Teaberry Farmers Market

by R A Wallace

  Teaberry Farmers Market

  A Teaberry Farm Bed & Breakfast Cozy Mystery

  R. A. Wallace

  2018

  Author’s Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, dialogue, places, and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Material in this book is not intended as a substitute for legal or medical advice from qualified professionals. The author has no connection to any software or website mentioned.

  © 2018 R. A. Wallace. All rights reserved.

  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

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Megan’s Recipes

  Books by R. A. Wallace

  Chapter One

  Megan Bennet sat on her back porch with Emma on her lap, her morning coffee in her hand. The young, black cat was sprawled across Megan. Emma’s green eyes closed in contentment as Megan absently rubbed her ears. Megan hadn’t slept well last night. She’d had the nightmare again. It had been happening more frequently lately. It didn’t take an advanced degree to figure out the frequency of the nightmare coincided with the increased amount of time Megan was now spending with Dan Parker.

  As it finally become apparent that daylight would indeed win the battle over night once again, Megan gave up on lying awake in bed and made a pot of coffee. She took the first cup to the porch to think about the dreams and what, if anything, she planned to do about them. The birds had begun noisily discussing their plans for the day with each other. Megan wondered if talking about her dreams would be helpful.

  She also wondered why her brain thought it necessary to relive the night her husband had died. She assumed that the frequency had increased because she’d begun to think about being married again. Was she subconsciously worrying that this marriage would end the same way? That Dan would find the constraints of fidelity too much, just as Josh had? Megan couldn’t see how that was possible. Looking back, the pattern of Josh’s wandering ways had been etched into him long before they’d been married. Megan had willfully ignored it, preferring to assume that everything would turn out okay.

  Dan had no such pattern. He had been married once, though he’d told her recently it was because he was trying to move on from her. Megan had never noticed his attraction to her when they’d been in school. She’d been too busy going through life with blinders on. She knew she’d have to make a decision soon. She and Dan had become a couple. Couples made plans for the future.

  Megan looked around the farm and wondered what she wanted for her future. Would she want to leave this place? She’d made Teaberry Farm her home. She let rooms out to guests to help pay her bills but also because she enjoyed meeting new people and having them come into her life temporarily. Did she want to continue doing that?

  She sat on her porch and looked around at her farm. The garden needed work today, as it did every day this time of the year. In addition to using the food for herself, she also used the produce from the garden and her fruit orchard for guests and sold the produce elsewhere. When winter came or when her rooms remained unoccupied, she supplemented her income by developing and maintaining web sites for a growing list of clients. She liked the life she had built. Would a new life with Dan change all of that? Would she want it to?

  Megan shook her head. She’d gotten up early but hadn’t used the time wisely. There was a lot of work to be done today. The Teaberry Farmers Market began this weekend. Megan and her cousin, Lauren, sold their goods there every year and shared the responsibility of staffing their booth.

  So far at this point in the summer, Megan would bring some swiss chard and green onions from the garden but she would wait until the morning of the farmers market to pick that. She’d been picking the sour cherries from the orchard and freezing them as she did. The raspberries were beginning to ripen now. She would need to make jam today, so she could bring that to the market. It usually sold well. And, even though Henry was spending a lot of time in the paddock with Flora and Dora lately, he wasn’t technically needed unless she wanted to hatch chicks. That meant there was still an abundance of fresh eggs.

  She heard Henry’s strangled crow and smiled. He had already escaped from the coop and was over in the paddock with the miniature donkeys. They’d become friends and Henry had been a big help with keeping Dora calm to give her injured leg time to heal. But the crowing broke Megan free of her musings. It was time to get to work. She wanted to get some of the chard from the garden before the sun wilted it so she could freeze it.

  After putting Emma back into the house, she put her work boots on and headed to the garden with her basket and shears. It didn’t take long to cut some chard. Cutting it was always the easiest part and she wasn’t harvesting much today. Megan brought it into the house and filled her deep kitchen sink with cold water. She immersed the chard into the water for its first bath and then sprinkled a heavy dose of salt in with it.

  It was what her grandmother had taught her, though Megan had also seen it described in very old cook books. She had several old cook books that had belonged to both of her grandmothers. The salt helped remove the worms and insects on the vegetables that she harvested from the garden.

  Megan left the chard in the cold salt water and went back out to the barn. She fitted the small rototiller attachment to her weed whacker and used it in between the rows in her garden. She knew that the hot sun would take care of killing the ground-up weeds in the rows. She would have to go back with a hoe later to get close to the plants, she thought as she put away her tools.

  Rototilling was quick work and Megan was back in the kitchen soon after. She lifted the chard from the sink, allowing any dirt to remain in the bottom so she could clean the dirt out rather than draining the sink with both the chard and dirt still in it. She then ran a second bath for the chard to rinse it again. Megan planned to blanch and freeze this chard. Today was Wednesday and the farmers market ran Friday and Saturday each week. She would pick more chard and some green onions Friday morning to take to the market.

