Priscilla frowned.
Justine waited patiently.
“Klimt,” the woman finally said, her eyes narrowing. “But don’t read nothin’ into it.”
“I signed the nondisclosure contract,” Justine reminded her. “But even if I hadn’t, you wouldn’t need to worry. I’m good at keeping secrets.”
“I imagine so.” After a deliberate pause, Priscilla shot her a direct glance and asked, “What’s a sylph, anyways?”
So she had heard the incantation. Justine answered casually, “An elemental spirit that represents air. There’s another one for earth, one for water, and so on.”
“Are you one of those tree-hugger types?”
Justine smiled. “I’ve never technically hugged a tree, but I’ve discovered they make great listeners. What faith are you?”
“I was brought up in the Angels on Fire Ministry.”
“I’m not familiar with that one.”
“They preach sexual abstinence and the apocalypse. And our pastor was convinced that Satan put dinosaur fossils in the ground to fool people.” Not without pride, Priscilla added, “I was exorcised twice before I was fifteen.”
“Really? What for?”
“I was caught listening to rock music.”
“Both times?”
“First one didn’t take.” Priscilla paused as a ringtone sounded from the depths of her bag. “’Scuse me.” She pulled out her phone and glanced down at the tiny screen. “I’ve got some e-mails and texts to take care of.”
“Stay in the office for now, if you’d like. I’ll get one of the rooms ready for you.”
“Thank you. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to collect all the room keys once they’re ready.”
“Okay. Usually I show the guests to their rooms when they arrive.”
“Jason prefers me to take care of that. He’s not much on chin-wagging.”
“No problem. I’ll stay out of the way when they get here.”
“Thank you.” Priscilla’s head bent over the phone as she began texting. “What room will you put me in?” she asked without looking up.
“Degas,” Justine said. “A French Impressionist who painted ballet dancers. It’s not the biggest room we have, but it’s the prettiest. Lots of white lace and pink roses, and a crystal chandelier.”
Priscilla didn’t pause in her texting. “What makes you think I’d like a girly type room?”
“Because I saw the background picture on your tablet.” Justine lifted her brows in teasing arcs. “A row of kittens sitting on a piano? Really?”
As the young woman’s discomfited gaze met hers, Justine laughed quietly. “Don’t worry. I won’t tell.”
Three
Later in the afternoon, Justine sat in the kitchen and drank mint tea, while Zoë took inventory of the refrigerator and pantry.
“Do you have everything you need for tomorrow morning?” Justine asked. “I finished cleaning the rooms, so I’m free to run errands.”
“We’re all stocked up.” Zoë brought a cardboard carton to her. “Take a look at these—the farm down the road added a couple of Araucana hens to the flock.”
Three pale turquoise eggs were nestled among the cream and brown ones.
“Those are fantastic,” Justine exclaimed. “Zoë, we have to start keeping chickens.”
“No we don’t.”
“Think of the free eggs.”
“Think of the smell and the noise. We’d have to build a coop. The expense of keeping chickens would cancel out any money we’d save on eggs.”
“One chicken. It would be like a pet.”
“It would be lonely.”
“Okay, two chickens. I could call them Thelma and Louise—”
“We are not getting chickens,” Zoë said, her tone soft but inflexible. “You have more than enough to do around here. You can barely keep up with the garden as it is. And I don’t think you need a pet. As you used to tell me before I got together with Alex … you need a boyfriend.”
Justine lowered her head to the table. “There’s no point,” she said dolefully. Her mint-infused breath collected in the space between the scrubbed wood and her chin. “It would end up the same way it did with Duane. From now on I’m swearing off men. Maybe I should become a nun.”
“You’re not Catholic.”
“I’d have to convert,” Justine said against the table. She sighed as another thought occurred to her. “But I’d probably have to wear a habit. And the floppy hat.”
“Wimple,” Zoë said. “And don’t forget, you’d have to live in a convent. All women and lots of gardening.”
I might as well join the coven, Justine thought glumly.
