A Fatal Twist of Lemon (5 page)

Swallowing, I turned to work. Everything on the north sideboard had been shoved to one end, no doubt to make room for some piece of forensic equipment. I put the tray down on the empty space and began collecting coffee mugs and china. By some miracle, not a single piece had been broken by the mob of police investigators, though everything was smeared with black fingerprint powder.

As I picked up each place setting at the table, Gina's game of whodunnit returned to me. I gathered the place cards and shuffled through them, looking at the names I'd calligraphed so carefully. I couldn't eliminate any of Gina's five suspects, though I felt pretty confident Mr. Ingraham wasn't the killer. Maybe I'd talk to Katie, ask her who was still in the dining parlor when she'd left it.

Of course I'd talk to Katie. She'd want to know all about the investigation. She was probably worrying how it would affect
her
business.

I fitted a teapot into the last empty space on the tray and paused. The saddest part of this mess was that the tearoom had been my salvation. Before I had decided to take the plunge and try to make it happen, I had been mired in despair.

The tearoom's genesis, though I didn't know it at the time, was a trip my family took to England—the last vacation we all took together. I was eighteen, about to head for college, and in love with English literature and history. My brother Joe was twenty-four and more interested in crawling pubs than visiting historic sites. While he was off exerting his independence, my parents took me to museums, famous buildings, and afternoon tea at the Ritz.

I fell in love. The dainty sandwiches and cakes, the scones, and especially the profound revelation of clotted cream—a food unlike any in America, so simple yet so sinfully rich—were such a delightful treat that I begged my parents to take me again the next day, and the day after that. We ended up having tea all over London, Brighton, and Bath. Even Joe got into the spirit of it, and found little places with no more than six elbow-rubbing tables that served cream tea and hot lunches. It was the trip of a lifetime.

The following year my mother was diagnosed with cancer. She never traveled again, spending the last two years of her life in a losing battle against that dreadful disease.

Dad was crushed when she died, and he never really got his spirits back. He passed on four years later, just as I was out of graduate school.

I spent a year in a tailspin after settling my father's estate. I gave all the cash I inherited to Joe in exchange for his share of the house on Stagecoach Road, in the hilly, northern part of Santa Fe. That house was much too big for me, though. A huge hacienda-style, single-story adobe laid out in a square around a center courtyard, what in a true hacienda would be called a
plazuela
.

That had been my favorite part of the house. I'd always thought of it as my secret garden, where I played and threw parties for my imaginary friends. After Dad died, I sat there for hours on end, trying to figure out what to do with myself.

Joe had moved to New York a few years earlier. Gina was away finishing a master's degree at Wellesley College. I wrote despairing letters to them both and racked up huge long-distance phone bills, but even though they poured out love and sympathy, I couldn't shake out of my gloom. It was Aunt Nat who finally gave me a much-needed kick in the pants.

“Ellen, you need to figure out where you're going,” she said to me over tea in my courtyard, wearing shades and a broad-brimmed straw hat adorned with yellow silk chrysanthemums. “You need to let go of the past, no matter how fond the memories are. You have a life, so get going and find it!”

“Where?” I asked her. Almost a year after Dad's death I was still numb. I felt as if I'd never have an idea again.

“Well, first question: do you want to stay in Santa Fe?”

“Yes.”

Santa Fe was my home. Though I had gone away to school and traveled a fair amount, I never found any place I'd rather live.

“Next question: what career can you have in Santa Fe?”

I couldn't come up with anything. My degrees in literature and music probably weren't going to get me a job in Santa Fe. I could try for a teaching certification, but the best I could hope for was teaching high school English, and I couldn't drum up any enthusiasm for that.

“Can't we just have tea?” I said, knowing I was ducking the question.

“Certainly. That's an excellent idea. You remember the afternoon tea we had at the Biltmore that time in LA?”

I frowned. “Sure.”

“You can do better than that,” she said loftily. “You've done a beautiful job with this little tea for us two.”

