Pamela’s heart sank to discover that more than one person was offering kittens to good homes. Soon it would be time to find homes for Catrina’s lively brood, but how many kittens could a tiny town like Arborville absorb at once?
Inside the market, Pamela selected a cart from the small collection waiting near the entrance and wheeled it toward the bakery counter, where a tempting assortment of loaves in various shapes and hues beckoned. She chose her favorite whole-grain, a gleaming oblong the color of toasted wheat, waited while it was sliced and bagged, and moved on to the cheese counter. There she hesitated between Gouda and cheddar, and finally came away with half a pound of each.
She maneuvered the cart into the produce section, where a row of bins piled high with greens of every sort faced bins of squash and root vegetables across a narrow wood-floored aisle. She added a head of romaine to her cart and moved on to collect a bundle of carrots and a bunch of celery. A special display at the end of the aisle featured sweet corn, still in its husks, and billed as “New Jersey’s Own.” Pamela couldn’t resist, and piled six ears into her cart. A display of local apples occupied the corresponding spot across the way. She picked out four, rusty red with golden streaks.
Farther down the fruit aisle, neighboring bins offered peaches, plums, and apricots. September was the last chance for good peaches, local peaches that tasted the way peaches were supposed to taste. Pamela pushed her cart a few yards farther and cupped a peach in her hand. It was pale gold, velvety, with a rosy blush. It wasn’t soft yet, but she knew peaches were happy to ripen off the tree. A bowl of peaches on the kitchen counter could perfume a kitchen for a few days and then turn into a pie—or a cobbler. In fact peach cobbler was exactly what she planned to make the following Tuesday when Knit and Nibble met at her house. She’d wait a few days to buy the peaches though.
The question of dinner for the next few nights still needed to be addressed, and she couldn’t forget the cat and kitten food and butter. A quick detour through the canned goods section allowed her to cross the first two items off her list, and she picked up a pound of butter on her way through the dairy aisle. At the meat counter she studied the offerings. The Co-Op had good meat, much of it from local farms, but it was hard to be inspired when cooking for one.
A package of smoked ham hocks caught her eye—not the most exciting perhaps, compared to the marbled steaks, dainty lamb chops, and racks of baby back ribs, but Pamela loved making bean soup. And she liked her meals to reflect the seasons. A salad was the perfect dinner at the end of a long summer day, but by mid-September a steaming bowl of soup ladled from a pot that had simmered on the stove all afternoon would be most welcome. And she could cook today and have a week’s worth of meals. She added the ham hocks to her cart.
* * *
Pamela was happy to set down the two canvas bags, laden with groceries and heavier than she’d expected them to be, when she stepped up onto her porch. Inside the house, she was greeted by five hungry kittens and their equally hungry mother, and she quickly spooned cat food into a bowl for Catrina and kitten food into the large bowl the kittens shared—though their first ventures with solid food had involved climbing into the bowl.
When the groceries were stowed away, she toasted a slice of the fresh whole-grain bread and ate it with a few slices of Gouda, finishing the meal off with an apple. It was only one p.m. She’d work her way through two of the articles that waited upstairs on her computer, then take a break and get the soup started.
At four p.m. Pamela was back in the kitchen, studying the dried beans in the jars she had lined up on the counter. The beans ranged in color from white to deepest maroon, with a jar of speckled pinto beans at the end. She poured from this jar and that until she’d filled a two-cup measure. In a large heavy pot on the stove, chopped onion, carrots, and celery were already softening in a few tablespoons of olive oil, and sprigs of parsley and thyme from the herb pots on the back porch waited on the counter. When the beans, water, and a ham hock had been added to the pot and all was on its way to a low simmer, she returned to her office and article number three, “Victorian Needlework in the Victoria and Albert Museum.”
Pamela worked until six-thirty, when the tempting aroma of bean soup summoned her down to the kitchen. The ham hock had simmered among the beans and other vegetables as she edited her way through the Victorian needlework article and “The Role of Weaving in Modern Mayan Culture.” It was time to extract it from the pot and trim off the now-tender bits of ham. She scooped it out onto a cutting board and set to work with her favorite paring knife.
But after a few minutes she paused in her task, letting her knife rest. It was unusual to hear sirens on this block of Orchard Street, or any block of Orchard Street in fact. Emergency vehicles sometimes sped along Arborville’s main artery, Arborville Avenue, at the top of the hill, or busy County Road, at the bottom. But this siren was close and drawing closer. She set the knife down and quickly washed her greasy fingers at the sink.
Outside it was still daylight, but the sky behind the church steeple was reddening. A man and a woman were standing on the sidewalk in front of the church. They were looking eagerly up the street, but the expressions on their faces suggested that whatever they were waiting for wasn’t connected with a happy event. The siren had become so loud now that when Pamela turned to look in the direction they were looking she wasn’t surprised to see a police car only a few houses away and bearing down on them. Pamela blinked as the lights on its roof flashed in sequence, left to right and back again, like so many flashbulbs.
The police car swerved toward the curb as it neared Pamela’s house and then coasted to a stop in front of the church. The doors swung open and two officers leapt out as if jointly responding to an internal command of “Ready, set, go!”
“This way,” the woman called from the sidewalk. She motioned the officers to follow and she headed toward the driveway that led to the church parking lot. The man who had been waiting with her joined the procession, and the four—the officers in their dark-blue uniforms with the heavy leather gun belts and stiff visored caps, and the man and woman in jeans and T-shirts—disappeared around the side of the church.
Pamela stood uncertainly in her yard. She was tempted to follow the procession toward the parking lot and whatever it was that had seemed serious enough to summon the police. But she knew that the sensible choice would be to go back inside, finish cutting off the ham bits, and add them to the nearly-ready bean soup. Then a third alternative presented itself.
She was just turning toward her house where the sensible choice in the form of the ham hock and the bean soup awaited, when from across the street came Bettina’s voice. She turned back to see Bettina scurrying toward her, with Wilfred several paces behind. Bettina was still wearing the chic wrap dress she had started the day in. Wilfred, judging from his apron, was evidently in charge of the evening meal.
“What could be happening?” Bettina panted. “We heard the siren but we couldn’t imagine it was on its way to Orchard Street.”
Wilfred joined them. “Most unusual,” he said. “The church, of all places.”
“Rehearsal,” Bettina observed. “The Players are here tonight. I saw Caralee arriving when I opened the door for a UPS delivery a little while ago.”
“Uh-oh!” Wilfred held up a finger and closed his eyes. He frowned as if straining to make out a sound. “More sirens.” He opened his eyes. Pamela heard them too. This time they were coming from both directions.
At nearly the same moment, another police car appeared at the top of the hill, and an ambulance swung around the corner from County Road. The competing sirens intertwined in a discordant competition of wails and howls, growing so loud that the sound was almost a physical presence. With a few last resentful growls, both vehicles nudged into spots at the curb and were silent.
EMTs in dark pants and white shirts hurried from the ambulance toward the church parking lot, followed by another police officer and a man in a sports jacket a
nd slacks.
“It’s Detective Clayborn,” Bettina said. “I talk to him sometimes for the Advocate.”
“This doesn’t look good,” Wilfred said. Concern had banished the genial expression he usually wore and he seemed almost a stranger. Bettina reached for his arm and he tugged her to his side.
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