At this point in her life, Justine had been expected to become initiated into the Circle of Crystal Cove. Her mother, Marigold, belonged to it, and the rest of the coven were honorary relatives—most of them had known Justine all her life. As much as Justine loved the coveners, however, she had never wanted to become one of them. She liked to cast an occasional spell or brew a potion now and then, but the idea of centering her entire life around the study and practice of magic was not at all appealing.
Unfortunately Justine’s reluctance had caused a rift with Marigold that had lasted at least four years and showed no signs of healing. In the meantime, Justine had received support from Rosemary and Sage, a pair of elderly crafters who were the closest thing to family that Justine had besides Zoë. The two women lived together in a lighthouse on Cauldron Island, where Sage’s late husband had served as a lightkeeper.
She sat up as she heard the sound of people entering the inn … voices, the rattle of luggage wheels.
“The guests are here,” Zoë said. “I’ll go with you to meet them.”
“No, we’re supposed to keep our distance. Priscilla is showing them to their rooms. She has the keys.”
Zoë looked bewildered. “We’re not supposed to welcome them?”
Justine shook her head. “Mr. Black is all business. He doesn’t want to be bothered with trivial social customs like saying hello and shaking hands and making small talk. The group will be down for breakfast in the morning, but he wants a health shake brought up to him at six. Priscilla said she would e-mail you the instructions.”
Zoë went to pick up her phone from the counter to check her e-mails. “Yes, it’s here.” She did a double take as she read the e-mail. “There must be a mistake.”
“Why?”
“Spinach … protein powder … peanut butter … soy milk … I won’t tell you the rest, because your stomach is already upset.”
Justine grinned at Zoë’s appalled expression. “That sounds like a variation on the Green Monster smoothie. Duane drank them all the time.”
“This will look like blended-up swamp.”
“I think the point is to make it as nutritious and disgusting as possible.”
“That won’t be a problem.” Zoë wrinkled her nose as she looked over the recipe. “I thought I would probably meet Mr. Black, since he’s negotiating with Alex. Now I’m not even sure I want to meet him.”
“Zoë, if this deal goes through, you and Alex are going to make so much money, you’ll want to name your firstborn child after him.”
The purpose of Jason Black’s visit to the island was to view a twenty-acre parcel of land bordering Dream Lake, which Alex had once bought with the intention of developing it as a residential area. Although the crash of the housing market had cleaned him out financially, Alex had managed to hold on to the Dream Lake acreage.
This past summer, a Realtor had approached Alex with an offer for the Dream Lake parcel. It seemed that Jason Black planned to establish a community retreat for education, innovation, and inspiration. The proposed development would include several buildings and facilities, all of them environmentally low-impact. Alex was LEED certified, which meant he could build according to the strictest environmental and energy regulations. As a result, the negotiations involved a stipulation that, along with the sale of the property, Alex would be hired as the retreat’s managing contractor.
Justine hoped the deal would go through, for Alex’s sake but especially Zoë’s. After the tough times Zoë had been through, including the recent death of her grandmother, she was due for some luck.
And Justine had a personal interest in the deal: In the summer she had bought and renovated a small lakeside cottage on Dream Lake Road. The cottage had been boarded up and decaying from decades of neglect. Zoë had wanted to live there with her grandmother, who had been diagnosed with vascular dementia. To help out, Justine had bought the cottage and paid for the renovations, and had let Zoë and her grandmother stay there rent-free.
If the Dream Lake land were eventually turned into an upscale community retreat and learning center, the value of Justine’s cottage, which bordered the property, would increase substantially. A win-win for everyone.
“I told Alex that Mr. Black must be a very nice person,” Zoë told Justine, “because the idea of creating an educational institute is a very noble goal.”
Justine sent her a fond smile. “And what did Alex say?”
“He said there’s nothing noble about it—Mr. Black is doing it for the tax-exempt status. But I’m still trying to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
Justine laughed. “I guess it’s possible that Jason Black has some redeeming qualities. Though I wouldn’t hold my breath.” She gulped the rest of her tea, stood, and went to put the cup into the dishwasher. “I’ll put out some wine and snacks in the lounge area.”
