My 1965 robin’s egg blue convertible backfired as I parked in front of the Wildflower Inn. The noise set off Clover barking in the backseat. Not exactly the quiet homecoming I’d hoped for. I jumped out of my Karmann Ghia—or “KG” as I’d nicknamed her—to check under the hood, hoping I wouldn’t need to get the roadster serviced yet again. No idea where that money would come from.
A screaming, ranting madwoman poured out of a neighboring house. Maybe in her late seventies, she brandished a large umbrella. I dropped the hood to find the umbrella pointing at me. Clover—all twenty pounds of him—jumped out and started growling.
“Easy, boy,” I said.
“You shoot something off, Missy? Here to cause trouble? Because I’m on the board of the Friends of the Rose Mallow Police.” the woman said. She wore a perfectly fitted Mamie Eisenhower pink skirt suit with enormous pearls—straight out of the 1950s. Her white bouffant billowed around her head. She reminded me of a researcher I’d helped earlier that day at the Library of Congress. That woman had been a murder mystery author looking for books about early detectives. This woman looked like she wanted to murder someone—namely me.
Suddenly, I remembered her: Cordelia Sullivan. She was my late grandmother’s arch-nemesis. After my Nana Z had moved to Rose Mallow, they’d competed to be the president of almost every board in town. Nana Z had called it a “friendly rivalry to garner the most civic goodwill,” but I don’t think Cordelia saw it that way. To her, the Blume family were—and always would be—outsiders in her perfect Chesapeake Bay town.
“What’s going on?” My sister Azalea appeared on the wraparound porch of the Wildflower Inn. Although I was two years younger at twenty-eight, she looked like my twin, except that her hair was much longer and darker than my slanted bob. She pushed her bangs back and brought a hand up to her forehead when she saw me. “Juniper? What on earth are you doing here?”
“Well, I….” My words faltered. I’d spent the past hour driving and trying to figure out how to tell Azalea about why I’d finally returned, but every time I tested the words out loud, they failed. Clover had listened with confused curiosity before giving up and falling asleep.
“You know there’s a noise ordinance,” Cordelia said as she waved her umbrella around. Clover barked at the offending instrument. However, I think he wanted to play with it more than anything else. Occasional growling aside, he’s not exactly attack dog material.
“Yes, Mrs. Sullivan. Not until ten p.m., and it’s not even eight o’clock yet.” Azalea’s exasperated voice led me to suspect that she’d had this conversation more than once.
“Hmph. I plan on taking your ‘halfway house’ to the zoning board. What a travesty to do to our pristine historic district. You know I’m president of the Rose Mallow Historical Society.” Cordelia wagged a finger at my sister. I closed my eyes before rolling them.
“Mama! Mama!” A young bundle of legs and a mop of nearly black hair appeared next to Azalea on the wraparound porch. I couldn’t believe how big Violet had grown. She was almost four years old now.
She latched onto Azalea’s legs and held on tightly. I wanted to run up to my niece and smother her in hugs and kisses, but I wasn’t sure how I’d be received. Clover apparently did, too, because he took off after her. The little girl squealed with laughter as he covered her in licks.
“Go inside, Vi. It’s past your bedtime,” Azalea said. She turned to us. “I don’t have time for this. As you can see, I have a young child requiring my attention. Plus, I have a house full of guests. Mrs. Sullivan, it sounds like you have a plan in place to handle my zoning and noise issues. I’ll leave you to it. And Juniper, if you’re here, then let’s get you inside.”
Violet ran inside, letting Clover follow. I took that as a positive sign, so I grabbed my suitcase from the trunk and followed quickly, as Cordelia monitored us. Her umbrella remained held out in the air. She reminded me of Don Quixote in pearls.
“You’ve done an incredible job restoring the place,” I said as I walked across the perfectly manicured lawn. Azalea had recently converted Nana Z’s Queen Anne-style mansion into a boutique hotel. After so many years away, I hadn’t been sure what to expect.
