Chapter Five #2
Cora didn’t flinch when she rounded the corner and found Lolly’s three best friends—Aggie, Bea, and Winston—huddled around a table with steaming cups of coffee as if they owned the place.
This was Sunrise, after all. The kind of town where people knew the code to your garage door, the best pie to bring for Sunday supper, and exactly where you kept your coffee filters.
The Spoon wasn’t even open, but that had never stopped them before.
They’d been having coffee and doing the crossword there every morning for years, and the fact that the building didn’t technically belong to them wasn’t reason enough to break the habit.
Aggie, the group’s ringleader, was impossible to miss, mostly because she looked like a rainbow that had gotten loose in the clearance aisle at a craft store.
Her neon tie-dye shirt, boldly declaring I’m not arguing, I’m explaining why I’m right, clung to her small frame.
A wild mess of silver hair was piled on top of her head, and she had a pair of multi-colored rhinestone glasses perched in the middle of it like a tiara.
She had the energy of a teenager who’d just downed three Red Bulls, which made sense.
After years as a high school principal, she’d absorbed all the sass her students had ever thrown at her. Especially the smart-mouthed ones.
She stabbed a hot pink nail at the crossword in front of her, her voice cutting through the café like a whistle. “It’s magnolia. I’m telling you.”
Aggie’s quick wit and no-filter style had made her and Lolly friends the moment she’d moved to Sunrise, back when Cora was still in diapers. Over the years, she’d mastered the art of saying whatever popped into her head, whether people were ready for it or not.
Most of the time, they weren’t.
Next to Aggie, Bea let out a soft snort, the kind that barely disturbed the air.
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s marigold,” she said, her voice calm, almost soothing.
She nodded to herself as she started counting the letters out on her fingers, her brow furrowing in concentration like it was the most important task in the world.
Bea was the balance to Aggie’s sharp edges, the quiet, steady presence that made everything feel a little more grounded.
Always baking something or fussing over someone, she was the kind of person who made people feel taken care of just by being near her.
If Aggie was the storm, Bea was the sunshine that followed, making sure everyone was all right once the dust had settled.
Then there was Winston, looking every bit like he’d just stepped out of a British mystery novel with his tweed hat and wire-rimmed glasses.
“Ladies, ladies. It’s mimosa. And before you ask, I don’t mean the drink.
” He gave his mustache a quick, thoughtful pinch.
“Though that does remind me of a rather interesting dinner party I once attended . . .”
As the long-standing editor of the Sunrise Gazette, Winston took his role very seriously, perhaps a bit too seriously for a small-town paper.
He’d been in Sunrise for decades, always ready with a story, whether anyone wanted to hear it or not.
He was like a walking encyclopedia, full of facts and anecdotes no one asked for.
And while his tales were packed with detail, getting to the point was always a bit of a journey.
Cora cleared her throat, cutting him off before he could launch into one of his famous “I once knew a man” speeches. Whether they were true or not, she’d previously spent an hour listening to him describe the Queen’s hairstyle up close, and she wasn’t caffeinated enough for a repeat.
Suddenly, three pairs of eyes locked on her, lighting up as if she’d just walked in with a pound cake and a winning lottery ticket.
“Look who decided to grace us with her presence,” Bea exclaimed, pulling Cora into a hug that smelled like butter cookies and lavender. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”
Aggie leaned in, her curiosity barely contained. “We heard you were back in town.”
Cora didn’t bother to ask how. News traveled fast around Sunrise. She sat down, clutching the mug of coffee that had magically appeared in front of her.
Bea eyed her over the cookie tin she’d just popped open. “Spill the beans, honey. What brings our big-city girl back to Sunrise?”
Cora took a gulp of coffee for courage, instantly regretting it as it scalded her tongue. “Well, I—”
“She met Jack Harlow,” Aggie cut in. “His truck was parked out back last night.”
Bea’s eyebrows shot up so fast Cora thought they might launch right off her forehead. “Jack Harlow? Oh, honey. That boy is trouble with a capital T-R-O-U-B-L-E.”
Winston tapped the table with his palm, his expression thoughtful.
“Now, now. The Harlows might have a . . . colorful history, but in my experience, there’s always more to the story.
” He smiled mysteriously and, for a second, Cora half expected him to pull out a pipe and start puffing away.
Winston was always convinced there was more to the story.
And he was usually right, but he had a habit of being so long-winded about it that everyone gave up before they made it to the end.
