Chapter 8 of 8It Isn't for Sale

Thea Quinn had a past-due tax bill on The Gilded Truffle and one tray of truffles to answer it with. If Saturday's market did not bring in money, the shop would go to the county, and the ledger would go with it — every recipe that was left of the only teacher she had ever trusted.

She had spent all of Friday on one of those recipes, and twice she had set it down and walked out of the kitchen.

Fina had the table up in the square in Cascade Ridge before Thea reached it: white cloth squared, the chalkboard price propped against a crate, coffee from Doreen's cart going cold beside the cash box. Thea set the tray down.

"Walk me through it one more time, while nobody's here," Fina said.

"Rosewater into the cream first. Warm, cool, warm again, or it splits."

"And then?"

"Cardamom. Green pods, crushed, steeped cold in cocoa butter overnight in the walk-in, so the flavor moves in slow and doesn't shout."

"The middle?"

"Hazelnut praline, pressed thin as a coin, so the shell cracks before the filling gives way."

Thea squared the tray against the crate.

"Nothing in it can be hurried and nothing in it can be guessed."

"Six dollars each," Fina said. "That's what I put on the board."

"Right."

"Cardamom and rose. That's the whole description?"

"That's the whole card."

"People like to know what they're getting."

"Then they should taste it."

Fina clicked her pen shut and let it go. The square had filled while they set up. It was September, warm where the sun reached the walkway and chilly in the maples' shade, and the whole place smelled of Doreen's drip coffee and the fry bread trailer down at the north end. Ben Coleman's hazelnuts sat heaped in open burlap on his own table. Farther along, at the corner where the light was best, Javier Rios had his tent up, white and sharp-edged, the banner over it reading Rios Modern Chocolate in letters that looked as if they had been cut by a machine.

The ledger would have done a thief no good. It never gave amounts. It gave order and ratio, parts and not weights, and the small brown flower drawn at the head of each page told her which part of the sequence she was reading.

"Somebody asks what's in the book, what do I say?" Fina said.

"Say it's the shop's."

"That's not what I mean."

"I know what you mean."

Privately she had been calling the truffle the Lost Margot since Friday night, and she had not written that name on anything.

The first customer wanted to know what the dark fleck was.

"Cardamom," Thea said. "Rose in the cream, hazelnut praline at the center."

"That's an awful lot going on."

"It's meant to be."

The woman bit it in half where she stood and stopped chewing.

"How many do you have?"

"As many as are on the tray."

"Then I'll take the row."

Behind her a man in a flannel shirt paid without a question. By the time the tray was half down there was a line at the table, and Fina had stopped writing names on the clipboard and was writing numbers.

"Where did you train?" a man asked.

"Seattle. Years back."

"You should be selling these in the city."

"I tried the city," Thea said.

Ben Coleman came along the walkway with an empty crate under one arm.

"Selling out," he said.

"It's selling."

"Your praline's from my nuts."

"It is."

"Then it's a decent batch."

He shifted the crate to his other hip and looked off toward the shop.

"This table used to look like this every Saturday. Long while back."

"Before?"

"Yep," Ben said, and carried his crate back to his own table.

Eleanor Penhaligon arrived with a stack of flyers under one arm.

"One, please. To take home."

"You're not going to eat it here?"

"I eat my chocolate at my own table, with the kettle on and nobody watching me."

"Then you'll want to know what you're tasting."

"I've eaten this shop's chocolate for more than thirty years," Eleanor said. "Don't tell me what I'm tasting."

Thea slid the truffle into a paper sleeve and held it out.

"All right."

Eleanor dropped it in her bag and kept her eyes on Thea a beat longer than the sentence needed. "I'll write it up in the newsletter, whatever it turns out to be. Assuming it's worth writing about."

Then she went off toward the co-op table.

Thea stood with the tray in her hands and looked down the walkway at the people in Cascade Ridge with a reason to want that ledger shut.

"Who's on your list?" Fina said, following her eyes.

"Javier, first. A shop on Main Street that fails is worth more to him than one that succeeds without him."

"And Eleanor?"

"She's handing out flyers for a tribute. A tribute needs Annelise to stay exactly as the town remembers her."

"Ben?"

"An old debt and a long silence travel together."

Fina stopped writing and waited.

"That leaves Simon."

"Simon told me what he was told and not one word more."

Simon came by at the end of the morning with his tie loosened.

"The county clerk called my office," he said. "Twice."

"They'll call again."

"They will," Simon said. "The estate's debts don't disappear because a truffle is good. I say that as a friend and as the man who filed the papers."

"I know what I'm against."

He looked at the short row of truffles left on the tray, and then at the line behind it.

"Where did this come from, Thea?"

"The book that came with the building."

"Well," Simon said. "That's one way of looking at it."

He took a truffle in a paper sleeve, paid for it, and went back down the square toward his office, and Thea watched him the whole way, because a man who says a thing that carefully is usually holding something back.

The tray emptied in an hour, and Fina turned people away with an apology and a promise about next Saturday.

Javier Rios crossed the walkway before the cloth was folded.

"So," he said. "Sold out in an hour. In this town."

"It happened here before."

"Not like this. Not in years." He took the last truffle off the tray and ate it where he stood. "Cardamom and rose. I keep a cardamom bonbon on my own counter. It does fine."

"Then you're all set."

"Where did that recipe come from?"

"A book that came with the building."

Javier stopped chewing. "I've eaten everything that kitchen ever turned out, and none of it tasted like that."

Thea said nothing.

"How much for the book?"

"It isn't for sale."

He laughed, one short note, and straightened his cuff. "Everything in this town is for sale, my friend. Ask anybody on this square."

He dropped a bill into the cash box, did not wait for his change, and had his phone against his ear before he reached his own tent.

Thea took the price card off the board, turned it over, and wrote on the back in brown ink, slow, so the lines would sit straight.

"What does it say?" Fina asked.

"That the recipes in this shop come out of the old ledger, and that one of them will be on this table every Saturday, for anybody who wants to taste it."

Fina looked it over, then propped it at the front of the empty tray herself.

"All of them?"

"All of them."

"Somebody's going to have opinions about that."

"Then they can come and taste them."

Fina looked across the walkway, where Javier was taking a picture of the card.

"He'll want that book," she said.

"He can want it."

"What if he gets it?"