by Leslie Meier
I looked around the kitchen. It had two small windows, dark wood cabinets, and looked like it hadn’t been updated in fifty years, but it was spotless. “But Gwyn’s not coming anymore?”
“No. Quit three weeks ago. Didn’t show up the Monday after Thanksgiving, and that was that.”
“Did you call the elder services office to find out—”
“Wasn’t interested. Don’t need her. I’m fine on my own.”
I wasn’t sure how she could be. “Do you drive? How do you get—”
“Never learned. Never cared to. Mr. St. Onge drove me, until he went to a better place. Now I make do. Take taxis.”
That made sense. One of Chris’s three jobs, four now with the restaurant, was driving a cab he owned. It kept him jumping evenings during the tourist season, but in the winter most of his fares came from taking older people to the supermarket.
“My mother says you had another regular visitor, a young man.” I continued to press.
“My grandnephew, Bradley. He lives with his parents over in East Busman’s Village and is kind enough to visit an old woman from time to time.”
“Has he been here recently?”
She shrugged her thin shoulders. “Can’t expect a young man to stay interested in an old bag of bones like me.”
“So who is looking in on you, Mrs. St. Onge?”
“I don’t need no ‘looking in on.’ Never have, never will.” She paused. “Mr. Eames comes regular to take my trash to the dump and do things that need doing around the house.”
When she said it, I remembered Mr. Eames and his rattletrap truck. He was an elderly man with a bent posture and massive forearms. All he needed was a corncob pipe to have looked exactly like Popeye the Sailor.
“Okay.” I backed slowly through the kitchen doorway toward the front door. “But can I pick up some groceries for you? Is there anything you need?”
She followed me, leaning more heavily on the cane. “That’s nice of you. Come over next time you do your shopping and I’ll give you a list, and some money. And I’ll pay you for your trouble, of course.”
By this time I was almost to the door. “No, no, no. I couldn’t take your money. It’s no trouble.”
“It most certainly is trouble. I insist on paying for your service, or I won’t let you do it.”
I put my hand on the doorknob. “I won’t take your money, but there is one way you could repay me. Mom says you make an amazing Bûche de Noël. I’m trying to learn. Will you teach me?”
That brought her up short. “A Bûche de Noël, do you say? I used to make half a dozen every Christmas season. Gave them to relatives for their celebrations.” She paused. “I can’t manage carrying the heavy pans and bowls, what with having to use my cane, but I reckon I could teach you if you supplied the muscle.”
“Yes, please. We have a deal. Can we start soon?”
“Come back in the morning. I’ll give you a list for the supermarket with my little items and the ingredients we’ll need. We’ll bake the base when you come back.”
I practically danced. “Thank you, Mrs. St. Onge. Thanks so much. I’ll be back at nine o’clock tomorrow.”
Chapter Three
The next morning I made my way across the frozen grass to Mrs. St. Onge’s house. When she answered my knock, she was up and dressed and had her list all ready. Aside from the ingredients for the Bûche, the list was spare—tomato juice, a loaf of bread, oatmeal, and some luncheon meats. Aside from the eggs, which were on the part of the list labeled “Cake,” there wasn’t much protein. When I attempted to ask, “Is this all?” she cut me off with a wave.
Before I went to the supermarket, I drove ten miles out of my way to the elder services office to inquire how they’d managed to leave an old lady at home, unsupported, over the holidays. It hadn’t snowed yet, but with winter looming, I thought the practice was dangerous.
The middle-aged woman who agreed to speak to me was appropriately cagey about answering my questions about Mrs. St. Onge, citing client confidentiality. She was more forthcoming about her employee, or rather former employee, Gwyneth. “Up and quit. No notice. Didn’t even have the nerve to tell me. Her mother, Mrs. Hillyer, er . . .” The woman paused, recognizing she’d revealed Gwyneth’s last name, then hurried on. “Her mother called for her. Can you imagine? Twenty-nine years old and her mother has to call to say she’s quit.” Like the magnet filings within an Etch A Sketch, the woman’s sharp features slid into a “these young people today” expression. Then she seemed to realize I was close in age to Gwyneth Hillyer and therefore unlikely to agree my entire generation was an irresponsible mess. “Whatever,” she muttered.
