The Solace of Bay Leaves

spice trouble nagged at me as I navigated through downtown and up to Capitol Hill, home to many of my best customers. But all those years working HR had taught me to be a problem-solver. I’d learned by watching some of the city’s top lawyers and HR managers that finding the right solution matters way more than salving one’s pride.
My last delivery took me to the back side of Capitol Hill, and from there, it was an easy slide into Montlake. I passed the Spite House, a local landmark. The mostly likely origin story for the narrow house, built long before tiny houses were fashionable, is that errors in platting created a sliver of a parcel between two larger lots. When the neighbor made an insultingly low offer, the owner of the parcel responded by building a wedge of a house, four and a half feet wide at one end, fifteen feet at the other, that blocked the neighbor’s view and forever kept the dispute in his line of sight. Whatever the true story, it’s a charming house, at least from the outside—yellow stucco with a curved white eyebrow arch over the front door.
And it was a reminder that the neighborhood was an old one, with plenty of mystery in its history.
“Let’s stretch our legs, boy,” I told the dog and parked near the coffee shop. Walk first, snoop later. My little gentleman was drawn to the puddles and I had to tug gently on the leash more than usual.
I paused in front of Laurel and Pat’s former house. When they tell you not to make any drastic changes for at least a year after your spouse dies, they aren’t talking about a spouse murdered in the back yard. Talk about drastic.
Sweet house, sweet neighborhood, and a great place for a kid to grow up. Murder aside, that is. I admired how the residents valued their community, advocating for safety, the parks and schools, and the wetlands nearby.
What was I doing here? What was I hoping to find? A feeling, I supposed, as much as facts.
I took a flyer out of the plastic box attached to the “For Sale” sign on the sidewalk.
“A little gem. New on the market.” At the sound of a male voice, I turned to see a man strolling down the adjacent rose-lined driveway. The man we’d run into at the coffeehouse. “Hey, don’t I know you?”
I shuffled flyer and leash to my left hand and held out my right. “Pepper Reece. Laurel’s friend. We didn’t get a chance to introduce ourselves yesterday.”
“I’m Bruce Ellingson. You in the market? Great neighborhood.”
Took me a moment to realize he meant the real estate market and this neighborhood, not Pike Place Market and downtown. Like I would really be interested in buying the house where my good friend’s husband was murdered. “I know, I know. I grew up a few blocks from here.” I glanced at the flyer. His wife’s listing, her picture on the bottom. “I was never in this house, and I hear it has a nice back yard. Can you see it from your place? Though it can’t be as nice as yours. What beautiful roses.”
“You’re a rose lover? Come take a look at the back.” He led me around the tall hedge that separated the two driveways to the side door of an olive green two-story with a steeply pitched roof. A common style, a variation of the classic Four-Square known as a Seattle Box. “I just got a delivery of mulch and it’s blocking the path on the side of the garage, so we’ll have to go into the house to get to the backyard.”
He held the screen door for me. Inside, I told Arf to wait and he stretched out on the door mat.
“Bought this place when our youngest started first grade,” Ellingson said. “Hard to believe he’s a junior in college now. Or would be. Spends all his time in the basement when he bothers to come home. You got kids?”
“Just the four-footer in your mudroom.”
We walked through the kitchen, done in the French country style popular about twenty years ago and due for an update. That surprised me. Not that every real estate agent has to live in a show piece, but the ones I knew all lavished time and money on their homes. And Deanna Ellingson seemed like a woman who would want her home to look just so. I’m a nester with a fondness for home decor myself, so I understood that, though our styles could hardly be more different.
Glass doors at the end of the dining room opened on to a deck and we went outside. I had never seen so many roses in such a small space. Tag and I had planted a few, and I knew rose lovers could get carried away, enticed by new cultivars, colors, and scents. Bruce Ellingson seemed to favor teas and grandifloras, and they filled a deep curving bed that lined the yard, but a pale peach climber, still in bloom, covered a wide swath of the cedar fence between his place and the yard next door.
Bruce pointed out half a dozen favorites, calling them by name. My appreciation was genuine, even though barely half were still in bloom, and the recent rains had done them no favors. Despite his complaints about weeds and the challenges of keeping out the blackberries that grew in the alley, it was clear that roses were his passion.
“You take care of all this yourself?” I asked.
“Yes. My wife enjoys the results, but doesn’t have much time for digging dirt.”
Not to mention what it might do to her manicure.
“I imagine this does take a lot of time,” I said. “What kind of work do you do?”
“Bond broker,” he said and held the door.
Inside, instead of returning to the kitchen, I walked through