Catherine brushes her finger against the corner of the top letter gently, as if she’s afraid it will pop like a bubble and disappear or crumble away into dust.
Just then, Nori appears beside the table with a tray bearing a ceramic teapot and three cups with saucers. She sets them all on the table. “Can I get anything else for you this morning?”
Phoebe, who is watching Catherine closely, seems to decide that Catherine needs more time to process when she doesn’t even notice Nori.
“That’s a pretty teapot,” she tells Nori, letting Catherine stay lost in her thoughts as she shuffles the envelopes without removing any of the letters.
Nori gives her a smile that almost looks tired. “Thanks. I always try to grab interesting ones from thrift stores and yard sales, but it’s taking a while to build up a collection. Especially because they break. People are mostly careful, but it happens.”
I hide a smile, already knowing what’s about to happen.
“Nori,” Phoebe says, “do you know a lot about tea? Or know people who know a lot about tea?”
“You mean like tea ceremonies or production or something else?”
“All of the above and more,” Phoebe tells her. “Where it started, how it affected agrarian economies, current harvesting practices, fair trade.”
Nori gives Phoebe a curious look. “I know a lot about a few of those things, and a little about a lot of those things.”
“I have an idea. I’ve been getting lots of donated tea sets, and they’re very pretty, but they don’t have the kind of historical value or local connections I need for the museum.” Phoebe leans forward, the same light in her startling amber eyes as when she shared her new exhibit ideas last night. She’s gorgeous, a bit of extra color in her cheeks as her enthusiasm grows. “But I’ll need to develop a lot of programs for everyone from VIP patrons to special interest groups in town. Would you consider a partnership? I’d give you all the tea sets we can’t use, you can keep them as a permanent loan and use them however you want. In exchange, you’d help me put together a quarterly tea with special guest lectures on historical and cultural tea-related topics. And of course, provide the tea in thoughtfully chosen tea sets.”
“I love the idea, but how soon are you wanting to start? I’m just getting my feet under me as the owner here, so I don’t have a ton of bandwidth.”
“I’ll give you the tea sets right away, but the soonest we’d talk about tea parties is six months from now.”
“I’m into it,” she says. “Thanks for thinking of me.”
She walks off to tend to another customer, and Phoebe settles back with a smile. It’s not a victorious smile, like she came out better in a deal. She’s genuinely so pleased byfinding a win-win solution. It’s so her. I understand why Dear Heart couldn’t resist calling Smitten Kitten adorable.
Speaking of … I glance Catherine’s way to see how she’s doing. She’s pulled the letter from the first envelope, and she’s reading it, a soft smile on her lips.
Phoebe and I exchange a look. Hers saysIs this good?Mine saysYes, it’s good.I pour tea into all three cups, and Phoebe and I each drink ours silently, waiting for a cue from Catherine.
Eventually, she sets the letter down and picks up her tea. “Tell me how these ended up with you.” Then she settles into her chair, takes a sip, and waits.
Phoebe explains, starting with her attempts to return the first letter to sender and my advice to finally open it. “From that point on, I was determined to return them to Smitten Kitten, or her family, or failing that, to the sender. It became more obvious with each one that at some point, these letters had been written with a lot of love, and I—we—hoped the story had a happy ending. But either way, we knew we needed to try to get them home.”
“How were you able to figure out it was me?” Catherine asks. She sounds astonished, and I take it as a sign that she’s not mad about us reading her private letters.
Phoebe lays it out letter by letter, from the clues we gathered, the wrong turns we took, our microfilm adventure, the old lease records. “It all clicked this morning. We’d narrowed it down to you three finalists, and I’m kicking myself that we didn’t think of the Kitty nickname possibility earlier. Although to be honest, I would have assumed it was Katherine Daily. I have such a hard time imagining you as a Cathy.”
“I haven’t been Cathy for a very long time. I started going by Catherine once I was married. But you still figured it out.”
Phoebe says, “We did. See the one at the bottom of the pile?”
Catherine pulls it out. “You didn’t open it.”
Phoebe shakes her head. “No, ma’am. And I’m sorry we had to open and read the other ones. I should have said that first.”
Catherine shakes her head. “No need to apologize.”
“That one woke me up this morning. I opened my eyes and knew I’d find it in the mailbox. I brought it over to Jay first thing. It’s kind of a tradition to try to crack them together. We were outside discussing the”—a tiny hesitation as if she was trying to figure out how to spin our spat—“board meeting, when we saw a fawn walk out of the brush. We were trying to think of all the different names for deer, and then we made the connection. Deer hart. Dear heart. Buck. William.”
Catherine nods as she listens, and Phoebe says, “I’ll let Jay tell the next part since he figured it out, if you don’t mind, Jay?”
I know she’s trying to give me a chance to prove I’m not the lightweight she told Catherine I was. She doesn’t need to do that, but this isn’t a moment about us, so I pick up the story rather than argue about who should tell it.
“We realized Kitten was probably a nickname, not just a pet name, which meant we now had two possible candidates with first and last name. I’d spent a lot of time thinking about the Dear Heart clues, so I tried a few advanced searches using the names of the two pageant finalists plus variations with Buck, William, MIT, and his job, and I got a hit with his obituary.”
