of
The Joy of Sex
.

Expanding our once-slim book selection had boosted the bottom line. Plus books make great displays. This shipment included
Salt: A World History
, by Mark Kurlansky, and
Salted: A Manifesto on the World’s Most Essential Mineral, with Recipes
, by Mark Bitterman. September’s Spice of the Month: salt. We’d pair books, shakers, cellars, and grinders with
fleur de sel
from the Camargue region of France, Maldon Sea Salt from Britain—both smoked salt and the very popular flakes—and of course, salts handcrafted from the icy waters of the San Juan Islands.

Head tilted, Kristen looked up. “For somebody who makes major decisions in an instant, you can move like a glacier on the small stuff.”

A good friend is someone who knows all about you and should know when to keep her mouth shut, even if you did ask for it.

I found out about Tag’s affair when he told me he was working an extra shift for a buddy, freeing me to join my office pals for a drink after work at a trendy—and pricey—new place. To see what was going on. On my way to the restroom, I spotted Tag and Miss Meter Maid in a corner booth all but plugging coins into each other. I kept my cool on the spot, but yelled and screamed for a few hours and moved out the next day. Filed for divorce the next week. “Don’t rush this,” he’d pleaded, but the discovery made sense of tiny, odd details: furtive expressions, last-minute changes in a long-established work schedule, and clothes I didn’t think he’d worn coming back from the cleaners.

In less than a month, I’d closed on the loft. A year later, my job evaporated when the partnership voted to dissolve. The firm had been hit with hundreds of thousands of dollars in sanctions after two senior partners failed to disclose information in a medical malpractice case. In the fallout, the accountants discovered the IT director had embezzled two and a half million. And an entire unit, including eighteen of fifty-six partners, decamped for another firm.

I’d have voted a lack of confidence in management, too, but nobody asked me.

And then came the chance to buy the Spice Shop. Took me twenty minutes to decide.

A good friend admits when you’ve pegged her.

“You’re right. How can choosing labels and logos be so hard?” Fabiola’s designs were variations of a scheme she’d been suggesting since our first project together, last winter. We’d been introduced by one of the displaced younger lawyers who snared Fabiola’s business after setting up her own firm representing “creatives.” Hate the term; love the women.

And in truth, I loved her designs. But cute as they were, the change would cost that proverbial pretty penny. I had to be sure.

Kristen read my mind. “You keep saying you’re doing better than you expected for the first year, money-wise. And it takes money to make money.” She stood, shaking her blond hair out of her eyes, and put her hands on my upper arms. “This place is worth the investment, Pepper. You’re worth the investment. You’ve come alive since you bought it.”

I blinked back tears and nodded. “I’ll call Fabiola.”

“And where did you get those shoes?” she called after me.

•   •   •

BY
six ten, I was alone in the shop.

The Second Watch patrol—Tag and Olerud’s afternoon-into-evening counterparts—had taken down the yellow tape. I cleaned up the doorway and fluffed the wilting memorial flowers for late passersby to enjoy. In the morning, I’d get a fresh bouquet or two. It would take some good Seattle rain to wash the last bits of black dusting powder away, though the stuff couldn’t be good for the water supply.

Front door shiny and ready to greet the hordes on the morrow, I went back inside, leaned against the counter, and surveyed my domain. Kristen was spot-on: We were headed in the right direction, despite the cost of refurbishing the space and expanding the inventory. This was no longer Jane’s Spice Shop. It was Pepper’s.

Time for me to make that statement to the world.

I scooped up a ginger candy wrapper that had escaped Reed’s broom and dropped it in the trash. As I did, my watchband caught on the rim of the can and popped off my wrist.

“Dang.” I could barely see the shiny bubblegum pink band. The closer my fingers got, the deeper it slipped into the recesses of the trash bag. I plunged my hand in further.

No luck.

I grabbed another bag, snapped it open, and started transferring trash. Halfway down, my nose wrinkled. Flowers? What were they doing in here? My staff knew better.

Throwing decent flowers in the trash is universal bad karma. It’s seriously bad karma in Seattle, where recycling is religion. Even our sample cups have to be recyclable or compostable. Putting “green waste” in the wrong container violates more rules than you could shake a cinnamon stick at.

Finally, I managed to extract my watch. It had settled into the folds of newspaper surrounding a bouquet of sunflowers nearly identical to the ones Alex had brought me. The ribbon said they’d come from Yvonne’s stall.

After spending the day buried, they weren’t exactly fresh as daisies, but freedom and clean water would perk them up. I swapped them for Alex’s bouquet and wrapped my flowers in the discarded paper for the journey home.

I didn’t know how they’d gotten there, but no city trash collector was going to levy a fine on me for wasting a perfectly good bouquet.

Talk about bad karma.

•   •   •

I
thought briefly about dropping in on Alex to say thanks in person, but it was nearly time for him to start dinner service. The gushy phone message I’d left earlier would have to do.

After the crazy day, I decided to take the long way home, to stretch my legs and drink in the view. I swung up to Post Alley for a recommendation from my favorite wine merchant.

“How you guys doin’ down there?” Vinny asked. Another merchant destined for his job. “Good thing you got a side door. Me, I’d be SOL.”

I smiled and traded cash for a bottle of Oregon Pinot Gris. “Thanks, Vinny. Temporary inconvenience—we’ll be back to normal tomorrow.”

“Good, good. Say, who was that fellow anyway? Never saw him till a week or two ago. Funny for a guy to move here just before the weather changes, but I guess we got a little while before Rain Season starts for real.”

True on both counts. It’s common knowledge that some of the homeless travel the circuit, moving around the country with the weather.

“Hope so. The webs between my toes have dried up. It’ll take a while for them to grow back. Cheers!” Webbed feet, an old Seattle joke.

I headed up the Alley, past the Irish pub that had revitalized the Butterworth Building, site of the city’s first mortuary. Bad luck—the work of unhappy ghosts?—had driven out previous tenants, but the current incarnation seemed to have made peace with the past. No doubt the ghosts enjoy a draft of Guinness now and then.

Another sparkling day on Puget Sound as the sun ducked down toward the Olympics. The usual folks clustered in Victor Steinbrueck Park—teens hanging out, couples arm-in-arm at the railing, tourists catching their breath after panting up the hills. A few men lounged near the totem poles—Jim, Hot Dog, and another man I’d seen outside the shop. But no Sam and no Arf.

I returned Jim’s wave and made the turn to stroll down Western. A step or two later, I heard raised voices and looked back.