Aggie pursed her lips. “Listen, Cora. Men like Jack are like exotic peppers—tempting, but they’ll leave you with nothing but heartburn and regrets.”
“Hold up,” Cora protested, setting her mug down with a clunk. “He seemed perfectly fine. He was only cooking.” And looking entirely too good while breaking and entering, she added silently.
She narrowed her eyes at the trio. “I thought he worked here. Lolly wouldn’t have let him into her kitchen if she thought he was bad news.”
Aggie snorted. “Remember that drummer she hired to be a server? Said he was between gigs and just needed a little work to get back on his feet. Turned out he was living in the storage closet and trying to brew his own kombucha in the mop bucket.”
“Lolly had to throw out everything that touched that floor.” Bea shuddered at the memory.
“Well, Jack doesn’t look like the mop-bucket kombucha type,” Cora said.
“No,” Aggie agreed, “he looks like the kind of man who knows he’s dangerous and doesn’t bother hiding it.
Broody. Mysterious. Too quiet for his own good.
Back in high school, he was always one step away from a suspension.
I heard he wrecked his dirt bike outrunning a deputy, got caught sneaking into the marina, and there was that whole mess with the bait shack fire nobody ever proved was his fault.
He up and vanished after graduation, then he just shows up again out of the blue?
Seems like the kind of man you should steer clear of. ”
Bea crossed her arms. “And don’t forget, he’s a Harlow. That name alone could clear a potluck faster than a fire drill.”
“Then why did Lolly hire him?” Cora asked.
“Never could figure that out,” Aggie said. “And he didn’t give us much of a chance to either. He kept to himself. Came in at odd hours, always through the back door like a raccoon with a key. By the time we showed up for coffee, he was always long gone.”
Bea nodded. “For a while, we thought he was a rumor. Like Bigfoot, but with better hair.”
Cora blinked. “So he just skulks around here like a creeper, cooking in secret and then vanishing?”
“You know Lolly was tight-lipped when she wanted to be.” Winston tapped his pencil on the table in front of him. “She said he needed a place to land, and she wasn’t about to judge a man by his family tree.”
Before Cora could respond, the door burst open, and in tumbled Leonard Hathaway, Lolly’s attorney, looking like a startled squirrel, all twitchy energy and wide-eyed panic.
His suit, at least two sizes too big, hung off his lanky frame as if he’d borrowed it from a better-fed relative, and his tie looked like a flower shop and a geometry textbook had gotten into a brawl.
“Miss Lockwood,” he wheezed, glasses askew. “We need to talk. It’s about the sale of the café.”
The room went silent.
“I’m sorry, did you say ‘sale’?” Winston asked, his voice dangerously calm.
Leonard’s eyes went wide as he finally registered the audience. He fidgeted, his oversized pants swishing like windbreakers. “Oh. Um, is there somewhere we can talk privately?”
Aggie slapped the table, cutting through the tension. “We’re family here, Leonard. Spit it out.”
Cora took a deep breath, ready to explain. “Guys, I need to tell you something. I didn’t come back to—”
“Hold on,” Aggie said, holding up one hand. “Leonard, back it up. I need to make sure I’m not losing my mind here.” She turned to Cora. “Cora, were you about to say you were planning to sell the café?”
Cora’s throat suddenly went dry. This was not how she wanted this to go.
“Yeah, that’s what I was about to tell you.
I was . . . I am planning to sell The Spoon.
” She glanced around at the faces she knew so well, the people who’d watched her grow up, shared countless meals with her, and seen her cry into her banana pudding more times than she’d care to admit.
“I didn’t come back to stay forever. The plan was to—”
“You can’t sell the café,” Leonard blurted out, his voice rushed and panicked. “Because there’s a lien against it.”
All eyes shot to Leonard, then back to Cora, like they were following a chaotic ping-pong match.
Cora blinked, trying to make sense of the words. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“A lien,” Leonard said again, nervously tugging at the knot of his tie. “On The Salty Spoon. You can’t sell it, even if you want to.”
The room went dead silent.
And then the dam broke.
“What in the name of Dolly Parton’s hairspray do you mean?” Aggie shot to her feet, the screech of her chair legs harsh against the wood floor. “How does a lien just . . . appear?”
Bea’s earrings jangled as she shook her head. “That can’t be right. Lolly would have told us if there was a problem with the café.”