I blinked, looking over the cafe table I had set with my favorite china: teacups and matching plates, tiny silver teaspoons, a pair of tiny violet chintz milk and sugar servers, and a three-tiered tea tray loaded with all my favorite little comfort-food nibbles.

“It's just cucumber sandwiches and deviled eggs—”

“And these cookies, which are divine,” Nat said, waving a thumbprint cookie filled with red currant preserves.

“I like to bake.”

“Well, why hide it under a bushel? Share your talent with the world, darling!”

“What are you talking about?”

Nat took off her shades and leaned toward me, the skin at the corners of her eyes crinkling as she grinned. “You just want to have tea. So open a tearoom.”

I stared at her. “Me?”

“Why not? You've always loved tea parties!”

“But, I—”

“You love planning menus, and you love English culture and tradition. Ellen, tea is an up and coming trend. If you find the right location, I think it would be a big hit.”

“Wait, whoa—”

“You love the Victorian era, too. I think you should make all the decorations Victorian. In fact, there are some Victorian buildings in town—you should see if any of them are available.”

“Nat!”

“What?”

She looked up at me, teacup in hand, all innocence. I knew what she was doing, and that I should be grateful, but I was too annoyed.

“I don't have any training or experience in the restaurant business,” I said flatly.

“So what? That's the beauty of entrepreneurialism. All you need is vision and investment capital. You've got both. Hire good people to help you with the rest, and you'll be fine.”

“A tearoom.”

“You've been chattering about English tearooms ever since you and your folks took that trip. You've been throwing tea parties ever since then, too. You
love
tea and all its trappings. Why not take it a step further?”

I just shook my head. Nat put her teacup down and took my hand.

“Listen, honey, you've got to get out of this old house. Remember how you complained about the property taxes?”

I nodded. They'd taken a big bite out of my cash reserves. I still wasn't working, and I'd have to get a job soon if I wanted to keep my head above water.

“Let's go look at some Victorians in town, huh? Maybe you'll see one you'd like to trade for this white elephant. I'll call Jody and have her look at what's on the market. It'll be fun.”

“Okay,” I said, wanting to end the argument. “It doesn't cost anything to look.”

Nat's friend Jody, a real estate agent, spent an afternoon showing us Victorian era buildings in Santa Fe. I figured it was just a lark, and made up my mind to enjoy the tour. Several were wonderful old adobe homes with soft lines, crooked doorways and uneven floors and yes, secret gardens. I had a nice time wandering through them, and was grateful to Aunt Nat for getting me out of my cocoon.

By the time we reached the Dusenberry house, I was tired. Nat and I stood on the front walk while Jody retrieved the key.

The house was neither large nor ornate, originally built in the mid-nineteenth century as officer's quarters for Fort Marcy. It was stuccoed in adobe-brown, and in fact was made of adobe, in classic Victorian shotgun style with a blue pitched metal roof. It was Territorial, really: the 19th century New Mexico style that evolved out of trying to make neoclassical structures with southwestern building materials. Early Victorians wanted their columns and Grecian dentations, but out here they had to make them out of wood instead of marble.

The place was vacant and looked a bit forlorn, the leaves of the wisteria vines that twined up the columns of the porch all fragile and withered in shades of gold, green and frostbitten brown (it was autumn). A sharp wind was kicking up, and when Jody got the door open and let us in I had a grateful sense of stepping into shelter.

Our footsteps on the hardwood floors echoed in the empty rooms and hallway. The northeast room on the ground floor was the kitchen, and the rest had been used as offices by the law firm that had most recently occupied the house. They had done some remodeling including the addition of pocket doors as dividers in the three ground floor office areas (a nice 19th century touch, probably a concession to historic preservation requirements). They had also added a restroom on the ground floor and a remodeled full bath upstairs.

“It really isn't suited to be a home as it is,” Jody said. “You'd want to make some changes.”

Nat hadn't told her about the tearoom idea, just that I wanted to look at Victorian properties.

“Can we look at the upstairs?” I asked.

