The Pickle Queen: A Crossroads Café Novella Read online

  Promo Page

  Over. Done with. Walk it off, Jay, compartmentalize.

  A talent of mine. Families don’t always survive. The wounded die or build a shield of scar tissue. Life moves on.

  “You do have a family,” Gabs said. “You’ll always have one, whether you admit it or not.”

  “I’ll take care of my cousins, yes, and . . .”

  “Gus. Tal. And me.”

  When I said nothing else, my throat tight, she turned her face away, giving me some privacy.

  I want to hold you, I thought at her. Desperately. I want to look into your eyes and see me making you feel wonderful. I want to see my soul in your eyes. I want to be part of you and become the man you want me to be. Except that I can’t yet. Not until my uncle can’t harm you again, or anyone else you love.

  WAKEFIELDS TAKE what they want. MacBrides never surrender. For nearly a hundred years, a battle of wills between these two deeply-rooted Appalachian families has ended in defeat and heartache—most often, for MacBrides. Now the MacBride name is barely more than a legend, and it’s up to Gabby MacBride to deal with the pain of her childhood memories and also the challenge of a MacBride legacy she’s only beginning to understand.

  That will mean coming to terms with her bittersweet love for Jay Wakefield, the lonely rich boy who became her soul mate when they were kids, before the dark demands of his own legacy forced him to betray her.

  Praise for Deborah Smith’s The Crossroads Café

  Wall Street Journal Bestseller

  Number One Bestseller, Amazon Kindle

  “Unforgettably poignant.”

  —Booklist

  “A top five romance of 2006.”

  —Library Journal, starred review

  “A perfect 10.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  “The best romance of 2006.”

  —The Romance Reader

  “A true treasure.”

  —Romantic Times BookClub

  “A book that readers will open again and again.”

  —Romance Designs

  Winner of a HOLT Medallion and a Reviewer’s International Award (RIO)

  The Novels of Deborah Smith

  From Bell Bridge Books

  The Crossroads Café

  The Crossroads Café Novellas:

  The Biscuit Witch, Book One of The MacBrides

  The Pickle Queen, Book Two of The MacBrides

  The Kitchen Charmer, Book Three of The MacBrides

  A Gentle Rain

  Sweet Hush

  On Bear Mountain

  Charming Grace

  The Stone Flower Garden

  A Place To Call Home (Audio)

  Silk and Stone (Audio)

  When Venus Fell (Audio)

  Blue Willow (Audio)

  Miracle (Audio)

  The Mossy Creek Hometown Series (Contributor)

  Sweet Tea Series (Contributor)

  Alice At Heart

  Diary of a Radical Mermaid

  The Pickle Queen

  Book Two of The MacBrides

  A Crossroads Café Novella

  by

  Deborah Smith

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead), events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-344-3

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-379-5

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2013 by Deborah Smith

  The Kitchen Charmer (excerpt) copyright © 2014 by Deborah Smith

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

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  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo/Art credits:

  Still life © Jolanta Brigere | Dreamstime.com

  Compass textures (manipulated) © SofkaQWE | Fotolia.com

  Textures (manipulated) © Yobro10 | Dreamstime.com

  Title Lettering © Jaguarwoman Designs

  Delta’s notebook page © Deborah Smith

  Rose border: Wedding Recipe Card © [email protected]

  The Families of the Crossville Cove © Deborah Smith

  Family tree background: Big oak tree isolated © Evgeny [email protected]

  :Eqpo:01:

  Delta’s Notebook

  The Families

  Part One

  Gabby

  2012

  Pickles are our friends, not just our food

  PICKLES ARE mentioned in the Bible. Cleopatra ate them as a beauty regimen. Shakespeare put them in his plays. Mason designed jars for bottling them. So did Ball. Did Mason and Ball fight over the King of the Pickle Jars title? I don’t know. I did know this much: I used pickles to keep fear, pride, and my love of Jay Wakefield behind a door I would not risk opening again. Even now.

  My pre-Christmas lecture from Tal

  THEY CALLED ME the bossy one and Tal the sweet one, but in the past two weeks, since Tal left New York for cousin Delta’s cove high in the mountains above Asheville, North Carolina, my and Gus’s baby sister had transformed into an Appalachian hoodoo woman. For the first time in her life, thanks to Scottish veterinarian Dr. Douglas Firth, our biscuit witch was in love, with extra butter on top. She now claimed to have the all-seeing vision of a spirit bear, the earth-mother insights of a country-western singer, and the we-must-return-to-our-roots fervor of a trout swimming upstream to spawn.

  I’m not certain mountain trout do that, but if they do, Tallulah Bankhead MacBride had become their honorary swimming instructor.

  She emailed me before Christmas, not knowing I was in a Los Angeles courtroom fighting to prove I hadn’t stolen five million dollars from my movie-star partner.

