A Quiet Evening at The Loose Leaf

A Crestwick Chronicles bonus chapter — a few weeks after Something Wicked This Way Brews

The town decided I was a heroine, which was worse than being a suspect.

When they thought I’d done it, at least they left me alone. People crossed the street. The bell over my door stayed quiet for whole afternoons, and I got a great deal of inventory done. But the moment the truth came out — the moment Crestwick understood that I had been the one to see what no one else could see, and had quietly carried it to the only end it could safely have — they came back, and they came back grateful, and gratitude in a small town arrives by the dishful.

By the third week I had a freezer I could not close.

Nell Purcell brought the worst of it on a Thursday evening, after I’d flipped the sign to CLOSED and was sitting in the back with the lamps low and the day’s leaves drying and Fig arranged along the windowsill like a dropped scarf. She knocked, which she has never done in her life, and let herself in before I could answer, which is more like her, carrying a covered dish with both hands and the expression of a woman bearing a gift she fully expects to be thanked for at length.

“Don’t get up,” she said, getting me up. “It’s a tuna thing. My mother’s recipe. There’s a crushed-cracker top.” She set it on the counter with the reverence of a relic and lifted the corner of the foil so I could admire it. “I know you don’t sleep right yet. You don’t, after something like this. I didn’t sleep for a week after the Pelham fire and that was only a kitchen.”

“That’s very kind, Nell.”

“It’s got peas in it. Peas are calming. I read that.” She had read no such thing. She produced two forks from her coat pocket — two, this time, she had come prepared to participate — and settled herself onto the stool by the counter with the air of a woman who would be staying as long as the tea held out.

I made the tea. I made her the linden blend, which is for nerves, and slightly stronger than she’d have chosen, because Nell talking is a force of weather and I find it goes easier downhill with linden behind it.

She talked. She talked about the funeral, which had been beautiful, and the flowers, which had been adequate, and the new minister, whom she had decided to like provisionally. She talked about Aldous, of whom she was now extremely fond in the way people become fond of the recently dead, all his sharp corners sanded off by the telling. She told me three separate times that she had always known there was more to me than tea, and each time she said it she looked at me a half-second too long, the way she does, with that bright crow’s-eye curiosity she has never once admitted to having, and each time I poured more linden and said nothing worth keeping.

We ate the tuna thing. It was, I will tell you honestly, a great many things at once, and the things were not on speaking terms, but the cracker top was genuinely good and I told her so and she received it the way she receives any kindness, as her due and a delight both.

It was nearly nine when she got to the thing she’d come to say, which is always how it goes with Nell — the casserole is the ticket of admission, the forty minutes of weather are the price, and the thing itself comes out near the bottom of the pot, dropped in sideways, as though it had only just occurred to her.

“Of course you’ll have heard about the cottages,” she said.

“I haven’t.”

“The north edge. The little ones up the lake road, past where Aldous was walking that last evening — you know the ones.” She lowered her voice, which means nothing in an empty shop, and tapped the side of her nose, which she has still never earned. “There’s a woman been up there. Twice now. Asking after the old deeds. The land registry, the founding parcels, whose name is on what and how far back. Margaret at the clerk’s office told me, and Margaret doesn’t gossip, so you know it’s serious.”

I kept my eyes on the pot. I am good at keeping my eyes on a small task while the rest of me goes very still. “A surveyor, probably,” I said. “Someone’s always wanting to build.”

“That’s what I said. There’s always a developer.” But she frowned at her own tea, dissatisfied with it for once. “Only she didn’t ask like a developer. Margaret said she asked like a woman checking a thing she already half knew. She asked about your parcel, Harriet. This corner. She asked who held it before you, and how the right came to you, and whether the transfer was clean.” Nell looked up, and for a moment the bright curiosity went out of her face and left behind the thing that lives under it, which is that Nell Purcell is not nearly as silly as she has spent a lifetime arranging to seem. “I thought you should hear it from a friend. Before you heard it from a stranger.”

The shop, around me, had gone quiet in the particular way it goes when something has happened that the air still remembers. The lamps did not flicker. Fig did not move. But the warmth went thin in the corners, the way it had thinned the morning I found Aldous on the bench, and underneath the linden and the tuna and the drying leaves I caught it — faint, scorched, like a match held too long and then put out — and it was not coming from anything in the room.

It was coming from the floor. From under the boards, where the old records are. Where Aldous’s careful papers had quietly come to rest after everything, the ones I had locked away and told myself I would deal with when I was stronger, the ones that have not, I am fairly sure, been lying as still as I left them.

“What was her name?” I asked. Lightly. The way you ask the parts that matter.

“Ashby,” Nell said. “A Mrs. Ashby, from two towns over. Drove a coat that cost more than my car.” She brightened again, the weather rolling back in over the deeper thing, the way it does. “Anyway. I only mention it. More tea? You’ve gone pale — that’s the not-sleeping, I keep telling you. Eat the peas.”

I ate the peas. I poured her more linden. I let her talk her way back up into the shallows, the funeral and the flowers and the minister she’d decided to like, and I made the right sounds in the right places, and the whole time a corner of me was downstairs in the dark with a name I had not been given and a date I had not asked for, doing the arithmetic I did not want to do.

Because here is the thing about a thread. You can see it lying there, bright against the weave, and you can tell yourself it is nothing, only a loose end, only a stranger asking dull questions in a clerk’s office two towns from here. You can leave it. I am very good at leaving things.

But a thread that has started to pull does not wait for your permission. It waits for your hand.

Nell left at half nine, finally, with her empty dish and firm instructions to sleep and eat something that wasn’t tea. I locked up behind her. I straightened the crooked sign over the door out of habit, and it went crooked again before I’d turned the key, the way it always does, the way it has since the first afternoon, telling the truth about the building underneath it.

Then I went back inside, and I lit the lamp over the trapdoor, and I sat down on the floor beside the old records, and I did not open them.

Not that night.

But I put my hand flat on the boards, where the scorched smell was coming through, and I felt the papers underneath go warm, the way a thing goes warm when it has been waiting a long time to be read.

“All right,” I told them.

Fig came down off the sill, crossed the floor, and lay along my knee with the settled certainty of a creature who has known for two years exactly how this ends and has simply been waiting, with enormous patience, for me to catch up.

He has never once been wrong.

— Jessie Clark

Harriet’s next case — A Bitter Cup to Swallow — is brewing. Join my reader list at www.jessieclarkauthor.com to read the opening chapters before anyone else.