Chapter 1
The perfection of a pristine crossword puzzle grid always made Quinn Carr’s pleasure center buzz. Like being touched by the hands of a lover, but better. Not that she’d felt that in a while, but she had a vague memory.
The puzzle was orderly. Symmetrical. No chaos. No mess. No negotiation. Only one correct answer.
A puzzle grid never looked at you funny when you agonized over some marketing sociopath who couldn’t understand that “pepper, black” was worlds apart from “black pepper.”
Crossword puzzles never judged you. Unlike the people who thought they knew all about you simply because you were in your thirties, had to move home with your parents, and needed—needed—to alphabetize their spices before you could continue creating the crossword puzzle for the local Chestnut Station Chronicle.
Quinn placed the turmeric next to the sesame seeds, not at all happy with the varying sizes of containers. Christmas was six months away. Maybe a new spice rack with matching jars would be a good present for her mom. But would that make her worry I was slipping? I could say it wasn’t about me at all. Just trying to bring out her inner Julia Child.
Georgeanne, Quinn’s mom, definitely needed to get in touch with her inner Julia Child. Or Betty Crocker. Or even that Gorton’s fisherman. Anyone who could help with her culinary endeavors.
As if on cue, Georgeanne shoved a cupcake with white frosting toward Quinn’s face.
“Taste this. I’m experimenting with cumin.”
“Gross.” Quinn twisted away from the distinctively intense chili flavoring, returning to her laptop at the kitchen table.
Georgeanne glanced at her phone and laughed, clearly in the middle of a text conversation with someone, maybe one of her piano students.
Georgeanne’s dimples deepened as they did whenever she smiled, which was pretty much constantly. Quinn loved those dimples despite the fact they were not symmetrical. It was quite obvious that her mother’s cheeks didn’t match. When Quinn was young, she’d gently tilt Georgeanne’s head so the dimples would cross the same imaginary line bisecting her face. As she got older she learned she could simply tilt her own head if she wanted symmetry in her mother. Quinn had read once that the attractiveness of a face was in direct proportion to how symmetrical it was, but she had scoffed. Everything about her mother was appealing. Except maybe when she shoved a cumin cupcake in your face.
Quinn’s dad, Dan, intercepted the cupcake intended for Quinn and took a big bite. He accepted the culinary abomination with the good cheer of someone who hadn’t been subjected to it for thirty-some years. Quinn admired her dad’s skill at diplomacy. Was it possible he actually liked his wife’s cooking? The world would never know.
“Hm.” He chewed thoughtfully, frowning slightly. “The cumin is interesting, but what kind of frosting is that?”
Georgeanne beamed. “That white frosting is miso”—she pointed to the others— “the red is smoked paprika, and the blue is just food coloring I added to a can of cream of mushroom soup.”
“You’ve done it again, Georgie.” Dan polished off the cupcake, then gave Quinn a kiss on the top of her head. “Solving a crossword or making one?”
“Making one.”
“What’s the theme?”
“Over. Like overshadow, overactive, overcharge, overexpose.”
Georgeanne cocked her head. “Not Fourth of July?”
“That ran in the last edition. You overlooked it.”
“Don’t overreact. Aren’t you going to be late for work?”
“Overexcited to get me out of here?”
“Trying to overcome my separation anxiety from my favorite child.”
“Only child, but point well-taken. Jake’s not opening the diner until after the parade. Nobody will be in before that.” Quinn gestured toward the cupcakes. “I can help carry those to your booth if you want.”
“I’m overwhelmed with joy for the offer.” Georgeanne dipped a rubber scraper into the bowl of red frosting. “I need to finish these first, though.”
Quinn marveled at her mother’s ability to do so many things at once: Mix, taste, and adjust the flavors of three different kinds of frosting and create a huge pot of Dan’s oatmeal, all while texting someone.
