Chapter Four
Four
I didn’t have it in me to have a conversation with Dierdre today, not with the big book signing looming over my head tomorrow. To voluntarily have a chat with the most frustrating woman I’d ever met wasn’t going to be high on my weekly to-do list, but it had to happen one way or the other. I could at least go to her in the guise of asking how her nephew’s plans for his new store were coming along. He was planning to open a very fancy artisanal soap and candle shop in about two months’ time. I’d been watching his Instagram with some interest because I selfishly wanted to know what all those adorable-looking soaps smelled like in person.
First, I just needed to make it through this weekend in one piece.
Honey followed me from the grocery store to my house in her own car and collected some mint before heading home for the evening herself. She promised she’d be at the book signing the next day and confirmed our plans for dinner the following week.
Once Bob and I were alone, I needed to clear my head. The day had been high-stress and confusing, and things weren’t about to get any easier. The one thing I could count on to calm my nerves would be preparing tomorrow’s iced teas.
I had three teas planned to serve our guests as well as our full hot tea menu at the ready. We also had a fridge stocked with our signature black tea with lemon, which was so popular we needed to make it by the bucketful.
I unpacked all the fruit I’d bought at the store and set it in a full sink to clean it off while I fed Bob his dinner. He was being unusually quiet this evening, as he would normally yowl at me and weave between my legs in an effort to either convince me or kill me—I was never wholly sure which.
After topping up his dry food and giving him fresh water, I filled his wet-food dish, and he immediately began purring and eating in unison, which made a particularly funny brr-nom-smack-brrr-brrr sound. Knowing he was content, I headed to the basement storage area, where all the surplus tea and tea-making supplies for the Earl’s Study were kept.
I hadn’t changed much about the way Aunt Eudora had arranged things in the basement. While her filing systems elsewhere could be a little chaotic—I still hadn’t found many of her personal documents after nine months of house sorting—the tea supplies were exceptionally well organized. Everything was alphabetical, and there were neat, laminated cards in each of the metal tins telling me how to mix the blends. The individual ingredients, like the various tea bases and add-ins such as marigold petals, jasmine flowers, and vanilla sugar, were all kept in clearly labeled and alphabetized tins and jars on their own shelf.
Metal tins were always the best way to store tea ingredients, because they kept light from damaging them or diminishing their potency, but I think Aunt Eudora just believed that some things—like the flowers—were too pretty not to be in jars, and I agreed.
I wanted to use three different tea bases to make my special blends for the signing the next day. A white tea would have a lovely light flavor; a green tea would give a nice grassy, herbal vibe; and a black tea would provide a deeper, richer flavor. Since our signature tea also had a black tea base, I would need to make sure the two black teas were distinctive enough to stand apart.
Rather than starting from scratch and making unique teas blends for the iced teas, I decided to pick from some of our ready-made options. It would be the add-ins that made the iced variations more unique.
For my black tea, I couldn’t resist our most popular summer tea, the Strawberry Earl Grey, which was a standard Earl Grey with extra bergamot and freeze-dried strawberries in it.
We didn’t have a ton of varieties of green tea, but we had one I particularly enjoyed called Picnic Basket, which was meant to evoke the feeling of sitting out on a fresh-mown lawn on a summer day. It had lemongrass, orange peel, and vanilla sugar in with the earthy green-tea base.
The last option I selected was our white tea, and here I went with a jasmine and white tea mixture that contained freeze-dried raspberries, blueberries, and lavender buds. We called it Tea Party. This was actually a blend I’d recently custom-made all on my own, and its success at the shop was giving me a slightly inflated ego.
It was nice to know that magic wasn’t the only gift Eudora had passed along to me.
I filled three mason jars with tea so I could bring it upstairs and also bring some extra along to the shop tomorrow in case we needed it. I suspected that when people tried these, they would want to bring the loose tea home with them as well. We’d had so many people wanting to recreate our iced teas that we’d needed to print out recipe cards that people could take with their purchase.
Back up in the kitchen, Bob had settled into his cushy bed on the fireplace hearth, a location he favored even when the fire wasn’t lit. As I started to chop the fresh fruit I’d bought at Lansing’s, I couldn’t help but think about how angry Leo had been when he’d been confronted by the lawyer. It churned my stomach to think about Leo’s rage, because that simply wasn’t the Leo I knew.
For someone to get that kind of reaction out of him, they’d really needed to push his buttons. Something about the lawyer had made my skin crawl, but I knew that if his goal was to buy up prime real estate in Raven Creek, I would hear from him one way or another. Maybe I’d prepare myself and ask a few other business owners in town if they’d also had the displeasure of speaking to him before he ultimately found his way to me.
