Read Secrets Baked With Love free: the opening chapter

Sugar and Sorrow: First Frost | The Note

The first frost came to Havenwood on a Tuesday, and Elsie McMillan saw it before her feet ever touched the floor.

She lay in bed a moment longer, watching the window. The glass had gone white at the corners, feathered with ice, like someone had brushed it with sugar. Beyond it, the maple in her front yard stood bare and black against a pale gray sky. Its last leaves had let go in the night. They lay scattered across the lawn like coins nobody had bothered to pick up.

"Well, Samuel," she said to the empty side of the bed. "Winter's knocking."

Nobody answered. Nobody had answered for eleven months now. She still said good morning to him anyway. It was a habit she did not want to break, because breaking it felt like losing him twice.

Elsie swung her legs over the side of the bed and found her slippers with her toes. The floor was cold through the soles. She pulled her robe tight, the blue one with the worn cuffs, and padded down the hall with one hand trailing along the wall. The house was quiet in the way of houses with one person in them. She knew every sound it made. The tick of the clock in the front room. The hum of the refrigerator downstairs. The little knock the pipes made when the heat came up.

She knew all of them, and none of them were Samuel's whistle.

---

In the kitchen, she set the kettle on and stood waiting for it, looking out the small window over the sink. Her garden was done for the year. The frost had seen to that. The marigolds she had babied all summer were bent and brown, and the basil had gone black overnight. She should feel sad about it, she supposed. Mostly she felt tired.

The kettle began its low rumble. She reached for the good mug, the one with the chip on the handle that she could not throw away. Samuel had chipped it the Christmas they moved in, thirty-nine years ago, dropping it in the driveway with the first box of dishes. He had wanted to toss it. She had kept it out of spite, and then kept it out of love.

She made her tea strong, the way he used to tease her about.

"That tea could strip paint, Elsie girl."

"Then don't drink it, Samuel McMillan."

He always drank it.

She carried the mug to the table and sat in her chair. Not his. His chair still faced the window, where he used to sit with the paper and complain about the headlines. She had not moved it. The paper still came, too. She kept meaning to cancel it and kept forgetting, or not forgetting. The stack by the door was getting tall.

Outside, Havenwood was waking up.

She could see a slice of Maple Street from her kitchen window, and she watched it the way she used to watch her shows. Mr. Kowalski came out in his flannel shirt and swept the frost off his porch steps, same as every cold morning, even though the frost would be gone by nine. The Whitaker girl rode past on her bicycle, late for something, her scarf flying behind her like a red flag.

And down at the corner, the lights of the Buttercup Bakery were on.

They were always on. Six in the morning, six days a week, for as long as most folks in town could remember. Bea Hawthorne opened that bakery the way the sun came up. You did not have to think about it. It just happened, and the whole town set its clock by the smell of cinnamon that drifted up Maple Street by seven.

Elsie wrapped both hands around her mug and felt the knot in her chest ease a little, seeing those warm yellow windows.

Some things held.

---

She got dressed slow. There was no reason to hurry, and that was the strange thing about her life now. For forty years she had hurried. Teaching school, raising the boys, keeping house, keeping Samuel in clean shirts and hot suppers. Now the days spread out in front of her like a road with nothing on it, and she had to invent reasons to walk down it.

Today she had a reason. Tuesday was her baking day.

She tied her apron, the faded one with the little blue flowers, and got down her mother's recipe box from the shelf. The box was tin, dented on one corner, and the card she wanted was soft at the folds from fifty years of use.

Molasses cookies. Samuel's favorite. His birthday would have been Thursday.

She had not decided yet if she was baking them for him or for herself. Maybe there was no difference anymore.

She set the butter out to soften and measured the flour the way her mother taught her, spooned light, never packed. She creamed the butter and sugar and cracked the egg one-handed, and for the first time that morning, her shoulders came down from around her ears. This was the one place the grief got quiet. Butter, sugar, flour. The measuring spoons cupped in her palm, warm from her hand. The dough coming together under the wooden spoon, dark and glossy from the molasses.

Her hands remembered even when her heart was somewhere else.

She was rolling the dough into balls, each one dipped in sugar, when the knock came at the back door.

---

It was Martha, from across the street, holding her mail and wearing the pink fleece she wore every day from October to April.

"You're baking," Martha said, pushing the door open without waiting. "I smelled it from my porch. Molasses."

"His birthday's Thursday."

Martha's face did the soft thing it always did when Samuel came up. She set her mail on the counter and picked up a dough ball and rolled it in the sugar bowl without asking, then another. That was Martha. She never asked if you wanted help. She just helped.

"They're saying Bea didn't open the bakery yesterday," Martha said.

Elsie's hands stopped in the dough. "Bea?"

"Closed all day. Dark windows. Carol Finch drove by three times to be sure, and you know Carol." Martha shook her head, rolling another ball. "Six days a week, near forty years, that woman has opened that bakery. Closed for Christmas and that time she broke her wrist, and she opened anyway with the wrist in a cast. I saw her frost a cake one-handed."

"Maybe she's sick."

"Maybe." Martha's voice said she did not think so. "She's seventy-eight, Elsie. And she lives alone out there above the shop."

The two of them looked at each other over the bowl of sugar. The kettle ticked as it cooled. Outside, a crow called from the bare maple, one rough note, and then the street was quiet.

"I'll walk down after these come out of the oven," Elsie heard herself say.

"I'll come with you."

---

The cookies came out crackled and dark, and Elsie set a dozen of them in a tin, still warm, and put on her good coat. The air outside bit at her cheeks. The frost had melted off the lawns but it still lay white in the shadows, under the hedges and along the north side of every fence, holding on where the sun could not reach.

