Something Borrowed, Something Bleu (4 page)

Outside, the sky was
that amazing mile-high blue that verges on purple. An arching lenticular cloud hovered on the far eastern horizon, but otherwise the sun beat relentlessly down upon pavement, flora, and fauna alike. Inside Dad’s Subaru Outback, I cranked the air conditioning as high as it would go.
Traffic on College Avenue had worsened since I’d lived in Spring Creek, but it still didn’t take long to get to the post office downtown. Only one other person stood in line ahead of me, and in no time I was talking with a clerk. When I told her about Bobby Lee’s letter being returned after eighteen years, she looked puzzled.
“Eighteen years?”
“My mother assumed it had been in the dead letter office.”
She shook her considerable mane of dark hair and squinted at me through thick eyeliner. “I don’t think so, honey. First off, we don’t call them that anymore. Now they’re Mail Recovery Centers, and if something ends up there it’s because it was undeliverable and couldn’t be returned to the sender. That return address is still the residence where your parents live?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then it would have been returned back then, not treated as a dead letter.”
“I see.” I wasn’t exactly surprised at this news, since I never really bought into the dead letter theory that seemed to satisfy my mother. Something about a letter showing up like that was suspicious—especially one that happened to be a suicide note. Over the years I’d learned not to trust coincidences.
“And,” she continued, “if it had gone to the Mail Recovery Center, it would have been opened to try and determine the identity of the sender and returned if possible. Or else burned.”
“Burned? You burn letters you can’t deliver?”
“Sure.” She leaned over the counter, and I took a step backward. “What would you have us do with them? Build a monument?”
“Er, no.” Sheesh. Settle down lady. “So what do you think happened?”
“Beats the heck out of me,” she said.
“Do you think someone might have an idea? Maybe your supervisor?”
She sighed, but disappeared into the back and returned with a portly man with a salt-and-pepper buzz cut and unfortunately large ears. He hooked his fingers through the belt loops of his dark trousers and hitched them up.
“Agatha here says you’ve got a question about the Mail Recovery Center.”
“Well, sort of. Actually, I’m wondering if you might have a theory about how this letter ended up being returned after eighteen years.”
Intelligence lit up behind his eyes. “Eighteen years? That might be a record. Let me take a look.”
I handed over the letter with reluctance, as if he’d take it and run away.
He held it up, turning it this way and that. “There are tales we hear every once in a while about letters that got stuck under a cabinet or a copy machine and then were found and sent on their way.”
“Do you think that happened here?”
He glanced at me. “Those are just stories. But sometimes they find letters in mailbags or machinery that hasn’t been used for a while.”
I perked up at that.
He shook his head. “But those items are stamped ‘Found in Supposedly Empty Equipment’ and sent on their way.”
“Really? You have a stamp that says that?”
“Yup. But lookie here. This was returned to …” He held the envelope at arm’s length and peered at it, ignoring the reading glasses poking up out of his shirt pocket. “… returned to Bobby Lee Watson back when first-class stamps cost twenty-nine cents.”
Now he put on his glasses and looked at me over the top. “I take it you’re not Bobby Lee.”
“He was my brother.”
My use of the past tense was not lost on him, and he nodded. “Ah. I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.” But I was distracted. The Bines had lived in the same house for several years after Bobby Lee died. Tabby had been there for at least another year, and after she moved into her own place her parents could have easily passed on any mail that came for her. But someone had handwritten the words
Return to Sender
on the envelope.
The post office supervisor gave it back to me. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“That’s okay. This information has actually been very useful.” I thanked the clerk who had helped me in the first place and made my way out to the parking lot, still thinking.

_____

My trip to the post office took longer than expected, as did the drive to the T&J Dairy. I turned off the county road, glancing at my watch as I drove toward the cluster of buildings at the end of a long gravel driveway.
The Bines lived in a big farm-style house at the top of a little hill. They’d painted it white with forest-green trim. The colors were reversed on the barn, chicken house, and three other outbuildings which marched in a circle around the house. The siding showed wear, and lighter shingles spotted the roof in several places where it had been patched after rough weather. There were no mild seasons in northern Colorado, despite three hundred days of sunshine a year.
