The Secret of Everything (14 page)

“Absolutely.” Eyeing the bakery offerings in the case, she asked, “What else should I try? What’s your favorite?”

“The carrot muffins, hands down.” She pointed to caramel-orange-colored muffins studded with pineapple. “Give us a big pot of tea and a couple of muffins, will you, Andrew?”

They carried a tray to a table by a window that overlooked the fields. Tessa made notes—the café was small, wouldn’t serve more than ten at a time, but it had a cozy feeling, like headquarters for a summer camp. The wood was rough-hewn, the tables made by hand, each individually wrought of twigs
and planks and knotty pine. She rubbed her hand over the tabletop. “Beautiful.”

Jessica poured tea from a utilitarian steel pot, releasing the fresh fragrance into the air immediately above the table. Tessa leaned in and breathed it, a tickle of memory moving over her brain, then slipping away. She broke apart one of the muffins to examine the crumb. “I noticed that The 100 Breakfasts Café uses a lot of baked goods from Green Gate. Is this the bakery, here?”

She shook her head. “It used to be. We’ve moved everything to the cooking-school building. It’s brand-new, state-of-the-art everything.”

“And everything is organic and vegetarian?”

“It is—and we go with as much local food as we can. Obviously we can’t grow everything—wheat doesn’t do well in this location, for example—but the honey is from our hives, the carrots from our gardens, and the eggs from our coops.”

“I’m not always a fan of the granola-groovy world,” Tessa said, “but the grain in this muffin is gorgeous.” Pinching a chunk out of the middle, she found it moist to the touch, tender and sweet in her mouth. She widened her eyes in approval. “Mmm!”

“I think you’ll find the food here is all that good.”

“So can I get some background from you while we’re waiting?”

“Yep. That’s why I’m here.”

Tessa asked a lot of questions she pretty much knew the answers to: the basics of the farm, the numbers of people who lived here year-round, the kind of tourism they were already hosting.

“Not a lot,” Jessica said. “The cooking school is the brainchild of Cherry’s mother, Paula, who did the research and organized
staff and brought in the whole team. She was one of the original members of the commune here—the tea is her invention.” She pointed at Tessa’s cup, which Tessa had not yet tasted.

Tessa held up a finger to pause the conversation and picked up her mug in both hands. The scent rushed into her sinuses, and the tea struck her mouth—swirled over her tongue and her palate and hit the back of her throat, and she tasted sunshine hot on high grasses and bees buzzing in the distance and—

—
she closed her eyes, seeing a field and herself running through grass well above her head. She was laughing, being tickled, splashing somebody in a baby pool, completely naked. She saw herself tucking a doll into a shoe-box bed
—

Jolted by the sudden blast of memories, Tessa put the cup down and shook her head slightly, as if the tea was the source of her reaction. “Wow,” she said.

“Amazing, isn’t it?”

Tessa nodded. “Tell me a little more history. It started as a commune, right?”

Jessica reiterated what Tessa knew from both her research and her own father. The commune was started in 1969 by a handful of serious counterculturists dropping out and turning on. “They grew a lot of pot, and some of them lived in tepees, the whole nine yards,” Jessica said. “There was an old Victorian house, but it was in pretty bad shape.”

“Is it still there?”

“Yes, and it’s been updated. They use it for retreats and things like that. Kind of big and drafty, hard to heat, so it’s closed through the winter.”

A quickening told her that she wanted to see the house if she could get a look at it. In the meantime, her boss would want
some facts and figures, a way to sell the farm to his customers, who wouldn’t be impressed by the ancient hippie-commune angle. Erecting a wall between herself and the past, she donned a business hat and gathered facts, figures, and possibilities, like the professional she was.

After they drank their tea at Green Gate Café, Jessica gave Tessa a tour of the grounds and main buildings. “How many of the original commune members are still here?” Tessa asked as they walked along a field that had just been turned under.

“Not many, I don’t think. Paula, who invented the tea, is one of them. Her daughter was raised here.” Jessica smiled. “Can you imagine what a great life that would have been?”

Tessa raised an eyebrow noncommittally “Anyone besides Paula?”