The pumpkins were still out on porches, going soft. Somebody's corn stalks, tied to a lamppost, rattled in the wind as they passed.

Martha tucked her hand through Elsie's elbow as they walked.

"He'd like those cookies," Martha said.

"He'd say I put in too much ginger."

"You always put in too much ginger. He ate them anyway."

"He did," Elsie said, and her voice did a small crack on the word, and Martha squeezed her arm and did not say anything, which was why Martha was her oldest friend.

They turned onto Maple Street proper and walked past the hardware store and the post office, past Mrs. Abernathy sweeping the steps of the library, past the antique shop where Clara Jensen was turning the sign in the window from Closed to Open. Clara gave them a wave with her gloved hand, bright and quick, and Elsie waved back.

Then they reached the corner, and both of them stopped walking.

The Buttercup Bakery was dark.

Not dim. Not slow to open. Dark. The Open sign hung crooked and unlit in the window. The chalkboard on the sidewalk, the one Bea wrote the day's specials on in her looping hand, had been left out overnight. Someone had written on it in chalk, in letters that were not Bea's.

It said: But the frosting was her secret.

Elsie stood looking at those words with the tin of cookies cold against her palm, and a feeling moved through her that she could not name. It was not fear, exactly. It was the feeling of the ground being not quite where you left it.

Martha read it twice, out loud, the second time in a whisper.

"Who wrote that?" she said. "Elsie. Who wrote that on Bea's board?"

The bakery windows stared back at them, black and still, and somewhere inside, the phone began to ring and ring, and nobody answered.

"Maybe she overslept," Martha said, but she did not believe it, and Elsie knew she did not believe it, because Martha always sounded brisk when she was frightened, like a person tidying a room very fast.

"Bea has opened that bakery at five in the morning for near forty years," Elsie said. "Snowstorms. The flu. The week her mother died, she opened late and apologized to the bread."

They stood a moment longer. The phone inside rang itself out, and the quiet that followed was worse. Elsie stepped closer to the door and shaded her eyes with her hand against the glass. The cases were empty. No trays of cinnamon twists, no rows of frosted buns under their glass domes. The little table by the window, where old Mr. Kessler sat every morning with his coffee and his newspaper folded into quarters, held nothing at all. The chairs were still upside down on the tables from the night before, legs pointing at the ceiling like a small forest turned over.

"Closed up midweek," Martha murmured. "She never closes midweek."

Elsie read the chalkboard again. But the frosting was her secret. The letters were rounded and careful, written by someone who had taken their time. Someone who wanted it to be read.

"Everyone knew Bea's frosting," Elsie said slowly. "Everyone in this town has licked it off a birthday cake. What secret could there be about frosting?"

The door of the antique shop jingled down the way, and Clara Jensen came hurrying toward them, her coat half-buttoned, her breath making small clouds.

"You've seen it, then," Clara said. "I found it when I came in at eight. I thought at first it was some schoolboy's prank, and I nearly wiped it away. But then I saw the windows." She stopped, and her gloved hand came up to her mouth. "Elsie. Her lights have been off since yesterday afternoon. Harlan across the street says the ovens went cold before supper."

"Has anyone called her house?" Elsie asked.

"Twice. No answer. I called the pharmacy thinking maybe she'd taken ill and phoned in a prescription, but nothing." Clara looked from Elsie to Martha and back. "I didn't want to be the one to call the sheriff over a chalkboard. It feels foolish. Doesn't it feel foolish?"

It did not feel foolish. That was the trouble. Elsie looked again through the black glass, at the upside-down chairs and the empty cases, and she thought of Bea Hawthorne's flour-dusted hands and the way she always tucked an extra cookie into every bag, for later, she'd say, for when you need it. She thought of how a bakery is the warmest room in any town, and how wrong it was to see one cold.

"Sheriff Dolan eats her bear claws every Saturday," Elsie said. "He'd want to know."

"I'll go to the station," Clara said, some relief in her voice at being given something to do. "It's only two blocks."

She hurried off, her quick small footsteps fading down Maple Street. Martha let out a long breath.

"Near forty years I've known Bea," she said. "She told me once the frosting recipe came from her grandmother, written on the back of a seed packet. She'd never let anyone watch her make it. She used to laugh about it. Said it was the one thing in this town nobody could pry out of her."

Elsie looked down at the tin in her hands. The warmth had gone out of it.

"But the frosting was her secret," she read once more, softly. "Past tense, Martha. It says was."

Martha's hand found hers this time and held it tight.

"Now," Martha said, very gently, in the voice she used for sick children and scared dogs, "we don't know anything yet."

"No," Elsie said. "We don't."

A school bus groaned past the corner and turned, and the street went on being a Tuesday in November. Mrs. Abernathy swept. The corn stalks rattled. Somewhere a dog barked twice and stopped. It astonished Elsie, the way the world kept its ordinary shape while something underneath it shifted. Samuel had taught her that, dying as he did on a morning with birdsong in it.

She thought of her kitchen, of the crackled cookies in the tin, of the frost lying stubborn in the shadows where the sun could not reach. Havenwood held its cold places all through the season. She had learned to live in one. And now, it seemed, the town had one more.

Sheriff Dolan's patrol car came around the corner then, slow, with Clara sitting upright in the passenger seat like an anxious bridesmaid. Elsie straightened her shoulders and stepped up onto the curb to meet them, Martha at her elbow, the two of them standing in front of the dark bakery like witnesses. Or like guards.

The chalk words waited behind her, patient as frost.

Whatever had happened to Bea Hawthorne, Elsie suspected, in the way you suspect a change in the weather before the first cloud crosses, that the whole town would know it by Sunday. And nothing in Havenwood would taste quite the same again.

The sample ends here.