As we climbed the old wooden staircase, a curious thing began to happen. I began to see things—a plush, oriental runner covering the worn treads of the stairs, the walls painted in quiet pastel tones with white trim, candlelight and lamplight warming the rooms—all of it creating a mood of peace. I was having ideas, for the first time in months.

As we reached the top of the stairs we turned to face west down the hall, and I saw that the clouds outside had broken up and late afternoon sunlight was streaming in through the window at the far end. I had an impression of ascending to heaven, and again a sense of peace.

I walked down the hall and stood looking out at the withered garden and the roof of the porch below. A few tendrils of the wisteria vines struggled for a grip on the ribbed metal.

“I wonder how old those wisterias are,” I mused.

“The Preservation Trust might know,” said Nat. “They keep track of the oddest little details. My friend Sylvia, who's the president of the Trust, told me there's a wisteria vine in Santa Fe that's almost ninety years old.”

“Really? How nice to have flowers every spring for that many years.”

The door to the north side of the upper floor stood ajar, and I went in and stood in the middle of the room by the big, brick shaft of the double chimney that served the fireplaces downstairs. I felt safe there. Maybe not joyous yet, but also not sad. It felt cozy, which was a much better sensation than the vast emptiness of my parents' lonely old house. I looked out into the hall, where Jody and Nat were standing together, giving me space.

“What's the asking price?” I said.

That was the turning point. I didn't know if I could afford the house, didn't know if I wanted it just for myself or to share (it was smaller than my parents' place, but still too big just for me), or for this tearoom that Nat had suggested. Jody got me the specs and the owner's asking price. It was steep, which was probably why the house hadn't been snapped up. That and the funky oldness of it, and the historical designation that restricted remodeling.

I visited the house again, alone except for Jody who agreed to wait on the
porch
while I spent some time inside. I walked through all the rooms, trying to imagine leasing them out, but kept finding myself picturing tea parties instead. I thought back to my family's trip to England and the way I had fallen in love with English tea customs.
Those
memories made me smile.

After walking through the whole house again, I joined Jody outside on the porch. Fallen wisteria leaves blew around our feet and danced in little eddies in the corners. Snowflakes were just beginning to swirl down from a blue-gray sky.

“I'd like to make an offer on it,” I said to Jody. “Can you list my parents' house?”

From then on I was caught up in a whirlwind of activity. I learned more than I ever wanted to know about real estate and mortgages and business loans. Nat introduced me to Sylvia Carruthers, who cheerfully bullied me into applying for a grant and agreeing to the Preservation Trust's terms for maintaining the historic character of the building. I acquired the Dusenberry house several months before Stagecoach Road sold (
that
was a nervous time), and was able to move in at my leisure.

I chose the south side of the upper floor, where the full bath was tucked behind what must have been two executive offices, for my suite. I brought only the items I most loved from home, along with those bits of my parents' furniture that would be appropriate to the tearoom. The rest I sold, donated, or put into storage. It was painful in some ways, but also very liberating.

At Nat's suggestion I took a class in tea blending and a seminar on small business start-ups. I needed to learn much, much more, but Nat said there would be time for that, and she was right. Putting the tearoom together was rather like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, only the pieces were not all provided. I had to go and find them. It took more than a year, during which time I attended a seminar at the Specialty Tea Institute in Seattle and began, slowly, to feel like I might really be able to pull this thing off.

It was expensive. I had to bring the kitchen up to commercial standards,
without
harming its historic character, and convert the neighboring room to a butler's pantry. I painted the walls myself but had to buy furniture for the tea parlors, along with rugs and gauze curtains and drapes for colder days. Computer system and telephones and cash register for the gift shop. And the china!

By that time Gina was home, and she and I had a grand time expanding my collection of beautiful teacups and saucers, teapots and milk and sugar sets, little silver teaspoons and tongs for sugar and lemon slices. We found a lot of things on Internet auctions, including some great bargains, but it all added up to a rather large chunk of change. And that was before hiring any staff or purchasing inventory and supplies. Suffice to say, I was motivated to make the tearoom a success.