Logged On by Barbara Ross

Author:Barbara Ross [Ross, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2018-08-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seven

I felt small and scared when I walked up Mrs. St. Onge’s flagstone walk the next morning, the way I’d felt when I approached the house as a child. We’d had a hard frost overnight and the brown grass on her lawn was tinged with white, which gave the yard an otherworldly feeling. Grow up, I told myself. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.

It didn’t help that when Mrs. St. Onge answered my knock, she was holding a large kitchen knife. “You’re late.” She turned on her heel and clumped toward the kitchen on her cane. Despite my qualms I scurried after her. I’d come too far on this Bûche de Noël journey.

In the kitchen the old woman had arranged on a cutting board the remaining chocolate I’d bought three days before: five ounces of bittersweet chocolate—“not unsweetened!!!” she’d specified on her list (exclamation points hers), and four ounces of quality milk chocolate. Mrs. St. Onge made quick work of them with the big knife, chopping the thick slabs into nickel-sized pieces. I had pulled my notebook from my Snowden Family Clambake tote and wrote furiously.

The old woman turned to the stove, measuring out three quarters of a cup of whipping cream and three tablespoons of butter and putting them in a small saucepan. She turned on the heat and handed me a wooden spoon. “Stir until the butter melts,” she directed.

I moved the spoon carefully as the butter began to send yellow rivulets into the white cream. “Did Gwyn know Bradley?” I asked, keeping my tone conversational.

“Did who know who?” she replied, though I had a feeling she knew exactly what I was asking.

“Did Gwyneth Hillyer, the woman from elder services who came to help you, know your grandnephew, Bradley Woodward?”

“Of course not!” she snapped. “Why would they know each other?”

“I thought maybe because they both came here—”

She shook her head. “One’s a servant. The other’s family. Why would I introduce them?”

Calling Gwyneth a servant was inappropriate, given her role, but I kept quiet. “Butter’s melted,” I said.

“Turn off the heat and bring it over here.”

Feeling a little like a servant myself, I brought the saucepan to the kitchen table and placed it on a pot holder. “Stir,” Mrs. St. Onge commanded, and so I did while she fed the chunks of chocolate into the mixture. When the last one was melted, she poured the mixture into a bowl and covered it with a dish towel. “That will need to sit for an hour or so, to cool,” she said. “Then we’ll fill the cake and ice it.”

My heart gave a little leap that we were finally, finally to this place. Today I was going to see our Bûche de Noël. I washed the saucepan and spoon. “Anything else I can do while we wait?” I asked.

“The decorations you brought up from the basement yesterday. Do you think you could put them up?”

“Of course!” I went to the box in the living room and sorted through the tangle of plugs and wires.

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