Queen Anne’s lace is a favorite of people who like to forage for edible foods. As a biennial, this wild ancestor of the garden carrot produces leaves and roots in the first year; in the second year, it produces flowers and seeds. You can mince the fresh leaves and add them to salad or soups. The roots are best harvested in the spring or fall of the first year when they are tender; second-year roots become woody. The peeled flower stalk has a carroty flavor and may be eaten raw or cooked. The flower itself makes a flavorful jelly or a pretty garnish. The ground seeds are spicy. However, if you’re pregnant, you should avoid eating any part of this plant. The seeds have been used for centuries as a morning-after contraceptive, and a decoction of the root can produce uterine contractions and cause a miscarriage.
And foragers, please beware! You must take extra care to be sure that what you are harvesting is wild carrot and not its deadly lookalike, poison hemlock. Crush a few leaves. If they smell like fresh carrot, you’re safe. If they have a foul odor, leave it alone. This is serious stuff, folks, so pay attention. Mistakes with this plant have cost lives.
“Anne’s Flower”
China Bayles
Pecan Springs Enterprise
I turned the shop door sign to open and went back around my sales counter.
“So what happened next?” Ruby was leaning against the counter, staring at me, her eyes round. I had just given her an abbreviated version of the events at Hemlock House. “Claudia wasn’t dead, was she?”
“Just concussed,” I said. “But she’s lucky she wasn’t hurt worse. Those stairs really are dangerous, especially in the dark. The med techs and the deputies took her to the hospital for observation. The doctor said the concussion was mild and that she would be her usual self in no time.” I grinned. “To quote Jenna, ‘No loonier than usual.’ I drove her home the next day. She was anxious about her parrots.”
It was a bright and balmy April morning in Texas. I had gotten home the evening before and was glad to be back behind the counter of my shop, surrounded by the familiar Thyme and Seasons sights and scents. The crisp, clean smell of lavender blended with an exotic orange ylang-ylang that wafted through the open door of Ruby’s Crystal Cave. The big antique hutch was stocked with herbal vinegars, oils, jellies, teas, and potpourris. The corner cupboard displayed herbal soaps, shampoos, and bath herbs. Beside it, the bookshelves were filled with cookbooks and gardening books. Handcrafted wreaths and swags hung on the walls, along with bundles of dried yarrow, sweet Annie, larkspur, statice, and tansy. Through the window behind the counter, I could get a glimpse of the rack of potted herb seedlings for sale—parsley, sage, thyme, fennel, more—and larger pots of shrubby herbs: lavender, rosemary, and bay.
I sighed happily. The trip had been an interesting experience. I had enjoyed the people and the mountains and even the snow. But I was glad to be home.
Ruby pushed up the sleeves of her trippy psychedelic sweater. “So it was Claudia Roth who actually stole the Herbal,” she mused, shaking her head. “How many of the other books did she steal? Was Jed Conway fencing her thefts on the internet, too?”
“She didn’t steal it,” I said. “In fact, the book never left Hemlock House. It was hidden in the secret room.”
“You’re kidding.” Ruby blinked. “A secret room! Like the one in that old Mary Roberts Rinehart mystery?”
“Sort of.” I opened the cash register drawer and began checking to make sure there was enough change for today’s business. “Not nearly as spooky, though. It was only about the size of a large walk-in closet with floor-to-ceiling shelves, hidden behind a bookcase in Sunny’s third-floor bedroom. The bookcase swung out on little rollers—that was the noise Jenna thought was a coffin being dragged across the floor. Inside the closet, the shelves were full of books Sunny had stashed there, maybe to keep them for herself. Or to keep them out of Jed Conway’s clutches.”
“And Claudia Roth knew about this secret room?”
I opened a roll of pennies and dumped them into the cash drawer. “Claudia Roth knows about a lot of things, as it turned out. After all, she was one of the family. She and Sunny were closer than anybody knew. Anybody but Rose Mullins, that is—and Rose wasn’t about to share that information with outsiders, like Dorothea and me.” I closed the cash register and checked to make sure that the credit card system was on and ready to go.
“Rose is the housekeeper—right?”
“Right. After Dorothea arrived to take over the library, Rose told Claudia that the Hemlock House board couldn’t decide what they wanted to do with Sunny’s library. Dorothea had been hired to catalogue and evaluate it, and then it might be sold. Which wasn’t exactly true, but Rose thought it was.”