A line of cottonwoods wandered across the landscape behind and below the house, no doubt tracing the path of a river or significant stream. Several brown cows with white markings lay in the morning sun, fenced from the road with split rails instead of the ubiquitous barbed wire. The rheumy eyes of a bony old specimen watched with calm interest as I shifted the Subaru into Park. My tennis shoes hit the gravel in the parking lot at the bottom of the hill, and I stretched briefly before reaching back into the car for my tote bag. Chickens of all sizes and colors gabbled at one another conversationally, bocking and scratching in a large rectangular enclosure built off one end of their coop. A thick animal smell hung over the whole place, potent but not unpleasant.
The hand-lettered sign stuck into the ground read
Classroom
, and the arrow on it directed me to a small, square outbuilding by the parking lot. Dark green with white trim, like the rest of the outbuildings. Tabby had just begun talking when I entered.
“Sorry I’m late,” I said, stowing my tote bag in a corner and then joining the others.
Surprised recognition flickered across her face as she nodded her welcome at me. “No worries. You’re right on time.”
When Bobby Lee first told me he was dating Tabitha Atwood, all he could talk about was how amazing her eyes were. They still were: ice blue and intelligent. Now a fine web of crow’s feet fanned from their corners, and the years and sun had added lines around her mouth. The rest of her skin was taut and tan. White-blonde hair swooped down from a denim scrunchy into a short ponytail, and her gaze ricocheted between the class participants as she spoke, constantly gauging reaction and understanding from her six students. But her eyes kept returning to me. She’d recognized me the moment I walked in, and no doubt wondered why I was back in town.
The interior of the small space was clean and bright. The open windows front and back encouraged air circulation. A long folding table stood in the center of the room, and equipment both recognizable and mysterious, instruction handouts, a microwave, and a two-burner hotplate littered the surface. A miniature refrigerator hummed in the corner.
“Today we’re going to be making mozzarella,” Tabby said. “It’ll be ready to eat today, as opposed to cheeses that need to age for a significant amount of time in order to develop flavor. By definition, then, fresh cheeses taste quite mild.”
My mouth started to water. Beside me, an older woman with gray dreadlocks nodded her agreement at our instructor. Next to her stood an outdoorsy-looking couple, and on my other side a drab, bespectacled woman in her mid-twenties hung on Tabby’s every word. Given their similar features, I guessed the heavyset blonde beside her was her mother.
Tabby donned a pair of rubber gloves and waved us over to where a stainless-steel pot of milk sat on the hot plate. “From the same milk you can get any number of cheeses—the difference comes from the kind of culture or bacteria introduced, the coagulating agent, and the amount of heat applied to the milk and for how long. Oh, and then there’s the aging process.”
We crowded around the pot as if it held gold bullion.
She continued. “Now, we’ll add a little acid to the milk, and then some rennet, and then heat it to around one hundred degrees—I’ll always be talking Fahrenheit when I mention temperature—to coagulate the curds. Then we heat the drained curds in the microwave a few times to extract more of the whey. In the end we get to stretch the mozzarella like taffy.”
We all exchanged dubious looks when she mentioned pulling cheese like taffy, but I was game. Unfortunately, all the talk about curds and whey started “Little Miss Muffet” chanting in the back of my brain.
Gesturing toward the thermometer attached to the side of the pot, Tabby said, “We’ll add the citric acid when the milk has warmed to fifty-five degrees.”
Sat on a tuffet.
What the heck was a tuffet, anyway?
She handed the dreadlocked lady a measuring cup with a little water in the bottom and told her to mix the citric acid into it. The citric acid was a white crystal that looked like salt. It was familiar to me, since I used it to make bath bombs. There was a five-pound bucket of it in my storeroom. It was food grade, so there was no reason not to use it to make mozzarella at home. A frisson of excitement ran through me at the thought of pizza made with Meghan’s homemade dough, sauce canned from our garden tomatoes, a chiffonade of fresh basil, and homemade mozzarella.
I wrenched my attention back to what Tabby was saying.
“You can usually find citric acid at the grocery store with the canning supplies. Often people add it to tomatoes when they preserve them, to ensure the acid level is high enough to safely can them in a water bath.”
We always used lemon juice for that, I mused to myself.
