Something Borrowed, Something Bleu (8 page)

My breath hissed in
through clenched teeth, and I tried not to jerk my hands out of Tabby’s grasp. My palms stung where I’d broken my fall outside, but that was nothing compared to the pain from the alcohol working into the cuts.
“I can’t believe Billy did this.” Tabby’s head was bent over her work as she disinfected my minor wounds. “I’m so sorry.”
She dabbed the cotton ball on my knee where another abrasion had drawn blood, and I sucked in my breath again. I felt like I was twelve and had fallen off my bike, the way she was mothering me. Still, her ministrations weren’t that surprising. After all, she was a mom.
“It’s no big deal,” I said. “I thought it was a girl goat, though. It didn’t have horns, and I couldn’t get a good look at its, er, other indicator.”
“We removed his horns. Billy likes to butt,” she said. “Despite their reputation, not all goats do that. But when they’re kids they play at it, and if you push them back they’ll get worse and worse.” She looked up at me from under her brows. “Naturally, Joe pushes back. Thinks it’s cute.”
“Do you milk them?”
“Sometimes, if a nanny is in season, and I have a craving for feta or chevre, but my main focus is cow’s milk. There.” She stood up. “That should keep you alive for a while. Have you had a tetanus shot?”
“About three years ago.”
“Should still be good. Have to be careful about that stuff around animals. Lockjaw’s nasty.”
She left, shutting the door behind her. I washed my hands and face and ran a comb through my short, messy mop. Though futile, I also dabbed at the dirt smudged across the front of my T-shirt. Thoughts of my upcoming nuptials crowded to the forefront of my brain as Tabby’s words continued to resound in my mind. Were Barr and I rushing things? We hadn’t even been together a full year, and here we were getting married.
What if we fell out of love and ended up like Tabby and Joe?
I shook my head at the woman in the mirror. According to Tabby, she and Joe had never really been in love. She’d said something about a bond. Had Bobby Lee’s death brought them together in the first place, and then they’d built a life on that horrible event? It seemed sad if not downright dysfunctional. But who was I to criticize?
And my fiancé wasn’t Joe Bines. Barr was intelligent, kind, thoughtful, strong, and handsome as all get out with those deep brown eyes and chestnut hair graying at the temples.
Relax, Sophie Mae. This is the real deal.
Now if I could only manage to get through the wedding ceremony itself without incident.
Sanitized to the best of my ability under the circumstances, I entered the kitchen again to find Tabby unloading bottles and jars from the refrigerator.
“Is Bobby Lee’s letter the only reason you’re here?” She asked. “Or are you actually interested in learning about cheese making and milk cultures?”
Her sudden bluntness threw me for a moment, and the accuracy of her question scraped a nerve. Perhaps she regretted her earlier honesty about her marriage. People often say that it’s easier to confide in someone you hardly know, but I’d found that inevitably a feeling of vulnerability settles in afterward.
Quickly regrouping, I answered. “I loved learning about making mozzarella yesterday. I definitely want to know more.”
She held my gaze for a few moments, then gave a slight nod. “Okay. I was planning to tell you about cheese cultures and how different bacteria work to create different kinds of cheeses. But now we don’t have as much time as I’d like, and you’ll get a lot of that information if you come to the class tomorrow.” The last word lilted up as a question.
I inclined my head. “I’ll be there, and my friend is planning to come, too. She’s a terrific cook and has quizzed me about everything I’ve learned so far.”
Tabby smiled. “Good.” She sounded pleased, even after our tense words. Did she actually want to teach me, or was she simply happy to get another class fee? I wondered how lucrative a small dairy could be.
“I’m going to show you how to make yogurt and kefir and piima cheese today. Quick and easy and tasty.” Now her words had taken on a teacherly tone. “Do you like kefir?”
“Um, I don’t know. I’ve never had it.”
Tabby pulled a jar of milk out of the fridge. It had a weird mass floating in it that looked like fish eyes, or tapioca pearls, all mooshed together. These were the kefir grains, she told me, and then gave me a taste of the kefir itself. I was a little hesitant at first, but the kefir was yummy—kind of like drinkable yogurt.
“It has bubbles,” I exclaimed after the first sip.
She nodded. “The grains ferment the milk. It’s a way to preserve it, and a tiny bit of alcohol is actually created, as well as that subtle carbonation. You can use the grains to ferment other things—fruit juice, for example. But once you do that you can’t use the same grains for milk anymore.”
“Where do you get the grains?”
“They grow slowly, and you can divide them. I got mine from a friend a long time ago. As long as you keep them active, they’ll last for years. I’ll sell you a batch if you’re interested. Or you can find them online.”
She chattered on, and I let her.
So much for intensely personal.
I thought of Bobby Lee, writing that cryptic letter to the girl he loved—and then taking that final step.
So much for love being overrated.

