Earl grave tea, p.6
Earl Grave Tea, page 6
We went into the kitchen, and Honey started scanning shelves and countertops with her eyes before nodding at the mantle over the fireplace and setting the gray crystal down. Bob, who had been nestled happily in his bed, blinked up at her with a confused expression that likely matched my own.
“Smoky quartz helps ward off negative energy. After today, I thought you could use a little metaphysical booster shot.”
Honey had incredible magical abilities, but she’d also been raised by a Wiccan mother, so she was both a witch in the real magic sense, and also a witch in the magickal sense, where she used herbal tinctures and crystals in everyday aspects of her life. I was never sure which side of her witchy heritage she was using to help me, but I would never say no; she was too good at what she did for me to question any of it.
“Thank you.”
Bob squinted at the large rock before tucking his nose under his tail and returning to Nap Town. Coco had vanished the moment I’d answered the door. She had started to accept Rich’s presence and would come out if she heard his voice, but everyone else she still treated like a terrifying stranger.
Pet parenting guides assured me this was normal, and some shy cats just needed more time to work up to accepting visitors. I had begun to understand that Coco might never be enthusiastic about guests the way Bob was, and was just grateful she had started to warm up to me.
Honey put a bundle of dried sage on the mantel next to the quartz. “I grew that all myself,” she told me. “Make sure you go through the house and smudge when I leave; it’ll get rid of any bad energy hanging around.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “Honey, is there a reason you’re especially concerned about bad energy hanging around me?”
She smiled, but I couldn’t read any deeper meaning in it. “Just let me take care of my friend the best way I know how, okay?”
It didn’t exactly answer my question, but if Honey thought I needed some wards against bad energy, I wasn’t going to reject them. She knew more about all of this than I did.
“Now that that’s all taken care of, what was it you wanted to show me?”
I had all but forgotten the reason I’d wanted to bring her over. The excitement of the audition and with Naomi’s sudden death had left me feeling topsy-turvy, and there wasn’t much room in my head for other things. Poor Eudora’s mystery had been pushed by the wayside.
Thankfully she was no longer on this mortal plane, so I didn’t think her riddles had a deadline attached to them.
“You remember how I said I spoke to Eudora when you and your mom put me in that magical trance?” I led her into my formal dining room, which was now officially just storage for all the things I was trying to get rid of.
For a while it had just had a few banker’s boxes, now the place was crammed with boxes and totes and stacks of paper everywhere. It was beginning to overwhelm me every time I came into the room, and I was almost embarrassed to show it to Honey.
She didn’t say anything as we walked in, but I could sense her taking in the piles of semi-organized clutter.
“Does this have something to do with what you saw in your vision?” Honey asked. She owned a new-age shop in town that was its own kind of joyous chaos, so I knew it wasn’t the amount of stuff that was setting off her alarm bells; it was just that it was so obviously stressful stuff.
“When I spoke to her, or… when she thought things into my head I guess, she said she’d left something for me to find.”
“Oh, Phoebs… I told you that wasn’t really Eudora; that was a reflection of your memories of her.”
I shook my head and set the box in front of her on the table. “It wasn’t just a memory, though. It was really her. And I found that under the floorboards in the attic this week.”
Honey’s brows creased, and she picked up the box, turning it around in her hands, her fingers searching for any seams or latches. “How does it open?” she asked.
“I don’t know. There’s a letter. And a coin?” I showed her the old coin and then let her read Eudora’s letter. When she was finished, she was smirking, which was surprising.
“She’s sending you on a scavenger hunt,” Honey said with a laugh.
I picked up the letter again. “Let the quarter take you for a ride. What does that even mean?”
“A lot of old kids’ rides used to be coin-operated. Like the little horses or airplanes in malls that would rock back and forth. Maybe it’s something like that.”
“Do you know of any of those around here? I think Lansing’s might have had one back in the nineties.” I could dimly recall an old spaceship my brother Sam had been obsessed with. But I’d been almost everywhere in town since moving back, and I couldn’t think of a single place with coin-operated rides.
Honey read the letter over my shoulder. “Maybe it means something more abstract, but I can’t think of anything right now. Do you mind if I take a picture of the letter? I love riddles, and it might have some doublespeak clues in it.”
“Knock yourself out,” I said, putting the letter on the table so she could snap a photo on her phone.
As she was framing up the shot, Bob jumped up onto the table and plopped his butt down right on the paper, then fixed us both with a stern look and declared, “Mreeooooow.”
“Oh, don’t you dare,” I scolded. “You’ve been fed, and treat o’clock isn’t for another couple of hours.”
At the pronouncement of the word treat, Coco suddenly appeared in the doorway, her ears and eyes alert. When she saw I still had company, she gave me a cross, betrayed look, and disappeared once again.
Just my luck that the only English word she’d learned summoned her like a Ouija board calling to a spirit from the great beyond, but she was just as hard to pin down.
“Do you happen to know any spells to improve cat friendliness?” I asked.
Honey smiled as she scratched Bob behind his ears, and he purred loudly. “Maybe you should ask the resident expert.”