She eyed me with uncertainty. I could tell she was debating whether to chew me out for not being here for any of the work, let alone the hotel’s grand opening earlier in the spring. But my sister is much better at maturity than I am.
“It’s been a journey. Not an undertaking for the faint of heart. Repairing that turret alone had me almost give up and put up the for sale sign.” Azalea pointed up to the three-story round tower protruding from the side of the house. As a kid, I used to pretend Nana Z’s home was a castle and fought many dragons racing up that tower.
“You wouldn’t.”
“I said ‘Almost,’” she replied with a laugh.
“I love how bright the yellow siding is. I bet that color really pops in the morning against the Chesapeake Bay.” I walked up the stairs to the wraparound, past garden beds bursting with purple coneflowers and Black-Eyed Susans, Maryland’s state flower.
“You know what’s funny is how much I hated canary yellow when we were little. Every time we came here, I’d always wished Nana Z’s house was more like Cordelia Sullivan’s with her dark greens and rich reds. But now that Nana Z’s gone, I couldn’t stand to change it,” Azalea said.
“But it’s such a cheery color. Why would you want something so drab as Cordelia’s place? ” I asked. As a kid, Cordelia’s house had been as scary as the owner. Losing a ball into her yard meant it was never coming back. Neighborhood kids claimed her house was haunted.
Azalea shrugged. “Yeah, the yellow’s growing on me.”
“You kept this mess?” I said when I spotted the clunky clay mezuzah on the doorpost. I’d made the case at Jewish day camp as a kid. Inside was a tiny parchment scroll inscribed with biblical verses in Hebrew. The painted clay design was supposed to be a bunch of zinnias in honor of Nana Z’s first name, but it looked more like a lumpy mud puddle than a bright firework of flowers.
Azalea shrugged with a smile. “Oh, there are a few of my own masterpieces on some of the other doors inside. Maybe I’ll get Violet to make some new ones.”
The inside was as exquisite as the outside. I don’t think my memories did the place justice. The stained glass above the front door also sported Black-Eyed Susans, while those above each window featured a different native wildflower.
Azalea had kept our grandmother’s lush red carpets with ornate gold and white floral patterns. Polished mahogany inset panels gleamed from the walls. A staircase with beautifully carved spindles fed into the large lobby.
On the left was a parlor that Azalea had turned into the registration space. On the right was the library, overflowing with leather-bound books. It was in this room I had discovered my love for stories and books as a child. I wouldn’t have become a rare books librarian at The Library of Congress without Nana Z’s library. I sighed, wishing things were going better there. Nana Z would have been proud of me, but my job had become so difficult since I lost that promotion to Greyson. A little birdie had told me not to expect another chance for a long time, which meant I was stuck with someone Nana Z would have described as a “schlemiel.”
A narrow hallway disappeared between the registration area and the staircase, which led back to the dining room and kitchen. I remembered how those overlooked the back garden, public boardwalk, and the Chesapeake Bay. I could imagine how ornately she’d decorated the upstairs bedrooms.
Clover sniffed at everything in sight. I monitored him, but he was having a grand time exploring. Just not too grand of a time. I tried sending the message to him telepathically. He lifted his nose at me as if to say, “Who, me?”
“I love that you hung some of Nana Z’s watercolors,” I said. My eyes grew misty as I gazed at her paintings of native flowers, including dwarf crested irises, ironweed, columbine, and, of course, the rose mallow for which the Maryland town was named. I shook my head, pushing the grief down deep.
A teenager hunched over a thick book sat at the registration desk. She had long, bluish-green locs that looked beautiful against her sepia-brown skin. Her large glasses were rimmed in a matching turquoise color. She looked up from the book and said, “Sorry, Azalea. Vi got away from me.”
The teen didn’t seem alarmed, but then again, neither did Azalea. I wondered if this happened frequently. Maybe Vi was a regular escape artist. Nana Z would have been pleased. I held back my smile.
“I’m Juniper, Azalea’s sister,” I said to the teen as I extended my hand.
