Legend (Legend, Colorado 1)

Jane started to reply, but then a busboy began to clean their table, broadly hinting that it was needed and they should leave. In a few minutes, the three women were back out on the streets of Alexandria. Jane looked at her watch. “Debbie and I need to do some shopping at Tyson’s Corner, so shall we meet you back at Onions at five?”

“Sure,” Kady said hesitantly, then grimaced. “I have a whole list of things I’m supposed to buy for the town house. Things that don’t go into the kitchen.”

“You mean like sheets and towels, that sort of thing?”

“Yes,” Kady said brightly, hoping Jane and Debbie would volunteer to help her with th

is incomprehensible task. But luck wasn’t with her.

“Debbie and I have to pool our money and get you something nice for a wedding gift, and we can’t do that with you around. Come on, don’t look so glum. We’ll help you look for sheets tomorrow.”

“Isn’t there a rather nice cookware shop in Alexandria?” Debbie asked, thinking she’d much prefer to go cookware shopping with Kady than gift purchasing with Jane.

“I believe there is,” Kady said, laughing. “I never thought of that. Maybe I can find a way to occupy myself after all.” It was obvious that she was joking and that she’d intended all along to visit the kitchenware shop.

“Come on,” Jane said, taking Debbie’s arm. “No doubt poor Gregory will be sleeping on cookie sheets and drying with waxed paper.”

“Parchment paper,” Debbie and Kady said in unison, a chef’s inside joke that made Jane groan as she pulled Debbie away.

Smiling, Kady watched her two friends go, then breathed a sigh of relief. It had been years since she’d seen Jane, and she’d forgotten by half how bossy she was. And she’d also forgotten how worshipful Debbie was.

Looking about her at the beautiful fall sunshine, for a moment Kady didn’t quite know what to do with herself. She had hours of freedom. And that freedom had been given to her by her dear, darling Gregory. For all that Gregory was heavenly, so kind and so considerate, his mother was a tartar. Mrs. Norman never took an afternoon off, so it never occurred to her that Kady should have time off either.

But then, truthfully, Kady didn’t have many interests outside the kitchen. On Sundays and Mondays, when Onions was closed, Kady was in the kitchen experimenting and perfecting recipes for the cookbook she was writing. So, even though she’d lived in Alexandria for five years, she didn’t know her way around very well. Of course she knew where the best cookware shop was and where to buy any produce imaginable and who was the best butcher, but, truthfully, where did one buy sheets? For that matter, where did one buy any of the things that Gregory said they’d need for their house? He’d said he’d leave all that up to her because he knew how important such things were to a woman. Kady had said, “Thank you,” and had not told him she had no idea how to buy curtains and rugs.

She had, however, spent a bit of time redesigning the kitchen of the town house into a two-room masterpiece, with one area for baking and another for bone-burning, as the pastry cooks called the work of entrée chefs. The two rooms, one L shaped, the other U shaped, met on either side of a big granite-topped table, where Kady could beat the heck out of brioche dough and hurt nothing. There was open storage and closed storage and . . .

She trailed off, letting out a sigh. She had to stop thinking about cooking and kitchens and think about the problems at hand. What in the world was she going to wear to her own wedding? It was all well and good to be in love with a gorgeous man, but she didn’t want to hear people say, “What’s a hunk like him see in a dumpling like her?” Debbie and Jane had been so nice to fly to Virginia to try on bridesmaids’ dresses and help Kady choose her dress, when they needed to return in six weeks for the wedding itself. But the three of them weren’t making any headway. Seeing herself in that mirror this morning had made Kady want to skip the whole thing. Couldn’t she just wear her chef’s coat to the wedding? It was white.

While she was thinking, her legs carried her to a certain cookware shop that never failed to have something Kady could use. An hour later she exited with a French tart cutter in the shape of an apple. It wasn’t a wedding veil, but it would last longer, she told herself, then started toward the parking lot and her car. It was early yet, but there were always things to do at the restaurant and, besides, Gregory might be there.

Smiling, she began to walk but stopped in front of an antique shop. In the window was an old copper mold in the shape of a rose. As though hypnotized, she opened the shop door, making the bell jangle. Reaching past an antique table and a cast-iron cat, she took the mold from the window, saw it was something she could afford, then looked around for a clerk to pay.

There was no one in the shop. What if I were a thief? she thought. Then she heard voices in the back and went through a curtain into a storage room. Through an open doorway leading into a yard, she heard a woman’s voice raised in annoyance and frustration. “What am I supposed to do with all of this? You know very well that I don’t have room for even half of these things.”

“I thought you’d like them, that’s all,” said a man’s voice. “I thought I was doing you a favor.”

“You could have called me and asked.”

“There wasn’t time. I told you that. Ah, the hell with it,” the man said, then came the sound of crunching gravel as he walked away.

Kady stood still in the storeroom, waiting to see if anyone would enter, but no one did, so she looked out the door. In the service yard was a pickup truck loaded high with dirty old trunks and boxes with tape around them. The tailgate was down, and on the ground were half a dozen more metal boxes and wooden crates. The whole mess looked as though it had been stored in a leaky barn for a couple of centuries.

“Excuse me,” Kady said, “I wonder if I could make a purchase.”

Turning, the woman looked at Kady, but she didn’t answer her. “Men!” she said under her breath. “My husband was driving to a hardware store and saw a sign that said, ‘Auction,’ so he stopped and saw that lot number three-two-seven was ‘Miscellaneous Unopened Trunks,’ so he bought the whole lot. All of them. He didn’t look or ask to find out how many there were, he just put up his hand and bought all of them for one hundred and twenty-three dollars. And now what am I going to do with all of these? And from the looks of them, most are trash, I don’t even have room to store half of them out of the rain.”

Kady didn’t have an answer for her, and she did have to admit that the piles of crates and boxes didn’t look very promising. Maybe “Unopened Trunks” was supposed to conjure the idea of hidden treasure, but she couldn’t imagine any treasure inside these things. “Could I help you pull them inside?”

“Oh, no, he’ll be back, and he’ll stack them up for me.” With a sigh, the woman turned to Kady. “I’m sorry. You’re a customer. You can see how upset I was, since it looks as though I left the front door unlocked. Could I help you with something?”

As the woman had been talking, Kady had been looking at all the boxes. Sitting on the bed of the pickup, under three cobweb-covered crates, was an old metal box that had once contained flour. It was rusty in places, and the writing was hardly visible, but it was still good looking in a craftsy way. She could envision the old box on top of the cabinets in her new kitchen.

“How much for that box?” Kady asked, pointing.

“The rusty one on the bottom?” the woman asked, obviously thinking Kady was an idiot.

“I have X-ray vision and I can see that that box is full of pirate’s treasure.”