A Scone of Contention Read online

A pound of best butter—that’s what you told me to ask for, and I did, but I kept wondering whether there was such a thing as second-best butter, or worst butter—Brianna was handing over wrapped packages to Fiona, laughing and talking at once.

  —Diana Gabaldon, Voyager

  Once Ainsley left, I tucked my iPad into my backpack and left the hotel, retracing our steps down the hill and into town. Whatever was going on between those friends, they were not going to share it with me. Not yet. But I wasn’t finished digging.

  The streets were busier now, beginning to fill with excited children, townspeople, and musicians carrying instruments, dressed in full dress red plaid kilts, white shirts, and black vests, with tall knee-high white stockings. Some women wore red sashes over black tops.

  I had about an hour before I had promised to meet the others outside the café where we had lunch. Much as I yearned to browse in each of the shops along the road and chat with the local shopkeepers, I had to hurry to squeeze in the visit with Joseph Booth’s family. The cottage I was looking for was almost at the end of the village along the road, and overlooked the river in back. A pretty garden brimmed with red geraniums and some of the flowers that had been blooming in front of Ainsley’s building. Hollyhocks, I thought Grace had told me. Or was it foxglove? The cottage was built of white stucco, with brown shutters and a glorious pink rose bush that climbed up the stucco and cascaded over top of the door to the other side. I took in a big breath of air for courage, climbed the steps, and tapped the door knocker, which was made of brass in the shape of a sheep. A couple minutes later, a woman whom I guessed to be in her early sixties, came to the door.

  “I’m Hayley Snow,” I said quickly. “I am so very sorry for your loss. When I read your son’s obituary in the paper earlier today, I could not help noticing that you are the author of prize-winning cinnamon scones. I’m a food writer, working on an article about Scottish specialties. I realize this is terrible, clumsy timing, but I am only in town this afternoon, and I wonder if we might talk for a few minutes? I simply could not resist stopping in to express my condolences and to meet the winners of the baking contest.” This was pushy even by my standards, but it felt so important to understand what had happened on that wheel.

  “Aunt, I’m his aunt,” she said. Her eyes narrowed as she looked me over, as though she couldn’t believe I had the gall to come calling about scones at a time like this.

  “Sadly, I was on the Falkirk Wheel the other day when your nephew fell, and I am so terribly sorry for your loss.” That sounded so blunt and cruel, but I couldn’t think how else to get them to talk to me about Joseph.

  “I’m Bettina. Come in.” She opened the door wider and waved me in.

  “I’ll only stay a few minutes. I imagine you are getting ready for the parade. Or maybe not much in the mood for a parade,” I added quickly. “Which I would completely understand.” I did a mental forehead thunk to remind myself not to babble. It was a miracle that she’d let me in, and I didn’t want to ruin the chance.

  She led me to the back of the house, into a small kitchen with a rustic wooden farmhouse table overlooking the backyard and the river. The tabletop was covered with baked goods, delivered I supposed by concerned neighbors and friends. An old brown dog woofed, then struggled to his feet from his plaid bed in a patch of sunlight and shuffled over to snuffle my hands.

  “Good dog,” I said, smiling. “You must be smelling my sister-in-law’s cats. Archie and Louise. They’re gorgeous gray tigers, but not fans of dogs.”

  “I’ll put the kettle on,” said Joseph’s aunt. “You sit,” she said, glancing at the crowded table. “Push a few things aside, and I’ll see if my sister is willing to speak with you. She might wish to hear what you know. And she might enjoy a distraction, much as the pain will return after.”

  I sat in a wooden chair with a rush seat, near the window, listening to the river that burbled along the bottom slope of their lawn. The old hound butted my hand out of the way and placed his head in my lap. He smelled comfortingly musty and doggy, and I rubbed his ears and felt my anxiety drop. “I wonder if you miss him?” I asked. “Did he live here? Or visit often?” The dog said nothing, only swished his tail, whap, whap, whap against the wooden post of the table and then stinging my calf with each wag.

