Chapter 23
Twenty-Three
Once again, Yoni seemed to be doing her very best to avoid Mira, and this time, Mira couldn’t even blame her for that.
Even when Mira came to buy ingredients, she refused to open the door, though a box of her usual order appeared on her doorstep when Mira went outside in the morning, along with a very impersonal invoice.
Mira took it inside with a knot in her chest. At least Yoni wasn’t that petty, though maybe Mira did deserve it.
She knew, after all, Yoni had told her herself.
And she’d gone and put selling and moving on the table right away, like it had been such an easy thing to consider.
She doubted that Yoni would believe her if she tried to explain that it really, really wasn’t.
And if she wanted space that badly… Well, Mira wasn’t about to go trampling that boundary.
At least Marigold still came around every now and again, mostly to accept her customary ear scritches and then go off and hunt the mice living in the grass in the back of the garden.
For a brief, wild moment, Mira considered attaching a letter to the cat, though she immediately discarded that idea.
At best, Yoni would receive chewed-up scraps, and she couldn’t imagine Marigold forgiving her for the grave insult of treating her like a glorified carrier pigeon. Even if treats were involved.
So Mira kept waiting, watching, and wondering if she could somehow salvage the situation, though she didn’t have the faintest idea how to even begin to do that, now that this threat hung in the air between her and Yoni. Of leaving her just like her fiancé had.
So she stewed in the consequences of her blabbermouth, of her negligence, and too much work as she kept trying, and only somewhat succeeding, to figure out how to make this potion business work in a way that would allow her to keep the house and stay in a place where she had been, for the first time in years, truly happy.
It was on one such day, after hours of trying to perfect a concoction that would help with the flu in the autumn, that Kayden came by to knock some sense into her.
Well, chiefly he was there to restock her ice box.
Though seeing as she was the last stop on his tour, he seemed to have no problem inviting himself – and Poppy – to stay in her kitchen afterwards, where he sat down at the table, folded his arms in front of him, and gave her a certain kind of look that Mira did not like at all.
“What?”
“Are you going to tell me what on Earth happened? Because I asked Yoni, and she only told me that she made a mistake, and to mind my own damn business.”
Nostrils flaring, Mira leaned against the counter. “So you figured you’d immediately go and ask me.”
“Not immediately. I did my deliveries first.” He raised an eyebrow. “So? Are you going to tell me why you haven’t spoken a word to each other in almost two weeks?”
After a moment, Mira looked away. “There isn’t much to say. I messed up, said something I shouldn’t have said, and she decided I wasn’t worth keeping around after all.”
“Really. Care to tell me what that was, that she decided to break off the first relationship she’s even considered since that pompous dolt broke her heart?”
Mira glanced up at him. “Are you trying to figure out if you should stop talking to me, too?”
The eyebrow just inched a little higher. Mira huffed.
“Fine. I got a damn letter from a damn bank. I owe them a lot of money because Uncle Lochlin took out a loan, and I was too stupid to read my papers correctly so I wasn’t aware of that.
I thought about selling the house to pay it off, and maybe moving back home, if I couldn’t figure out another way to fix the situation.
Yoni took umbrage with that, and quite frankly, I don’t blame her all that much, considering the aforementioned pompous dolt.
” She glared at Kayden. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
There was a look of uncomfortable surprise on his face. “Sort of? I mean, I didn’t particularly want to hear that you’re having money troubles, actually.” He leaned forward. “Are you… doing all right?”
“I’m doing all right enough for know.” With a heavy sigh, Mira sat down at the table. Poppy promptly scooted over to use her feet as a pillow, which made her smile despite herself as she peered under the table to be met with an innocent look from forest green eyes. “Wretched creature.”
“Woof.”
“Sure.” Mira leaned on the table, focusing on Kayden again. “It’s not as bad as she probably thinks. I’m not a week away from having the house foreclosed on and getting on a train back to Willow Harbour. I just… I thought about it, you know? A last resort kind of thing.”
“I get it. But you know what that sounded like to her, don’t you?”
“Of course I do.” Mira frowned. “It’s not like I want to go back.
I don’t miss it, the terrible work hours, my boss who always found something to complain about, the awful pay.
I like it here! I want to stay!” She raked a hand through her hair.
“I don’t want to go back to working for Golden River and selling shoes and shawls and self-mixing bowls that don’t work and apparently also bottled water now! I’d rather-”
She abruptly fell silent when her own mind caught up with her words.
