Chapter 24 THE MISSING PIECE
THE MISSING PIECE
Back at the Pink House, Rosie was deep in a cake-decorating session as Mom sat by, offering piping recommendations in between dictating an email on her phone.
The Bluetooth speaker on the counter crackled with a playlist of eighties hits, the music going in and out as Rosie roamed about the kitchen gathering up piping nozzles and adjusting the settings on her KitchenAid.
Finn – who apparently was alive – kicked back on one of the giant couches, quietly strumming at one of Charlie’s guitars. Not the sunburst one from the workbench in the music room, but a glossy tan-coloured instrument so well loved that the varnish on its body had started to wear away.
‘Just in time for dessert!’ Rosie exclaimed, waggling a maple carrot cupcake at me. It had been beautifully iced with a swirl of cinnamon cream cheese and topped with a tidily piped carrot.
‘I did the ones on the rejects plate,’ said Mom. She pointed to half a dozen cupcakes of varying sizes, all sporting lopsided icing and wonky autumnal sugar leaves. ‘They still taste good, I promise. Your stomach won’t know the difference.’
Finn held up a plate covered with crumbs and cupcake wrappers. ‘Amelia tells no lies.’
Noah and I both helped ourselves to cupcakes – a spiced chai one for me, and a cinnamon pumpkin one for Noah. We leaned against the counter to eat them, although I took a step to one side as I noticed Finn’s attention on me.
‘How was the book signing?’ Rosie was expertly piping some perfect roses onto a cupcake and adding it to the tiered cake stand for the non-reject cupcakes.
‘I do love that shop. I found a book shaped like a cat the first time I went in, you know. Then Cleo showed up on our doorstep the next morning. Kismet.’
‘Kitty-met,’ offered Finn.
‘Don’t quit your day job,’ said Rosie with a rueful grin.
‘What day job?’ said Noah, taking a spatula from a mixing bowl and licking it clean. Spatulas and beaters were, of course, the best bit of any kind of baking. Warnings about raw eggs be damned.
Finn made a face at his brother. And then a rude gesture.
A week or so ago, I would’ve chuckled along at their antics. But now they were starting to exhaust me. The constant bickering, the tension, the weird weather – it was too much.
But it’s because of you, Molly, said a small voice in my head.
Ignoring both the boys and my snarky inner voice, I set down my signed copy on the counter, freeing up my hands to gorge myself on cupcakes. ‘I got a signed one for Dad.’
‘He can store it with his secret cereal-box collection,’ said Mom, dabbing a glob of fallen icing with a napkin. Of course Mom wouldn’t just scoop it up with a finger like a normal person. ‘Where’s Tiff? Did she stay in town?’
I tried not to let a frown darken my features. ‘She and Lara wanted to hang back a bit.’
I hoped that was the case, at least. I kept thinking about the way Tiff had looked at Leon, and how ordinarily she’d be on the phone with Damien. When was the last time she’d spoken to Damien, now that I thought of it? What if they’d broken up and she just hadn’t said anything?
Or what if she and Leon were …
No, surely not. Tiff wasn’t like that. Finn, yes. Tiff, no.
‘I think so,’ I hedged. ‘With Lara. They wanted to make the most of the free pizza.’
‘I see you went the jigsaw route, Noah.’ Mom nodded approvingly. She loved a productive hobby.
Noah slid the jigsaw box across the counter so that she could examine the image on the front. She raised her eyebrows at the piece count – all right, so it was going to be an ambitious undertaking.
‘What a glorious scene,’ said Rosie, standing on her tiptoes for a better look. ‘You can set it up on the dining table if you want, since we’re mostly eating outside while you’re here. Or you could try the big table in the sunroom.’
‘We’ll bring you in some cupcakes,’ promised Mom. ‘So that you don’t miss all the goodies.’
‘I think you should do it here so that we can all watch you struggle,’ teased Finn. Although was he teasing? His tone had changed recently, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it.
Finn snapped his fingers, yanking the box off the counter and sending it off towards the dining table. ‘It’ll be like the time Molly brought her extra-credit Solar System diorama.’
‘Oh my goddess, I remember that,’ said Mom, laughing. In her amusement, she squeezed her piping bag too hard. Another cupcake for the rejects plate. ‘You spent a whole week trying to figure out how to do the Kuiper belt. And you tried so hard to justify including Pluto because you felt bad for it.’
‘I still feel bad for Pluto,’ I admitted. ‘Left out in the cold all because of our arbitrary planet classification system.’
‘I’ll become an astrophysicist just to get Pluto back in with the cool kids,’ promised Finn, picking out a tune as he spoke.
‘That’s definitely the most romantic thing anyone’s ever said to me,’ I told him, grinning.
