Chapter 1 of 7A Flower in Brown Ink

Thea Quinn had one place left to go, and it belonged to a stranger. A woman she had never met had left her a chocolate shop in Cascade Ridge, Washington, along with a property tax bill that had gone unpaid, a walk-in cooler nobody had serviced, and a clause in the will she could not explain. She could sign for all of it, or she could drive back to Seattle with two suitcases and nothing.

She signed.

Simon Trent's office sat up a narrow staircase above the hardware store on Main Street. He was waiting at the top with his hand out.

"Ms. Quinn."

"That's me."

"Simon Trent." The handshake was dry and quick. "I'll say it plain. I wasn't sure you'd come."

"I wasn't either."

He stepped back and held the door. "Come in out of the rain."

"Thank you."

The office smelled of cold coffee, cedar shavings, and dust gone soft in the rug. Simon hung her coat on a hook and opened a folder with her name on the tab.

"Short version or the long one?"

"Start short."

"Annelise Vogel founded The Gilded Truffle and ran it herself until she couldn't, and she left you the building, the shop, the equipment, and everything in it."

Thea kept her hands folded in her lap.

"I never met her."

"So she told me."

"Then why?"

"That's the question I've been carrying since the reading. I asked her once, some time ago, whether she meant to leave the shop to family or to someone she had never met, and she said she would explain it in her own time. She ran out of time."

He closed the folder and squared it against the desk edge.

"She never told you why me."

"No."

"Was there anyone else?"

"Not in the will."

"A nephew? A neighbor?"

"Nobody has called me."

Thea waited, and when he said nothing more, she tried the next question.

"What was she like?"

"Difficult," Simon said. "Generous. Both at once, most days."

"Did she leave a letter?"

"Nothing I found. I looked more than once, if that tells you anything."

"Is there a catch?"

"There's a clause." He turned the page and read it out slowly. "'The property and all its contents pass to Thea Quinn entire, and nothing within the building is to be sold, moved, or thrown away until she has walked through it herself.'"

"That's a strange thing to put in a will."

"I've written a good many, and never a sentence like that one."

"How far behind are the taxes?"

"Far enough to matter. Not far enough to sink you, if you open the doors."

He slid an envelope across the desk.

"What's this?"

"Two keys, one long and one short, and a slip of paper with the alarm code on it. Front door, back door. It's been off since she died, so you'll want to set it."

Thea turned the envelope over. "There's an apartment upstairs."

"Above the shop, yes. She kept it as a spare room. Bed, chair, a coffee pot." He stood and reached for his coat. "I'll walk you over."

They went down the stairs and out onto Main Street, into rain that was more a wet gray breathing than a storm, the kind that soaks a wool coat through and never once looks like weather. Simon raised an umbrella, glanced at her, and lowered it again.

"You're not from here."

"Seattle."

"That's all right. Most of us came from somewhere."

They passed the corner coffee shop, The Daily Grind, where people at the window watched them go by with the frank interest of a town that did not see many strangers on a Tuesday. The block narrowed, and there it was.

The Gilded Truffle.

The window glass held the gray sky and nothing else. Inside it, a laminated card from the Cascade Ridge Farmers' Market was still taped up and curling at one corner, listing hazelnuts at eight dollars a pound.

Thea stopped on the sidewalk. "How long has it been shut?"

"Since the funeral. Nobody's been inside but me, to check the locks."

"The cooler has been running the whole time."

"It has."

Simon unlocked the door and held it, and the smell came out at them: cold cocoa, dust, sugar gone stale, and under it something sharper, like orange peel left to dry on a sill.

"Not what it was," he said, following her in.

"No."

"People used to drive out from Seattle for her truffles. I'm not making that up."

"It doesn't look like anyone has been happy in here for a while."

Thea turned a slow circle. Empty marble counter, bare glass cases, a register with a Safeway receipt curled under the drawer, a row of hooks where aprons had hung.

"Where's the kitchen?"

"Through there. The cooler is on the north wall and it's held its temperature."

"You checked?"

"I checked the locks and the lights. The cooler, after the storm, when the power flickered."

"Who else has keys?"

"Only the two I gave you, and mine until this morning."

She walked the length of the counter, and Simon followed a step behind with his hands in his pockets, saying nothing, which was its own kind of answer.

"You don't have to take it," he said. "There's no fee, no penalty, nothing that follows you back to Seattle."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I know what's waiting for me in Seattle."

He checked his watch and thought better of whatever came next. "I'll leave you to it. My number's on the folder. Call if something's wrong. Heat, water, anything."

"Thank you."

"Ms. Quinn." He tipped his head and went out, and the door shut behind him with a knock of wood on wood, and the rain got louder in the empty room.

Thea walked the front room slowly, reading the counter for what it wanted. The marble had a good thick edge, and the cases had been built by hand, and built well. On the shelf above the register, behind a stack of takeout menus from a pizza place that had closed, sat a jar of huckleberry preserves, dusty and still sealed.

The office was through a narrow door at the back, small enough that the desk took most of it. A mug sat on the desk with something dried black in the bottom. A shelf of binders held invoices, supplier lists, tax returns. Behind the binders, pushed back against the wall as if someone had meant to forget it, was a book.

Leather, cracked at the spine, with nothing on the cover and nothing on the first page.

She worked it free, and it was heavier than it looked, and Thea Quinn sat down in the dead woman's chair.

She opened the ledger and turned past the blank pages, and there, in ink gone brown with age, was a recipe. Flour was a triangle. Sugar was a small circle with a dot at its center. Butter was a line curved like a wave. Page after page of the same symbols, and at the head of the first entry, drawn in the same brown ink and no bigger than her thumbnail, someone had put a small flower with five petals and a curved stem.

Her hand, which had never once shaken over a bain-marie or a batch of ganache pulled at the wrong temperature, went still on the page and stayed there.

She had seen that flower before, though not in a book and not on paper. Drawn in dark chocolate on the corner of a box lid. Piped smaller than a pea on the top of a single truffle. Set into the sugar crust of a cake that no one else had ever been allowed to taste.

Thea set her thumb over the little flower, as if covering a name on an envelope, and left it there while the rain moved across the shop windows. She did not put the ledger back on the shelf.