She wasn’t talking about the riddles anymore, but her offhand comment had given me an incredibly goofy idea.
“Honey, you’re a genius.”
CHAPTER TEN
Bob liked to be held like a baby.
I stood in the front entrance looking at the grand staircase and the two main rooms leading off it, and gently bounced the big furry lump in my arms like I might soothe a child to sleep. He purred like he was having the best time in the world, his green eyes squinting, a tiny dollop of drool on his lips.
His paws made little biscuits on my forearm.
“Okay pal. You were here when Eudora hid that box; I’d bet my life on it. So, you can tell me what her first clue means.”
The purring continued, and he made a small ekekek sound, almost like he was trying to talk back. His eyes were now almost entirely closed, and I feared I had perhaps made him a little too comfortable to complete our task.
If this wasn’t the craziest idea I’d ever had to begin with.
Beside me, Honey didn’t say anything, so her opinion of my sanity was still up in the air.
I peppered Bob’s forehead with a half dozen kisses and then gently set him down on the floor. For a moment he stared at me as if asking Is cuddle time over, before sitting back on his haunches and slow blinked first at me, then at Honey. It was like watching a toddler slowly wake up, except my toddler was furry, round, and slept seventeen hours a day.
“Come on, Bob. I know you can do this.” I held out the quarter and the box, which Honey had been holding for me, and he sniffed them both.
After a long, languorous yawn, I felt almost certain this idea had been a bust. Until his ears perked up and he sniffed the air around him, like he’d just sensed an open tin of food somewhere.
“Merow?” Bob asked, though it wasn’t clear what his question was.
“Yeah, buddy, you got this,” I encouraged.
Bob stood up, tail high, and headed in the direction of the kitchen, further making me wonder if this new enthusiasm was just about getting fed. But as Honey and I trailed him into the kitchen, he bypassed the food dishes on the floor completely and made a beeline for the basement door, which he pawed at before giving me a meaningful look and a plaintive meow.
“The basement?”
This whole thing had shades of What’s that Lassie, Timmy fell in the well? But I trusted my cat, and I knew he was smarter than any non-animal lover would give him credit for. If Bob thought there was something in the basement, there was something in the basement.
I switched on the light from the kitchen and opened up the door, where Bob raced down faster than I’d ever seen him move unless food was involved. Honey and I shared a quick glance, and if she was thinking this was nuts, I appreciated her not saying so to my face.
The basement of Lane End House was not your typical basement, if there was such a thing. Most basements in the area were concrete slabs squares. Some were even just glorified dirt crawl spaces. While Eudora’s basement had once been the concrete slab variety, she had breathed new life into it by turning it into a storage space for all her teas.
Of course, the humid, rainy weather of the Pacific Northwest meant that I was running a dehumidifier twenty-four seven to stave off dampness in the air that might threaten the tea, but it was ultimately a pretty perfect place to mix delicious blends and keep the overstock we didn’t have room for at The Earl’s Study.
It was also where Eudora had kept her plethora of seasonal decorations, because she—like the entire town—took holidays very seriously. I hadn’t even begun to plumb the depths of everything she had, but it was clear she had been prepared for every possible holiday she might need to kit out the house and shop for.
When Honey and I reached the basement floor, it wasn’t immediately obvious where Bob had disappeared to. Normally his general orange roundness stood out in a room, but this was a very busy space, and I couldn’t tell where he’d gotten himself to.
“Bob?” I said, then gave Honey a little shrug. She was still holding the box I’d found under the floorboards, while I clutched the letter and quarter in my hand.
“Mreow,” trilled Bob from the back of the room.
I still couldn’t see him, hidden as he was behind stacks of boxes and things I’d added since I moved, like overstock for mugs and tote bags from The Earl’s Study.
I moved a few things out of the way, following his little voice, until something emerged from behind all of the Halloween storage bins I’d pulled out a week earlier.
Bob sat perched atop the saddle of the old carousel horse that had been down here since I’d moved in—and likely decades before that. He looked for all the world like he was ready to take an afternoon horseback ride. His orange tail flicked back and forth, and he squinted his eyes at me with a few slow blinks for good measure.
Cats can’t smile, per se, but I swear he was beaming with pride in that moment.
I had never known how Eudora came to have the carousel horse, or why she had it stashed down here so long, and the longer I’d lived in the house the less I noticed its presence in the basement.
Now, as Bob licked his front paws to clean his whiskers, I wondered if the gorgeous old antique was more than just a fun piece of kitsch my aunt had found in her travels.
What if it were something magical?
The horse had seen better days. It was obvious just by looking at it that it had spent most of its life outdoors—as most carousel horses do—and its paint was sun-bleached and peeling. Still, the animal maintained an undeniable aura of majesty. The horse had once been a rich plum color, its mane painted silver, and the saddle a combination of lilac, teal, and burnt orange, with silver and gold accents. The colors were all still there, though pastel, muted versions of their former glory.