Same with Dan. Running his own independent insurance agency meant he had to understand and keep up-to-date on multiple companies’ policies and all the different lines of insurance, like homeowners, auto, health, and liability, and even obscure ones like bed bug and kidnapping coverage. He also had to juggle, and often soothe, the varied personalities of his employees, clients, attorneys, and insurance company contacts.
It was a superpower lost on Quinn, who maintained the right way to do anything was from beginning to end. Dan often came home from the office talking about all the fires he’d had to put out over the course of the day. If Quinn was in charge, the agency would have burned down—hopefully only metaphorically—many times over.
If she were in Georgeanne’s shoes, she would have made the cupcakes yesterday so they’d be cool enough to frost today. Then she would have made the white frosting and frosted one-third of the cupcakes. Then made the red and frosted the second third. Then the blue. Of course, she’d also have used only food coloring and not miso, paprika, and mushroom soup, but that was an entirely different can of worms.
It was beyond Quinn how her parents could shift activities and trains of thought in such a nimble manner. She watched with increasing alarm one day while Georgeanne parked the vacuum in the center of the living room—with less than half of it cleaned—to go take a load of laundry from the dryer. But did she then fold it? No. She left it on the couch while she washed the pots that had been soaking in the sink. And she didn’t even dry them before returning to fold the laundry. Quinn had needed to leave the house in case Georgeanne decided to weave cloth for new drapes, or draft a screenplay, or climb Machu Picchu before finishing with the vacuuming.
She realized later that a good daughter would have vacuumed the rest of the room, but that’s not what she had been focused on.
“Eat some breakfast, Dan,” Georgeanne said. “I already made your oatmeal.”
Dan and Quinn exchanged a smile behind Georgeanne’s back. For the 8,000 years they’d been married, Georgeanne had been making Dan oatmeal for breakfast. In the beginning it was normal oatmeal, like most people ate. But over the years, Georgeanne increasingly expressed her creativity through her cooking. These days, Dan’s oatmeal was virtually unrecognizable, buried under layers of dried and fresh fruit, nuts, seeds, roasted chickpeas, basil, and tarragon. The pièce de résistance, however, was the artfully arranged spoonful of dill pickle relish on top. This flourish was added after Georgeanne heard a Japanese chef extol the virtues of “eating with your eyes,” something Quinn desperately wanted to learn, if it meant she needn’t use her mouth.
Quinn had never once seen her father refuse to eat something Georgeanne prepared, or even grimace in the slightest. Quinn tried to emulate him as much as possible because Georgeanne was the sweetest, kindest, best mother on the planet, but more often than she wanted, a wrinkled nose and a “gross” escaped her lips. Luckily, Georgeanne was the sweetest, kindest, best mother on the planet, and such comments slid right off her like she was coated in Teflon.
Dan scooped a spoon into his hearty bowl of oatmeal and offered it to Quinn.
“No thanks, Dad. I already ate.” Since Quinn had boomeranged back home a few weeks back, she’d learned to set an early alarm, drag herself out of bed, and force herself to eat a few bites of cereal before Georgeanne padded into the kitchen to begin her culinary calamities. Now that she had to be at the diner before seven, she had an excuse and it wasn’t even awkward anymore. It also served to hide from her mother how little appetite she had these days. No need to encourage that kind of scrutiny.
Dan finished his oatmeal just as Quinn put the finishing touches on the remaining clues for the puzzle.
“Knock, knock.” Rico Lopez stuck his head in the back door.
“Rico, you’re just in time for oatmeal.” Georgeanne opened the cupboard for another bowl.
“Sorry, Mrs. Carr. I can’t. I’m on duty.”
“Hence the uniform.” Quinn smiled. Rico dodged that bullet.
Georgeanne detached the top from a blue frosted cupcake. “Well, just a taste of this, then. I’d like your opinion.”