“You have a sister?” she asked Azalea with a look of surprise. Then she recovered, shook my hand, and said, “I’m Keisha Douglass. I’ve been helping Azalea with the Wildflower Inn. But, uh, we’re all booked up tonight.”
“I’ll figure it out,” said Azalea. “Although giving me some sort of a heads up you were finally coming would’ve been nice, Juniper.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I smiled awkwardly. Clover raced over to the desk to check out Keisha. The desk was higher than him, so he couldn’t quite see atop. Fortunately, she came around to pet him. “Oh wow! A dog? We’re allowing dogs now?”
I turned to check with Azalea, who massaged her temples. She breathed deeply but then simply shrugged. Great. Not only had I shown up out of the blue, but I hadn’t checked to make sure pets were allowed. I was pretty sure I knew the root cause of her sudden headache. I smiled sheepishly.
“No worries, Keisha. Clover’s the exception to the no-dogs rule. Vi’s fine. I’m going to put her to bed,” Azalea said as she ushered the bouncing kid down the narrow hallway and turned abruptly right before the kitchen. Unsure of what to do, I followed. There was a small sitting room there, which she had reconfigured into a bedroom. It was a tight space. Azalea caught me staring. “It’s a temporary solution. I’m still working on updating the Carriage House in the back garden. Once I’m finished, Vi and I will move there.”
Vi ran around the room, fighting Azalea’s attempts to return her to bed. My sister paused mid-chase and said, “This may take a bit. You know where the kitchen is. Why don’t you go there, start a kettle of tea, and I’ll meet you there when we’re done? I was getting ready to pull a kugel out of the oven anyway.”
That was my sister, always gently commanding, whether it was an unruly neighbor, an energetic preschooler, or me, the surprise guest. I thought of her like a duck. Above the water, she appeared to be smoothly sailing along, but below, it was a mad fury of management to keep everything afloat.
“A kugel?” I asked with excitement. Nana Z had made plenty of the baked noodle casseroles each summer. Sometimes, they were savory, but more often, they were sweet, made with lokshen, or egg noodles, and various cheeses.
Azalea looked pleased. “I’ve been trying to perfect her recipe. You’ll have to tell me what you think.”
I knew immediately she meant Nana Z. As we headed down the hallway, I caught the aroma of the decadent noodle pudding. I could already detect the cinnamon she’d used. My eyes watered slightly at the memories the smell produced.
The kitchen was both familiar and new. No longer was it the 1890s meets 1970s chic that Nana Z had employed. Azalea had replaced most of the yellowed appliances with updated stainless steel, upgraded the laminate countertops to granite, and removed the harvest gold wallpaper to paint the in vogue “greige” along with a matching subway tile backsplash. Someone had been watching a lot of HGTV. But it was still Nana Z’s kettle on the stovetop, her handcrafted cookie jar on the counter, and a variety of favorite teas in the same cabinet location. Being here felt like being at home, but only if that home had been completely renovated when you weren’t looking.
The view out back remained the same, looking past a blooming garden of blue hydrangeas and the small Carriage House, to the public boardwalk separating the garden from the Chesapeake Bay. On good days, you could make out the shoreline on the Eastern Shore. Being early June, the sun was beginning to set beyond the Bay’s edge, so the view became a Tonalist painting with its atmospheric blues, grays, and browns.
Clover found an embroidered tea towel to play with. I tried pulling it away from him, but he decided that meant the game was afoot. I dug into my suitcase and found his food. I borrowed a couple of low rimmed bowls to fill with his dinner and water. He quickly abandoned the towel for something to eat.
According to the timer, the kugel still had a few minutes left in the oven. I caught the kettle before it whistled and filled up two mugs. Given the abundance of Darjeeling black tea, I assumed it was still Azalea’s favorite and prepped it for both of us. Within a few minutes, she came in, plopped down on an empty seat, and dropped her head to the table. I sat up in alarm, afraid that my cool-as-nails sister might be about to cry.
“Why are you here, Juniper? Why now?” She didn’t look up as she spoke. She cradled her head in her folded arms. Unsure of what to say, I gingerly placed my hand on her shoulders. I was amazed when she didn’t swat it away. I pressed into her shoulder and could feel her sob.