“Are you looking for someone new for Mrs. St. Onge?” I asked.
“Yes, yes,” the woman answered, apparently forgetting her concerns about my neighbor’s privacy. “Maine has the oldest population in the country and our county has the oldest population in Maine. As soon as I get through the approvals and can hire someone, I’ll add your neighbor to our list. These things take time.”
In the meantime the holidays would pass and the winter weather would arrive full force. I thanked her for her time and said I would check in again.
She didn’t thank me for that.
* * *
I did the grocery shopping at a Hannaford I passed on the way back to Busman’s Harbor. It was larger than the one on our peninsula and I felt more certain they’d have everything I needed. I stowed the bags in the back of my new, used Subaru Forester. The ancient Caprice I’d bought the year before had made it through the previous winter and most of the summer, far beyond its life expectancy. After nine years in Manhattan, it had taken me a while to come to terms with needing a car, but now that I had a reliable one that could handle our Maine weather, I adored it.
I parked in the St. Onge driveway and made two trips carrying bags to the front porch, then rang the bell. I heard the clump of Mrs. St. Onge’s cane coming across the living room.
“Come in, then.”
I dragged the groceries into the kitchen and put the personal purchases away under Mrs. St. Onge’s exacting supervision. When she directed me to put the oatmeal on the third shelf in the pantry, I did as she asked. Or so I thought.
“Not that shelf! The one below it!” She’d appeared in the doorway to the pantry so quietly I jumped. She glowered at me, her cane raised like she was about to fence with me.
“Sorry.” I moved the offending box.
“Not the third shelf from the top, the third from the bottom. Why would anyone store the oatmeal with the soups? Stupid girl!”
I began to have an inkling why Gwyn had left without a good-bye.
At the old woman’s direction, I left the bags containing the ingredients for the cake out on the counter. Once the groceries were stowed, she went to work wordlessly, lifting a ceramic bowl out of a lower cabinet and filling a saucepan with water.
“Let me help.” I moved forward, hands out to take the pot. Carrying heavy things was the part of the job she’d said she couldn’t do.
“I can do it.” She’d left her cane by the sink to carry the pot with both hands, limping awkwardly as she moved toward the stove on the other side of the kitchen. She limped back, picked up the ceramic bowl, placed it on the pot, and turned on the burner.
I grabbed my notebook from the Snowden Family Clambake tote bag I always carried and began to write. “Place ceramic bowl on pan of water. Turn on heat,” I wrote.
“I’m turning on the oven to three hundred fifty degrees,” she said over her shoulder. She measured out a quarter cup of milk and poured it into the bowl. Then she tossed in what looked like a quarter stick of butter. I dutifully wrote down the measurements and instructions, putting a question mark after the butter. I’d try to confirm the amount with her later.
While the milk and butter heated, Mrs. St. Onge slowly made her way back across the fake red brick of the linoleum floor. She opened a bottom cabinet and bent to lift out a bowl, the bigge
r sibling of the one on the stove.
“Let me get that.” This time I insisted. Both bowls were beige with a navy blue band around them. My mother had the same set. The big one weighed a ton.
“Set it on the table,” Mrs. St. Onge instructed.
I did as I was told. The old woman rooted through the grocery bags, pulling out the cake flour, baking powder, and salt. “There’s a flour sifter in the cabinet over the icebox,” she said. “Get it down and sift three quarters of a cup of flour into the big bowl. Then add a teaspoon of the baking powder and a quarter teaspoon of salt and whisk it together. The whisk is in the drawer next to the sink.”
“I’m glad you know the measurements so precisely,” I said. “I was worried you’ve been making the Bûches for so long you did it all by eyeball.”
She grunted. “I cook by eyeball, as you say. Cooking is art. Baking is science. You have to measure.”