“You can also use lemon juice,” Tabby said, “since that’s citric acid in its original form. Some people use lemon juice to make mozzarella, too, but we’re using the crystals in order to ensure we get the exact amount of acid that we need. Go ahead and stir that in now.”
The dreadlocked woman did as she was told. We all peered eagerly at the milk in the pot. Nothing happened.
Tabby handed another cup with water in it to me, along with a small bottle of brown liquid. Following her instruction, I carefully added seven drops to the water.
“This is liquid rennet,” she said, “and I find it to be the most reliable for cheese making. Traditional rennet comes from the stomach lining of very young cattle, but you can also get vegetable-based rennet. Some people even use a kind of nettle tea. You can get what we’re using today online, or I have some available for purchase. In a pinch, you can use plain old junket from the grocery store instead, but the resulting texture will be a little different. Okay, let’s take a look at the temperature. We’ll add the rennet when the milk reaches ninety degrees.”
The addition of the diluted rennet gave the milk a kind of grainy texture. While we waited for the temperature to increase to just over a hundred degrees, Tabby gave us a little lecture on the history of cheese through the ages. Man puts milk in a leather bag made from a calf stomach, jostles it around as he rides his horse all day in the desert, goes to drink it and finds cheese instead. From there on the conversion of milk to cheese became more complicated, complex—and tasty.
“Oh, look!” I said, pointing to the pot. A white mass was pulling away from the edge, leaving a rim of clear liquid next to the stainless steel.
Tabby smiled. “Perfect. Just what we want it to do.” She checked the temperature. “Almost there. Then we’ll let it sit a few minutes and drain the curds.”
Eating her curds and whey.
Once the curds and whey were separated, Tabby told us to don rubber gloves. “This is going to be hot to handle, folks.”
We took turns heating the cheese in the microwave, stretching and pulling it each time.
“No wonder string cheese is so stringy,” I said to the tomboy brunette standing beside me.
She folded her chunk of cheese and then stretched it back out. “Look how shiny it is, too. I love fresh mozzarella, but it’s so expensive.”
“I bet it would be a lot cheaper to make yourself,” I said.
The subject changed to our favorite cheeses, and as we worked the rest of the group joined the discussion.
And I waited.
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

The other class participants
gathered their belongings and trickled out to the parking lot, chatting amongst themselves and carrying their cheese samples. I hung back, puttering and poking at the contents of my big tote bag until Tabby had finished a long goodbye to Gray Dreadlocks, whom she apparently knew. When the door finally closed, Tabby turned to me with a slightly wary expression.
“Aren’t you …?”
I nodded. “Sophie Mae Watson. Well, Reynolds now. Soon to be Ambrose.”
Sophie Mae Ambrose. Had a nice ring to it. Still, it would be strange to give up my dead husband’s last name after all this time. And Reynolds was the name I used in my business. Did I really want to change my name after Barr and I were married? Would he balk if I didn’t?
Tabby’s forehead wrinkled. She examined me for a long moment, and something akin to regret deepened the lines around her eyes. “You look so much like Bobby Lee.”
That hung there in the air for a while, neither of us quite sure what to do with it. Then she cleared her throat and said, “You’re back in Spring Creek, then?”
“Just for a visit. My mom and dad, you know.”
Her expression hardened at the offhand mention of my mother, and I quickly moved on. “But I love to cook and to make things from scratch. My friend and her daughter wanted me to hike up Horsetooth Mountain with them today, but when I saw you offered this class, I couldn’t resist.”
Another long pause then, “I make several artisan cheeses, mostly bleu varieties, but generally people don’t want to go through the hassle of doing that themselves—inoculating, pressing, and curing. We’ll get a few people for that class, but this fresh cheese class always fills up. Sometimes we make mozzarella, sometimes feta or paneer.”
“More and more people are interested in doing this sort of thing for themselves,” I said. “I’m a soap maker, myself. I sell handmade toiletries on the Internet from my home in Cadyville, Washington.”
“Soap! Now that sounds like fun. I’d love to learn more.”
“A lot of the same things apply: temperature, chemistry, time. But no bacteria. At least we soap makers work pretty hard to avoid that.”
“I bet,” Tabby said. “Bacteria can certainly be bad—or really, really good. After all, it’s what keeps our digestion working. Are you interested in making mold-ripened cheese?”