“So Claudia decided she had to do something.”
“Exactly.” I began straightening the small display of herb seeds on the counter beside the cash register. “She was convinced that it was her duty to protect the thing that Sunny held most precious: the Blackwell Herbal. So she went to Hemlock House one weekend when Rose told her that Dorothea and Jenna would be gone. She moved the book from the display case in the library up to Sunny’s secret room.” I relocated an envelope of basil seeds from the parsley section up next to the bee balm, where it belonged. “She was doing what she thought Sunny would want her to do. She was keeping the Herbal safe.”
“But if that was her motive, what made her change her mind? Why did she try to take it away? In the middle of the night, too.”
“That was . . . well, it was my fault,” I said ruefully.
“Your fault?”
I opened the laptop behind the counter and turned it on. “Afraid so. The morning after I arrived, I quizzed Rose about the secret room. I even asked if she’d be willing to help me hunt for it. My questions made her nervous, and when she talked to Claudia, she mentioned that a stranger—that was me—was asking about the room. Claudia and I had a common bond when it came to parrots, but she saw through my cover story and thought she saw more than that. She thought I wanted the Herbal.”
“So she figured the safest place for the book was her parrot sanctuary.” Ruby shook her head. “But she had to go and fetch it in the middle of the night?”
“Well, she could hardly do it in the daytime, when everybody was around,” I said. “Actually, it was her second attempt to get the Herbal. She had come the night before, but she couldn’t get the bookcase to open the way it should—that was the noise that scared Jenna and prompted her to ask me to sleep in her room. So Claudia came back the next night, with tools. She was concerned that the book might get wet in the snow, so she brought the wheelie. Unfortunately, one of the wheels broke. That was the weird thumping noise.”
Ruby frowned. “But didn’t you say that her house was more than a mile away? Surely she didn’t expect to drag a loaded wheelie all that distance, even if the wheel hadn’t been broken.”
“That lady is eminently resourceful,” I said. “She drove her snowmobile.”
Ruby looked skeptical. “And nobody heard it? Those things are loud.”
“She cut the engine a hundred yards from the house and walked the rest of the way. I think she might have gotten away with her plan if the sliding bookcase hadn’t slipped off its rollers. That’s what woke Jenna. Dorothea, too.”
There was a loud mrrrrow and Khat, our fawn-colored Siamese shop kitty, stalked through the door to the tea room and jumped onto the sales counter. “Hello, sweetie,” I said, stroking his lovely seal-point ears. “Miss me?”
Khat flicked his dark tail dismissively. Like most Siamese, he disdains any show of affection unless he thinks it will get him an extra helping of kitty food. I laughed. “As long as somebody fed you, you probably didn’t even know I was gone,” I told him.
“So is what Claudia did a crime?” Ruby asked. “Is she going to get into trouble with the law for hiding that book?”
“The sheriff is threatening to charge her with obstruction,” I said. “But I doubt he’ll go to the trouble. The Herbal is back where it belongs, undamaged, and he has his hands full with Jed Conway and Socrates.com. He’ll give Claudia a stern lecture, clear the theft, and that will be the end of that. She has also promised Dorothea that she won’t come back—not at night, anyway.”
“Jed has been arrested?”
I opened the little cupboard behind the counter and took out the broom. “Yep. Chief Curtis has charged him with offering two stolen prints of Redouté’s Lilies on Socrates.com, and there will be additional charges when they figure out what’s what. Jenna is going through all the listings on the website in an effort to match them with items that are missing from the library. Jed had better start looking for a lawyer.”
“And the foundation’s board?”
“Good news.” I smiled. “They’ve commended Dorothea for getting the book back. And agreed to her proposal for climate control, an alarm system, and an additional person to help with the cataloging. I think they’re beginning to take their work seriously at last.”
Ruby sighed. “And the story of the ghost of Hemlock House—it was Claudia Roth all along?” She sounded disappointed.
I hesitated. “I didn’t say that,” I said slowly. I shivered, thinking of the intense cold and the powerful dark energy I had felt when I stepped out into the hallway. “There’s something there. A ghost, a spirit, a force—whatever it is, it’s been there for years. I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon. And I’d just as soon not know what it is.”
The bell over the shop door chimed gently. I looked up, expecting to see the door open and the first customer of the day step inside. But there was no one there—at least, no one that I could see.
Ruby smiled. “That’s Annie,” she said. “She always likes to have the last word, you know.”