THE HERBALIST (Books 1-5)

by Leslie Leigh

  Flora smiled, looking pleased with herself. “If they go well, and if I get really good at it, I may think about trying my hand at macaroons, as well.”

  “Wow! That’s ambitious!”

  “Now that I have my great baker’s helper, things are so much easier.”

  “Yes, her presence has really been a lifesaver these last few months.”

  “Where is she this morning?”

  “She asked for the day off today because she’s supposed to pick up Jim’s brother from the airport in Tucson.”

  “What? He couldn’t rent a car and drive down?”

  “I had the impression it was her idea. I think she couldn’t stand the thought of just sitting and waiting for him to arrive here.”

  Kim James was a 23-year-old widow whose artist husband had taken a dive head-first out of their kitchen window under the influence of a large quantity of belladonna last fall. The whole thing had been terribly tragic, and Melissa had helped to uncover the nefarious workings behind his death.

  She had hired Kim to work at the market when Kim just needed some comforting human contact and when she didn’t think she had a penny in the world. Now, Kim had received an advance on the purchase of her husband’s art, but she still chose to work in the market simply because she enjoyed the social contact and the creativity of it all. Jim had kept her pretty much under his thumb and away from most social contact, so it was a new world for her.

  Kim had told Melissa that her brother-in-law was coming to town. Kim was very excited about it; Melissa was not. Melissa knew that Kim was about to receive a fortune from the sale of Jim’s art, and so did Jim’s brother, Brandon. Shortly after Jim had passed, Brandon had sent a notice of claim to Kim regarding the estate before he realized that Kim was Jim’s wife—and not just his live-in girlfriend.

  Melissa’s heart ached for Kim. She was bright and cute, but terribly vulnerable and hungry for love and attention. Melissa and her crew had lavished much attention on the girl, and they had seen improvements, but they also knew that, because of Kim’s past, their attention would not be enough. She and Kim had discussed Jim’s brother several times. Melissa had tried to warn her, as gently as possible while attempting to trigger the girl’s own sense of self-preservation, but she wasn’t sure how successful she had been. She didn’t want to unfairly malign the young man, but the timing seemed a bit strange, just nine months after his brother’s death. In fact, no one, including Kim had known that Jim even had a brother until the estate claim had come following Jim’s death.

  In the midst of Melissa’s thoughts, the door jangled, and Miss Ada, the town’s favorite newsmonger and fussbudget stepped in. “Ohhhh, this heat is atrocious, and it’s not even nine o’clock yet,” Miss Ada began.

  “The weather on my computer showed a fifty-percent chance of storms today,” Miss Ada, “so maybe we’ll get some relief.”

  “Well, it’s about time. I swear it gets worse every year.”

  “What gets worse, Miss Ada?”

  “Just the waiting for that first drop of rain.”

  Melissa grinned. True, climate change was afoot, but she suspected Miss Ada’s “worse” simply meant that it seemed like it took longer to come to fruition any more.

  “Oooh, look at those little fluffy meringues. What flavor are they?”

  “Lavender,” Flora said.

  “Lavender? I didn’t ask you what color they were. I can see that.”

  “They’re flavored with lavender sugar, too, and have some lavender bud inclusions.”

  Miss Ada just stood with her mouth open for a minute then said, “I’ll have two…of each. Two meringues and two of the little chocolate things.”

  “Cream puffs.”

  “Yes, cream puffs.”

  “Do you want them here or to go, Miss Ada?”

  “I’ll have them here,” she said, “and a cup of Earl Grey tea with it.”

  “Hot or iced?”

  “Hot, of course! You must have your thermostat set on sixty degrees.”

  “It’s nowhere near sixty degrees,” Melissa responded. “But it may be working a little harder right now to compensate for the oven heat.”

  “I thought you were some kind of ecologist, Melissa. Doesn’t seem very environmentally friendly to me to be running your air conditioning at that level.”

  Melissa and Flora exchanged glances. Melissa had a half-smile on her face.

  “It’s not terribly, but I don’t think I’d have many customers without it. And I actually keep it on 76 degrees. It is actually more economical for me in this kind of weather because the compressors on my coolers wouldn’t take it for very long if they weren’t kept cool.”

  “Hmph,” Miss Ada grumbled.

  Flora served Miss Ada her goodies along with a steaming cup of Earl Grey.

  “Did you want something with your tea, Miss Ada?” Flora asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I want milk to cool it off.”

  Melissa and Flora were finding it difficult to keep straight faces at this point until Ada spoke again. “I suppose you all heard that they found Lloyd Johnston dead over his breakfast yesterday morning.”

  “Johnston. From Sonorita?” Flora asked.

  “Oh,” Melissa said. “I think he has a daughter about my age. I remember her from some mutual school activities. Corinne, I think her name is.”

  “That’s right,” Flora said. “I remember that. She lives in California now, doesn’t she?”

  “I guess so,” Miss Ada said. “She flew in early this morning.”

  Melissa wondered how Ada came up with all her fountain of information. “Had he been ill that you know of, Miss Ada?” Melissa inquired.

  “I think he had some kind of heart condition. He hasn’t gotten out for a number of years. He became kind of a recluse after his wife died, and then I think his heart just kept him down.”

