Between a Wok and a Dead Place: A Spice Shop Mystery

“I grow herbs, and dry them, and make remedies for all the ails that visit us. I physic a great many souls besides those of us within.”

“And that satisfies you?” It was a muted cry of protest; it would not have satisfied him.

“To heal men? After years of injuring them? What could be more fitting? A man does what he must do,” said Cadfael thoughtfully.

— Ellis Peters, The Devil’s Novice

I’M NOT ONE OF THOSE PEOPLE WHO WAKE UP AND POP INTO action, ready to start the new day. It’s like my mind’s been working out the previous day’s kinks while I’ve been sleeping and wants me to pay attention to them before I do anything else. Tuesday morning, I woke with an odd sensation that something big in my life had changed, but what was it?

It flooded back quickly. First, Nate’s revelation about Roxanne and the uneasiness it triggered.

Second, the sense that there was something else Nate wasn’t telling me. Nothing so painful or fraught, but unspoken nonetheless. Last Christmas, Vinny had suggested Nate was looking to make a change, then clammed up. I’d chalked his comment up to stress and confusion over the incident that led to Nate working in the wine shop for a few days. And to Vinny being Vinny, and the effect wearing a top hat ten hours a day had to have on the brain.

Arf and I took a quick jaunt around the block. On our way back, I saw my neighbor striding up the street. I should invite her over for a cup of tea or glass of wine. Not tonight. Tonight was Flick Chicks, at my place. The movie and food were chosen. I’d gone Chinese to celebrate the season. At the moment, though, I wanted nothing to do with longevity noodles or fortune cookies. Clearly, I was thinking with my emotions instead of my mouth. Or my brain.

Too late to pick a different movie. Last-minute changes messed up the traditional thematic potluck. Like the time Kristen chose Chocolat only to discover that one of her girls had taken the DVD to a friend’s house and come back with the wrong movie, so we devoured a decadent French spread while watching Enola Holmes.

I unlocked the door to the loft, as eager for a shower as Arf was for his chew bone. I was toweling off when my phone buzzed with a text from Nate.

Morning, little darlin’! Don’t worry about anything I said about R. She’s great and I’m glad you two are friends. Love you! Miss you like crazy!

Time for work. Arf and I hiked up the Market steps, past the shops and restaurants huddled there and the double doors leading to the lower levels. A couple stood on the wide landing, pointing at the metal figure of a man walking down the wall, a white globe in hand, one of a dozen light-fixture sculptures. The Market is a virtual gallery of public art. At the top, we stopped at the bakery for a breakfast sandwich. I’d marveled at the mix of languages in the CID, but the Market was a tower of Babel, too. You might hear Greek, Italian, Farsi, or Russian. In the family-run Asian market, the owners switched between Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, depending on the customer. The Orchard Girls, Angie and Sylvie, often spoke to each other and to customers in Spanish. I remembered enough from high school for a casual chat and to shop in the street markets with my mother when I visited my parents in Costa

Rica, but the native speakers talked too fast for me to catch every word. What about brushing up with lessons online? My mother swore by Duolingo. Learning a foreign language from an animated owl? What a hoot!

The counterman handed me a white paper bag. I thanked him, then Arf and I wove our way through the preopening madness. I buy flowers for the shop on Tuesdays and Saturdays, alternating between the florist at the corner of First and Pike and the days-tallers, mostly Hmong women. This time of year, choices are limited, but a few have greenhouses.

The words the Hmong flower seller at the first table flung at her neighbor may not have meant anything to me, but the tone was loud and clear.

“She-dog, good for nothing,” the woman muttered to me in English. “Her chrysanthemums are brown and her roses don’t stink.”

I was pretty sure she meant “don’t smell,” but didn’t correct her. “A dozen of your roses, then.” She continued muttering as she added baby’s breath and ferns to a bundle of long-stemmed pink and yellow roses, then cradled the stems in paper. Despite her grumbling, I had a hunch the tension had less to do with her competitor’s blooms and more to do with her prices or the theft of a long-time customer. Comes with the retail territory, especially in close quarters.

Arf and I ate our breakfast and got the shop ready. Sandra was the first staffer to arrive.

“How’d the new girl do?” she asked as she tied her apron strings around her ample middle.

A spark of terror stabbed me in the throat. “Tell me you’re not thinking about retirement.”

“No. I like working.” She bit her lower lip. “But after this summer, I’d like to cut back to four days, and work solely in the shop. The warehouse is pretty physical.”

Nothing I hadn’t expected. Though it gave finding the right warehouse manager an extra urgency.

“We’ll make it work. Oh, here’s fun for you. Have you met the new cheese shop owner?” I told her about Sandy Lynn, the possibility of collaboration, and Cayenne’s ideas for using smoked cheddar.

“Yum.” She slipped on her readers, leopard-print on a black-and-gold beaded chain, then pulled out her phone and flipped through the recipes on our blog. “How about a variation of those cheddar rosemary crackers? The slice-and-bake ones. What herbs and spices do you like with the cheese?”

“I keep thinking paprika, maybe because I’m half Hungarian and ate two bowls of Hungarian mushroom soup last night.”

“The smoked will have a deeper, fuller flavor, though it could overwhelm a mild cheese. Let’s try ’em both.” Smoked paprika might just be my favorite spice, if I were playing favorites, but I’d never say so out loud, where the other herbs and spices might hear me.

