Excerpt from Chapter 3

Just Jenni

Jenni emerges out of the gallery into the sunlight, takes the gallery steps slowly, trying to resist the urge to turn around and go hide somewhere. The flannel shirt Lou had loaned her reaches down to her thighs, sized for Lou’s height and broad shoulders and definitely not for Jenni’s five foot three frame. The good thing, she supposes, is that it hides the smears of paint on her sensible navy skirt. The bad thing is that she’s wearing a vividly red flannel shirt with a navy pencil skirt. And heels. And she’d rubbed all her makeup off and pulled her shoulder length hair back into a silly spiky ponytail to hide the paint they couldn’t get out of it. 

She turns around. “This is ridiculous. I can’t go out like this. I’ll just—”

She bumps into Lou, who firmly closes the Gallery door. 

“No,” she says. “Lunch now. It’s almost one and you haven’t eaten anything all day, have you?”

“No, but…” A couple of people pass by on the street, looking up at them curiously. She can’t tell whether they’re eyeing the building or her.  

“No buts,” Lou says. “The exhibit’s on its way. You want to pass out on the loading bay?”

Lou cups her hands and tips her head up to yell up at the roof. “Kyle! We’re going to lunch! Be back in an hour!”

Jenni looks up but doesn’t see anything.

“Who are you yelling at?”

“Oh, it’s just Kyle, our security batman. A little weird, but harmless. I’ll introduce you later. Come on, let’s go.”

Jenni trudges after her onto Renaissance’s main street. Maybe no one will recognize her. She wishes now she’d taken Lou’s hat, but at the time the over sized faux fur and the ear flaps had been just a little too much. 

Across the street is Renaissance’s Town Hall and Courthouse, where she worked up till last week. Please please please don’t let the mayor, or anyone else who knows me, see me like this. 

“Morning, Mrs. Carmichael-Starr! Morning, Ms. Soleil!”

Jenni groans. 

“It’s a quarter after one, Dave,” Lou says. 

Dave Bellman, Renaissance’s sole mail carrier, delivers the mail every morning but Sunday, and has done so for the past thirty years. As he’s aged, his route has taken him longer and longer to complete. But, as Dave will tell you, loudly, he only delivers mail in the morning. Thus, the morning is any time he’s delivering the mail. Now he ‘good mornings’ people on the street until at least three pm. 

Dave nods amicably, ignoring Lou’s inconvenient fact completely. “Processed your change of address form last Friday, Mrs. Carmichael-Starr. Delivered your first batch of mail to the new apartment just this morning! There are some valuable coupons in that batch, make sure you don’t miss them!”

Dave is also of the opinion there is no such thing as ‘junk mail.’ He delivers tatty flyers from the local shops as eagerly and carefully as tax refunds and wedding invitations, and gets very, very offended if he finds mail of any kind in the trash. People in Renaissance have learned to hide their junk mail to save themselves the long, tedious lecture about the sanctity of the federal post.

“Thanks, Dave,” Jenni mumbles.

“Don’t mention it,” he says. “New issue of Popular Mechanics for you this morning, Ms. Soleil. Looks like a real humdinger!”

“A what?”

“Well, I can’t be here lollygagging all day, must get on, the morning don’t last forever. Have a nice day!” Dave steps past them and immediately stops again. “Morning, Mrs. Laghari! Morning, Mrs. Tremblay!”

“Have you ever thought,” Lou says, setting a leisurely pace, “that for Dave, the morning does actually last forever?”

“As forever as he wants, anyway.”

Lou chuckles. “Right.”

“Can we walk a little faster?” 

“Oh, come on, it’s a nice day. I’ve been huffing paint fumes since eight am.”

Jenni tries to tug up the collar of the flannel shirt. 

“A pop collar is not an effective disguise,” Lou says. 

Several of the interchangeable pack of old men that hang out in front of the Renaissance Freemason Lodge playing checkers every day look up as they approach. They stare at Jenni unselfconsciously in unison, heads turning on their skinny necks like birds on a wire. Jenni thinks the walk to Delores’ has never taken this long.

They pass the post office, locked and empty with Dave on his rounds, and the ice cream parlor with the delivery truck from the dairy farm west of town stopped out front. The extremely fit man who jogs by after lunch every day with his chocolate lab passes them, the man calling the dog to heel as it stops to snuffle in the pots of geraniums the local antique shop puts out in boxes at the front of the store. 

