Tea and Primroses

by Tess Thompson

  TEA AND

  PRIMROSES

  TESS THOMPSON

  Booktrope Editions

  Seattle, WA 2014

  COPYRIGHT 2014 TESS THOMPSON

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.

  Attribution — You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

  Noncommercial — You may not use this work for commercial purposes.

  No Derivative Works — You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.

  Inquiries about additional permissions

  should be directed to: info@booktrope.com

  Cover Design by Greg Simanson

  Edited by Jennifer D. Munro

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to similarly named places or to persons living or deceased is unintentional.

  PRINT ISBN 978-1-62015-209-6

  EPUB ISBN 978-1-62015-305-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2014901685

  Table of Contents

  COVER

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  DEDICATION

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ALSO BY TESS THOMPSON

  MORE GREAT READS FROM BOOKTROPE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  As always, I must first and foremost thank my editor, Jennifer D. Munro, for her remarkable and insightful editing. I could not do this without you, nor would I want to. Thank you to Susan Fye for your discerning and precise eye as final proofer. Greg Simanson for your beautiful cover; your talent astounds. To my team at Booktrope: Katherine Sears, Heather Ludviksson, Ken Shear, Andy Roberts, and Jesse James Freeman, thank you for your continued support in making my dreams a reality. To author Marni Mann for the coffee and brainstorming session on a rainy day in Sarasota. Samantha March, my new book manager, welcome to the team and cheers to much success for both of us. To my early reader group, thank you for your encouragement, support and dedication. And to all the book bloggers and fans that have been with us since the very first book, we couldn’t do this without you. As long as you keep reading, I’ll keep writing. To my aunt, Deborah Cross, for helping me through a rough personal year in more ways than can be counted. And to my little girls, Ella and Emerson, for being my “lottery.” I love you both so very much. Finally, to my mother, for always encouraging me to be myself. I strive every moment to be half the mother you are.

  For my mother

  PROLOGUE

  SUTTON MANSFIELD PUSHED OPEN her front window; the familiar scent of the seaside entered the room. It was an ordinary morning in Legley Bay: the sound of seagulls in the distance; the familiar view of her street, lined with modest houses built mostly in the 1940s; and, just beyond, the Pacific Ocean a paler blue than the August sky. Legley Bay was a one-stoplight kind of town, the unwanted stepchild of the northern Oregon coast. There were no tourist temptations here, no stretch of beach with famed rocks like Cannon Beach or Manzanita or Arch Cape. No one opened shops or restaurants to tempt wealthy city dwellers. It was nothing more than the ordinary here, buildings sagging and faded from damp, salty air, and small businesses struggling to survive against Wal-Mart and Costco thirty or so miles in every direction but west.

  Opening the window a little farther, she took in a deep breath and felt grateful for the familiar. Home is home. It was good to return, although the two months studying in Paris with a master baker had been illuminating and expanding both personally and professionally. Her mother, Constance, had surprised Sutton with the trip to Paris as a thirtieth birthday gift—a gesture so thoughtful and generous it brought tears to her eyes just thinking of it now. She turned away from the view and back to her cozy bungalow, decorated with eclectic pieces she’d gathered over the years, antiques and shabby chic, all very French countryside, like the artisan and rustic baked goods she made: crusty breads, buttery pastries, soft cookies. She’d conquered the croissant while in Paris. She smiled, thinking of it, but instantly sobered. There was nowhere to debut her new skills but her own kitchen. She had no job. Six months ago she’d left her assistant baker position at a well-known bakery in Portland, where she’d apprenticed for the better part of five years, to move home to Legley Bay. It was her dream to open her own shop but so far the courage to do so was as elusive as the perfect croissant.

  The doorbell rang. Who could it be? No one but her mother knew she was back in town. She turned down the radio; her mobile phone was buzzing—Roger. She tossed the phone on the couch; it bounced on a cushion and fell onto the soft rug. Voicemail. Just go to voicemail, she thought. I need time to think. She needed to speak with her mother first. Her mother would help her sort it through. Mom, I’m having doubts about the wedding. That’s all she would need to say. Then they would hash it out over a glass of wine or a walk on the beach. Is it just that I’m afraid or do I not love him enough? Her mother would know the answer.

  The doorbell rang again just as she reached for the doorknob. Opening it, she saw Tim Ball, the town’s Chief of Police. He was the same age as her mother, in his mid-to-late fifties, and his lined face was still handsome, hinting at the town’s football star he once was. But today his skin was gray and his features pinched. She backed away from the door, as if he were going to hurt her. What was the matter?

  “Sutton, can I come in?”

  She nodded, backing into the room. Don’t say it.

  He guided her toward the couch. “Please sit, sweetheart.”

  She did so, clasping her hands together on her lap. “Is it my mom?”

  “I’m so sorry.” He stopped; his eyes reddened. “She was killed this morning.”

  “How?”