  The cherry trees still had some ripe cherries on them, so Megan went out to the orchard with her four wheeler and a ladder. She’d leave the already picked cherries in the freezer for use on another day. It took a good part of the morning to pick enough cherries for a couple batches of jam. The hummingbirds kept her entertained as she stood in the bed of the four wheeler or on the ladder up in the trees. They were attracted to the bright red cherries and apparently amused that Megan was too. They often came to watch her as she picked the cherries, darting quickly around the tree.

  Megan looked at the mound of cherries as they soaked in her sink. There were other cherries still in buckets waiting their turn. Now was when the real work begins. After squeezing the seeds out, she’d need to sterilize the canning jars and spend the afternoon making multiple batches of jam.

 
; Megan preferred to freeze the fruit and make jam on cooler days, but during the summer she needed to get her goods to the farmers market to be sold. That meant a lot of hot afternoons in the kitchen next to the stove. She turned on some fans and got to work. By dinnertime, she surveyed her kitchen. She had a lot of jars of beautiful cherry red jam. Tomorrow, she would work on the raspberries.

  She also saved some of the cherries in zippered bags for Lauren and sprinkled powdered ascorbic acid on them to keep them looking fresh. She needed to take them to Lauren’s now, so that Lauren could bake pies with them for the weekend. While Megan brought the produce and jams to the market, Lauren provided the fresh baked goods. They’d been selling their goods at the Teaberry Farmers Market for years, starting as young girls. Megan looked forward to it.

  After cleaning up and changing from her work clothes, she gathered her things and the bags of cherries and got into her truck. As she pulled away from her farm, she glanced in the rearview mirror. She loved her farm and the life it gave her. She didn’t know exactly what the future held, but she knew that she still wanted some sort of farm life.

  She sincerely hoped that Dan felt the same way. She knew that a future with anyone would mean making adjustments. But she also knew from experience that any hope of success they had for a life together meant that they needed to have similar ideas about what that life should look like.

  Chapter Two

  Irlene Lasinski looked in the mirror and smoothed a loose lock of dark hair back into place near the nape of her neck with well-manicured nails. She wore the back pinned up but preferred curls in the front to give her wide face some much needed height. Irlene had never been a beautiful woman but she had taken care of herself over the years, had kept her weight down, dressed well, and was careful not to wear more makeup than she needed.

  She was able to see her entire head with a three hundred sixty degree view using all of the mirrors in her salon. She’d had more time than she’d care to admit to do just that lately. Her usual steady stream of customers had thinned because of the thieving woman who had opened her own salon directly across the street.

  Irlene looked out the front window of her salon and glared into the window across. She could see Cybil Lacey clearly, all the way to her bleached blonde hair with the dark roots and the purple tips. She was working on Molly Winters. Molly, who had been a devoted customer of Irlene’s for as long as Irlene could remember. And Irlene had a very long memory.

  The fact that she kept all of those memories to herself had always helped her to keep her customers in the past. No matter who had sat in her chair, no matter how juicy the story they told her, Irlene had always kept those stories safe. Why were her customers now abandoning her for that, that thief across the street? Irlene fumed. Then she looked around her near empty salon and fretted.

  Sean Mitchell had a customer a few stations down from Irlene’s. He had been renting the chair at Irlene’s salon for over three years now. He had a comfortable following and many of those clients were still coming to Sean for their styling needs. The station next to Irlene was empty. It used to be Marissa’s chair. Marissa Saltzman had rented a chair from Irlene for nearly a decade. Then one day, out of the blue, she’d high tailed it across the street to work with that thief.

  Irlene had no idea what to do. Now fifty three, she’d owned her salon for thirty years. Attracting and keeping customers had never been a problem for her before. Her salon had always been bustling with local and loyal customers. So much so that she’d padded her income by renting out some of the chairs in her salon. She also had both a full time and a part time manicurist.

  And business had always been great until a few months ago when the thief had rented space across the street and opened her own salon. Cybil claimed to be thirty but looked older to Irlene. Irlene stood at her front window again, eyes narrowed, as she watched Cybil chatting away to Molly. Molly seemed quiet though. Irlene wondered why. Usually she talked a mile a minute about gossip she’d heard in the grocery store where she’d worked for years.

  Irlene glanced at the clock. She’d better get ready. She had a customer scheduled to come in and she didn’t want to do anything that could cause Caitlyn to wonder if perhaps she should try the younger stylist across the street instead. Irlene was setting her combs, scissors, and cape out when Caitlyn Anderson walked into the salon.

  “Well, hello! Come on back and we’ll get your hair washed.” Irlene smiled confidently at Caitlyn. It wouldn’t do to let anyone know how very concerned she was. If her business continued its downward slope, she was going to be in serious trouble. And she had never done anything but hair. At her age, starting over with a new career wasn’t an option she wanted to explore.