“How’d you know? How did you know I couldn’t do this all on my own anymore? Divorce is even harder than I had expected. And it’s not like I thought it’d be a walk in the park, but it’s so much worse.” She sat up, tears streaming, and leaned over to me, pulling me into a firm embrace. I hadn’t known what to expect returning here, but it certainly wasn’t this. However, I wouldn’t turn her warmth down. I debated about how to tell her the truth about why I’d finally come back to Rose Mallow.
While my sister and I were close in age, we had never been close in person. She was the logical-minded entrepreneur, while I was the pie-in-the-sky academic dreamer. I don’t think Azalea had ever not toed the line. I’d never seen her speed or take an extra sample from the grocery store. Sure, we shared a love for anything old. I loved books and clothes, and she couldn’t resist an antique store. Restoring Nana Z’s house must have been a dream project for her, combining a love for all her passions. I wouldn’t be surprised if she had measured everything personally or drawn all the blueprints.
“Uh, excuse me.” A young man with a goatee interrupted our tender moment. “But we need more toilet paper in the…. What’s it called? The Forget-Me-Not Room?” He started laughing. “Oh, that’s funny that I forgot the Forget-Me-Not. That’s right, right?” That phrasing set off another burst of laughter. He didn’t seem to notice or care that neither of us had joined in his amusement.
“Sure, I’ll be there in a moment. Do you need anything else?” Azalea turned on a dime. She was all sunshine and smiles. You’d never know she just confessed her pain to me a moment ago. She was gone for about half a minute before returning. “Teenagers.”
“He didn’t look like a teenager.”
Azalea shook her head. “I meant Keisha. She should have taken care of him. Look, she’s amazing, but she gets so caught up in her books sometimes. And if it’s not her books, then it’s her latest coding project on her laptop. I constantly have to remind her that she’s at work, not at a study session.”
“Oh, like when Violet ran outside?” I remembered the brief exchange when we had come into the inn. Azalea nodded in agreement.
The timer for the oven went off. Clover looked up, startled at the sound. Azalea got up, grabbed some oven mitts, and pulled the kugel out of the oven, placing the casserole dish on a trivet to cool. Out of the oven, I could get even more scents. If I wasn’t wrong, she’d added apples and raisins to it. Clover noticed, too, pacing below the counter. He whined, obviously hoping someone would give him some.
“Not now, Clover,” I said quietly to him. He tilted his head to the side before giving up and returning to his food bowl.
“But Keisha’s fabulous. She got our website up and set up our reservation system. Plus, she does all our social media. And she responds to every online review. She can get a bit distracted, which is not great when we have a packed house,” Azalea said as she returned to the kitchen table. The kugel would need time to cool. She added some honey to her tea and offered me some, which I accepted. The jar looked like it was from a local farm. It smelled tantalizing.
“A packed house?” I remembered Keisha saying that there weren’t any rooms. Were Clover and I going to need another place to stay tonight? Not to make it all about us, but it was a consideration floating through my mind. Besides, it’s not like I had asked about staying. Nope. I had just shown up and expected my dog and me to be welcomed like royalty. I gulped at my tea, hoping I seemed less inconsiderate in real life than I did in my head.
“You ever watch that show, Professor Treasure Hunter?” Azalea asked.
“Oh, him.”
Azalea looked at me with confusion. She obviously hadn’t expected how much my face darkened at the mention of his name. I sighed and explained, “Last year, Orson Bradford – your so-called ‘Professor Treasure Hunter’—had been a speaker at the Society of Rare Book Librarians conference. Sure, he was more into popular history than my more erudite colleagues, but he was at least entertaining. He was also completely drunk at the conference hotel bar when he blatantly hit on me.”
“Well, okay, so he’s not staying here himself,” she went on, “but the entire television crew from the Chronos Channel is. And all their equipment, too. Getting around upstairs is a bit of an obstacle course. He’s been doing a book tour for his new memoir.”
