Punch, Pastries, and Poison Harper Lin (best e reader for manga TXT) 📖

“Did you bake with her?” I was trying to be friendly, but I was also trying to figure out if she’d be interested in working on the baking side of things as well.

“I worked in her shop for a while.”

“Her shop?”

She had moved on to sniffing bags of beans. They were pretty airtight, so I didn’t know what she was smelling, but she seemed to have a plan, so I left it alone.

“Yeah,” she said. “She had a bake shop up in Maine. I helped out until she decided to retire and sold it to some yuppie couple who took all the gluten and sugar out of everything and stopped using ingredients from more than a hundred miles away, which is fine, you know, but it’s not what people go to a bake shop for, especially since they didn’t even sell coffee anymore ‘cause it’s from too far away, just some dandelion tea crap they harvested from a field somewhere because they told the farmer they’d do it for free if they could keep the product. And, I mean, who wouldn’t take that deal, you know? They weeded his freaking field for free so they could get some weeds to make tea out of. And not even, like, actual weed, ‘cause that might be good, but literal weeds from the ground, like the kind that kids make wishes on. Anyway, they’re only open, like, two hours a day now, and there’s only this one guy named Jim who ever comes in to drink their weed juice and eat their mashed-up blueberries and potatoes, because what the hell else grows in Maine? I don’t even know how they stay in business. I think their family gives them money or something.”

I stood in silence for a minute, digesting the torrent of words that had just poured out of her mouth. It was easily the most I’d heard her say in one go, and I suspected that if I counted up all the words I’d ever heard her say, that speech would have accounted for more than half. Still, I was glad she was showing some passion about something and fascinated that her expression hadn’t so much as flickered the entire time. Her face had remained completely impassive the entire time, and she hadn’t missed a beat in her inspection of the beans.

“Wow,” I said. “That sounds terrible. I’d hate for something like that to happen to Antonia’s.”

The Ephy shrug returned. “If they want to ruin a good business, that’s on them. Doesn’t bother me. They paid my grandma well.”

And that was that. She finally decided on a bag of beans—the first one she’d sniffed, actually—grabbed it, and went over to the espresso machine like we hadn’t just been having a conversation. I had a feeling it was something I’d just have to get used to if I was going to keep her around, which I planned to. Her personality may not have been stellar, but her coffee was, and besides, we needed the help.

Fortunately, she somehow managed to mostly get along with most of the staff and customers. She was polite but not warm, and she kept her head down and did her job. She showed up close to on time—punctuality was another of her weak spots—didn’t mind staying a few minutes late, and did as she was told. She even got me to try her grandmother’s shortbread recipe, which, I had to admit, was melt-in-your-mouth delicious. So, for the most part, I felt like I made the right call in hiring her.

Her third day, I even trusted her enough to leave her out front while I went in the back to check our stock levels and see what we needed to reorder. Napkins, probably. It was always napkins.

I’d been back there for about twenty minutes when Ephy appeared out of thin air beside me, as if she’d teleported. I’d even been facing the door and hadn’t seen or heard her coming until I looked up from my clipboard and saw her standing there stone-faced in front of me. I jumped and dropped my clipboard. “Ephy! You startled me!”

“Some guy’s here to see you?”

I bent down and grabbed the clipboard. “Who is it?”

She shrugged.

I took a deep breath. If I was going to keep her, I’d just have to accept that I would periodically have to explain to her how I wanted her to behave in situations where someone else would have already known. Ephy either didn’t know or didn’t care, and I’d just have to accept and correct that. “Next time, ask their name before you come back to get me, okay?”

She shrugged, and I had no idea whether she would do it or not.

I jotted down the number of napkins I thought we needed to order—never enough, even when I ordered twice as many—and laid the clipboard on the desk on my way out into the café. The first man I laid eyes on was my old friend Mike Stanton, who was just walking through the door. Instinctively, I went straight for the coffee pot, dumped it, and started a new batch. “One minute,” I mouthed in his direction. Mike always ordered the same thing—a large black coffee to go—so I’d gotten in the habit of starting a fresh pot as soon as I saw him. With as much coffee as he drank, the man would have single-handedly kept us in business if he paid for any of it, but police officers and firefighters had eaten for free at our coffee shop since my grandparents’ days, and Mike was the lead—and only—detective in the Cape Bay police department. Luckily, he kept his orders simple, so his coffee habit didn’t bankrupt me either.

“Why’d you do that?” Ephy asked.

“Do what?”

“Dump the coffee pot? I just made that, like, five minutes ago?”

“Oh!” It was so ingrained, I’d barely realized I’d done it. “For Mike.” I nodded in his direction.

She made a vaguely scowling face that I took