  Dear Big Sister,

  There’s something going on between you and Jay Wakefield. Admit it. Not just from when we were kids. When he came to the Cove to make that cold-blooded offer about hiring us to work for him at Free Wheeler (when he knows we’re the rightful heirs!), my food angels couldn’t get a good grip on his secrets and pain. But now that Doug and I are lovers, my angels have expanded their menu! The same thing happened when Eve was born. I’m full of aromas and everyone around me is a glory-full meal of spiritual flavors!

  It’s true what Mama always said: It tastes good to be alive!

  So here’s what my foodie angels are telling me: Jay has turned into baking chocolate. He’s got barely enough sugar left to qualify as “bittersweet.” He’s desperate for more sugar. Just like when we were kids, only much, much worse. For love. Trust. Family. For you. You, Gabby. You. He needs you like cocoa butter needs vanilla.

  I know I told you to let me and Doug handle him. I told you not to listen w
hen Delta was egging you on with all that talk about, “Go after him, just remember you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, Pickle Queen.”

  But I was wrong. You need to go after him. Come here. Come home.

  Where we were born. Where we belong.

  I came home. Now you and Gus come home, too.

  Love, Tal

  “THE HEARING’S about to start.” My lawyer laid her hand on my shoulder. You know things are bad when your attorney keeps patting you.

  My senses filled with avocado and lemon. The lawyer’s safe place.

  Tal’s foodie angels brought her visions of baked goods. Mine brought brine, peppers, spices, tastes that bit back. If my chances of walking away without being charged with embezzlement got any worse, my lawyer was going to turn into guacamole.

  I closed the cover on my phone and stood.

  I wasn’t going back to North Carolina. Or back to Jay. Not ever. The sweet boy I remembered was lost inside a bitter man. He’d become what he’d once hated most. A Wakefield.

  Jay

  Wakefield, MacBride, Nettie, Whittlespoon

  Atop The Rock of Ages

  1989

  LOVE IS AN OPEN vein in a mountain of granite rock. Elemental. Gabby and I were bonded under pressure, sealed in the earth, surfaced by heat, crystalized by fire. Like sands through the hour glass, these are the days of the lies we survived. Our Wakefield-MacBride legacy started deep inside the rock of ages.

  SAND. SILICA. SILICON Dioxide. SiO2. Known since ancient times. Quartz. The most common working-class rock on the planet. The bedrock under the mattress of the Blue Ridge Mountains that cover our part of North Carolina.

  My great-grandfather Augustus didn’t know or care about the minerals under the surface of Free Wheeler when he bankrupted Arlo Claptraddle by buying his competition and driving bicycle prices into the ground; Augustus just wanted revenge for Arlo rescuing, hiding, and winning the heart of Augustus’s extraordinary cook, a young mountain beauty named Emma Nettie. Back in the 1940s, Emma was on Great-Grandfather’s short list for the next opening in his long list of mistresses. Her lack of interest in the position didn’t stop him from locking her in a room at his Asheville mansion until she came to her senses.

  She escaped and headed back to her family near the Crossroads Cove, only to be tracked by Augustus’s hired security men. She found refuge in the strange world of inventor and bicycle maker Arlo, whose Clapper Motion Machines were built in the community he invented with all the whimsy of a cross between Walt Disney and a post-Victorian Mad Hatter.

  For the next ten years, she lived with, worked with, loved and inspired Arlo, going under the name Rose Dooley. He designed a bike for her. He adored her. He would have married her, if he hadn’t been separated from a wife in his wealthy circles. Divorce wasn’t an option. The paperwork would have exposed Emma’s identity.

  Eventually, in the 1950s, Great-Grandfather found her. You don’t take a woman from a Wakefield. You don’t take anything from a Wakefield. Not and live to talk about it.

  So that, friends, is the short version of how Free Wheeler, an abandoned and haunted bicycle village near the cove, came to be the property, in perpetuum, of Wakefields, to serve as a warning to anyone who ever thought about crossing us again.

  Like putting a head of your enemy on a stake outside your castle walls.

  Now, that head had become surprisingly valuable.

  Fifty feet beneath Dad’s Birkenstock sandals and Uncle E.W.’s tasseled loafers lay a vein of Carolina quartz so pure it could be pulverized into sand as white as bleached cotton. Wakefield Mining and Land Development considered quartz a throwaway. Scrape the valuable feldspar and mica out of the ground, separate the quartz that ran through it, sell the quartz sand to golf courses. It made those eye-popping sugar-white sand traps people saw on television at the Masters Tournament.

  Until a little worldwide revolution called the silicon chip came along. North Carolina quartz became the gourmet truffle of silica, worth fortunes.

  “I inherited the surface access, right?” E.W. said loudly, snapping his fingers in the thick summer air.

  One of his attorneys stepped forward with a document, as if the mere appearance of a piece of paper was drama enough for the wild and isolated setting. “You know that. It’s a standard easement.”

  Thick blue-green mountains rose around Free Wheeler’s weedy main street and sad, haunted buildings—all that remained of Arlo Claptraddle’s bicycle shops, his factory and the little town he built for the workers who became his family. A magical mountain village where people rode their Claptraddle bicycles on pretty paths to the cottages he built all through the valley, all the way to the fancy pavement of the Asheville Trace and into the Crossroads Cove, where the Jeffersons and Whittlespoons and Netties and other old families filled their bicycle baskets with fine corn whiskey; and where the friendly roadside farmhouse of Delta Whittlespoon’s grandmother would one day become Delta’s famous Crossroads Café Diner.