  The two sisters appeared in the kitchen shortly after, Joseph’s mother, Violet, pale to the point of almost gray. Her shoulders were stooped and her eyes drooped, the picture of sadness. She would certainly have imagined her son outliving her many years after her death, perhaps attending to the two of them as they grew older. I felt a little sick about pushing my way into their grief.

  I stood up to greet her. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said in a quiet voice. “Thank you for agreeing to talk with me.”

  “And you are here to tour Scotland?” Bettina asked. “Please, sit down.” She pressed her sister down into the chair across from me and took the seat nearest the stove.

  I explained about Nathan and his sister and our honeymoon, and then stammered a bit about how much I was enjoying the Scottish food so far. How in fact I wrote about it for a living and was at this moment obsessed with scones. All of which was true.

  In the background, the tea kettle whistled. Bettina held a finger up and hurried over to get mugs, tea, and sugar from the cabinet. After quickly fixing three drinks, she folded her sister’s hands around a warm mug of liquid. She placed another in front of me along with a small china plate rimmed with pink roses, and a fork and knife.

  “Now, you do not sound like you are from Scotland or even England. New Zealand perhaps? America?” asked Bettina.

  “America,” I said, smiling. “I live at the end of the state of Florida on a small island called Key West. As I said, I’m writing an article focused on scones …”

  The two women looked at the baked goods covering the table, each plate and pan centered on a hand-tatted doily. “Then you absolutely must try some of these,” said Violet. “I can’t fathom why our friends and neighbors think we could eat all of this or have any appetite for it, but I suppose it’s the best one can do under the circumstances. Unfortunately, we haven’t had the nerves to do our own baking, but some of these are not awful.”

  Bettina took me on a whirlwind tour of the sweets on the table, the shortbread, the tablet, the Dundee cake, the raspberry almond scones, and the black bun, or currant loaf, which she explained was more traditionally served at New Year’s. Without waiting for me to choose, she cut pieces of each offering and loaded the plate in front of me.

  “Will you tell me about your cinnamon scones? To have won such a prize, there must be family secrets.” I smiled at the women, sipped my tea, and nibbled on a piece of shortbread.

  “As we clearly said in that article,” Bettina said, emphasizing her words with a brisk nod of her chin, “we don’t intend to share the recipe. Scones look so simple, but the truth is, they can be easily transformed into tough and tasteless lumps of dough.”

  “One secret is frozen butter, grated into the dry ingredients,” said Violet. “Don’t skimp on good cinnamon. And work the dough as little as possible.” She sat back with a small but satisfied smile, her hands folded in her lap. “That’s as much as we are prepared to share.”

  “I understand,” I said, feeling a bit disappointed. Even if my original goal for visiting had nothing to do with the prize-winning scones, they would have been the pièce de résistance of my article on Scottish delicacies. Maybe I could wangle something similar from Grace once we got back to Edinburgh.

  “What will your tour cover?” asked Bettina.

  I listed off the places we were going—and then took my chance, mentioning the Falkirk Wheel.

  “Bettina said you were with him when he fell?” Violet’s lips trembled, and she pinched them together to contain her distress. “Did you see him fall? Did someone push him?”

  I glanced at my phone. It was fifteen minutes before six, and I was bordering on late. Obviously, I couldn�
�t leave yet. I took another sip of strong tea and told them the story of the fall in the broadest possible terms.

  “Unfortunately, we were seated at the front end of the boat, so I’m unable to report on how it happened. There were screams and everyone was on their feet trying to figure out what had happened. And then the captain instructed us to take our seats because we were returning to the pier. Once we disembarked, police were everywhere, and your son was on the ground, though I didn’t know it was him, of course. It all happened so quickly that I’m quite certain he did not suffer.” I added that last bit thinking how awful it would be for them to imagine the scene.

  Violet covered her face with her hands, and Bettina stroked her back.

