Chapter 12 of 13A Bad Business

The letters in Thea Quinn's tote bag would be worth nothing unless a living person tied the initial to a face, and the only person she knew who had stood in that kitchen when both women worked in it was bagging hazelnuts across the square. The county's tax notice was propped against the register upstairs. It did not care about letters.

Saturday had taken the square in Cascade Ridge again — white canopies, folding tables, a Safeway bag flapping under the next stall, the smell of fry bread and diesel from the equipment auction at the far end. Thea waited her turn at Doreen's coffee cart behind two women arguing about whether huckleberry jam counted as a preserve or a jelly.

"Coffee for the shop table," Thea said, "and the cinnamon one's for Fina."

Doreen wrote on a paper cup with a grease pencil. "Four fifty each."

"She'll appreciate the cinnamon."

"Ben's got his nuts in early this year." Doreen snapped a lid on and slid both cups across. "Tell him I still owe him for the cream he dropped off in June."

"He's on my list."

"Then take him one of these. He talks more when his hands are busy."

Fina was at the shop's table with the tray of truffles, and she took her cup in both hands. "Oh! Wow. Thank you."

"Don't poke the caramel. I mean it."

"Not poking." Fina poked it. "It's set. It's so set."

"Watch the table. I'll be back before the crowd."

"You're going to Ben's." Fina's voice dropped. She glanced at the tray, where every tag carried the small five-petaled flower. "About the letters?"

"One of them."

"Which one?"

"The one about the nuts."

Fina opened her mouth, thought better of it, and drank her coffee.

Ben Coleman's stall stood at the end of the row: two burlap sacks, a cash box, and a folding chair he never sat in. He was filling a paper sack for a woman in a rain jacket and took her money without looking at it.

"Six dollars," he said.

The woman went off with her hazelnuts, and Thea stepped up. "Morning, Ben."

"Morning."

She set the second coffee on the corner of his table. He looked at it, then at her, and left it standing there.

"The nuts look good this year."

"Yep."

"I want to ask you about a bad one." She unfolded the letter from her tote and laid it flat between the sacks, smoothing the crease with her thumb. The brown ink had gone soft and warm-looking with age and the paper smelled faintly of cocoa butter. "The nuts came in late and green, and the praline went gritty. Somebody complained to somebody else about it in writing. Do you know the year I mean?"

Ben read the letter, or looked at the ink long enough that Thea stopped talking. A truck went by on Main behind them. He poured coffee into the lid of his cup, sipped, and set it down.

"Nuts sat in the field and swelled up," he said. "Rain came in early that fall and wouldn't quit. I brought mine in late and she was mad about the schedule."

"Which she?"

"Miss Vogel. Annelise." He shrugged. "The other one said wait. Wait for the nuts to dry out. She didn't care if we shipped after Thanksgiving."

Thea kept her hands still on the table. "The other one. What did you call her?"

"Nothing. Miss Vogel called her Em. That's all I ever heard in that kitchen."

"Em," Thea said.

"Short for something, I figured. I didn't ask."

"How long was she here?"

"Long enough that folks got used to her." Ben moved a sack a few inches to the left. "Then she was gone and folks got used to that too."

"What was she like?"

"Quiet. Kept to the back. Drew on the parchment when it was slow. Flowers, mostly."

Thea looked across the square at her own table, where every truffle tag carried that same five-petaled flower.

"Did you ever talk to her?"

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"She didn't want to be talked to."

Thea pulled the letter back toward herself and folded it along its old creases. "After Em left. What changed?"

"Everything." He said it the way he'd say the weather. "Prices went up. She quit paying me out of the coffee can and started writing checks. Cleared a whole shelf of stock she'd been selling for years. Had the sign repainted right after that. New lettering, gold leaf. Never said why."

"Did she ever say where Em went?"

"Nope. I asked once."

"What did she say?"

Ben picked up the lid of his cup and finished it. "She said it was a bad business and we wouldn't speak of it again."

"What else?"

"She was gone herself right at the end of it. Came back with her hair cut short." He looked off toward the auction noise. "Never wore the green coat again. Wore black after that."

Thea didn't move.

"One more thing." Ben nodded across the square toward her table. "The rose ones. She made them one more time after Em left, and then never again. I remember because I asked her for one."

"And?"

"She said they weren't hers."

Thea walked back with the cold coffee and set it behind the cash box, and Fina looked up from a customer's change.

"You got something off him."

"I got an initial and an order of events."

"What order?"

"Em left. The sign got repainted. Annelise wore black."

Fina slid the tray straight on the table. "People don't repaint a sign over a friend moving away."

"No." Thea took out the ledger, opened it to the blank pages at the back beneath Eleanor Penhaligon's unsigned account, and wrote Ben Coleman's name and the market date. Under that, she wrote the three words he had handed her. Not hers.

"Not hers," Fina said. "She said that about her own truffles."

"She said it about the rose ones. The cardamom ones." Thea closed the book and pressed her palm against the cover, feeling the ridged leather, the cheap brass clasp, the weight of somebody else's handwriting underneath. She sat with the market going on around her and tried to think of anything a person could live through that would take the joy out of her for good.

Whatever had happened to Annelise Vogel, it had happened in the same season Em disappeared, and Thea still did not know what it was.