Sitting back on her heels, she counted eight silver pieces cradled in the palm of her hand. Annie cast a bemused look heavenward. “You’ve done it again, Gram!” she said. “Another mystery left in the attic for me.” As a child spending summers at Charles and Betsy Holden’s Maine home while her parents traveled on missionary work overseas, Annie had spent many an afternoon playing in the attic. It became her private magical land, filled with curiosities. Now that she was a grandmother herself, the attic continued to bring excitement of almost magical proportions into her life.
The mysteries from the attic over the past few years had provided much-needed diversion since the loss of her husband, Wayne, to a massive heart attack. Annie carefully slipped the silver bands back into the purse and stood, thinking of how unmoored she had felt after selling the car dealership she and Wayne had built into a thriving business in Texas and for which she had been the bookkeeper. With both her husband and her work gone—and with LeeAnn now married and a mother—Annie had almost drowned in the void.
The inheritance of Grey Gables upon Gram’s death had been the lifeboat back to the land of the living for Annie. Her days filled again with purposeful activity—renovating the old house, renewing her relationship with her childhood friend, Alice MacFarlane, who lived in the carriage house next door to Grey Gables, and immersing herself in the community of Stony Point. The transition had brought its fair share of obstacles and frustrations, but it had also brought joy. And apparently, it had also endowed Annie with a new green thumb for vegetable gardening.
Smiling, Annie found the side table where the harvest basket was perched and carried it and the purse downstairs. Placing the purse on a side table in the living room, she took the basket into the kitchen for cleaning. While wiping the basket with a spray of homemade wood cleaner, Annie hummed to distract herself from the thought of the purse’s awaiting mystery. Being a gardener required discipline and disciplined she would be. So she hummed Come, Ye Thankful People, Come and redirected her thoughts to the bean and cucumber plants awaiting harvest; that would free up more growing room. She would have plenty of time afterward to polish up those silver bands and see what design lay beneath the tarnish.
With the basket hanging from the crook of her arm, Annie returned to the sunny patch. She had just placed the basket on the ground and bent over the first bean plant when the hedges bordering the side of her yard rustled. Alice emerged through a small gap between two bushes.
Annie straightened and waved at her friend. “Alice, come see my summer miracle!”
The morning sunlight caught Alice’s auburn hair, burnishing it with gold as she strode across the grass. She stopped at the edge of the garden, examining it from one end to the other and then exaggerating a frown. “What, no beanstalk soaring higher than the clouds?”
“I said miracle, not fairy tale.” Annie grinned and flourished her hand over the plants. “Can you possibly not be amazed at the fact that I’ve managed to not kill off my vegetables? Look at all these green beans and cukes!”
Alice’s blue eyes opened wide. “Oh, that miracle. How could I have missed it?” She couldn’t hold back a chuckle.
“Well, it’s before noon. Your brain doesn’t generally fire on all cylinders so early,” Annie teased back.
“Guilty as charged, though the coffee should be kicking in any time now.” Alice bent over to get a closer look at the beans dangling from a plant. “These will be good in a tasty pasta salad! Need some help picking?”
Annie nodded. “Absolutely. There’s a pile of cucumbers that needs harvesting too. I still can’t believe how well everything is growing, and I know I have you to thank for it. If you hadn’t mentioned where Gram kept her gardening notes hidden in the library, I’d probably be mourning yet another vegetable garden gone bad.” She gently stabilized a plant between two fingers and pinched a long slender bean off with her thumb and forefinger.
“It would have been shameful to let all the gardening wisdom Betsy gained over the years disappear from your family,” Alice said, selecting a bean plant and starting to pick. “She was always making adjustments each growing season to find out what worked best. Honestly, your grandmother was a one-woman house-and-garden network. I’m so thankful she told me about the notes. Who knows how long it would have taken for you to just stumble across them, tucked in the back of that drawer.”
Annie started to tell her friend about the purse she had found in the attic earlier, but she then thought better of it. One whiff of a mystery and her garden help would desert her in an instant to look at the find. Instead, she told Alice about the photos she planned to email to LeeAnn and the pickles she planned to make.