“No, I’ll do it. You’ve been busy enough today, cleaning all those rooms with only Annette to help. Did you find out what was wrong with Nita earlier? Was it the twenty-four-hour flu?”
“It’s not quite that temporary,” Justine said with a smile. “She texted me a little while ago. It was morning sickness.”
“She’s pregnant? Oh, that’s wonderful! We’ll give her a baby shower. Do you think we’ll need to hire someone to fill in for her when she gets past the first trimester?”
“No, we’re heading into the winter season, so business will slow down. And I can easily pick up the slack.” Justine heaved a sigh. “It’s not like I have a personal life to get in the way of work.”
“Go to the cottage and relax. And take these with you.” Zoë went to the pantry and unearthed a plastic container filled with treats left over from yesterday’s afternoon tea: icebox cookie squares studded with cranberries, buttery nuggets of shortbread, dark and chewy molasses rounds, and French-style macarons sandwiched with layers of homemade marionberry jam. It was a wonder that any were left—Zoë’s cookies were so delectable that guests at the inn’s afternoon teas usually showed no compunction about slipping cookies into handbags and pockets. Once Justine had seen a man fill his baseball cap with a half-dozen peanut butter blossoms.
She held the box as if it contained a lifesaving organ donation. “What kind of wine goes with cookies?”
Zoë went to the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of Gewürztraminer. “Don’t have too much. Remember, you might have to bring Mr. Black his vodka tonight.”
“He’ll probably want Priscilla to do it. But I’ll take it easy just in case.”
Zoë glanced at her with an affectionate frown. “I can tell you’ve already made up your mind about what you can’t do, and what you’ll never have … but you can’t give up. When there’s no reason to hope, that’s when you need to do it the most.”
“Okay, Mary Poppins.” She gave Zoë a quick hug before heading out through the back door.
She walked across the yard, past the herb garden that separated the backyard cottage from the main building. It had originally served as a writer’s retreat, back in the days when the inn had been a private residence. Now Justine lived in the tiny two-bedroom dwelling.
“There’s plenty of room here for a chicken coop,” Justine said, even though Zoë couldn’t hear her.
The afternoon was deep and full-slip ripe. Dandelion light slanted through the scalded red branches of a single madrone, and gilded the brown tassels of alder catkins. The pungent green scents of a raised-bed herb garden steamed through screens of pestproof fencing.
Justine had fallen in love with the former hilltop mansion as soon as she’d seen it, and had bought it for a steal. As she had painted the rooms and decorated each one according to a different artist such as van Gogh or da Vinci, she’d felt as if she were creating a world of her own. A quiet, welcoming place where people could relax, sleep well, eat well.
After a childhood of constant wandering, the weight and feeling of home was deeply satisfying. Justine knew practically everyone on the island. Her life was filled with all kinds of love … she loved her friends, the inn, the islands, walking through forests thick with pine and sword fern and Oregon grape. She loved the way Friday Harbor sunsets seemed to melt into the ocean. With all that, she had no right to ask for anything more.
She paused before the doorstep of the cottage, her lips quirking at the sight of a disappointed brown rabbit staring through the steel mesh at the plants it couldn’t reach. “Sorry, buddy. But after what you did to my parsley last June, you can’t blame me.”
She reached for the doorknob, but hesitated as she felt something catch at her senses. Someone was watching her.
A quick glance over her shoulder revealed that no one was there.
Her attention was drawn to one of the second-floor windows of the inn, to the dark, slim silhouette of a man. Instantly she knew who he was.
There was something predatory in his stillness, something ominously patient. The chilled wet neck of the wine bottle dripped condensation over the tightening circle of her fingers. With an effort, she shook off the feeling and turned away. The rabbit broke for cover, streaking to its burrow.
Justine walked into the cottage and closed the front door, which had been painted sky blue on both sides. The furniture was comfortably worn with layers of paint gleaming through the scuffed places. The upholstery was covered in linen printed with vintage flower patterns. A pink and beige rag rug covered the wood floor.