“I get that,” Kayden said. “I really do. It’s just that Yoni’s pretty hurt right now, and-”
“The water.”
“…what?”
“The water!” Mira stared at him, wide-eyed, wondering how she had not bloody seen this before. “I think I know what’s going on.”
Kayden pinched the bridge of his nose. “Mira, can we back up here for a moment? What does the water have to do with Yoni?”
“It doesn’t- I mean, it might? She was there, we both saw it at the spring.”
Mira got up, a sudden urge compelling her to pace around her kitchen. Poppy gave an upset huff at losing her pillow and rested her head on Mira’s chair.
“When we went walking together, we saw that the water level in the spring was low. And you? Remember when we met those tourists, not long after I got here? How they went to the spring so late? I don’t think they were tourists at all.
” Mira gestured at the sink. “The water is messed up here, too. And I think it’s Golden River’s fault. ”
Kayden looked like he had no appreciation at all for her logic, which was frankly rude. It made so much sense inside her head. “The tourists? Why were they not tourists? And why is this supposedly Golden River’s fault?”
“Because it’s the only thing that makes any sense.” Mira raked a hand through her hair. Her mother’s voice echoed in her head. They say it’s good for your health. Well, so was the spring water, wasn’t it. “So last time I visited home, I saw that they were selling water in bottles.”
Kayden nodded slowly. “Yes. And?”
“And when I went to the store here in town a little later – oh, don’t look at me like that!
I needed bottles, and they have very cheap bottles.
Doesn’t matter. I saw those supposed tourists come out of the manager’s office.
It didn’t sound like they were customers, more like employees, but I didn’t think too much about it.
I did see them again later though, when Yoni and I…
” Mira blew out a breath. “We saw them leave the spring. It sounded like they were carrying jars around. Glass in a bag. I’m almost certain they took water samples from the spring that day.
And I don’t know if you’ve noticed all those deliveries they’ve been getting to the warehouse, which is very much too large to supply a store this small.
I thought maybe it was for the region as a whole, but now I’m not so sure anymore. ”
As she was talking, she watched Kayden’s expression change from confusion to annoyance to baffled understanding. He fell back in his chair.
“Are you saying they’re pumping our groundwater to bottle and sell it? And that is why we’re all having trouble with our wells and pumps?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying, yes.”
They looked at each other for a minute. Eventually, Kayden ran a hand across his face.
“That’s a pretty substantial accusation,” he said. “Do you have any proof at all?”
“I don’t,” Mira admitted hesitantly. “But it does make sense. I don’t know why else they’d send people to the spring, or why so many waggons would go to that warehouse when nobody here is buying enough for that to make any sense.”
“They’re shipping in empty bottles,” Kayden suggested, “and shipping out bottled water?”
“Could be.”
“Or it could all be perfectly legitimate business, and our water problems have nothing to do with that.”
“Where else would they be coming from, though?”
He didn’t have a response to that.
“I can write home,” Mira said. “Ask someone to send me that water. I don’t think they’re selling it here, I’ve never seen it. And it makes sense, I don’t think people would take very kindly to that, never mind the water rights situation.”
Kayden huffed out a laugh. “Yes, that would be a problem. And you think they’d just do it anyway?”
“They’re not exactly known for perfectly ethical business practices,” Mira muttered.
“What’s a little bit of breaking the law on top of that?
” She moved Poppy’s head to sit back down, upon which she promptly received a lap full of gently slobbering dog.
“Ew. Thanks, Poppy.” She tapped on the table.
“Suppose someone sends me some of their water. Could we make sure it’s from the Sweetwater Spring? ”
“The spring water is pretty unique. There should be some way to verify that. Honestly, just drinking it is probably enough.”
Mira nodded. “So I’ll do that. And once we know what it is…”
She trailed off when she realised that this was pretty much it. The realisation, the moment she’d put all the pieces together, had hit her like a sack of bricks. Now though? What would they do now, once they were sure that her hunch was right?
How did one go about proving something like this to the people who mattered?
“Maybe first, we should know that this is what is happening,” Kayden said cautiously. “You can’t just go around making claims like this.”
“Right.” Mira bounced her leg, which didn’t seem to bother Poppy at all. “Right. I’ll write home. Get my hands on some of that water. It’s spring water, I know it is. And once we know that, we’ll fix this.”
Somehow. She had no clue yet how, but now that she was looking at this depressingly plausible explanation for so many of the town’s problems, she would be damned if she didn’t at least try.