  “Hit and run. She was on her bicycle. You know, her morning ride to town. I’m so sorry,” he repeated, voice strangled in the back of his throat. “Your dad was my best friend. I was at their wedding. But you know that.”

  Tim Ball was next to her on the couch now, about to pat her shoulder. When had he sat? She was outside her body, thoughts floating just above her, like a cartoon. Hit and run. Killed.

  “Is there someone you want me to call?” Tim asked. “You know, to stay with you.”

  “Louise,” she said. “Call Louise.”

  She barely noticed when he flinched at the sound of his ex-wife’s name. “I’ll call Peter. He can call his mother.”

  “Yes, call Peter. Ask him to come home. Please.” She started to cry, hiding her mouth with her hand. Sutton’s mother and Louise had been best friends all their lives. Sutton had grown up with Louise’s sons, Peter and Jack Ball. They were all close, like family. Peter was a police detective in Seattle now. He’d married Cleo last summer and the old gang had all been together at the wedding; her best friend Gigi and Peter’s younger brother Jack had been there. Everyone but Declan.

  “I’m looking at this carefully,” said Tim. “Examining it from every angle.”

  She stopped crying, looking at him, her heart rate like that of a bird. “What do you mean? You mean like someone did this on purpose?”


  “Like I said, I’m looking at every angle. No stone unturned, so to speak.”

  “But who would want to murder my mother? Everyone loved her.”

  “A crazed fan?”

  “She wrote novels—she wasn’t a rock star. And she was so reclusive. I don’t think anyone even knew where she lived. Especially after what happened to poor Stephen King, you know, getting hit by that crazy driver while he was out walking. She was so careful and nervous.” And overprotective of me, she thought. Always worried something was going to happen. This she could hardly be blamed for, given all the loss she’d suffered over the years.

  Tim shook his head, rising to his feet. “I owe it to her to find out.”

  “Call Peter,” she repeated. He’s a hundred times the cop you are. But she kept that inside.

  She walked him to the door and closed it. Time ceased and her heart thumped and ached in her chest. She stumbled to the kitchen and out the back door, walking blindly two blocks west until she reached the steps that went down to the rocky beach. It was a sunny day, the kind of weather they anticipated all year. Legley Bay—it’s nice in August is what the locals said, always with a hint of apology in their voices, as if they had anything to do with what the weather did or didn’t do. This was the way with the locals, sorry for this and sorry for that, like the damp salt air had crept into them and made everything gray as the gray buildings.

  But her mother loved Legley Bay no matter the weather. She loved August the most. Her mother was soft and fair and beautiful and gracious—simple. She loved the beach, a good book, and a strong cup of tea.

  When Sutton reached the rocky shore she trudged toward the water, eyes blurry with tears, until she reached the sand, newly wet from a crashing wave, and fell to her knees. She dropped her face into her hands, her torso bowed over her knees. She sobbed, her salty tears and the salty seawater like reunited sisters. A wave came, soaking her thin cotton skirt, but she didn’t feel the rush of cold on her skin. Another came. And another. Until finally she was exhausted from crying and shivering from the cold and she rose to her feet, looking as far out to the horizon as she could, squinting in the sunlight, remembering how as a child Declan had said he could see another country if he held his gaze just so. See it, Sutton. Someday we’ll get married and go all over the world, just you and me. She’d been frightened by the thought of all those foreign lands. I’ll stay here instead and you can bring me treasures, she had answered.

  Where are you now, Declan? Would he have felt the shift in their world, the life he’d left six years ago? Would he somehow feel the loss as keenly as she? Surely he would?

  Declan, I need you. Wherever you are, come home.

  ***

  Declan Treadwell, napping during the warm Italian August afternoon, with the shades drawn in his small apartment, was dreaming of Sutton. They were children and playing on the beach in Oregon. Their mothers were in low chairs, chatting like they did, sipping glasses of white wine, more friends than employer and employee. Roma and Declan are family, he often heard Constance say to Sutton. They’d all been together since before Declan could remember. His mother, Roma, had come to work for Constance when Declan was only eighteen months old and Sutton wasn’t yet born. Roma ran the house and took care of both Sutton and Declan while Constance wrote stories in the big office. But today was Saturday and they were all enjoying a day of play.

  The sun was warm on his face. The waves crashed back and forth in nature’s music as Sutton buried him with sand, patting it with her tanned hands, her light brown hair in curls down her back. She wore a pink sundress; one strap kept falling off her shoulder. He counted the freckles scattered over her nose and cheeks, like flecks of nutmeg in a bowl of cream with a tad of vanilla. She was laughing, in the way she did, like cascading bells, and her face was alight, giving the world more air. “I need water to complete my evil plan,” she said, patting the sand near his chest.

  “You have to be evil to have an evil plan,” he said, grinning. Sutton was his best friend even though she was a girl. She was such a girl. All she cared about was cooking and wearing pretty dresses. It should disgust him but she was so pretty. And sweet. When she smiled it was like the sun.

