“Oh, I am that old,” she said. “It’s just not that far across the lawn.”
“I’ll see you in a few minutes, then,” I said.
When I went back into the kitchen, Owen and Hercules were sitting by the back door. Clearly they were waiting for Rebecca. I had no idea how they knew she was on her way. It was just another one of their “abilities” that I couldn’t explain, and next to walking through walls and becoming invisible, it was pretty mundane.
The coffee was brewing and I had a plate of date squares on the table when Rebecca tapped on the porch door. I figured after the morning I’d had I was entitled to having dessert twice. I let her in and took the cardboard file box she was carrying.
She frowned at my face. “Oh dear, that looks sore,” she said. I noticed that she didn’t ask what had happened.
“It looks worse than it feels,” I said. “Who told on me? Roma?”
A pink flush spread across her cheeks. “I wouldn’t exactly call it telling on you,” she said. “And no, it wasn’t Roma. It was Marcus Gordon.”
“So you decided you’d bring this over”—I patted the top of the box—“and check on me.”
“I was planning on coming over anyway,” she said. “When Marcus told me what happened yesterday, it just seemed like perfect timing.” She looked me up and down. “How’s your ankle?”
“My ankle’s just fine. And Marcus Gordon has a big mouth.”
I glanced down at her boots. They were black with little red ladybugs all over them. “Oh, I like your boots,” I said.
Rebecca stuck out one foot and rolled it from one side to the other. “Thank you. Ami gave them to me.”
Ami was Everett Henderson’s granddaughter. She adored Rebecca and Rebecca was crazy about her.
Rebecca put her foot back on the floor and stepped out of the ladybug boots.
“How about a date square?” I asked as we headed into the kitchen.
“Oh that does sound good,” she said, patting her silver-gray hair. “And don’t think I didn’t notice how you changed the subject away from what happened to you.” She reached into her pocket and handed me a small, brown paper bag. “Spread this on your ankle before bed. It’ll help.”
“Thank you,” I said. I gave her a one-armed hug.
She caught sight of Owen and Hercules then, and moved across the floor to bend over and talk to the cats. For the moment at least, I was spared from having to explain for what felt like the umpteenth time that I was fine. The cats were listening intently as Rebecca spoke softly to them and I could hear the low rumble of both of them purring like twin diesel engines.
The boys really liked Rebecca. Everyone did. Everett was as smitten with her as he’d been when they’d fallen in love as teenagers. Maggie, whom she was teaching about herbal medicine, hung on her every word. Harry Taylor, Senior, shamelessly flirted with her even though he was twenty years her senior.
There was something about Rebecca, maybe it was her innate kindness, that made people care about her, that made them—me included—just a little protective, at which for the most part Rebecca just smiled. On the other hand, underneath that gray hair and angelic smile there was a steel-hard stubborn streak.
“Would you like a cup of coffee?” I asked as she came over to the table.
“Thank you, I think I would,” she said, hanging her bag on the back of the chair.
I poured a cup for both of us and then took the chair opposite her, so the box was on the seat between us.
Rebecca picked up her mug and smiled at me. “Did you make a doctor’s appointment?” she asked. “Just to get checked over.”
“I’m going to,” I said, feeling my face flush.
“Why don’t you go ahead and do it right now?” she said. She smiled down at her two furry cohorts sitting beside her chair. “Hercules and Owen will keep me company.”
I hesitated.
“I’ve found it’s best not to put things off.” She still had the sweet smile on her face.
I knew when I was beaten. And I felt a kind of grudging respect for Marcus, who had come up with a pretty good way to do an end run around my dislike of doctors and hospitals.
“Excuse me,” I said.
The doctor’s office had a cancellation for Monday morning. I took it. When I went back into the kitchen, Rebecca was sneaking some of her date square to Hercules. Owen was already sniffing his bite on the floor.
I sat down, giving Rebecca’s box a quick, curious glance.
“Go ahead and take a look inside,” she urged.
I wiped my hands on a napkin and pulled off the lid. Inside were books and papers that had belonged to Rebecca’s mother, Ellen Montgomery. She’d acted as unofficial nurse and midwife in Mayville Heights in her day, using herbal remedies to treat kids, adults, and from what I’d heard the occasional horse, cow and house cat.
I lifted out a thick, handmade book bound with neat, Coptic stitches.
“That’s her plant book,” Rebecca said.
I opened the cover and for a moment I was speechless. The first page was a beautiful watercolor of a dandelion plant. There were notes in black ink and fine block printing along the bottom and up both sides of the page.
I turned the page to an equally beautiful image of a chamomile plant. I looked up at Rebecca. “These are gorgeous,” I said.
She nodded. “My mother was very artistic. There are paintings and sketches of every plant she used in that book.”
I had no idea how I was going to make the book part of a display in the library, but I definitely wanted to use it. I went through the rest of the things in the box—more drawings, a book of herbal remedies with meticulously detailed instructions for making various salves, infusions and poultices, a stack of black-and-white photos tied with a faded blue ribbon and several composition books that I realized had been Ellen’s journals.
“Are you sure about these?” I asked Rebecca, holding up one of the black-covered, narrow ruled notebooks.
She nodded. “Yes, assuming you find anything that’s useful in them.” She took one of the small volumes from me and slowly flipped through the pages. “My mother kept a journal all her life. They were always ‘open books’ so to speak and so was her life.” She looked up, a devilish twinkle in her eye. “I don’t think you’ll find any secrets in these books, sad to say.”
“You sound disappointed,” I said with a smile, as I put everything back in the box.
“Well, Kathleen, there was a time when I entertained the fantasy that I’d been left by pirates and that my real parents would someday come back for me.”
“Pirates?”
“Oh yes.” She picked up her cup again and leaned back in her chair. “In a huge pirate ship like the Jolly Roger, with a monkey in the rigging and flying the skull and crossbones of course.”
“Of course.” I picked up my own cup. “How exactly were they going to come for you?” I asked. “Minnesota isn’t really an ocean front state.”
“By sailing up through the Great Lakes system into Lake Superior,” she said.
I couldn’t keep a straight face. “And when the Good Ship Rebecca made it to Lake Superior, how exactly was it supposed to get to Mayville Heights?”
“Magic, of course,” Rebecca said, laughing. She picked up her fork and took a bite of a date square. “Ummm, these are good.”
“Thank you,” I said, grinning back at her across the table.
Owen and Hercules were still beside her chair, watching her with their mournful no-one-ever-feeds-us look. It was so fake. And it always worked.
Roma was constantly reminding us that Owen and Hercules were cats and should be fed as such—they just didn’t seem to understand that. A couple of weeks ago she’d caught Maggie feeding them grilled tomatoes and mozzarella and had ranted that in a few years the cats were going to be two overweight fur balls with bypass surgery scars. Maggie had simply nodded solemnly and gotten more careful about sneaking them food.