  “I know the police are investigating, because this morning, they came to my sister-in-law’s home and showed us your son’s photo.” At this point in my recitation, I realized there was no logical reason to explain me visiting their home and pressing them about Joseph, if I didn’t want to tell the truth—the truth being that Vera and her friends appeared unusually tense and that all or some of them were hiding something, possibly related to Joseph Booth’s death. Or murder.

  “I’d really love to help sort this out if I could. Had you talked to him recently?” I asked. “The newspaper piece said you wanted the police to pursue this as criminal. Did you have a sense that Joseph believed he was in danger?”

  “He called me every Sunday,” Violet said, “isn’t that right?” She asked her sister as though she wasn’t sure of anything these days. Bettina put a hand over her sister’s clenched hands and nodded.

  “He never missed, not once. He was a lovely young man and devoted to his mother.”

  Violet snuffled at her sister’s words.

  “And devoted to me too, as he knew I had no children of my own,” Bettina added.

  “He was exactly as always this last visit on the phone,” Violet said, straightening her shoulders. “He asked about the garden club and the dog and whether I’ve been taking my constitutionals every evening. And he naturally wondered if we had thought about entering next year’s baking contest and what recipe we would consider submitting. He was so proud of us. Nothing out of the ordinary. One day he was there and the next, gone.” She began to weep a little, and I took bites of each of the baked goods on my plate, to give her a moment to gather her composure.

  “Would you tell me about Joseph?” I asked. “I understand that he was a tutor at St. Andrews for a while and more recently worked as a software engineer. Did you get the idea that he was involved in something difficult at work, something dangerous?” Which I’d sort of asked already, but it hadn’t been answered. And it seemed important. Because I’d love for there to be another reason that he might have fallen, unrelated to my sister-in-law and her friends.

  Bettina dropped her gaze to the table. “If he did, he didn’t share it with us. But he wouldn’t have done, wouldn’t have wanted to worry us.”

  “I understand. Do you know why he left the University suddenly some years ago? Or was this something he preferred not to talk about?”

  “He wanted to teach,” said his mother in a firm voice. “He always wanted to teach from the time he was a boy, when he used to gather the neighborhood kids to play school.” She gave a sweet but sad laugh, as if remembering. “He was a whiz at mathematics and computers and history, and he loved each one of those subjects. But then he left abruptly midterm, and we were so surprised, but he refused to tell me why. He said that it was done and best not to discuss it. But it seemed to me that he lost something after that, a spark. Would you say, Bettina?”

  Her sister nodded. “We wondered if it was a love gone sour,” she said. “We couldn’t think why else he would abandon the work he was so excited about.”

  “I do believe it was a broken heart,” said Violet, nodding in agreement.

  “Do the names Glenda or Vera or Ainsley sound familiar?”

  They looked at each other, and both shrugged. Their kitchen clock chimed six, and I felt the pressure to ask everything and wrap up my visit. “The paper said he was a software engineer most recently? Was that going well? Was he married? Any children?”

  “Never married. No children. His job was fine, as far as he told us,” Violet said.

  She was so sad and I was so late, I knew it was time to go. I pushed back in my chair and stood up, causing the old dog to struggle to his feet too. I left my Key Zest business card on their table between the currant loaf and the shortbread.

  “In case you change your mind about sharing that recipe. I would be so thrilled. Or remember anything more about Joseph. Thank you for speaking with me and for all the delicious goodies. Again, my deepest condolences on the loss of your son.”

  Bettina walked me to the door and closed it behind her so we were standing on the stoop together.

  “I don’t truly understand why you are the one to ask all these questions,” she said. “You’re not affiliated with the police?”

  I gulped and crossed my arms over my chest, determined to tell the truth as I knew it. “No. As I mentioned, we were on that boat, and we all felt so terrible about what happened. And then it turned out that some of my friends seemed to have known him from school, which made the loss even more shocking. And my husband is a detective back home, so asking questions comes naturally.” I paused to take a breath. “When I read in the paper that you weren’t satisfied with how the investigation was going, I hated to think about you suffering with no answers. That’s it, mainly. I hoped I could help.”