  “Wow, it’s quiet in here,” Caitlyn remarked as she took the seat at the shampoo bowl.

  Irlene draped the cape around Caitlyn’s shoulders. “Yes, yes it is,” Irlene said brightly as she gently guided Caitlyn’s neck onto the edge of the sink bowl. “I hear your brother, Jax, is back in town. Your mother must be thrilled.”

  “That she is,” Caitlyn said over the sound of the water spray. “He’s starting his own business. It’s in landscaping.”

  “Oh, that is exciting,” Irlene agreed. She’d heard a similar story from others about Jax but she never shared the tales she heard between the people who sat in her chair. She had always treated her conversations with her customers as private and she kept them that way. Irlene finished Caitlyn’s hair and helped her up from the bowl then loosely wrapped a towel around her head so that Caitlyn could follow Irlene back to her hydraulic chair.

  Irlene pumped the chair way up. With Caitlyn’s lack of stature, Irlene needed to get her as high as possible. “Are we going with the same style or are you going to go a little crazy this time?”

  Caitlyn smiled at the question Irlene had been asking her for years. “No craziness for me, thanks.” Caitlyn looked in the mirrors and realized that there was only one other customer in the shop. She couldn’t remember ever seeing it less than busy before. Though, now that she thought about it, it hadn’t been as busy as she remembered the past few times she’d been in.

  Irlene saw her looking around and guessed at her thoughts. Her shoulders slumped a bit as her eyes met Caitlyn’s in the mirror. “It’s that woman across the street. She’s been stealing all of my customers.”

  Caitlyn’s eyebrows rose but she quickly lowered them as Irlene’s sharp scissors slashed across her brow, cutting her bangs. “Cybil Lacey? I can’t believe that. Why?”

  “That’s what I’d like to know.” Irlene’s frustration showed as she continued to cut Caitlyn’s hair, her hands a blur around Caitlyn’s head as snips of hair went flying.

  Caitlyn watched in concern as her hair quickly grew shorter, but she could also tell that the older woman was genuinely upset. “Did something happen? I mean, did Cybil undercut your costs or run a special ad promising a gift if they switch hairdressers or something like that?”

  “No,” Irlene shook her head vigorously and began working on the back of Caitlyn’s head, her face in a scowl as she ran the imaginary scenarios through her head again. She’d asked herself those same questions and many more already many times. What had happened?

  Caitlyn looked into the mirror and saw an ad on the wall behind her. Or was it to her side? She couldn’t tell, she was looking into multiple mirrors. It mentioned the start of the Teaberry Farmers Market which would run every weekend from now until fall in the town square with the water fountain. Caitlyn turned her eyes back to Irlene and watched more snips of hair go flying.

  Perhaps a change of conversation was in order. Calming Irlene down seemed like a good idea. “Are you planning to cut hair at the first weekend of the farmers market for the fundraiser again?” Caitlyn’s eyebrows rose again as Irlene’s hands began flying even faster, the silver scissors a blur as they sheared through her hair.

  “Do you believe that woman across the street turned it into a competition this year to se
e who makes the most money for the fundraiser?” Irlene scowled again. She had held a fundraiser the first weekend of the farmers market for decades. It had originally been her idea and she’d been proud of the money she’d helped raise over the years for some very worthy causes.

  “Cybil is going to be at the farmers market cutting hair too?” Caitlyn asked, letting out a relieved breath as the scissors finally came to a rest.

  Irlene set her comb and scissors down and brushed the small snips of hair from Caitlyn’s neck before removing the cape. “Yes, and they plan to have a running tally of cuts that we do to show in real time who is bringing in the most money for the benefit.” Her normally smiling face was contorted in distress.

  Caitlyn looked sympathetically at the kind woman who had listened to her patiently over the years all the way back to her teenage trials and tribulations including the drama of prom. Irlene had been an important component in many lives in Teaberry. She had been the hairdresser for Lauren, Erica, and Megan’s weddings and countless others. “What do you think is going on?”

  Irlene looked through her front window at the salon across the street as Nina Delgado, another former customer, entered Cybil’s Salon. “I don’t understand it. But something just isn’t right. She isn’t even a good hairdresser. She cuts their hair all wrong and when they’re there, they seem unhappy.”

  Irlene threw her hands up in despair then clasped them together in front of her. This wouldn’t do, she thought. She shouldn’t be bothering Caitlyn with this. She took a deep breath and then forced herself to smile at the younger woman. Turning Caitlyn’s chair around so that Caitlyn faced the mirror, she asked, “What do you think?”

  Caitlyn’s striking blue eyes opened wide with surprise. She’d been prepared to hate whatever Irlene had just done to her short, black hair but that wasn’t the case. Irlene had kept the essence of a pixie but had made some subtle modifications. Caitlyn liked it.