“Sh
all we explore the henhouse? I’ll tell you how Letty and Ace made a ramp to roll the eggs down. It worked perfectly—except that every egg broke. They were— Bloody hell! There he is!”
Casey looked up to see a huge peacock, long tail trailing behind him, strutting in front of them. He disappeared into some rhododendron bushes.
Tate tossed his empty foil to the floor and handed Casey his water bottle. “Hold on! I’m going to get that creature.”
She grasped the doorframe of the truck as Tate drove around the huge shrubs, but on the other side was a tangle of what looked to be young trees. They could see the peacock making his way through them.
“He’s going somewhere,” Casey said. “He’s not just wandering; he has a destination.”
“Are you up for following him?”
“Oh, yeah!” Casey braced her feet and tightened her hands. The ground was rough, with ditches and holes and stumps.
“Nina said that when she first saw the place, it was all like this. She had a couple of acres around the house cut and smoothed.”
“My brother Josh did the work,” Casey said. “Yeow!”
“Okay?”
“I’m fine.” The peacock turned left. “Maybe he’s leading us to the blackberries. I was told they’re hard to find.”
Tate jerked the wheel around so hard that Casey almost flew out the side, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Tell me how you came to be a chef.”
“Thanks. My mom and I found my career by accident. Since she’s a doctor, she was gone a lot.”
“Sorry,” Tate said.
“No! No! It was okay. She’s a bit intense, so…” Casey shrugged.
“Got it. Serious, dedicated doctor. Great in a hospital but overpowering to live with. I’ve played that role before. So who took care of you?”
“Nannies. I had a Jamaican woman for the first seven years of my life and I loved her very much. When she decided to go back home, my heart was broken.” She paused while Tate drove around a magnificent magnolia tree. Casey looked back. “There’s a big statue under that tree.”
“Probably where Letty and Ace made contact with outer-space demons. They conquered them and saved the world. How did you put your heart back together?”
“By not repeating that error. I told Mom I never wanted to hurt like that again, so we decided to hire a different nanny each year. Mom suggested we find people who could do specific things, like art or teaching me how to swim. She especially wanted me to learn some lifesaving techniques. She never said so but I knew she wanted me to be a doctor. Anyway, that’s what we did. Mom and I would think up things that I wanted to learn, then she’d find someone to teach me.”
The peacock had found something on the ground and was pecking at it, so Tate stopped the truck. “That was either a lot of fun or a nightmare.”
“Exactly! One of the artists once said she needed a few puffs of her special herbal smoke-sticks to be truly creative. My mom came home to find her eleven-year-old daughter rolling marijuana joints in origami paper and the nanny stoned. I was rather good at it, and I thought they were very pretty. Quite colorful.”
Tate laughed. “My guess is that nanny was fired.”
“Right that moment. After that, Mom hired a retired woman who had worked in a bakery for twenty-some years. I learned a lot from her. The next one was an Italian man who showed me how to make pasta. After those two, I realized I liked cooking the best, so the rest of my caretakers were in the food industry. By the time I was in high school, Mom and I changed them every six months, and I got interested in the cuisines of different nationalities. French, Basque, Hungarian. I loved Mexican cooking! When I left for college I could make my own tortillas, cut sushi, and decorate a wedding cake.”
“And roll joints.”
“In tortillas?” Casey sounded confused. “I don’t think they would burn properly.”
Laughing, Tate put the truck in drive. The peacock was on the move.
“Was that…?” Casey asked as they passed a group of gravestones.
“My ancestors’ private burial plot,” Tate said. “Uncle Freddy is buried there. He lived here for many years with his caretaker, Mr. Gates, and when he died he left the whole place to Mom. By the way, Nina told me it was my job to see that the family cemetery was cleaned up.”
“What did Letty and Ace think of that place?”