Not many people knew I was the secret owner of the bulk of Main Street. The financial aspects of that were handled by a company called Mountain View, and most of the cash flow was siphoned back into making Raven Creek better. That had been the deal Eudora struck when she’d been given the opportunity to purchase the deeds decades earlier.
It wasn’t a hard choice to continue to support the town the way Eudora had. I didn’t need millions of dollars. I had a beautiful house, enough money to support my employees and myself, and the ability to keep rental rates low for the other business owners I cared about.
This town had taken me in when I had nowhere to go, they’d made me feel welcomed from my very first day—with the exception of Dierdre—and over the months I had finally settled into my surroundings and routine here. I cared about these people, and keeping the town as pristine and welcoming as it had been for me and Eudora was very important to me.
It was a no-brainer to just leave things status quo, and that’s how I wanted them to stay. For this lawyer to come in and think he could take that away from us, well, it made me as mad as it had made Leo.
I’d been absent-mindedly chopping fruit while working myself up into a frothy rage, so it took me a moment to realize what was happening around me. It wasn’t until I noticed that Bob had climbed up onto the kitchen table and was pawing at something red floating over his head that I set down my knife to see what he had found.
Which was when I realized that all my freshly washed berries were suspended in midair all around the kitchen. They’d floated up off the counter and were all the way up to the ceiling, hanging overhead like a chandelier.
“Oh,” was all I could think to say.
My fritzy magic was apparently triggered by anger, or at least by high emotions, something I didn’t think I’d realized previously. I tried to think of the past instances where things had gone awry, but I couldn’t recall if anything had been making me more stressed than usual. It had all started happening when I’d begun to plan the big signing and hike, so perhaps I’d just been in a constant state of elevated stress since then?
Bob batted at a strawberry half, and it just floated calmly away from him, like it was in zero gravity. I poked a fat blueberry hovering over my head, and it sailed upward, slow and casual, not a worry in the world.
Though what worries a blueberry might have, I couldn’t guess.
I pulled out my phone and snapped a quick photo to send to Honey. Since it seemed that the floating fruit wasn’t all going to come crashing to the floor now that I’d noticed it, I set about collecting it all again. Thankfully, it didn’t start to head back upward once I grabbed it and replaced it in the bowls, but it was a bit of an effort to get a few nectarine slices that had managed to find their way almost to the ceiling.
Bob was reluctant to let me have his strawberry, so after a few unsuccessful attempts, I relented and just let him keep it. He’d get bored eventually—either that or I’d find hovering strawberry over my bed later tonight.
I didn’t want to tempt fate further, but the iced tea still needed to be made. I couldn’t do it in the morning, because it was best left to steep overnight. So rather than letting myself get sidetracked by stress and negativity again—heaven only knew what other trouble my magic could get me into tonight—I put my phone on the shelf above the kitchen sink and put on an episode of Parks and Recreation so that Ron, April, and Leslie could keep me distracted while I worked.
This technique worked wonders. I continued to chop up fruit until it was finely diced, then macerated it in using my big mortar and pestle. I took three jumbo glass pitchers—the kind you might use for a big town picnic—and set them on my kitchen table, which was the only place in the small kitchen that could hold them all.
To one, I added the smashed strawberries and some crushed basil leaves I’d taken from the plant in the window. To the second, I added the blueberries and some fresh-sliced oranges. To the third, I added a nectarine mixture into which I’d tossed locally harvested honey.
I filled several biodegradable tea bags for each pitcher. Strawberry Earl Grey went in the first, Picnic Basket in the second, and Tea Party in the third. I then added a hefty serving of boiling water to each, filling them one-third full and adding a cup of sugar apiece.
The mixtures would steep for the next several hours, and then I would remove the tea bags and fill the rest of the containers with water. Allowing the tea to steep for hours rather than just a few minutes would give it a strong concentration of flavor—not something you normally wanted in a cup, but for a pitcher it was ideal. The extra water would then cut down the potency, giving it the perfect balance overall.
Satisfied with a job well done and no follow-up magical disasters, I left the tea on the table and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich for a quick dinner using some leftover cheddar jalape?o sourdough I had on the counter. While we rarely had leftovers at the shop after lunch rush, I sometimes got lucky, and yesterday had been one of those days. The trick to my perfect grilled cheese was to add shredded cheese to the pan right when the sandwich was almost finished cooking so it would melt under the bread when you did the final flip. This added a delicious cheesy, crunchy layer to the outside of the sandwich, and it was absolute perfection.
A greasy cheese-bomb was just what the doctor ordered after a stressful, rainy day, and Bob and I finished our night curled up together on the couch. I needed a nice restful sleep to prepare me for the day ahead.