  “I have the right to dig up as much of this God-forsaken piece of Nothing as need be,” my uncle insisted, as his private security men stepped forward with folded arms. Uncle E.W. was hated by a lot of people; nothing new for us Wakefields, but did he really believe I, Dad and Lawyer George were going to jump him? Behind him and his army of suits waited bulldozers and graders ridden by men in yellow hardhats. We’d be bulldozed before we got half a chance to attack.

  “Go home, Elba,” Dad said. “We’re rich. We don’t need more money. We need to keep what’s left of our souls.”

  “My soul wants progress, Baby Brother. Job creation. Tax money going to the coffers of our great state. And raw materials for the technology revolution that will keep our great nation at the forefront of . . .”

  “Save your rhetoric for interviews and press releases. You want to own every mining property in this part of the state. You’ve put most of your investments in off-shore accounts, you’ve bribed regulators to look the other way and bought politicians and strong-armed activists. It’s a family tradition, I know. But this is one place where our family name is not going to be attached to the wholesale destruction and desecration of a historic site, not to mention a pristine natural environment.”

  “I’ve been patient long enough, Tommy. There’s not a damned thing worth preserving here. It’s just a bunch of old buildings in the middle of the woods, full of junked bicycle parts and cobwebs.”

  “It should be given to Arlo’s heirs.”

  “There are none.”

  “That’s debatable. Emma had a daughter . . .”

  “No proof of paternity. And it wouldn’t matter anyway. Grandfather’s will says this property stays in our family. If you try to hand it off to strangers, you forfeit it to me.”

  “I understand that, Brother. That’s why I’m going to protect it. I have no choice.”

  “I’ll give you twenty percent of the net profit from the quarry I develop. You can’t legally stop me, Tommy.” He shook the document. “By God, I’ve got mining rights. Those include the access right. An easement to come onto this property and dig.”

  I looked up at Dad with my fists clenched in the pockets of my khakis. Did even God know that E.W. Wakefield was the majority stockholder and CEO of one of the biggest mining companies in the southeast? That Wakefields had been gouging fortunes out of these mountains since the late eighteen hundreds?

  Dad looked so tired. He’d inherited Free Wheeler from their father as a throwaway gift to a sickly second son. E.W. got the good stuff—the mining rights. Dad got the useless, pretty surface. Dad wanted it that way.

  Dad leaned on his cane. A lifetime of type 1 diabetes had taken a toll on the nerve endings in his feet. He was a tall skinny pine tree pushed sideways by an ice storm. I stood as close beside him as I could without impugning his dignity by shov
ing a shoulder into his hip to hold him up. I was tall for eleven, but he was the size of the Olympian giants. In my eyes, at least.

  “Elba,” he said in an elegant uplands drawl, “couldn’t you just once do the righteous thing?”

  “Arlo Claptraddle nearly killed Grandfather. He assaulted him. The bastard died in prison. Rightfully so. I’ve got no qualms.”

  “This place should be preserved, regardless,” Dad said.

  “Sir?” Dad’s assistant whispered. He had been listening intently on a satellite phone he clutched to one ear.

  “Yes, George?” Dad looked tired. I leaned into his shadow. I loved him more than breathing. Even more than he loved me. And he loved me even more than he loved old buildings, history, doing the right thing, comic books, and honesty.

  Lawyer George—my nickname for George Avery—whispered to Dad, his thinning blond hair ruffled and sweaty, his open golf shirt showing a slight stain where his wife hadn’t quite smudged out the burp-up from their baby. Dad could afford an entourage; he just didn’t like the idea. “You’re better backup than ten lawyers and a Rock ’Em Sock ’Em Robot plus three Godzillas and a team of X-Men,” he always said to George and me.

  George finished whispering. Dad looked at E.W. “Give me five minutes, Elba. I have proof that your access rights belong to someone else.”

  Uncle E.W.’s lawyers did everything except roll their eyes and laugh. One of them stepped forward and handed E.W. a folder. He held it up triumphantly. “Court order,” he said. He waved the folder at the men behind him.

  A bulldozer rumbled.

  My stomach clenched. I looked up at Dad’s gaunt face. Unzipping the hip pack I always carried, I pulled out a small bottle of orange juice. “Cap’n, it’s time to re-fuel your jet pack.”

  George gave me an approving thumbs-up. “Sir, Junior Commander Jay is making an excellent suggestion. Let’s conference in the shade of a tree and—”

  Dad cut us off with a gently-raised hand. He tilted his head, listening. In the distance, along a rutted trail that ran back through the woods toward the place people called the Crossroads Cove, came the sound of a car engine. Dad smiled. “The Rebels are here early. I knew they’d make it.” He winked at me. “Darth Elba doesn’t stand a chance.”