There were rings at the horse’s mouth where reins had surely once gone, though the straps had been lost long ago. The stirrups for the saddle still remained, though. The horse’s head was lifted slightly, as if it was about to toss its beautiful mane in the wind.
I could picture small children clamoring to pick this specific mount for their ride.
Bob curled up on the saddle, a rather precarious position, but he seemed to be managing it fine. I swear, cats can make themselves comfortable just about anywhere.
“That’s incredible,” Honey said, her voice barely above a whisper. “Has that always been down here?”
Well, I guess that answered any questions I had about whether or not Eudora had used the horse for seasonal décor of some kind. “It’s been here as long as I’ve been here, and no idea how long she had it before then.”
“I think that might have been from the original fairground carousel that used to be here in the forties,” Honey said, approaching the horse with reverence and brushing her fingers over its wooden mane.
“There was a fairground here?” If that was the case, it had been long gone before I started paying my aunt summer visits as a kid.
“It was where the Lansing’s parking lot is now, just down the road. It was a small place, with only a few rides, but it ran from the early forties up until 1980. They had to shut it down because the cost of upkeep on the old rides was going to be more than they could ever make operating it.”
“How on earth do you know all that?” I asked.
Honey wasn’t a Raven’s Creek lifer, she’d moved here in her early twenties to open her New Age shop. Her family’s roots didn’t go all the way back the way mine did, but I also felt like new blood here. Even after a year, there was still only one person in Raven’s Creek newer than me, and that was Dierdre’s nephew Dylan.
“I was looking up old historical records of my shop not long after I rented it. I like to know if places have good or bad history; it can really impact the vibes, and while I was doing that, I found an old map of town that showed the fairgrounds. I wanted to know more. You’d be amazed what you can dig up at the library.” She gave me a faint smile, as if she knew how strange her research hobby sounded.
“That’s very cool. I wonder if they’d have pictures of the carousel from back in the day.”
Honey, now encouraged by my interest, nodded enthusiastically. “They do! That’s why I thought it looked so familiar. I wonder how she ended up with it.”
“Knowing Eudora, she probably just pointed at it and said, That’s coming home with me and no one argued with her.” I could practically imagine my aunt with an early eighties perm, telling the crew who dismantled the fairground to drop the horse off at her house. She had a commanding presence; I doubted anyone would have blinked twice.
But what did the horse have to do with my mission? Bob had clearly led us here with a purpose, but a carousel horse wasn’t a coin-operated ride outside a shopping center. As far as I knew, there was nowhere to put a quarter into one.
“Can you help me check this thing to see if there’s somewhere the quarter goes?” I asked, setting the letter down on top of a nearby tote.
Honey put the wooden box down on top of it, and we scoured the horse from top to bottom, looking at every crease and dent to see if it might be a place where a coin could fit.
No luck.
I let out a little sigh of frustration. I guess it had been too much to hope that my cat might be the secret key to this little magical scavenger hunt.
My cat.
My cat. Who was currently blocking a good chunk of saddle real estate.
I gently lifted Bob from the saddle, and though he made a little grunt of protest, he went without a fight. Once I’d placed him on the ground, he made a trilling noise and pawed at the horse’s leg.
There on the saddle was the tiniest slot at the base of the pommel. I gave Honey another loaded look, and we both barely dared to breathe.
“This better work,” I whispered. “Because once I put it in there, I don’t think there’s any way for me to get it back without taking the whole darned horse apart.”
“Only one way to find out,” she said, nudging me with her shoulder.
I took a deep breath and dropped the quarter into the slot.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I expected to hear the hollow sound of the quarter tumbling into the horse’s empty belly, telling me this whole experiment had been a fool’s errand. Instead, there was a soft click sound, followed by a whirring that was almost too quiet to hear.
The horse started to glow the same faint blue as the box had, though it was hard to tell in the brightly lit basement. Bob noticed it well enough, as his tail puffed up and he darted back to the top of the stairs to observe us from a safe distance.
I wasn’t sure if that was a bad sign, or simply evidence that he was sometimes a literal scaredy cat. Nevertheless, Honey and I took a few steps back from the horse as the sound of whirring became something more like moving gears, and motes of dust started shaking off the old wooden object as it apparently vibrated.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it, the shimmer of light, the strange noises. Obviously, I’d found the right home for the quarter, but what was I about to discover, and was it something that might have been better left alone?
Finally, after a few achingly long seconds, the horse went still, and a soft pop noise sounded as the saddle apparently clicked open from an unseen hinge. Whether that was a real hinge or a magical one was a question for another day.
Together, Honey and I inched forward until I was close enough to lift the saddle. Inside the horse’s belly, the blue light continued to glow, and while there was no sign of the quarter, there was another letter, and next to it an old-fashioned key. I’d seen many similar keys around Lane End House. In fact, it bore a striking resemblance to the front door key.
I hesitated a moment before reaching inside, as if worried this might somehow be a trap. But ultimately, that was very silly. My aunt had loved me as much as she might have loved her own daughter. She’d left me this house, her business, and entrusted me to care for Bob. There was no way she would have set a trap for me.
