It was, he realized, very much like something out of a childhood dream. Or, more specifically, a nightmare.
When he had staggered his way down this wooden corridor to the other end of the house, he arrived at another staircase. This one was narrow and quite steep, almost like a ship’s ladder. Descending it carefully, Mitch found himself confronting another closed door with no knob. Frowning, he gave it a push, activating the touch latch that popped it open.
He was standing in a big, modern farm kitchen. Or at least it would have been modern in 1952. It had a vintage GE fridge and freezer chest, an ancient gas stove, a deep, scarred farmhouse sink. In the middle of the room Moose was tossing salad greens at a cluttered trestle table.
“Well, hello there,” she said to him pleasantly. “You survived Father’s little fun-house ride, I see.”
“God, this must have been a great house to be a kid in.” Mitch set the wine and the lantern down on the table, catching a wonderful whiff of meat roasting in the oven.
“Actually, you never stop being a kid if you live in this house. Witness father.”
“Anything I can do to help?”
“You can help me feed the pig,” she replied, hefting the metal bucket filled with food scraps at her feet. “Unless that sounds too unglamorous for you.”
“No, it sounds right up my alley.”
He followed her out to the mudroom, where there were several pairs of men’s and women’s boots and garden clogs, all of them muddy. Also a second overflowing slop bucket. Mitch grabbed that one as Moose stepped into a pair of clogs, and they headed out the back door in the direction of the pigsty. It was a cold, clear night. There were stars overhead, and a full hunter’s moon that cast a low-wattage light over the entire barnyard.
“Suppertime, Elrod!” Moose called out, dumping the slop over a low wire fence into the pig’s aromatic home. “Sup-sup-suppertime!”
Mitch followed suit with his bucket, the pig ambling slowly over to check it all out. Snorking and slurping noises ensued. “I can certainly see why you’ve stayed,” he said to Moose.
“Stayed?” She seemed puzzled.
“Why you haven’t gotten your own place, I mean.”
“This is my home, Mitch,” she said simply.
“Does your sister feel the same way about it?”
“Well, that didn’t take long, did it?”
“What didn’t?”
“For us to start talking about Takai.”
“We’re not,” Mitch insisted. “I was asking you about the farm.”
“Sorry, my mistake,” Moose said hastily, shooting an uncertain glance at him in the moonlight. “You shop for Sheila Enman, is that right?”
“Yes, I do. How did you…?”
“We’re old, old friends. It was Sheila who got me interested in teaching. It’s very kind of you to do that for her, Mitch. It says a lot about you.”
“I don’t do it out of the goodness of my heart. I get amazing chocolate chip cookies out of it.”
“Do you know her secret?” Moose asked him eagerly.
“Her secret to what?”
“Her chocolate chip cookies, you silly. I’ve been trying to get that darned recipe out of her for over ten years. And I just can’t. She won’t let me have it. You know how those old ladies are. They won’t tell anyone. She makes her own chips out of the chocolate bars. I know that. But I also know she has a secret ingredient. If you do her marketing, you must have some idea what it is. Exactly what’s on her shopping list? Try to remember. Try very, very hard.”
Mitch found himself smiling at her. Because this was so Dorset. All of this intrigue over an old lady’s cookie recipe. And him caught right in the middle, his lips sealed. Because he did know Sheila’s secret ingredient. The sour cream. Had to be. Nobody ate as much sour cream as she went through in a week. Standing there, watching Elrod scarf up his supper in the moonlight, Mitch realized that here it was-the perfect hook to his Cookie Commerce story. Moose and her quest for Sheila’s recipe. But how could he write about Moose without mentioning her famous, reclusive father? The answer was he couldn’t. And that made it off-limits. He would not take unfair advantage of a private man who had invited him into his home. “If Sheila won’t tell you,” he finally said, “then you can’t expect me to. That would be a betrayal of confidence, wouldn’t it?”
“You’re someone who can be trusted, aren’t you,” she said, kicking at the mud with her clog. “Father has amazing instincts.” She lingered there watching Elrod, who didn’t seem to mind. He was not in the least bit self- conscious. “Takai mentioned that you’re in a relationship.”
“I thought we weren’t going to talk about Takai,” Mitch chided her.
“We’re not. We’re talking about you.”
“It’s true, I am involved. And it’s a big step for me. I… I lost my wife to cancer last year.”
“And you still think about her.”
“All the time,” he said, his voice growing husky.
“I’m sure she’d be very proud of you, Mitch.”
“That was a very kind thing to say,” he said, glancing at Moose in the moonlight. “But I’m still not going to tell you what’s in Sheila’s cookies.”
She let out an unexpectedly huge, full-throated whoop of a laugh. “Okay, you win. And in answer to your previous question, Takai doesn’t feel the same way I do about this place. She isn’t the least bit attached to it. In fact, if you get to know her better-and for your sake, I sincerely hope you do not-you’ll discover that she doesn’t care about anything or anyone.”
Mitch wondered if he had ever heard someone deliver such a sweeping denunciation of another human being.
“We should really tell Jim that dinner’s ready,” she said now, glancing over in the direction of his little wood- framed cottage, where lights were on. “He can seem a little scary, but he’s been a good, good friend to Father.”
Mitch began to hear music as they made their way to Jim’s cottage-an old sixties San Francisco band, Quicksilver Messenger Service. Mitch had always admired the soaring, quivering licks of Quicksilver’s lead guitarist, John Cipollina. He’d never been able to duplicate the sound on his Stratocaster.
“How come Jim was in prison?” he asked Moose.
She rapped on the crusty Vietnam vet’s door with her knuckles. Inside, the music went silent. “You can ask him. He doesn’t mind talking about it.”
“Talking about what, girl?” Jim wondered as he pulled open the door, wearing an aged Pendleton plaid wool shirt over a tie-dyed T-shirt. A strong scent of marijuana came wafting out of the cottage along with him.
“Mitch wondered why they sent you to prison,” Moose said to him.
“Son, I’m a big bad drug trafficker,” Jim answered as the three of them started toward the house together. “Or so the law says. I say otherwise. Had me my own place over on the other side of those trees. Sixty good acres that had been in my family since forever. I was working that land and minding my own business.”
“Jim raised organic produce for the local health-food stores,” Moose said. “Lettuce, spinach, strawberries… All of it wonderful.”
“So why did they come after you?”
“I raised me another crop, too,” Jim replied. “The demon weed, son. Not for profit. Nothing like that. I grew it for my friends with cancer who were on chemo and sick to their stomachs night and day. I grew it for the older people who’ve got the arthritis so bad they can’t get out of bed in the morning. It was medicine for them. I gave it to ’em for free.”
“Some might even say he was an angel of mercy,” Moose said.
“Don’t know if I’d go that far,” Jim said. “I did smoke me a lot of it, too. But, hell, I was doing some good. And it’s legal to use it for medical purposes in this state. Just ain’t legal to grow it. Someone ratted me out to the law. Got me a pretty fair idea who, too. And they said my farm was being used in the commission of a drug crime and therefore could be seized. They took my family’s land away from me, son. Put me on the shelf for three years. I’m still on parole. And if Hangtown hadn’t given me a place to stay, I’d be living out of a cardboard box under an