While I whisked, I attempted to restart the conversation about Gwyn Hillyer. “So the woman from elder services who helped out, she just stopped coming?” I didn’t want to admit I’d been to talk to the caregiver’s supervisor.
“I told you that yesterday. Didn’t need her in the first place.” Mrs. St. Onge pursed her lips in distaste. “She was a most unpleasant girl. Had her own ideas about how things should be done.”
The greatest sin of all.
As we talked, she got two more bowls from the cupboard, the middle sizes from the set we were using. With a quick hand and deft flick of the wrist, she cracked an egg on the side of one bowl, and then separated it, putting the white in one bowl and the yolk in the other. She separated two more eggs as efficiently. “Get the beater. In the drawer,” she directed.
I found a hand beater in the drawer next to the sink. My mother had one, in case of a whipped-cream emergency during a power outage, she said. But how likely was that? I’d never used it.
Mrs. St. Onge pushed the bowl containing the egg whites forward. “You beat these. I’ll add the sugar.” I went for it, turning the handle quickly, while she fed a quarter cup of sugar into the egg whites a tablespoon at a time. Soft white peaks formed on the mixture just about the time my arm went numb.
“And you said your nephew stopped coming. Why is that?”
Mrs. St. Onge took the beaters from me and shook the egg white that clung to them into the bowl. She limped over to the sink to rinse and dry them. “Grandnephew,” she corrected. “I don’t know why. He just did. Who knows why anyone does anything? Being honest, I’m glad. Always pestering me, asking about my parents and grandparents.” She stopped washing and, standing up as straight as she was able, pushed air out through tight lips in exasperation. “The past is better left to rest, I find.”
“You said he lives in East Busman’s Village,” I prompted.
“Lives with his parents, my late sister’s son and his wife. Why would a man, a successful accountant, thirty years old, live with his mother and father? Time he got married and settled into a place of his own.”
“Did you say that to him?” I began to suspect why the grandnephew wasn’t coming around so much anymore, either.
“’Course I did,” the old woman allowed. “Though why anyone had to say it, I don’t know. Plain as the nose on his face. He needs to get out of his parents’ house.”
The pot on the stove was simmering by then. Mrs. St. Onge turned off the burner, leaving the bowl on top of the pan. She returned to the table and, with that wrist movement I so envied, she added two more complete eggs to the bowl that contained the egg yolks. Then she put the beaters into the bowl, turning the handle vigorously, pausing only to occasionally sprinkle in the contents of a half cup of white, granulated sugar. I wrote madly in my notebook.
“Do you see your grandnephew’s parents, then?” I asked. “Your nephew and his wife.”
Mrs. St. Onge raised her voice against the din of the metal beaters hitting the side of the ceramic bowl. “No. I don’t like him much. Pushy man. Thinks he’s the boss, even when he’s in my home. And that wife. She’s a milquetoast. Can’t abide people who don’t speak their minds.” Mrs. St. Onge was certainly speaking her mind, and I could see why she and her nephew weren’t close.
“And their name is?”
“Woodward. Richard and Whatshername Woodward.”
“What’s her name?”
“That’s what I told you. I can’t remember. Something soft and unmemorable.”
I doubted a woman still as sharp as Mrs. St. Onge would really forget the first name of her nephew’s wife, the mother of one of her most consistent visitors and someone who lived in the next village.
Mrs. St. Onge left the beaters and went back to the stove, banging the cane with each step. This time, when she stuck her finger in the bowl, she counted out loud, “One, one-thousand, two, one-thousand,” until she got to ten, then jerked her hand away.
After a longer time than I could have turned that crank, she dragged the beaters across the surface of the bright yellow mixture. They left tracks across the top, and she pronounced it done. She ordered me to get a big rubber spatula from the drawer, grabbed it from me, and then folded the egg whites into the egg yolks a third at a time.
Then she grabbed the sifter and sifted the flour mixture into the wet ingredients, occasionally stopping to fold it with the spatula.
“Can I do that?”
“You’re not ready,” she snapped.
I might have been getting a lesson, but it definitely wasn’t hands-on.