  She threw her head back and let out a cackle, imitating the witch they saw in the movie, Wizard of Oz. Just last week they’d watched it, huddled together in her mother’s television room. Sutton was afraid of the monkeys and the wicked witch. She’d been sleeping in her mother’s room every night since. Sutton was afraid of things and Declan was brave. He was two years older and it was his job to protect her, his mother told him over and over. Sutton grabbed their plastic bucket, the red one with the broken handle, and ran toward the water. She knelt down, waiting for the water to come, the wet sand soaking through the thin material of her dress. After a moment, she fell to her knees, putting her face in her hands. Her body was shaking. Was she crying? Had he made her cry? Then he saw it. A wave was cresting, larger than it should be. A tsunami, like the signs warned. This way, the signs said. The giant wave would come and carry her out to sea, away from him. She would be crushed into the bottom of the ocean, mangled and broken. He called out to her as he twitched, trying to lurch his body from the sand that weighed him down. But he could not. He was stuck, as the girl he loved, the girl he’d loved all his life, was overcome by the wave and carried away. She screamed as the wave pulled her under, “Declan! Declan!” And then she was no more.

  He awakened, his T-shirt wet with sweat. Sutton. Something was wrong. The clock said 6:12 p.m. Oregon was nine hours behind Italy. It would be just after 9 a.m. She lived in Legley Bay now. She’d come home to open a bakery of her own.

  The bakery had been Sutton’s dream as a child. After being mentored for five years by the verbally abusive master baker in one of the famous shops in Portland Declan could never remember the name of, Sutton had finally had enough and quit, moving home to Legley Bay. In theory, she’d accepted her mother’s offer to finance her own bakery. “She will blossom back here,” Constance had written to him. “The city is no place for a girl like Sutton. And you know she’s wanted this all her life. She was just too proud to take a loan from me but I finally wore her down, as only a mother can.” He’d written back that he agreed about Sutton and the city, remembering the way she looked walking the beach below her mother’s house. He added that it would be nice for Constance to have Sutton home after all this time. She’d written back only one sentence: “If only you would come too, I could die a happy woman.”

  But it had been six months and Sutton had yet to find a space for her shop. “She has one excuse after another,” wrote Constance. “Fear is ruling reason.”

  Constance didn’t understand fear. She was always on both of them to pursue their dreams without fear. She’d bought him his first set of paints when he was eight years old. “I see the way you look at things. Like an artist.”

  And Sutton, his sweet, beautiful Sutton, she’d lingered in the kitchen making things from sugar and flour and yeast from the time she could hold a spoon. “It was her destiny,” Constance often said, “to make the world a little sweeter.”

  Constance understood why he stayed away, living like a gypsy, in one town in Europe after the other. Sutton Mansfield. Always Sutton. The love of his life. The one he could not get over.

  He’d loved her for as long as he could remember. She was always there, like peripheral vision, this love, lurking unseen, just below his skin where warm blood flowed in his veins, always moving, coursing, pulsing her name.

  When she’d rejected his marriage proposal six years ago something broke in him that he believed could not be repaired. He’d tried. There were women everywhere and they offered their bodies and their hearts to him and when he made love to them in the dark, he looked at their faces so he didn’t imagine Sutton. But it was no good. Sutton remained in all the broken places, no matter the ways in which he looked for glue to heal the pain.

  So he lived this vagabond life, never stayi
ng in one place for too long, hoping the next destination might distract him enough so that he could finally let go of the past. His only peace was in his work. Sometimes, oftentimes, peace came when he held the paintbrush in his hand, the smell of oil and turpentine in the room, and he created something beautiful on the blank canvas. Luckily, he was able to make a decent living selling his paintings, especially commissioned portraits for the aristocratic families of Europe. “Reputation and word of mouth is everything,” he’d written to Constance. “They know I can be discreet about their family business.” But it was his paintings of Sutton and Constance and his mother, some done from memory, others from old sketches or photographs, that sustained him during the black hours of sleepless nights. There were hundreds of the paintings now, piled one on top of the other in the closet of his small apartment.

  He’d been in a village in Tuscany for almost a year now, the longest he’d stayed anywhere in the six years since he left Oregon. While here, he spent his time traveling throughout the region for commissioned work, expanding into landscapes for several of his wealthy clients. He loved Tuscany. He could breathe here in a way he couldn’t in some of the other places he’d lived. It was the brown rolling hills and the particular blue hue of the sky and the orange of the egg yolks next to cured meats and espresso in the mornings and the way people lived simply in the indelible moment and grew vegetables in their gardens.

  Now he sat up, looking for his phone. Sutton Mansfield. He had the number programmed even though he hadn’t spoken to her in six years. How many times had he stared at the number after a glass or two of wine? Let it be, he said to himself a thousand times. Let her go. He’d been letting her go for six long years now.

  He sat, staring at the phone in his hand. What could it be, this sudden longing, this sudden urge to call her, to make sure she was safe, to protect her, like when they were children? Could she be in danger? Was it possible that after all this time he would be able to feel it across all the miles between them?