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I folded my arms over my chest. “You know, if you don’t tell the truth, your nose is going to grow.”

Rose lifted one hand and smoothed her index finger across the bridge of her nose. “I have my mother’s nose,” she said. “Not to sound vain, but it is perfectly proportioned.” She paused. “And petite.” She offered the plate again.

“You’re spoiling me.”

“No, I’m not,” she retorted. “Spoiling implies that your character has been somehow weakened, and that’s not at all true.”

I shook my head and took the plate from her. It was still warm. I could smell cinnamon and maybe cheese.

There was no point in ever arguing with Rose. It was like arguing with an alligator. There was no way it was going to end well.

“Come in,” I said, heading back to the kitchen with my food. I set the plate on the counter and lifted the bowl. Underneath, I found a mound of fluffy scrambled eggs, tomatoes that had been fried with onions and some herbs I couldn’t identify, and a bran muffin studded with raisins. Rose was a big believer in a daily dose of fiber.

It all looked even better than it smelled, and it smelled wonderful.

Rose was leaning forward, talking to Elvis. She was small but mighty, barely five feet tall in her sensible shoes, with her white hair in an equally sensible short cut.

I bent down and kissed the top of her head as I moved around her to get a knife and fork. “I love you,” I said. “Thank you.”

“I love you too, dear,” she said, “and thank you for helping me out.”

Okay, so we were going to continue with the fiction that Rose had cooked too much food for breakfast. “Could I get you a cup of . . .” I looked around the kitchen. I was out of coffee and tea. And milk. “Water?” I finished.

“No, thank you,” Rose said. “I already had my tea.”

I speared some egg and a little of the tomatoes and onions with my fork. “Ummm, that’s good,” I said, putting a hand to my face because I was talking around a mouthful of food. Elvis was at my feet, looking expectantly up at me. I picked up a tiny bit of the scrambled egg with my fingers and offered it to him.

He took it, ate and then cocked his head at Rose and meowed softly.

“You’re very welcome,” she said.

“Why don’t my eggs taste like this?” I asked, reaching for the muffin. Scrambled eggs were one of the few things I could make more or less successfully.

“I don’t know.” Rose looked around my kitchen. Aside from the two crusts of bread, the empty peanut butter jar, and the mushy banana on the counter, it was clean and neat. Since I rarely cooked, it never got messy. “How do you cook your eggs?”

I shrugged and broke the muffin in half. “In a bowl in the microwave.”

She gave her head a dismissive shake. “You need a cast-iron skillet if you want to make decent eggs.” She smiled at me. “Alfred and I will take you shopping this weekend.”

I nodded, glad that my mouth was full so I didn’t have to commit to a shopping trip with Rose and her gentleman friend, Alfred Peterson.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like Mr. P. I did. When Rose had been evicted from Legacy Place, the seniors’ building she derisively referred to as “Shady Pines,” I’d let her move in to the small apartment at the back of my old Victorian. Mr. P. had generously made a beautiful cat tower for Elvis as a thank-you to me. He was kind and smart, and he adored Rose. I didn’t even mind—that much—that Alfred had the sort of computer-hacking skills that were usually seen in a George Clooney movie and that he was usually using them over my Wi-Fi.

It was just that I knew if I went shopping with the two of them, I was apt to come home with one of every kitchen gadget that could be found in North Harbor, Maine. Rose had made it her mission in life to teach me to cook, no matter how impossible I was starting to think that was. And Mr. P. had already—gently, because he was unfailingly polite—expressed his dismay over the fact that I didn’t have a French press in my kitchen.

Rose smiled at me again. “Enjoy your breakfast,” she said. “I need to go clean up my kitchen.”

“Do you want to drive to Second Chance with me?” I asked. “Or Mac and I can come and get you when we’re ready to head out to Edison Hall’s place.”

Rose worked part-time for me at my store, Second Chance. Second Chance was a repurpose shop. It was part antiques store and part thrift shop. We sold furniture, dishes, quilts—many things repurposed from their original use, like the teacups we’d turned into planters and the tub chair that in its previous life had actually been a bathtub.

Our stock came from a lot of different places: flea markets, yard sales, people looking to downsize. I bought fairly regularly from a couple of trash pickers. Several times in the past year that the store had been open, we’d been hired to go through and handle the sale of the contents of someone’s home—usually someone who was going from a house to an apartment. This time we were going to clean out the property of Edison Hall.

Calling the old man a pack rat was putting it nicely. Rose and Mac were going with me to get started on the house, along with Elvis because I’d heard rustling in several of the rooms in the old house, and I was certain it hadn’t been the wind in the eaves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sofie Ryanis a writer and mixed-media artist who loves to repurpose things in her life and her art. She also writes the national bestselling Magical Cats mysteries under the name Sofie Kelly.

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