“Sure. The guys who run the fields, Jonathan and Robert, are brothers and they were raised on a farm in the central valley in California—and the midwife, Anna. They’re all old now, like in their sixties. Some of them have grandchildren working here. It’s mostly the middle group, the kids, who’ve managed to get the systems working—getting the produce to market, establishing the retreat center, making the website.” She stopped at the greenhouse. “A lot of the original members of the commune are Luddites. They really don’t want anything to do with computers.”

“Or iPods or capitalism,” said a woman with dark hair cut into a crisp and shimmering bob to her jawline. “Or even electricity, some of them,” she added with a grin.

“I know a guy like that,” Tessa said.

“You must be Tessa.” The woman, around Tessa’s age, stuck out her hand. “I’m Cherry. Sorry to keep you waiting. Had an emergency in the greenhouse.”

“No problem.”

Jessica said, “I’ve gotta get to the barns.”

“Thanks for your help,” Cherry said, and turned, gesturing for Tessa to come with her along a path cutting through an open field bounded on three sides by the rising mountain and forest. “This is the meadow. It was one of the original settlement sites. They had tepees and tents here before they fixed the house.” She pointed as they rounded the edge of the trees.

Tessa halted, almost without realizing it, slammed by recognition. The house stood against the dark day, three stories of rambling Victorian, eccentrically decorated with gingerbread and a tower rising like a Russian dome above the pines surrounding it. A wide porch wrapped around the front and both sides, facing the river and the town on the other side and the ridge of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains behind Los Ladrones. It was painted the wrong colors, she thought, very clearly.

“Are you all right?” Cherry asked.

“Fine. I just—” She shrugged. “Déjà vu or something.”

Cherry nodded. “We can’t go in right now, because there’s a conference going on. Psychologists, I think.”

“So there are meeting rooms? Bedrooms? How does that work?”

“It can accommodate a small conference, maybe up to twenty. Otherwise, we use the cabins, which will hold up to a hundred fifty. They were built in the early seventies. It was a thriving commune at the time. More than two hundred people lived here for nearly a decade.”

“Really? Two hundred? What happened?”

“Officially?” Cherry stopped, eyeing the house. “Officially it was a feud between two camps of the original followers. One group wanted to leave it natural—live without electricity and
all that—but the others wanted to start coming into the modern world.”

“And unofficially?” Tessa asked.

“One of the leaders was killed. Shot to death. Details have never really become all that clear. There was a writer out here a few years ago trying to piece it all together, but nobody talked.” She eyed the house. “They’ll take the story to their graves.”

“You lived here then?”

“Yeah, but I was only two. I don’t remember anything about it.” She rolled her eyes. “A lot of the students around here think it would have been so great to grow up here, but believe me it got old.”

Tessa touched her chest ironically. “Hi, my name is Tessa, and my dad was a magician for Renaissance festivals until I was thirteen.”

Cherry laughed, a robust sound. “So you get it.”

“I get it. I adore my dad, don’t get me wrong, I do. But I was really glad to go to a normal school and wear pink T-shirts and glitter fingernails.”

“I would have
killed
for that.” Her eyes showed raw longing. “Eventually I talked my mom into letting me go to normal high school, but by then I was already a weirdo kid from the commune and it wasn’t that easy to break into the cliques.”

“I’m sure.”

Cherry waved a hand. “Let’s keep walking. Where’s your dad?”

“Santa Cruz. He’s a surfer now. Runs a drinks shack on the beach.” Looking briefly over her shoulder at the house, Tessa said, “You must like it here if you stayed all this time.”

“Are you kidding? I got out of here the minute I turned
eighteen. I have to admit that the commune educated me brilliantly, so I landed a great scholarship to CU Boulder, mass comm. Never looked back.” She raised a finger. “Until my mother got breast cancer last summer. I came back to make sure she had the help she needed through chemo.”

Tessa thought of the woman with no eyebrows. “She works the farmers’ market, right?”

“Yeah. She’s doing great, actually, in complete remission, so she’ll be fine.” Cherry smiled fondly. “Funny, though, now I don’t want to live away from her anymore. I grew up and noticed that she’s this incredibly amazing person. I’m divorced, and newspapers are dying, so I’m doing the PR and Web marketing for the farms. Thanks to the demand for organic vegetables, the place is booming.”

“I can see that.”

“Let me show you one of my favorite things,” Cherry said, leading the way into the forest.