_____

It didn’t take long for Tabby to show me how to make yogurt—it was so easy I couldn’t believe we didn’t already make our own at home. All you did was heat the milk to a hundred and fifteen degrees, add a little commercial yogurt to the milk and let it sit on the counter in a thermos for six to twelve hours. At least that’s what she told me I could do, because she had a fancy yogurt maker and used a packet of starter culture.
“You’ll get a thinner yogurt than you might be used to,” she said. “Commercial manufacturers add thickeners. This is the real deal, though.”
The real deal sounded good to me.
“You can always strain it through a coffee filter if you want it thicker,” she added. “Strain it for long enough and you’ll have yogurt cream cheese.”
The piima was more of a starter culture that had to be replenished periodically, like sourdough. “It’ll last for years, just like the kefir grains,” she told me.
She showed me how to add a few tablespoons from a jar of cream that had already been cultured—it was the consistency of thick sour cream after the piima had a chance to work its magic—to a new jar of cream and mix it in.
“Then you put it in a dark cupboard for twenty-four hours to let it stew, before popping it in the fridge. Again, none of this stuff works very well with ultra-pasteurized milk, so you have to find someplace where you can get either lightly pasteurized or raw milk.”
“Won’t the cream sour?” I asked. Leaving it unrefrigerated for a whole day seemed kind of weird to me.
“No, the room temperature encourages the culture to grow. It’ll continue to grow, though more slowly, in the fridge. And it’ll last for several weeks, which the uncultured cream wouldn’t.”
“Our half-and-half lasts a month.”
She pointed a finger at me. “It’s ultra-pasteurized. That kills all the bacteria, good and bad, as well as a significant portion of the nutrition.”
“Yuck.”
“Normally, the lactic acid in milk kills any bad bacteria, so ultra-pasteurization is kind of overkill. But it’s good for shipping and shelf life, so it works best for the big corporations. Even light pasteurization damages many nutrients, including conjugated linoleic acid.”
“Conjugated what?”
“CLA for short. It’s an important omega-six fatty acid. The most nutritious milk is hormone free, comes from grass-fed cows and isn’t pasteurized at all. Unfortunately in a lot of states it’s illegal to sell raw milk, so you have to purchase a share in a dairy cow in order to get it.”
Mental note: Cheese making or no cheese making, we would find a good source for milk when we got home.
Then we made butter from the piima cream, using a standing mixer. Again, it was ridiculously easy. We whipped the cream in a standing mixer as if for dessert topping, but kept whipping beyond stiff peaks. After awhile it became grainy with tiny butter solids which soon combined and stuck to the beaters, separate from the buttermilk. Then it was a matter of rinsing the solid mass in a clean towel and squeezing out any remaining buttermilk. Finally we added a little salt and packed it into an old-fashioned butter mold.
Tabby gave me more of the butter, and a jar of buttermilk along with a recipe for salad dressing. Then she gave me a sample of piima cheese she had made by culturing whole milk and straining it, much like yogurt cheese. It was soft and spreadable. “Add a few herbs and serve it with crackers,” she said. “Or spread it on bagels or sandwiches.”
My big tote bulging with all those goodies, I wrote her a check and got ready to go.
“I’ll walk down with you. I have to get something from the classroom and then check on the mold house.”
“The what?”
“It’s where I inoculate my specialty cheeses and let them age. It was tricky to get the humidity right, but now I can make a unique variety of bleu and other mold-ripened cheeses.”
I wanted to know more, but by now we were walking down the driveway toward the parking lot. Time was running out.
“Tabby?”
Something in my voice must have telegraphed the change of subject, and she shot me a look. “What?”
“I looked up some newspaper articles from around when Bobby Lee died, to see if I could find out what he was talking about in that letter.”
I took a couple of steps before I realized she’d stopped behind me. Slowly, I turned back to face her.
Tabby stood stock still, hands on her hips. Her voice was emphatic, her words carefully enunciated. “You have no right poking your nose into something that was between your brother and me.”
“So you do know what he was talking about!”
She shook her head. “I didn’t say that. But whatever it was, he didn’t write to you about it. He wrote to me.”
Then maybe your mother shouldn’t have sent the damn letter back to us, I thought. But I keep my mouth shut.
“Leave it alone,” Tabby said. “Just let it go.”
“But he was my brother—”
“If something happened back then, do you really think it would change anything to dig it all up? Do you somehow think you can bring him back? Because you
can’t
. All you can do is hurt other people.”
I stared at her, dismayed.
“I’ll see you tomorrow in class,” she said, rotating on her heel. Without another word she walked around the back of the classroom building where she’d taught us how to make mozzarella.
What the heck? I felt closer than ever to the truth, yet strangely more reluctant to learn what it was. I was sure both Tabby and Joe knew what had happened. In fact, I bet they’d known all along and had managed to keep it a secret. What if they never told anyone? The thought was crazy-making, and I shook it off. Even if they wouldn’t reveal what they knew, the truth was still there for me to discover.
Keeping an eye out for cranky goats, I continued between the delivery truck and the red pickup toward the Subaru. I had just put my tote into the backseat when Tabby’s high-pitched scream echoed off the outbuildings.

Joe Bines was sprawled
on his side amidst chunks of broken glass. A thin trickle of scarlet threaded through the pool of bright white cream spread like a corona around his head. A shaft of afternoon light slanted behind the classroom building to illuminate the waxy, translucent skin of his face.
His eyes were closed. His chest was perfectly still.
Beside me, Tabby sucked in a shuddering breath as if to compensate for her husband’s lack of respiration. Then, before I could stop her, she shouldered me aside and fell to her knees, reaching for Joe’s shoulder.
I opened my mouth to say God-knows-what—Don’t do that? To comfort her? To swear?—but snapped my jaw closed again in silence as she turned him over and I saw the other side of his head.
Let’s just say it wasn’t round anymore.
Tabby recoiled, scrabbling back like a drunken crab. She almost fell, but I grasped her arms from behind and managed to steady her. Slowly, she stood and leaned back against me. Her rapid breathing mingled with the murmurs of turtledoves in the nearby trees.
Gradually, she calmed. I released her, and she turned to face me. Her ice-blue eyes echoed a resounding sadness. “Joe really did it this time.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Did what?”
She closed her eyes and shook her head.
My eyes returned to the dead man, surrounded by shards of the murder weapon: a glass bottle of heavy cream, by the looks of it. I sighed. My tendency to find dead bodies had apparently followed me across state lines all the way to Colorado.
It was getting so I felt like I should come with a warning label.