Everyone knew Rico couldn’t tell a lie. It was his albatross. When Quinn and Rico were kids, if Georgeanne suspected that Quinn was fudging the truth, all she had to do was ask Rico. If he attempted even the tiniest of fibs, he’d wrinkle and twitch his nose like a bunny sniffing ammonia. “Has Quinn been smoking? Did she ditch chemistry on Thursday? When are report cards coming out?”
Being best friends with Rico was like being perpetually hooked up to a lie detector. She learned early on to keep Rico out of the really important loops, especially ones where direct questions might be asked of him.
Rico broke off a small bit of the cupcake. He swallowed fast, a trick he’d learned from Quinn. Fewer taste buds got assaulted. “It’s…something I’ve never had before.”
Truth won again.
Dan held out his hand for the rest of Rico’s cupcake.
“Why do you have a fish in a bag, Officer?” Quinn asked. “Is this some sort of fishy perp walk?”
“Oh.” Rico held the clear plastic bag aloft and peered in. “I helped Abe set up his booth at the festival and he paid me in goldfish. It’s a gift for you to say thank you for helping me with that bicycle theft case. Who knew crossword puzzles were a crime-fighting tool?”
“Oh, please. It was kismet. The clue transportation with a kickstand was BICYCLE, waiter outside a seafood restaurant was ALLEYCAT, and class with a flexible schedule was YOGA. So, when I was doing the crossword waiting for yoga to start and saw that kid getting sushi when he should have been in school, well, all the puzzle pieces dropped into place and it just made sense that he was the bike thief. Just a matter of doing the New York Times crossword at the right time in the right place.”
Bemused, Rico handed the bag to Quinn. “Regardless, your skill at working crossword puzzles saved my butt. I never would have figured it out if you hadn’t pointed everything out to me.”
Quinn had been doing crosswords for as long as she could remember, but had kept from Rico that she created them as well. She was nerdy enough in high school; she didn’t need him broadcasting things she wanted to keep secret. It was one secret she’d continued to keep from him. She closed her laptop so he wouldn’t see her crossword-creating software. Quinn accepted the goldfish from him.
“Thanks. I’ll name it”—she held the bag up and studied it from all angles—“him…Fang.”
“You can tell the sex of a goldfish?”
“Of course. Can’t everyone?” Dan caught Quinn’s eye and winked at her.
“Remember not to overfeed it…him. The directions are very clear.” Rico pulled a small jar of fish food from his pants pocket, handing it to Quinn.
“Remember who you’re talking to, dude. Clear, explicit instructions are my nirvana.” Quinn unscrewed the lid and took a whiff of the briny flakes, immediately wishing she hadn’t.
“Don’t joke about that, Quinn,” Georgeanne said. “It’s not funny.”
“Yes it is, Mom, but it’s fine.”
Quinn knew her parents were worried about her, so she tried to change the subject. “I’m fine. You’re fine. Dad’s fine. Fang is obviously fine. And Rico would be fine too, if you’d quit feeding him cumin cakes with miso frosting.”
“Ignoring problems doesn’t make them go away, Quinn. You’ve got to move on. I wish you’d call that therapist.” Georgeanne turned back to the stove. Quinn assumed it was to hide the sadness in her eyes. As fantastic as Quinn was at hiding her emotions, Georgeanne was hopeless.
“Rico, can’t you get her to call?”
“I don’t think so, Mrs. Carr, but—”
Quinn interrupted Rico. “I am moving on, Mom. In fact, I’m going to move on and get ready to go to the festival with you.” Quinn collected up her computer and returned it to her bedroom, making a point of not glancing at the therapist’s business card tacked to the kitchen corkboard.
Wasn’t it enough she was taking her meds like a good little girl? I’m not ashamed of being who I am and neither should anyone else. Despite everything that happened, I don’t need therapy. I just need a fresh start with this new job at the diner so I can save some money, move out, and be normal.
