Engagement and Espionage (Solving for Pie: Cletus and Jenn Mysteries #1)
Penny Reid
Dedication
To Amanda, thank you for the daily text messages threatening bodily harm if word counts were not reached.
And to all the Cletus and Jenn stans, this book is most definitely 100% for you.
Chapter One
“Dreams do come true, if only we wish hard enough. You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it.”
― J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan
Jenn
There’s no faking quality.
A thing was either high quality or it wasn’t.
I was convinced Mr. Richard Badcock’s organic, free range eggs were the highest quality anywhere in Green Valley, East Tennessee since Nancy Danvish had retired. Perhaps the whole of Tennessee. Maybe the southeast USA. For that matter, quite possibly in the entire universe.
They were the platinum-diamond Nobel Prize of eggs. Some were narrow, some were wide; some had sage green shells, robin blue, tawny brown, or snow white; some were even speckled. But all his eggs contained firm whites and the most gorgeous orangey yolks, brighter than orange sherbet—don’t get me started on the yolks!—that I’d ever seen in all my years of baking.
I didn’t take to broadcasting this much, mostly because folks already thought I was a little off, but I didn’t think anything I made tasted as good if I didn’t use Richard’s eggs. My creations lacked a richness, a texture, one I could only achieve with Badcock eggs. And that was fact.
Which was why I was currently up to my eyeballs in despair.
“What do you mean you don’t have any eggs?” I looked behind Mr. Richard Badcock, searching his huge gated lawn and fancy henhouse in the distance.
It had white gables and eaves, a hand-welded copper gutter, and a cedar picket fence.
“Just what I said, Ms. Sylvester. I’m plum out of eggs.” His voice was firm and hard and—if I wasn’t mistaken—laced with distrust. “But if you want some fresh chicken, I know the Lee farm just butchered—”
“I can’t put a chicken thigh in a custard, Richard!” I wailed, unashamed in my anguish, my teeth chattering in the early January cold snap. “It’s not a gelatin. Fat and meat and bones won’t do me any good.”
My gaze shifted back to the man, moved over this new Mr. Badcock. I had no idea why he was behaving this way, but I couldn’t spare a thought to that. I was too much occupied by the great egg dearth of the decade.
Mr. Richard Badcock sighed, his eyebrows tenting on his forehead in an arrangement of both compassion—finally—and helplessness. “I am very sorry, Ms. Sylvester. If I had some eggs, I’d give them to you.”
“I’m sorry too, but this doesn’t make any sense. You must have a hundred chickens back there, and—”
“We have sixty-one chickens.” He sniffed, looking down his nose at me, once again hostile. “Unlike some folks, we believe our hens need space, autonomy, greens, and serenity to be good layers.”
Good Lord, now I’d offended his serene layers.
“Of course, Mr. Badcock.” I tried to make my tone conciliatory. “And I can’t tell you how much I just love—and I do mean love—those eggs. Which is why, please pardon my outburst, I am feeling a great deal of desolation at the prospect of baking without your superior product.”
His shoulders relaxed, apparently mollified, and he quit peering at me, instead sighing for maybe the tenth time since I showed up. “Ms. Sylvester, there ain’t nothing I can do. I am sorry. But we had two unexpected—and very large—orders late last night. I’m cleaned out for at least two weeks, and—”
“Two weeks?” I shrieked, completely beside myself, and clutched my chest.
He sighed again, taking off his hat and wiping his brow with the back of his flannel-covered forearm, saying nothing. His old brown eyes moved over me with a look that seemed speculative, and I got the sense he was having himself an internal debate.
Meanwhile, I was going to cry.
I could feel it. The twinge in my nose, the sting behind my eyes, the unsteadiness of my chin. Nothing seemed to be going right. Usually, I could handle a string of bad luck, but I was exhausted from pulling long hours at the bakery between Thanksgiving and New Year’s.
And I missed Cletus. Desperately. I’d barely seen or spoken to him, and we’d had zero alone time together since the end of November.
Being close to tears at present was about a lot more than the unfriendliness of the farmer in front of me, withholding the output of his serene layers. It was just the final straw.
I couldn’t go two weeks without Badcock eggs. I couldn’t. Folks would remark. They’d notice. We’d be asked if we’d changed our recipes, and not for the better. Early last month, I’d gone three days without the eggs, using instead run-of-the-mill store-bought ones, and the church choir near pitched a fit about my coconut custard pie.
“It’s fine.” Mrs. Seymour—the pastor’s wife—had said to my momma. “But what I don’t understand is, why didn’t Jenn make it? We specifically asked for Jennifer’s coconut custard pie.”
My momma had hemmed and hawed and, in the end, she’d lied. She’d told them an under-baker `made it and had eventually given it to them for free.