The smell of minerals and forest floor—pine needles rotting and warming to release their spiciness, mixed with earth and rocks and water—swamped Tessa. Dizzy, she stopped and put a hand on a tree, suddenly seeing herself holding hands with another girl.

“Smell this one. It’s vanilla.”

Blinking, Tessa said, “Hot springs. There’s hot springs, right?”

Cherry turned. “Yeah. Have you been here?”

Tessa wasn’t ready to say she had lived here. “Maybe?” she hedged. “I don’t really remember. We traveled through New Mexico when I was little. It looks very familiar.”

“Wow. We probably knew each other. How old are you?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“I’m thirty-five.” She peered at Tessa’s face, hard. “You have
the look of the commune kids, actually. Do you remember when it was?”

Tessa peered into the middle distance, trying to puzzle out the year they would have left. She had been four, so—

A sharp pain arrowed over her left eyebrow. “I don’t remember. My dad will. I’ll ask him.”

“Wouldn’t that be funny, if we met before?” Cherry grinned impishly, and for one long second Tessa was reminded of him, of Sam. Suggestion? Or fact?

“You talked about your mom,” Tessa said, “but not your dad. Does he not live here?”

She rolled her eyes. “I have no idea who my dad is. I’m sure my
mother
doesn’t know. We were all just the children of the tribe,” she said with exaggerated emphasis. “Everybody was my dad. And nobody.”

Tessa squeezed her arm. “Sorry.” But she found herself peering at Cherry’s face to see if there really was a resemblance to Sam, and there was, in a way. The pale eyes. The high cheekbones and full lips.

In a way, she realized with a start, Cherry actually kind of looked like Tessa. The high-bridged nose, the same long-limbed body type, the elliptical fold at the eyelid.

The children of the tribe
.

“I never really knew my mom,” Tessa said. “She died when I was little and I don’t remember her at all.”

“Well, then, I’m sorry for you, too.”

Tessa stopped. “Despite the hippie parents, we seem to have done pretty well, huh?”

Cherry smiled. “Yeah.” She waved Tessa along the trail. “Come on, I’ll show you another part of the unofficial reason the commune broke up.” At an open, slightly marshy spot, she paused. “Ta da.”

Tessa blinked. “I don’t get it.”

“These were the pot fields. It was the main source of income for the commune, and then someone came in and stole it all. They got away with kilos and kilos of weed.”

Tessa laughed. “Wow.”

“I get the feeling that was the beginning of the end.” Cherry gazed over the open meadow. “The thieves stole the dream.”

“Los Ladrones,” Tessa said.

Cherry looked at her. “Right.” Then, briskly, she turned toward the path. “Enough of the past. The present is much, much better. Come on. I’ll take you down to the school and you can see what we’re doing. It’s just getting up and running, but maybe that would be something your demographic will enjoy. Cooking with organic and local food.”

“Perfect,” Tessa said, and glanced over her shoulder. She couldn’t wait to call Sam tonight.

Green Gate Cooking School was housed in a long, low adobe building, built recently in the old Santa Fe style, complete with wooden window casings painted turquoise to keep out evil spirits, and corners like an old woman’s shoulders, soft and round. Deep porticos ran around the entire outside of the rectangular building, furnished with benches, and pots of marigolds and herbs faced the fields and river and mountains. Inside, the kitchens and classrooms opened onto an internal garden. Tessa stepped out of the foyer into the courtyard and stopped, this time halted by sheer delight. A fountain chuckled in the midst of a vast herb garden, and a series of traditional
hornos
—wood-burning outdoor ovens—graced one wall. A multicolored Siamese cat sunned himself on a bench, tail flicking.
He had paws practically the size of baseball mitts, and Tessa couldn’t resist stopping to scratch his head. His eyes were bright blue.

The air smelled of thyme and rosemary and basil, the oils heavy in the hot sun, mixing with the scent of wood smoke and roasting onions. A woman in a pale-green chef’s coat trimmed basil from a hearty plant, and she looked up with a smile. “Hello.” Her hair was pulled back beneath a purple-and-green bandana printed with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Tessa liked her immediately for the whimsy. “You must be Tessa. I’m Zelda.”

“Zelda is our head teacher and executive chef at the school,” Cherry said. “We were very lucky to lure her away from the West Coast, where she worked with some of the best organic chefs in the country.”