Vanessa arrived, wearing thick-soled, high-top sneakers. We started the tea, then readied for the day.

When my ten-thirty interviewee hadn’t shown by ten minutes to eleven, I crossed her off the list.

My mind kept drifting back to the mysteries of the Gold Rush—the closed-up hotel, the abandoned room upstairs, and the dead man in the hidden pharmacy. The cops had a name now. Would they share it? I retreated to my office, about the size of your average home shower, and punched a phone number I wasn’t supposed to have.

“Actually, I was hoping you could help us. Thanks to your idea about the costume shops, we tracked our dead man. He’s Terence Leong, thirty-two. He gave an address in an apartment building in the CID, but we haven’t been able to talk to anyone there yet. We’ve also confirmed that he was not part of any dance group on the official schedule. Probably not a local man.”

Anyone could stay anonymous in the city, but not completely. Not for long. And wouldn’t people want to help find a killer? I remembered Reed’s comment about the community protecting its own. “Maybe people know who he is, but don’t want to admit it.”

“Always a possibility,” Spencer said. “We see it often in drive-bys or gang disputes. Shootings with witnesses who fear becoming targets if they talk.”

“I’ve heard rumors,” I said, “from one of the tenants, that the building might have been for sale. Or, that someone was interested in buying it.” A potential buyer was a mystery, but what could it have to do with the murder?

“We’ve heard that, too. We’re looking into it.” She paused, then continued. “You’ve been spending time with Dr. Davidson. She say anything helpful?”

First Tracy pushed me about Roxanne, now Spencer. What was up with that? “About what? The Wus? The building?”

“Oh, anything,” she said. “You never know what might come up in casual conversation.”

True enough. Roxanne might tell me something she wouldn’t say in an official interview, particularly if she still bore the scars of that youthful encounter with the system. Then there was that business about the ghost of Bruce Lee, but I didn’t take it seriously.

“I can’t think of a thing,” I said truthfully. We hung up and I clutched the silent phone in my hand. What would Brother Cadfael do?

Back out front, a customer was surveying our Lunar New Year display. “So many spices I’ve never heard of.”

“We used to take the kids to see the lion dancers for Chinese New Year.” The customer reached for a book on Chinese home cooking. “When did they change the name?”

“Over time,” I said. “The name Lunar New Year acknowledges that many Asian cultures celebrate the New Year at the new moon in late January or early February, not just the Chinese. With any luck, that’s when we begin to shift from winter to spring, the season of renewal. Each country or culture has its own customs and food. Makes for a more colorful celebration. And a tastier one.”

“Ahh. Thanks. The big drum scared my daughter when she was little.” She mimed swinging the big mallet.

We finished our chat about spices and cookbooks. Then I left Vanessa and Sandra to pack her order and grabbed my coat and the handcart.

After a delivery to the bistro on Lower Post Alley, I stopped at the PDA office to drop off my December sales report. The PDA handles all the administrative doodah involved in running the Market, our own version of city hall. With more than two hundred merchants, two hundred daystallers, and a hundred bars and restaurants, plus five hundred residents, the Market is like a small town—one that hosts ten million visitors a year in nine acres. Rents are a combination of a fixed monthly sum and a percentage of sales. That structure saved a lot of businesses during the pandemic, effectively slashing their rent when sales plummeted. This past December had been my best month since I bought the Market more than two years ago, making my rent check the biggest yet. I did not mind one bit.

Yolande Jenkins, the leasing manager, stood behind the front counter, pointing out something on the computer screen to the young man seated in front of it.

“Hi, Pepper,” she said. “Training a new hire. Hey, I hear you broke up a fight the other day between a couple of hot-headed drivers.”

“Tried, but the damage had already been done. Sometimes it seems like everyone’s living on the edge of their tempers these days.”

“We’re setting up a task force to address vehicle traffic in the Market. I’m hoping you’ll be one of the merchant representatives. We can use your people skills.”

“Thanks, I think.” It was true that I’d helped resolve a debate on the Tenant Review Committee between bringing in new blood or favoring an existing tenant’s expansion when I’d solved a murder that eliminated one applicant, but hopefully the traffic task force wouldn’t require that particular skill.

Mid-March, near the first day of spring. Could we fix a perennial issue with no obvious solution before the perennials began to bloom? I didn’t see how, but we could at least plant the seeds.

On my way back to the shop, I wondered if anyone in the Market might have known Terence Leong or the secrets of the Gold Rush Hotel. I parked my cart outside the Asian grocery and popped in. My young pal Lily would be at school, but her mother and I had become friendly. I grabbed a bottle of my favorite toasted sesame oil and plucked a couple of bags of fortune cookies out of the basket on the front counter.

“Been to any Lunar New Year celebrations yet?” I fished in my pockets for cash.

“We took Lily to see the dancers Saturday after we closed here,” Mei said. “And her class is having a party Friday afternoon. My mother is making two hundred spring rolls.”

“The dancers were terrific, weren’t they? You heard about the one who died.” Terence Leong had dressed the part, even if he hadn’t belonged to an official dance troupe.

“Died?” Mei’s skin paled and her eyes went very wide. She pressed her fingers to her lips. “Brings bad luck for the new year.”