Over at the dining table, Noah fumbled the jigsaw-puzzle box. Tiny pieces went everywhere – at least a hundred or so slipped off the table and went careering over the floor.
Then, all at once, my ring buzzed and the kitchen lights flickered, dimming to nothing, then returned to full brightness.
Rosie and Mom both shrieked, and the cupcake Mom was holding went flying. I caught it just in time with a snap of magic, setting it back down in front of her. Icing-side down. Oh well, I’d tried.
‘Noah, can you check the fuses in the basement?’ said Rosie, when she’d recovered. ‘This weird old house – it really does seem to have an attitude problem at the moment.’
Nodding, Noah hurried down into the basement.
‘Do we need to call out an electrician?’ asked Mom.
‘Or an exorcist?’ added Finn, reaching over for the cupcake I’d just rescued. He devoured it in two bites. ‘Yum, you’ve been messing these up on purpose, haven’t you?’
‘I’d never mess anything up on purpose,’ Mom replied through a mouthful of cake – she’d grabbed a cupcake for herself before Finn could get his hands on it. ‘But these are too good to give all of them away. I’m just making sure we have a stockpile of our own.’
‘Ah, the truth comes out,’ said Rosie. She plated up a few perfectly iced cupcakes and passed them out to each of us.
‘They’re so good,’ I said, practically swooning over the apple-and-cinnamon one I’d picked out.
‘You’ll need the carbs to help you focus on that puzzle,’ said Rosie. ‘And maybe some of my hot spiced cider. It has a bit of a kick – Lara got me on to the cinnamon Fireball whiskey.’
I wasn’t going to turn that down. I poured a glass for both Noah and myself, then, after being given some prayer hands, one for Finn as well.
‘This will get these poor fingers moving,’ he said, banging out a chord on the guitar.
‘Uh huh,’ I said, trying not to grin. ‘If you don’t mind, I have a jigsaw puzzle to attend to.’
‘I’ll be quiet so long as you promise to watch The Mummy with me later tonight. The nineteen-ninety-nine one, of course.’
‘Well, it’s hard to say no to that ridiculously beautiful cast,’ I said. ‘But you’re going to have to be really quiet while we work. Because this puzzle is a major undertaking.’
‘If I’d known it meant Finn was going to shut up, I would’ve picked a bigger puzzle,’ goaded Noah, who’d just returned from the basement.
‘If I’d known you were going to be such a dick, I would’ve picked a different brother,’ said Finn, in a sing-song voice.
‘Finn,’ said Rosie warningly.
I rolled my eyes. All right, so I did enjoy spending time with Finn. He was so fun and cheerful, and we always had a good time together. But Noah and I had experienced something special tonight at the bookshop. Something … heated. I didn’t want to lose the thread of that just yet.
Thankfully, true to his word, Finn sat quietly, alternating between scrolling videos on his phone and jangling out a few notes on his guitar. After a while he grabbed another cupcake and cider and loped off, presumably to the music room.
As Mom and Rosie piped cupcakes and murmured about the tech client who was giving Mom grief, Noah and I sorted pieces, putting together piles of oranges, yellows and russets.
Noah had a much more sophisticated colour palette than I did, and had all sorts of names for colours that, unlike mine, did not come from a twelve-pack of Crayola markers.
‘You’re mocking me,’ I said at one point. ‘There’s no way that’s a real colour.’
‘Don’t make me get out my colour wheel,’ he warned.
‘Next you’ll be telling me that vermillion is a reddish-orange colour, and not the beautiful green of the luna moth.’
He cocked his head, trying to tell whether now I was pulling his leg.
I wasn’t sure, actually. I was definitely fifty-fifty on whether vermillion was orange or green. But with the right teasing look, I could definitely pretend otherwise.
‘All right. Let’s dig out these edge pieces next,’ he said, sorting through the veritable haystack of pieces.
‘You and your edge pieces.’ This wasn’t the first jigsaw puzzle we’d done together, of course.
A few years back, Summerween had been unusually damp, and we’d spent most of it indoors.
We’d become experts on the board games that Rosie kept stashed away in the various drawers, and we’d worked our way through at least half a dozen smaller jigsaw puzzles.
This puzzle was more involved than any of the others we’d attempted – except perhaps the one with the tropical parrots – but we’d find a way.
‘Edge pieces keep a puzzle civilized,’ said Noah. ‘Imagine the chaos otherwise.’
‘I don’t mind a little bit of a chaos.’ I set down a sky piece in the middle of the frame he was starting to put together.
‘Anarchy,’ he said, pretending to be mortified. ‘You’ve been spending too much time with Finn and Lara.’