  “How many children did he have?”

  “Just the one daughter. I was always surprised that she didn’t come back here or take him out there to live with her once her mother passed, but I guess that was between them.”

  “Pretty much,” said Melissa rather absently now that she was focused on something else—not that she didn’t want to hear Ada’s response since she had asked her the question; but, she had noticed some holes on shelves where there should have been products.

  “Flora,” Melissa called out, “hasn’t Kim been restocking the shelves every day?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “Just checking,” Melissa said, glancing Ada’s way to indicate to Flora that she didn’t want to discuss it in front of Ada.

  Melissa walked up to the front counter and pulled the prior day’s receipts out from under the cash register drawer and looked carefully through them.

  Several customers came through the door at once and Melissa put the receipts back in order to give her patrons her full attention.

  Melissa looked around the market and thought about how far it had come since she first opened it six years ago with one large room and a back room for stock.

  Now, she had a bakery counter, café tables, a built-on section for fresh, local produce from the large market gardens which were expertly tended by her gardener, Carl, and a selection of whole foods and supplements to rival many larger markets. In addition, they had a farmer’s market on the weekends, which Carl also managed.

  The newly-arrived customers spread out throughout the store. She came out from behind the counter where she was more visible if any of them had questions.

  One woman walked past Miss Ada and must have glanced at her plate. “Oh, Ada, what do you have there?” the woman asked.

  “Lavender meringue and chocolate cream puffs,” Ada announced. Every head in the market whipped around and started peering from wherever they were to see the fare on Ada’s table.

  “Up here; check it out,” Flora called out across the floor, and immediately everyone hovered around the bakery case.

  Melissa looked u
p, and Flora winked at her. Melissa felt very pleased to have such capable and innovative employees. She hated to even use the word employees because they were certainly her friends. It seemed Flora had been right about the meringues and cream puffs.

  “Monsoon meringues!” a woman squealed. “How clever!”

  Before they knew it, the tables were filling up, Flora was refilling the case with her temptations, and other people were coming to buy them as a result of texts or phone calls they had received. Melissa hoped Flora could keep up with the demand, but it appeared as though she were well-prepared, as she kept replenishing the cases. Luckily, Vivian, Melissa’s other counter help showed up shortly after to assist.

  Once Vivian was helping at the counter, Melissa went back onto the floor, and continued looking at the grocery and supplement shelves. She was missing at least three bottles of high-end supplements which truly puzzled her. She had looked briefly through the receipts and had seen no purchases for those items. She knew also that they had done it after Kim had left because Kim would have restocked the shelves after they left.

  She put it on the back-burner for now, but she took her phone from her pocket and made a note for herself to check on it later.

  While she had the phone pulled out, she noticed she had a text from her friend, Brian Byrne, who had helped her solve two mysteries lately, and with whom she had developed an interesting friendship. She had to admit it had progressed beyond “friendship” at this point, but she didn’t know whether either of them was ready for it to progress further.

  The text read, “Call or text me when you get home. I have strange but exciting news.”

  She smiled at that. Brian rarely called or texted her at work unless it was urgent, but he must have been very excited at the news he had to share. She wasn’t sure that she could wait all day to find out what he was so excited about, so she decided she might have to walk home at lunch to call him if it wasn’t pouring by then.

  # # #

  Although the sky was increasingly threatening, and it was sprinkling here and there, Melissa braved the threat of the downpour to run home for lunch. She had her head down to fend off the harder sprinkles, so she didn’t see Brian sitting in his green and white Mini-Cooper when she pulled up.

  He opened his door just as she was parallel with it, and she jumped. “Hey!” she said, “Looks like we both had the same idea, except I thought I was calling you.”

  He grinned and put his arm behind her back, as they dashed for the dry portico outside her front door. They barely made it under when the clouds let go and began to pelt hard rain.

  They both stood there, inhaling. There was nothing like the scent of the first monsoon rain of the season. Dust and dryness immediately gave way to the green aroma of the rain-bruised creosote bush, mesquite, and palo verde trees—a perfume like no other on earth.

  He stood there with his arm around her slender waist, his eyes closed, sensing. She opened hers and looked at him, wondering what had him so excited that he would drive down from Tucson—more than an hour away—to tell her.

  He opened them, and they turned toward the house. She unlocked the door, and Sweet Pea, Melissa’s tabby greeted them with cat chatter and a rub around the ankles.

  “This is an unexpected surprise,” she said.

  “I decided it was something I wanted to tell you in person rather than over the phone.”

  She couldn’t imagine what it entailed, and the air of mystery made her a tiny bit apprehensive. Was he leaving? Taking a job somewhere, perhaps, away from Tucson? she thought.

  Just then, a huge thunderclap made them both jump.

  “C’mon into the kitchen,” she said. “It’s really cozy in there when it’s raining. Just leave the front door open to the screen; I’ll set a cross-breeze from the kitchen.”

  Melissa got a jug of iced tea from the refrigerator and poured it into tall, thin glasses. Then, she garnished it with mint, which she plucked from a miniature herb garden in the kitchen window.