She sat at the end of her twin bed, pulled on some socks, and laced up her waitressing shoes, a pair of well-loved sneakers. She sighed at her reflection in the mirror before gathering up her shoulder-length hair, giving it a twist, and clamping it into a messy bun. It was all she could accomplish in the grooming department most days. At least she was washing it again. Progress, eh?
She grabbed her purse and returned to the kitchen in time to see her dad and Rico carefully coaxing Fang into a large Pyrex mixing bowl. They watched him explore his new home.
Quinn read the instructions on the fish food, keeping it a good distance from her nose, and tapped a few flakes into the bowl. Fang inhaled a few, letting the rest drift to the bottom of the bowl. Quinn prepared to shake more flakes to replace the fallen ones, but Dan held out his hand for the jar.
Rico tapped the glass to get Fang’s attention. Fang did not give in to his demands.
After Dan put away the jar, he nudged Quinn, dropping two pills into her hand.
“Thanks, Dad,” she said quietly. She tossed the capsule toward the back of her throat, then swallowed it down with a gulp of water. The pill she placed on her tongue, the acrid taste intense and bitter.
“You guys going to the festival? It’s going to be a scorcher today.” Rico picked up his duty cap, organizing it over his tight curls, the bane of his existence. In middle school Quinn had to squelch rumors that he got regular perms at the beauty salon. It only took one whispered threat to expose perpetrator Molly Campbell’s secret shame, a padded bra. The rumors stopped immediately.
They organized themselves to walk the few blocks to the festival while Georgeanne put the finishing touches on the boxes of bake sale items, which consisted of toothpick tent poles in each cupcake to support a canopy of protective plastic wrap.
Every so often they passed a statue of a chestnut, even though Chestnut Station, Colorado—out on the plains—was named after a person from Merry Olde England and not the tree. In fact, there was not a chestnut tree to be found in Chestnut Station, but long ago, some artsy type began sculpting chestnuts, large and small, and planting them around town, often in the dead of night. One particularly productive summer saw more than thirty chestnut statues installed at intersections throughout town; quite remarkable, since there were only about twice that many streets. In the years since, many more had materialized depicting raw chestnuts, shelled chestnuts, chestnuts fuzzy from the tree, and, of course, roasting on an open fire. Made of wood, metal, clay. Large, medium, and small. Loud and proud, hidden and demure. Earth tones and neon. You name it, there was one like it somewhere in town.
Quinn and Rico passed several of these chestnut statues decorated for Independence Day, one sporting a Lady Liberty crown, one with an American flag print bikini top tied around it at a jaunty angle, and Quinn’s favorite, one wearing sunglasses and a beer hat. She stopped to adjust the glasses.
As they strolled through the residential area of Chestnut Station, they collected neighbors heading to Square Park. Georgeanne and Dan fell in step with friends and dropped behind Quinn and Rico. It wasn’t technically the festival parade, but it might as well have been. Problem was, with a town so small, there’s no one to watch the parade since practically everyone was in it.
Quinn and Rico crossed Parliament Avenue into the park.
“As a kid, it used to bug me so much that this was called Square Park,” Quinn said. “It’s not anywhere near square. In fact, if one of those enormous chestnuts was planted at the corner by the fountain, you’d have a fairly anatomical depiction of the side view of a brown bear.”
“Not Kodiak or grizzly?”
“Nope. Definitely brown. And if you turn the map forty-five degrees, it looks suspiciously like the Facebook logo.”
“Why suspicious?” Rico asked.
“Because what would Facebook gain by branding Chestnut Station? It’s like crop circles. Completely baffling.”
“You know it’s actually called Town Square Park,” Rico said.
“Well, I know that now.”
“Hey, Quinn, hey, Rico. Like our booth?” The publisher/editor/typesetter/sometime reporter of the Chestnut Station Chronicle, Vera Greenberg, gave a Vanna White sweep of her arm.
Rico wrinkled his nose. “Can’t say I’m wild about it. Think you missed your mark this year.”
