LITMIR.BIZ

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must miss him, bless your heart. To go in such a…dreadful way.”

      “Every day.” She forced brightness into her smile, not wanting to end the transaction on a somber note as she pressed the register button. Emily used an old-fashioned ornate brass cash register—the kind that made a delightful ching when you pushed the sale button to open the cash drawer. She didn’t like computerized cash registers, opting for hand-written receipts instead. Her only nod to technology was the electronic machine that generated credit card sales—and even that was placed in a tiny chintz box so that only the buttons and receipt slot were visible. It wasn’t until last year that she began asking for e-mail addresses to send out sale notices, and that was only after the postage rates had gone up again, forcing her to find a more economical way to reach her customers.

      “Come back next month when I’ll have the matching body lotion on sale.”

      “I’ll do that. I’ll certainly do that.” Although, from the expression on her face, Emily couldn’t quite tell if any subsequent sale would be born out of the quality of her French-milled lavender, or plain old pity for a young Kentucky widow.

      She marked down the sale in her tally, lining up the numbers in precise columns. For a bath shop that was supposed to be west of Paris, France, but ended up west of Paris, Kentucky, she was doing okay. Not well, but okay enough to barely make this month’s loan payment.

      Actually, Emily always made her loan payments, and she always made them on time. Her checkbook balanced down to the last penny every month. Her Christmas cards arrived on time if not early, and her library books were returned ahead of their due dates. She showed up five minutes early for every appointment, and nothing in her fridge was anywhere near its expiration date.

      Emily liked to have all her details under control.

      So how, she wondered as she stared at her naked left hand and the pale void where her wedding ring had once been, had so much of the big stuff gone wrong?

      Chapter Two

      The next morning, it was astounding that Gil Sorrent didn’t break a case of soap dishes when he stormed into the shop. He stalked up to the counter and slammed down plastic bag. “What’s in there?” he demanded, pointing to the bag. It was a wonder half the store wasn’t rocking in his wake.

      Emily shot up from her desk by the window. “Pardon?”

      Sorrent’s voice deepened to the near-growl she remembered from their last town-hall clash. The man had a fierce temper—one she hadn’t expected to ignite just by talking about the designs of streetlights. Was it that strange an idea that things should look nice as well as functional? Everyone else on the town council had understood that it would take a few extra dollars to get lights that didn’t look as if they belonged on the freeway. He was always going on about improving this or upgrading that—she’d have thought he’d be happy to be purchasing new streetlights for Ballad Road. He didn’t look happy then, and he sure didn’t look happy now. “I want to know what’s in that soap you gave us, and I’m not leaving until you tell me every last ingredient, you hear?”

      It took Emily a moment to realize what he was talking about. Then she remembered her spontaneous act yesterday. The Pirate Soap. “Gracious. Did your friend have some kind of allergic reaction? Believe me, I’ll do whatever I can—”

      “Oh, he had a reaction all right, but it wasn’t the itchy kind. Now I mean it, tell me what’s in there.”

      It was at this point that Emily noticed a row of faces pressed up against her shop window—a collection of tough-looking young men, noses flattened on the glass. She panicked for a brief moment, until she realized they were Sorrent’s farmhands. Gil Sorrent ran Homestretch Farm, a correctional program for young-adult offenders. Every year he brought on a new batch of troubled young men, usually in their late teens or early twenties, to work the horse farm and put their lives back in order. She’d seen them around town every so often accompanied by Gil or Ethan—the foreman often in charge of the farm’s young residents—but they’d never had cause to come into her shop. She’d never met Ethan before yesterday. Awful as it was to say, she didn’t mind their absence. They looked…well, they looked mean.

      But they didn’t look that mean at the moment. In fact, they looked downright odd. “Well,” she stammered, thinking that Sorrent and “his guys,” as he called them, were probably not people you wanted to upset. “I don’t make the soap but I can surely find out the ingredients.”

      “Find out what’s in there, and quick.” Catching that Emily was glancing over his shoulder, Gil spun around to face the window. The line of rugged faces scattered like mice. She thought she could hear his teeth grind from across the counter.

      She looked at the bar, wet and slightly muddy in a plastic bag. “Well, why don’t we start by looking at the label.” She started to head off to the table where the other Pirate Soap bars were displayed.

      “Got it right here.” He produced the other bar, still in its label, inside another plastic bag. He held it with two fingers as if it were something nasty he’d found on the floor of his barn. “Ain’t nothin’ I can see out of the ordinary, but according to Ethan, it ain’t no ordinary soap.” Red crawled up his neck and threatened to flush his face. He shifted his weight and scratched his chin. He hadn’t yet shaved this morning.

      “Why would you say that?”

      Sorrent shuffled and stole another look at the window. His guys had returned and were now peering into the shop harder than ever.

      “Should I tell them to come in?” Emily offered, thinking anything she could do to ease the situation might be a good start.

      “Not on your life!” he shot back furiously.

      “Okay, well, perhaps you should tell me what happened,” she said as calmly as possible. Behind him, one man was pressing an ear to the glass as if to eavesdrop. It was the strangest thing she’d seen in ages.

      “Ethan—you remember Ethan from yesterday?” he began, “Well, he’s not exactly a ladies’ man. Not a fan of clean and shiny, if you know what I mean. But he got caught in a greased chain on the tractor—well, skip the details on that part. Anyways, he got stuck having to use my shower. I tossed him that soap you gave us yesterday cuz I didn’t want him griming up my own soap cuz he’s filthy and…well, that night…” The man flushed crimson.

      “And?” Emily said. “What? Hives? A rash of some sort?”

      Gil Sorrent leaned over the counter. “Women. They were all over him like flies on honey. As if he were the last man on earth. And he claims it’s the soap.” Sorrent lowered his voice even further. “Now, I wasn’t there, but you and I both know women do not flock to a man just because of the way he smells, no matter what cologne ads promise. But I had to near wrestle Ethan to get him to give me back that bar. He thinks the soap got him all that attention and those guys out there, they are more than ready to believe him.” He pushed the second bar across the counter. “I can’t have this kind of thing going on at my farm. So prove to me so’s I can prove to Ethan there’s nothin’ in there to make my foreman such a center of attention.”

      “Well, of course it couldn’t be the soap.” She pulled the unused bar from the bag and scanned the rustic packaging. The usual soap and scent ingredients were listed. The wrapper was a vintage style, with a line drawing of ships and waves—nothing to suggest large-scale female attraction would result from use. No enticing claims, no warning, nothing really out of the ordinary except the Bible verse that had drawn her to Edmundson’s Soaps in the first place. Every Edmundson soap had a Bible verse on the label.

      She pulled open the wrapper.

      Sorrent grew still. The young men at the window pressed closer. At the other window on the opposite side of the door, three women now peered inside, curious as to what the fuss was all about.

      It was a rather unimpressive little bar—nothing dashing or flashy. Hand-shaped, a bit lumpy and an inconsistent

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