“Of course,” I said. “When is that class?”
“Day after tomorrow. Just show up if you decide to take it. You can pay me then.”
She was going to slip away, and however much I might like the idea of making my own cheese, I hadn’t had a chance to talk to her about anything important yet.
“I heard you married Joe Bines.”
She paused in the act of reaching for the door handle. Looked over her shoulder. “Your mom tell you that?”
Uh oh. “My dad, actually. When he learned I was coming out here this morning. You know, so I wouldn’t be surprised when I saw you, I guess.”
She watched me babble with an amused glint in her eye.
I wanted to kick myself, but kept going. Couldn’t let her escape yet. “So anyway, is he around?”
“He’s out delivering milk.”
Joe, the milkman. Go figure.
“You guys have any kids?”
“A daughter. She’s fifteen.”
“Wow. That makes me feel old.”
She laughed. “Tell me about it. She’s a good kid, though. Nuts about horses. Pretty good rider, too.”
“How is Joe?”
“Ornery as ever.” She seemed to be loosening up a little, her gestures and facial expression relaxing the more we talked.
“Do you guys ever talk about … Bobby Lee?”
Her shoulders hunched and her chin tucked in. So much for loosening up. Too bad. I only had a week to figure this thing out, and I didn’t have time to dink around.
“I’m sorry, Tabby. I didn’t mean to hit a nerve,” I said.
She looked at the floor. “That’s okay.”
I pushed harder. “I mean, I think about him a lot. Since you and Joe and Bobby Lee were so close when it happened, I just wondered.”
Her eyes met mine, wariness and anger flaring behind them. “It wasn’t my fault.”
“Oh, God. I know that. And let’s get something out in the open here. My mother knows that, too. She was just hurt and bewildered when she said that at the funeral. She’s always felt bad about it.”
Okay, so maybe I shouldn’t have spoken for my mother. She had, after all, accused Tabby of killing her son. I remembered the day well. My mother had been a mess: a precisely coiffed, Southern-belle-with-perfect-manners mess. Not many people would have known, but when she lost it and yelled at Tabby in front of everyone, I hadn’t been the least bit surprised.
The Watsons and the Atwoods hadn’t spoken since.
But my attempt to explain Anna Belle’s actions fell flat. Tabby made a “pffft” noise and looked away.
“I was pretty upset then, too,” she said. “But you didn’t hear me accusing your mother of being responsible for her son’s death. And you know what? I dare say she was a lot more responsible than I ever could be, the way she judged everything he did, the way he had to live up to all of her crazy expectations.”
The hair rose on the back of my neck as my daughterly pride came to Anna Belle’s defense. I opened my mouth to protest.
Then I remembered the letter. Painful though it was, I had to admit Tabby wasn’t entirely wrong. Bobby Lee had said he couldn’t face my parents if they discovered what he’d done. Tabby either already knew that, or had instinctively figured it out. That part of the letter must have hurt Anna Belle a lot to read. Was it one of the reasons she insisted on keeping my father in the dark?
“Okay,” I said. “Fair enough.”
She looked surprised.
“Any chance we could get on the other side of the whole funeral thing?” I asked. “I’d really like to come back for that other class, learn more how to make cheese before I have to go back to Cadyville.”
She considered me, chewing on her lower lip. “You should definitely come for the mold-ripened cheese class. Are you interested in knowing more about soft cheeses? Cultured milk products? That kind of thing?”
I couldn’t keep the big smile from spreading across my face. “I’d love to know more.”
“How long are you going to be here?”
“A week.”
“There’s only so much I can teach you in a week, but I can cover enough to give you a firm base.”
“Really?”
“Sure. How ’bout you come by for two hours tomorrow morning, and we’ll cover bacterial cultures. Then you can hit the mold-ripened cheese class on Wednesday with everyone else, and then come back for another two hours on Thursday to learn more about hard cheeses like Cheddar and Parmesan.”
“Sounds good. How much do you charge for private lessons like that?”
She shrugged. It was a deliberately casual gesture. “Regular class fee.”
Whatever that was. Anna Belle hadn’t said how much she’d paid for the class I’d just taken, but I felt my head nodding in vigorous agreement. I had a feeling Tabby could use the money, plus I loved the idea of learning more about the ins and outs of cheese making
“Okay, then. We’re set. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Finality in her tone.