  She stared at me for a moment, then gave a quick nod, as if I’d passed a test. “He was tense about something, Sunday,” she said, emphasis on the was. “I didn’t like to say anything in front of Violet, but he had an angriness in his voice that I’d seldom heard. Except perhaps when he first left Edinburgh. He did fine in his career, but he lost the spark he’d had as a teacher. He was going through the motions of his life, I’d say.”

  “Did your sister notice the difference in his voice as well?” I asked.

  “Violet is a kind soul who prefers to see the good in every situation and hates to make waves. So she never did press him too hard. But something bad happened before he left St. Andrews, and last Sunday he sounded exactly like that.”

  She looked away and plucked a couple of brown leaves off the climbing rose. “Violet would be devastated if she began to think we should have noticed and done something to help him before that terrible fall. That somehow if we’d paid more attention, we could have saved him.” She grabbed my hand. “You’ll tell us what you learn?” She pressed a scrap of paper into my fingers with a phone number on it. “Call my cell.”

  In the distance, I heard the mournful wail of the bagpipes and the rhythmic tap-tap-tap of drums. “I will,” I said. “I promise.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  It wasn’t very nice of me, but I hoped the pickles gave him heartburn.

  —Jenn McKinlay, Buried to the Brim

  I hurried back toward town, hoping I hadn’t missed the parade highlights. As I got closer, the crowds grew bigger on the sidewalks, and I had to weave through the villagers to make my way to my friends and family.

  A traditional bagpipe band led the parade, consisting of about twenty pipers and half that many drummers behind them. They set off down Main Street, playing “Scotland the Brave.” The crowd around me was clapping and cheering, and several of them began dancing a jig, dipping and whirling, with joyful faces. Behind the bagpipers trailed the women I had seen earlier in the day, with sashes across their chest—town officials maybe? Children dressed in red sweat suits followed them, who I guessed belonged to a sports team of some kind. A breeze had come up, causing the white and red pendants strung across the street to flap. And the sky overhead roiled with big white and gray clouds. When had I experienced any scene quite so beautiful? I wished Nathan could have been here to share it with me.

  As the musicians moved on to the melancholy notes of “The Skye Boat Song,” I spotte
d my group gathered in front of the café.

  “I hoped you weren’t going to miss this!” cried Miss Gloria. “Isn’t it the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen? Can you imagine a more festive way to welcome summer?”

  I gave her a quick hug. “I love it. I’m speechless.”

  Helen grabbed my hand firmly and drew me a yard away from the others. “How was your afternoon?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said, feeling surprised and slightly ambushed. “I did some work, though not nearly enough. I need to rough out my thoughts about lunch, so I don’t get it mixed up with dinner. If the meals start piling up, I won’t remember what details go with what. And I still have the scone and cock-a-leekie soup recipes to write up.” I grinned, suddenly aware that I was talking too fast—and all about food, which I knew didn’t interest her that much—and generally acting guilty. “And then I walked to the end of Main Street to stretch my legs.”

  She shot me a look of stony disbelief that reminded me completely of Nathan. “I know you know something is going on here”—she tipped her head toward Vera—“and I know you well enough to know you aren’t just letting it go.”

  I could tell a small stretcher from time to time as needed, but I couldn’t flat-out lie to my mother-in-law. I beckoned her to move a little farther away from the others, and explained about the article I’d come across about Joseph Booth and how, in utter synchronicity, his mother and aunt lived right here in Peebles. “I know we’re busy this evening and leaving in the morning, so this seemed the only chance to talk with them. They are just adorable—two sisters who look like peas in a pod. I assume they must have married brothers, because they share the name Booth.”

  She cut me off. “I wish you wouldn’t shoot off places by yourself,” she said, a sober look still on her face. “Nathan would have a coronary. I don’t think I should need to say it, but there have been two possible murders, or one murder and one attempt, and we have no idea who is behind them. And everyone who might be a suspect is right here on this trip with us.”