“Right. The book’s not so originally named Professor Treasure Hunter. He talked about it at the conference.” I made a face at the memory. “But Rose Mallow? Why here?”
“They say he has some sort of announcement planned. He’s staying with friends or something, but they’re all here this weekend and possibly beyond. I don’t know yet, but at least it’s steady business. And right now, I could use all the money I can get,” Azalea replied. She sipped her tea.
“Do you know what he’s going to talk about?”
“Not a clue.”
“For the Chronos Channel? Probably aliens or mad cow or Nazis,” I said with a laugh, thinking about their typical show themes. Of course, right then was the exact moment when the goateed guy came back. He threw me a death glare. Great, now I had insulted my sister’s guest. I threw my hands up in apology. He shook his head and stormed off. Fantastic. Simply fantastic.
To my surprise, Azalea just laughed. She took a generous swig of her black tea. I looked at her with concern. “How’re you holding up?”
“I don’t know. Some days, I think divorcing Rory was the right choice, but other days…” She sat there, looking out the back bay windows at the gardens in the back yard. I followed her gaze. Darkness descended, but I could still make out the tall shrubs and bushes, the outline of the Carriage House, and beyond to the water’s edge. Increasing numbers of fireflies darted about. Summer in Maryland could be humid, but it was undoubtedly beautiful.
She stood up and headed to the kitchen counter. After pulling out two plates, she cut squares of the kugel for each of us. Clover jumped up again, but I shook my head at him. He seemed to pout but didn’t race after her. Azalea sat the plates in front of us. I stared at it, wanting to dive in, but feeling tremendously guilty.
“I have to tell you something,” I said. My heart pounded in my chest. I wondered if she could hear its tattoo.
“What?”
I gulped deeply. “I’m back in town because of Rory.”
“What?” Azalea looked at me in surprise.
I sipped at my tea and thought of how to explain. “This afternoon, he emailed me while I was at work.”
“Why on earth would he email you?” she asked.
“Have you ever heard of the Book of Kells?” I asked.
She looked confused. “You mean that old book in Ireland?”
I laughed despite myself. It was an understatement to call a 1,200-year-old illuminated manuscript just an “old book.” Azalea gave me the stink eye, so I explained. “I saw the Book of Kells when the Society of Rare Book Librarians had their conference in Dublin. Beyond spectacular. One of my absolute favorite books in the entire world.”
Seeing the Book of Kells at Trinity College in Ireland had been a high item on my bucket list. I nearly cried looking at the 9th-century masterpiece which illustrated the Gospels. Each page featured elaborate and exquisite medieval paintings with vibrant colors and brilliant gold leaf on vellum. It was larger than I had expected, and I couldn’t imagine the hours—really, the years—it must have taken to create. Although Azalea and I had been raised in a culturally Jewish household, I nonetheless found the loving care of the artwork to be transcendent. Kells might not have been my sacred text, but it was still sacred to me.
“But why would he email about the Book of Kells? Rory doesn’t care about books or history. Remember when I worked briefly at that antique store, and he found my work ‘boring’?” Azalea asked.
“Yeah, I know. My curiosity got the best of me, so I called him.” My obnoxious boss had been on my case lately, so I snuck into a cramped janitorial closet to make the call.
“What did Rory say?”
“He said he’d found the missing covers.” When I heard him say that, I had assumed the smell of cleaning supplies in the tiny closet was messing with my head.
Azalea, however, looked baffled. “The covers are missing?”
“For over a thousand years. Back in 1007, the books were stolen from Kells Abbey in county Meath, Ireland. Maybe by Vikings, but I don’t know. Miraculously, the manuscript was discovered months later, apparently ‘under a sod,’ but they were missing their original gold and jeweled cover. Folios from the start and end of the manuscript were also gone, likely destroyed when the ornamented covers had been ripped off. I’d always assumed the covers were sold or taken apart for their valuable jewels and gold. Either way, they were never seen again.”
Azalea stared at me. “Okay, so these fancy covers were stolen, and Rory—my ex Rory we’re talking about—found them? But he works for a car dealership. Here in Rose Mallow. In Maryland. How would he have found them? He’s not an archaeologist. And, I don’t think he’s been out of the country before.”