  Brian had settled into a chair behind the kitchen table, and she sat opposite him. He was grinning. It made her feel better; she couldn’t imagine that he came to tell her he was leaving with his beautiful, boyish features so lit up.

  He leaned back into the chair and relaxed a bit. He looked at the table and began to play with some stevia packets she had in a small container. Now, he was making her nervous the opposite way; she began to think he might ask her to marry him.

  Good grief, you can certainly let your mind run away in the wildest conjectures, she told herself.

  At last he leaned forward. “You remember around the time Jim James died that I had attended a funeral of a friend?”

  “I do,” she said. “Pancreatic cancer wasn’t it? And we decided he must have been a bit of a recluse.”

  “Yes. That’s the one. I got a letter yesterday telling me…well…telling me he had left me his estate.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “Gosh, you didn’t tell me you were that good of friends.”

  “We were early on. We worked together to help extricate him from some bad scams of which he had been the victim. We became good friends at that time, and he always said he owed me one. We saw each other a few times—went fishing in Canada, skiing in Colorado, took a trip to Europe, all at his expense. I felt like I had been paid back multi-fold. I had absolutely no idea about his will.”

  “That’s pretty amazing. He must have thought a lot of you.”

  “Apparently. I had no idea how much. Had I had some idea, perhaps I’d have stayed in touch more.”

  Melissa shook her head. “He probably had it the way he wanted it. Perhaps more on your part would have been an intrusion. He was apparently a very private person.”

  “He was—which was what got him in trouble in the first place. He didn’t want to talk to anyone else about the investments he was making—simply to avoid being social rather than any desire to be secretive. However, when things got out of hand and he realized he was being taken for a ride, he contacted me. He was living in Tucson at the time.”

  “So, do you have any idea what his estate entails?”

  “I do,” he said, “about a half million in cash, and another million and a half in property.”

  Melissa gasped. “So…you’re not coming to tell me that you’re going away to live in California on one of his properties, are you?”

  He laughed. “Absolutely not. I came to tell you so that we can dream together about what I should do with it all.”

  This time she was surprised into silence. She had no words.

  “I…I,” she said.

  He took her hand that was resting on the table in front of her and said, “I’m alone, too. I have family in Canada, but once my grandparents passed away, the whole family migrated back to the hometown, except for me, and there’s a reason why I stayed behind. As a PI, I don’t have much of a social life. Everybody’s afraid to talk to me. I’m not sure what they think a PI does with someone’s every day information, but, believe me, if they won’t talk to me because they have something to hide, they’re not people I want to hang out with, anyway. But you! You I can talk to.”

  That was quite a mouthful, she thought, and it is the first time I have really heard Brian talk about friends and family aside from a cursory answer to a question. So there is a reason he separated from his family, and I guess it is probably something besides the obvious difference between the weather in Arizona and Canada. But that is something to be explored later.

  She wrinkled her nose at him. “I like that you feel you can talk to me.”

  “It’s more than that,” he said. “I hope we’re truly friends.”

  “I hope so, too,” she said, shifting in her chair, a bit uncomfortable with the direction of the conversation.

  “Come in here,” he said, picking up his iced tea and walking into the living room.

  She turned off the light in the kitchen. The leaden skies showed little sign of lightening up. She turned on the
gas fireplace without heat, just for cheer. He set his tea on a coaster on the coffee table. She had recently purchased some Spanish-style oak and upholstery furniture, complete with brass nails. Although at first glance it looked to be nineteenth century, it was much too modern. It was a sectional—two pieces which faced the TV screen for movie watching, and the other two pieces were side-by-side chaise lounges.

  Brian pulled her down beside him onto the chaise lounges. In one way, she felt he was being really bold which made her a tiny bit anxious, but another part of her loved it completely. She hadn’t had much romance in her life since coming back to Catalonia. It was a great little tourist town—but not that great in the men department. The only one she had really dated in the last five years was an EMT named Grant Martin who she had known in high school. He had been enamored, but she had not.

  She loved Brian’s dark auburn hair, his square-jawed, Kennedy-esque features, and his boyish, blue eyes.

  “So, dream with me,” he said.

  “A half-million dollars,” she said. “If you’re lucky, that will last you till you’re 50.”

  “But that’s just the cash,” he said.

  “If I sold some of the property and invested the money, I could have plenty for the rest of my life. Besides, with two million dollars, I’m hardly going to become one of the idle rich. I’m still young; I have a Criminal Justice degree; and some of this money will give me the opportunity to study further so that I can be a Crime Scene Information Analyst Consultant.”

  “A Crime Scene Information Analyst Consultant?”

  “Yes, I added ‘Consultant’ myself. If I can get more schooling under my belt, I’d be able to look at crime scenes, run research, and analyze criminal behavior. I’m very much interested in that. I want to be good at it so people will call me and ask for my assistance, but I want to be the best so I can say no. I’ve spent too many years enjoying setting my own schedule and taking the jobs I prefer to work full-time for an agency.”

  “You’re too funny,” she said, relaxing back against his arm.

  “Unless, of course, you just want to travel the world with me, and then I’ll give up all Crime Scene Information Analyst Consultant ambitions.”