“Stick your pinky finger in that,” she said, indicating the bowl containing the milk and butter on the stove.
“What?”
She repeated the instruction and I did as I was told. The mixture was hot and closed around my finger. “Count,” she commanded. “One one-thousand, two one-thousand.”
I counted, until I got to ten, one-thousand. “Ouch!” I snatched my pinky out of the bowl, hurried to the sink and ran cold water over it. Was this her revenge for my request to be more hands-on? She was as prickly as a cactus, no doubt about it. I considered ending the lessons after today and trying to make the cake on my own. But three failures had taught me I needed the help.
“Perfect temperature,” she said with satisfaction. “It should remain hot enough you can’t stand to hold your finger in it for more than the count of ten.” She folded the milk mixture into the rest.
When she was done, she lined a rectangular cake pan with parchment paper and poured the mixture in.
“How big is the pan?” I asked.
“The perfect size for a Bûche de Noël,” she answered.
I wrote down “10 x 15?” She popped the pan in the oven, slammed the door, and set the old-fashioned timer on the stove for twelve minutes.
I gathered all the bowls and utensils, put them in the sink, and began washing before she could beat me to it. She collapsed in a kitchen chair, took off her glasses, and rubbed her eyes. It was obvious the cake-making had worn her out.
I’d finished drying the last item in the dish rack just as the timer dinged. Mrs. St. Onge removed the cake from the oven. It was golden and beautiful and smelled like heaven. She loosened the sides of the cake with a sharp knife, covered the top with a clean dish towel, and flipped it onto the kitchen table. She shimmied the pan off the cake and then gingerly peeled off the parchment paper. Then she slowly rolled the whole thing, towel and all, into a log shape and put it on a cooling rack.
“That’s it for today,” she announced. “We’ll do the filling tomorrow.”
“Okay. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
She looked around the neat kitchen, peering through her thick glasses. “The parlor could use some dusting.” She gave me a cloth and feather duster and set me to it. The knickknacks on the mantel, the side tables, and the back of the old upright piano were covered in a thin gray coating, the kind of soot you got with an old burner when the oil heat first came on. I wondered how well Mrs. St. Onge could actually see. As I worked, I got madde
r and madder at the caregiver and the relative who had abandoned her. She might be tough to deal with, but that was no excuse.
I dusted the dining room while I was at it and returned to the kitchen. The old woman sat in the kitchen chair, eyes closed behind the distorting lenses. “Anything else I can do?” I asked.
She opened her eyes, shook her head vigorously, picked up her cane, and stomped to the front door. If she’d handed me my hat and said, “What’s your hurry?” I couldn’t have been more thoroughly dismissed.
When I was on the front porch, the heavy door slammed behind me. She was difficult. Curt. Not warm. The opposite of warm. But that didn’t mean she should be left alone by her family members during the holidays. I got in my Subaru and pulled out of the drive. It was time to find out what was up with these Woodwards.
Chapter Four
I found the address for Richard Woodward in East Busman’s Village on my trusty phone. East Busman’s was a charming little enclave a few miles out of town. It sat on a thin peninsula that jutted into the Gulf of Maine. In the center of town was a millpond, with a small waterfall at one end that had originally supplied the mill’s power. A swath of green parkland surrounded the pond, originally used for grazing cows. Even though the grass was brown and the leaves had fallen off the maples, it was still a beautiful sight.
I didn’t have any trouble finding the Woodward house. It was undoubtedly visible from outer space. The front yard hosted a human-sized Santa in a sleigh who nodded his head and waved. The reindeer were all there too, also full-sized, which was big. On the roof was a deep red banner that proclaimed, “Merry Christmas!” in marquee-style lights, which were lit even now in the middle of the day. There was a wreath on every window, and a larger one on the door. I threaded my way through the reindeer and knocked.
“Hello. Merry Christmas.” The trim blond woman at the door was in her midfifties, dressed in well-fitting kilt, white blouse, and red cardigan, with an appliqué wreath on the lapel. She had to be Whatshername.