A light spring breeze blows cool air in from the lake. The air smells like water and flowers, a bit of home cooking from the diner, and maybe just a hint of dead fish from the docks.

All these things are familiar, but they feel different today. Jenni feels different. She can’t tell whether that’s good or bad. The choices she’s made over the past month march in front of her mind’s eye, a parade of possibilities. There are so many of them. 

“Jenni!”

She wonders if…

“Jenni!”

Oh right. That’s me. The new me.

She turns around. Lou is standing at the entrance to Delores’ Bakery and Diner. Jenni’d walked right past it. 

Lou raises an eyebrow, hooking a thumb at the entrance to the diner.

Jenni walks back sheepishly through the door Lou holds open for her.

And stops, letting the diner’s aroma wash over her. 

Delores’ Instagram has almost ten thousand followers. Jenni knows this because she’d looked it up for an article she did on the history of the old diner for her newsletter. This is because Delores, or Dolly as everyone calls her, makes and sells the best baked goods in five counties. And it doesn’t hurt that she’d taken a semester of photography as part of the college’s extension program, either, and really knows how to work a photo filter. Visually, Dolly’s got a lot to work with. The diner is a historic old building, lovingly restored, all exposed brick and track lighting with Delores’ name painted in gold leaf on the expansive open glass windows at the front of the shop. 

But if Instagram had smell-o-vision, Delores’ would have a million followers and offers of marriage arriving via private messaging on the hour. 

The scent of hot coffee and baked goods washes over Jenni; butter, vanilla, the sharp, tart tang of citrus. There’s the rich smell of cheese from a local dairy, and honey and pots of fresh blackberry jam Dolly brings in from upstate. 

Jenni mostly, very sensibly, brought her own lunch from home when she worked at the town hall. But occasionally she’d go in for a coffee at Delores’ just so she could spend a few minutes smelling the place. She takes another deep breath and sighs.

“Ladies,” Dolly says, pushing an apple pie into the display case. “Late lunch, early dinner, or ‘to hell with the diet’?”

“Dolly,” Lou says, “we require 10ccs of chocolate cake. STAT.”

“Ah, one of those days,” Dolly says, giving Jenni a head-to-toe perusal. “‘To hell with the diet,’ it is then.”

Lou inclines her head toward Jenni. “I don’t think they have martinis here. Coffee?”

“Coffee’s great.”

“Right,” Dolly says, “two orders of Delores’ Defconn-Ten Double-Double Devil-Chocolate Cake and hot coffee, coming right up. You want a scoop of butter pecan with that?” 

“Yes, I do,” Lou says with utter seriousness.

Dolly nods as Lou leads the way to a table for two by the window. 

“Are we having cake for lunch?”

“We’re having a lot of cake for lunch,” Lou says. “And ice cream. And possibly key lime pie. Objections?”

Jenni places the linen napkin in her lap. “Today? No.”

“Good.”

Jenni glances out the window. Gurty Moore, the mayor’s terrible assistant and the town’s most egregious gossip, is staring at her from the sidewalk. They make eye contact. Gurty gives her a smile that is maybe one quarter sympathy but mostly unalloyed glee at Jenni’s deliciously gossip-able state of (un)dress. Then she turns and dashes down the street, making a beeline back to the town hall, no doubt to get the gossip train powered up as fast as possible.

Jenni sighs. “Great. My new reputation. Genevieve Carmichael-Starr; abandoned homemaker, complete mess.”

“You forgot ‘Leaver of cars in neutral so they roll down Main Street at nine am.’”

“Yes. And that. And also paint-flecked, makeup-less wearer of flannel. And the least qualified, most inexperienced new curator in the history of all museums.”

“What’s wrong with flannel?”

“Nothing’s wrong with it. It’s soft.” Jenni looks up at Lou. “Are you really sure you want to be seen with me?”

“Seen with Jenni Starr, acclaimed historian and newly independent woman, fueling up for her first kick-ass day at her brand new job as curator and head of the multi-million dollar Town of Renaissance Gallery?”

Jenni blinks. Then ducks her head to hide the blush she can feel crawling up her neck.

“I’m okay with it,” Lou says and smiles. 

The Renaissance Gallery Mysteries first book, Now Museum, & Now You Don’t, is scheduled for release in 2021.
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