“I don’t know. He said they’re here. He promised to show me proof.”
“And you believed him?” Azalea asked with a snort.
“Well, he sent me some photos.”
“Of the covers?”
I grimaced. “Not exactly.”
“Then of what?” she asked.
I pulled out my phone, found the photos, and handed it to my sister. She pinched and pulled at the screen, just as I had done a few hours earlier. “They’re from something called the O’Doyle diary. He says it’s from about 1650, although it may be earlier.”
“How can you tell what this is? These are impossible to see. Is that supposed to be a picture of something? Violet can draw better than this,” Azalea said.
“Yeah, the resolution’s pretty awful. I think that one is a map. See, that’s the Chesapeake Bay,” I replied.
“If you say so.”
“He asked me to come here to explain things. He promised I could look at the diary and anything else he had,” I replied.
I knew how foolish it sounded, but I couldn’t resist finding out more. The mere chance he might be right…. I shook my head. I knew better than to think he’d found one of the world’s greatest missing literary treasures, but on the off chance it was true, that they were in Maryland. I needed to find out. It seemed worth the hour’s drive south from D.C.
Azalea was quiet. She stared deep into her tea. Our kugels remained untouched on the table. Finally, she lifted her head and said, “You missed the grand opening of the hotel three months ago.”
“I know, and I’m sorry,” I started to say, but Azalea held a hand up to interrupt my apology.
“You never came for any of Violet’s birthdays. You knew Rory and I were divorcing, and you didn’t come for that.”
I wanted to explain how much being here had hurt after our grandmother died, but I knew it wouldn’t make any of this right. Instead, I just nodded.
“You didn’t come for anything else. But you finally came back—out of the blue—for what? For some ridiculous hare-brained scheme of his? For some poorly taken photos of an old diary—one that knowing Rory is probably a fake? Really? This is what you came back for, Juniper? Not for me, not for your niece, but for some old book?” Azalea said.
I sat there with my mouth gaping, unsure of how to respond. Azalea shook her head. Her disappointment cut me deeply. I don’t think I had realized how much I’d failed her until hearing her tick off my faults one by one.
“After Nana Z died, it was just too hard,” I said.
“It was hard for me too,” she replied.
“I know, but…” My voice trailed off. We had both been grieving, but I’d let mine eclipse every time my sister needed me. That needed to change immediately.
“There’s something else you should know, Juniper.”
“What?” My voice croaked.
“I’ve started coming home sometimes to find these, well, ‘trinkets’ left at my doorstep.”
I didn’t expect her to say that. I sat upright. “What do you mean by ‘trinkets?’”
“They range. Crushed flowers. Mean notes. Torn photos of me. Things like that.” Tears collected in her eyes. She looked towards the phone on the wall. “Sometimes there are breathy voicemails. No talking, just breathing. A few times, there was canned laughter. The menacing kind from the movies.”
“Oh my goodness, Azalea. That’s awful.” I wanted to ask why she hadn’t told me any of this before, but given my failings as a sister, I couldn’t blame her. “Do you think they’re from Rory?”
“I don’t know. He’s never been mean before, but maybe he thinks they’re pranks. Getting some steam out. I mean, who else would they be from?” she asked.
“Wow.” I had always considered Rory annoying, but I never thought him capable of stooping so low.
“But even if he just thinks he’s pranking me, it’s really starting to concern me. I’m thinking of getting new locks if it doesn’t stop.”
“Have you told the police?” I asked.
Azalea didn’t answer my question. Instead, she looked me dead-on and said, “So if you’re still planning to meet up with him, you should know that you’re probably walking into some sort of… I don’t know. Another prank, I guess. He’s probably using you to mess with me. Think about it, okay?”
I nodded. “Yeah, of course.”
“Look, the Carriage House is swimming in storage boxes, but if you find some place to camp out there, you and Clover are welcome to it. For tonight. Only. And then, Juniper, I want you gone.”