Vera rolled her eyes at Quinn. “When will I learn?”
Quinn jabbed Rico in the ribs while pulling him away. “What is wrong with you?”
“What? She asked!”
Quinn sighed. “Rico, we talked about this. She wanted you to say something nice. Not truthful.”
“Then she should’ve—”
“Have you been practicing like I told you?”
“I’m not going to practice fibbing, Quinn.”
“There’s no hope for you. You need to learn how to fib. You can hurt people’s feelings that way. Like yesterday when you said I was too skinny.”
“That hurt your feelings? But it’s true!”
“Be that as it may. If you really felt it necessary to comment on my weight, why couldn’t you just have said, It seems like your jeans are fitting better?”
“I don’t know.” And he didn’t.
They found the Music Teachers Association booth and set down their boxes of cupcakes. Georgeanne and Dan followed soon after.
Dan saw Abe the handyman two booths over. “You have everything under control, Georgie? I want to go talk to Abe.”
“Off you go!” Georgeanne shooed him away. She motioned to Quinn and Rico to pick up the boxes while she fluffed and smoothed a musical motif tablecloth. Georgeanne began placing her cupcakes randomly on the table.
As soon as Georgeanne turned away to chat with the orchestra director at the school, Quinn carefully chose a red frosted one, then a white, then a blue, repeating the pattern after offsetting the first cupcake in the row, creating a multicolored parallelogram centered on the table. The cupcakes marched like little soldiers along a line of the treble clef staff.
Rico thought he’d figured out the pattern and tried to help. Quinn simply held out her hand until he returned the cupcake to it.
“I guess I better get to the station,” he said.
“Anything interesting going on at the police department these days?” Quinn asked. “Murder? Human trafficking? Secret drug cartel working out of Mrs. Olansky’s nail salon?”
“Nope. Not even another bike theft. How ’bout you?”
“Well, it’s a hotbed of infamy at the Chestnut Diner. Yesterday I told someone we had lemon pie, but we didn’t. Got me an old-fashioned tongue-lashing.”
“Wow. Scary.”
“Plus, there was a kerfuffle when Jake forgot to put a fresh pot of coffee on before the Retireds got there.”
“You be careful over there,” Rico said with mock horror. “Keep your eye on those notorious Retireds.”
Rico said his goodbyes. Quinn leaned her backside against the table and counted the men in her vicinity wearing socks with their sandals. When she ran out of those, she counted all the sun hats she saw, grouping them into large-brimmed, visor, and baseball cap categories. Then she saw one of those canvas Australian ones and had to start over.
“Quinn? You in there?” Wilbur said in his gruff, gravelly voice.
Herman and Wilbur, two of the Retireds she waited on regularly at the diner, stood in front of her.
“Gathering wool, my granny used to say.” Wilbur’s voice was three notches too loud.
Herman’s face was arranged in its normal quizzical manner. He was a true literalist, analyzing and parsing every word and deed so he always looked puzzled, no matter what was happening, for at least ten seconds longer than was reasonable.
“When’s the diner opening today?” Wilbur asked.
Quinn took in Wilbur’s socks-and-sandals combo. “After the parade.”
Right on cue, the wobbly strains of the high school fight song wafted over the park.
Wilbur handed Georgeanne a dollar and picked a cupcake with red frosting from the center of the display, making Quinn wince. As he passed her, he gave her a head-to-toe glance. “You should be the one eating this. You’re scrawnier that the puniest side of nothing…and then whittled to a point.”
Herman stopped mid-stride and frowned, trying to unpack Wilbur’s folksy aphorism.
“I’ll have you know,” she said, “that I maintain this exquisite figure by adhering to a strict diet comprised solely of the wistful dreams of orphans and the obnoxious words of old men. So thanks for feeding me.”
Wilbur cackled and led a short-circuiting Herman away. Quinn did her best not to smile until they turned and walked away. The Retireds might be o. . .
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