Rats. Trust me to lose track of the reason I was really there. My hand crept into my bag, and I fingered the envelope that held Bobby Lee’s letter. “I brought something to show you.”
Curiosity flicked across her face as she looked at her watch. It was quickly replaced with alarm. “Oh, God. I’m sorry, Sophie Mae. I have to run.”
Ack! “This won’t take long,” I said, desperation leaking out between the words. “It’s important.”
“I don’t—”
“Please.” Taking a deep breath, I reached into my bag and extracted the envelope. After a brief hesitation, I handed it to her.
Her eyes widened as she read the handwriting, and she shot me a bewildered look. “What is this?”
“It’s a letter that was returned to my parents’ house. According to the postmark, Bobby Lee sent it to you the day he died.”
She blinked. “I don’t understand. Your mom and dad have had it all this time?”
“It only came in the mail a week ago. I’m as baffled by that as you are.”
She bent closer, eyes traveling over the writing on the envelope. Then she grimaced. “My mother.”
“What?”
“This handwriting?” She pointed to the words
Return to sender
. “It’s hers. She kept this from me.” Bitterness laced her tone.
“Why would she do that? Didn’t she like Bobby Lee?”
Her eyes met mine. “My folks were a little … overprotective. They thought Joe and your brother were bad influences at the time, but I think she probably sent this back because she didn’t want me to be any more upset by Bobby Lee’s death than I already was.”
That actually made some sense.
Tabby removed the single sheet and unfolded it. I watched carefully as she read it. Tears shone in her eyes when she laid it down on the counter.
She blinked them dry and swallowed audibly. “I can’t believe I didn’t get to see this until now.”
I felt a little sick to my stomach. This digging into the past was making a real mess, and a part of me wished I’d left everything alone. Too late though. I was up to my neck in it.
Barely breathing, I asked, “Tabby? What was my brother talking about in the note? What had he done?”
Her one-shouldered shrug was nonchalant. “Haven’t got a clue.” But her eyes slid off to the side when she said it.
“Sounds like something pretty major.”
“We were teenagers. Everything was major.”
“You know what I mean. He wrote that so you would know what he was talking about and no one else would.” My hand crept out and took possession of the letter and envelope again.
Tabby watched me return it to my tote bag. “I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
Can’t or won’t, I wondered.
But I couldn’t let it go. “What about Joe? Do you think he’d know?”
Her lips pressed together, and her eyes seemed to search the air above my head. Then her gaze met mine. “I don’t see how he could.”
“Will he be home soon? I could wait.”
She shook her head with a rueful twist to her mouth. “I have to go. I’m already late picking up my daughter from her riding lesson.”
Quickly, she turned and opened the small refrigerator in the corner of the room. “Here—take this with you.” She shoved a small plastic container at me. “It’s piima-cultured butter. So you can get a taste of what we’ll be doing tomorrow morning. Eleven o’clock work?”
“Um, sure.”
She was already out the door, and I followed her to the parking lot. Lickety-split she jumped in a black jeep and drove away. A red pickup and older blue minivan were still in the parking lot. A metallic noise drifted down from the barn. Someone was still on the property.
Well, duh, Sophie Mae. A place like that was bound to take a lot of work. No doubt Joe and Tabby had a hired hand or two around to help. Slowly, I got into Dad’s car and turned the key in the ignition. Hot air winged out of the vents as the air conditioner revved up. It magnified the manure smell tenfold, making me cough.
Was Tabby really in that much of a hurry, or was she trying to get away from me? I didn’t know her well enough to tell. Still, she seemed game to give me another cheese-making lesson. Maybe she simply needed time to process this blast from the past.
At least I could still ask Joe about Bobby Lee’s note tomorrow, even if Tabby didn’t exactly encourage me. If anyone besides Tabby knew what Bobby Lee had been up to before he died, it was his erstwhile best friend.
Plus, Meghan would be thrilled if I learned how to make cheese. There was a dairy near Cadyville where we could get quality milk.
And Erin would—well, I didn’t know. It was hard to tell with her anymore.
I circled the tiny parking lot and turned onto the dirt driveway. Dad’s Subaru kicked up a cloud of dust that followed me out to the county road.