Chapter 11 of 13M for Margot

The last cream supplier on her list had said no, and the county tax notice sat under the register with a red stamp across the front of it. If that bill went unpaid, the county could put the building on the block by spring, and Javier Rios would be first in line with a cashier's check. Thea Quinn knew every word of the notice by heart, including the clause about the county's right to sell.

Rain ran down the front glass of The Gilded Truffle in slow gray ropes, and the gutters along Main Street had gone to rivers by midmorning. Fina Moss came in shaking water off her jacket, a cardboard tray of coffee from The Daily Grind balanced on one palm.

"I brought coffee," she said. "And bad news."

"And?"

"I called the rest of the dairies myself." Fina set the tray down and slid a cup toward Thea. "Mr. Halloran says he's at capacity."

"Did he mention a phone call?"

"He said somebody had been around asking questions about you." Fina wiped rain off her nose with the back of her wrist. "He wouldn't say who."

"He didn't have to." Thea peeled the lid off her coffee and let the steam come up into her face. "The card with the interlocking R."

"Probably. Oh, wow. That is so sneaky." Fina dropped onto the stool by the register. "So what do we sell this week? Sugar and apologies?"

"It leaves us a day to make room."

"In the storeroom? Like, a deep clean?"

"Every flat, every jar, every crate." Thea pulled her apron off its hook. "If I can't fill the case, I can at least build space to fill it later."

They worked through the afternoon with the alley door propped open and the rain coming and going. The storeroom smelled of dust, cardboard, and the ghost of old cocoa, sweet and faintly bitter, layered over a mineral tang of damp concrete. Fina kept up a running commentary on each shelf, holding up jars at arm's length like evidence.

"That whole top row is expired pectin. It's pectin from another century, Thea."

"Toss it."

"All of it?"

"All of it, and the packing paper goes in the recycling." Thea dragged the step stool into the corner. "The cocoa crate comes down next."

"I'll get it."

"Bend your knees."

Fina took one end, Thea the other. The crate came off the shelf quicker than it should have, and for a moment Thea thought Fina had let go of her side. She hadn't. Thea rested her hands on the wooden slats and frowned at the weight of it.

"It's half full," Fina said. "I can see beans through the slats."

"Then it should weigh more than this." Thea thumped the side with the heel of her hand. The sound came back wrong, round and open, like knocking on a dresser drawer instead of solid wood. She turned the crate and tapped again, lower down.

Fina leaned in. "Did you hear that?"

"Hollow."

"False bottom?"

"Palette knife. On the bench behind you."

Thea worked the thin blade along the seam until the nails gave, and the panel lifted free with a rasp of old tape. Underneath, wrapped in oilcloth and tied with butcher's twine, was a bundle the size of a paperback. The twine cracked when she touched it. Inside were letters, folded small, the paper gone tan and soft at the folds. The stack had weight to it.

"Letters?"

"Letters."

"They're addressed?"

"Every one." Thea turned the top envelope over. "Stamped, postmarked. Somebody kept them."

"Who writes letters?"

"Someone who didn't want a phone call overheard."

Thea slid the top one out and unfolded it flat on the bench. The hand was small and slanted, brown ink, no date at the top. The first line read: *Cardamom is a shy thing. You have to warm it before it will speak.*

She read it out loud. Fina stopped sorting pectin.

"She writes about a praline," Thea said. "Bitter orange, cream, and a fight about whether it would sell."

"Who argues about a praline?"

"Someone who's been told her praline won't sell in a town like this." Thea turned the page. "Listen to this. 'The orange fights the cream until it gives in, and that is the whole trick. She says it will not travel. I say nothing worth eating has ever traveled well.'"

Fina set the jar down. "She sounds like she's arguing with somebody who counts things."

"Somebody who counts things for a living."

Thea went through the bundle one letter at a time. The arguments repeated themselves — cost, shelf life, packaging, the price of a custom mold, a demand for a simpler ganache and a stubborn refusal to simplify. Then the signature at the foot of every page, in the same brown ink, alone below the closing line. Just an M.

"Every one ends the same way." Thea squared the stack. "No name. Just an M."

"M for what?"

Thea looked at the marks left in the wood where the panel had sat. "Whoever hid these didn't want them read and didn't want them thrown out."

"That's a weird thing to do."

"It's a specific thing to do. That crate was at the back of the top shelf, behind the pectin, and the tape on the false bottom had gone brittle long before Rios opened his doors in this town. Simon Trent has never set foot in this storeroom."

Fina's eyebrows went up. "Okay. So that's two names off your list."

"For this, yes. Two of four."

"You're making that face."

"I'm not."

"You are. Who is M?"

Thea set the last letter down and ran her thumb along its fold. The oilcloth smelled of cocoa butter and cedar, and beneath that, faintly, of a kitchen she had stood in a long time ago. She recognized the mind in these pages — the shy cardamom, the orange that had to be argued with, the stubbornness she had spent her whole career trying to learn.

"M for Margot," she said.

Fina's coffee stopped halfway to her mouth. "Margot who?"

Thea folded the letters back into the oilcloth, and the rain moved off east toward the Cascades, and the compressor behind the walk-in kicked on with its old rattle. Somebody had mailed these out years ago, and somebody had kept every one of them — hidden where no one would look and no one would throw them away.

She had proof now, in Margot's own hand, that the woman had existed and had a voice nothing like Annelise Vogel's. Who wrote them was half the answer. Who kept them was the rest.