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CHAPTER ONE
“Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday, dear Celia, Happy Birthday to me,” I sang sadly under my breath before blowing out the candle on the Strawberry Supreme cupcake, which was my personal favorite and a best seller at the bakery I owned. Then I just sat there looking at it—I didn’t even have the heart to take a bite.
I was turning forty and I was all alone—no husband, no kids, and no family at all besides one estranged brother I hadn’t seen in years. I was officially in what my Great Aunt would have called a “blue funk.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad if I was at leastdatingsomeone,” I muttered, as I pinched off a piece of my birthday cupcake. It was delicious as always, but that didn’t lift my spirits. “I mean, I’d even settle for a hook-up at this point. Just a quick, one-night stand would work. At least it would besomething.”
But it seemed like no one was interested in hooking up with a curvy, plus-sized bakery owner who was edging into middle age. Middle age—God!
I slapped the kitchen table and stood up, unable to stand sitting still anymore. I started pacing the black and white checked tiles of the roomy kitchen. It was my favorite space inthe old, rambling Victorian house my Great Aunt Gertrude had left me in her will. She had left me her bakery, The Lost Lamb, too and I had been running it successfully for the past five years.
But running a successful small business means you have almost no time for yourself. And that goes double for owning a bakery—especially in a magical town like Hidden Hollow where Creatures with big appetites live side-by-side with the few human inhabitants.
I have to make quadruple batches of every recipe because your average Orc or Minotaur or Centaur will inhale a dozen donuts in two bites and then ask for more. And don’t get me started on my hubcap-sized cinnamon rolls, my Frisbee-sized chocolate chip cookies, or my mountainous blueberry muffins—not to mention the enormous fifteen-layer Devil’s Food cakes I make on Saturdays only because they take so much time and oven space.
But baking for supernatural beings—Creatures as they call themselves—is only part of living in Hidden Hollow. It’s a special place—a small New England town located in the Berkshires Mountains.
A magical bubble around the town keeps non-magical folk out. It also keeps the outside world’s weather at bay. Years ago the town council took a vote and everyone agreed that their favorite time of year was Fall—peak leaf season to be exact. So now it’s almost always Autumn.
I say “almost” because there are a few exceptions. In May we have a whole month of Spring. In August it’s Summer, and in December it’s Winter with big, feathery snowflakes that collect in gorgeous drifts, but never on the road, because that would be inconvenient. Every other month of the year it’s Autumn and except for the constant leaf raking—which most folks around here manage by magic—it’s amazing.
Hidden Hollow is a beautiful place to live and I hadn’t regretted moving here a bit…until now.
Now I had to wonder if I had done the right thing when I accepted my Great Aunt’s invitation—which came in the form of a cryptic greeting card with a picture of a fresh baked loaf of bread on the outside and the words,You are the Only One who can Help Me! Please Come—Love, Aunt Gertrude,in her untidy scrawl inside.
At that point I’d had only a very vague notion of who my Great Aunt was. My Mom had mentioned something about her once—she had apparently disappeared mysteriously when she was in her thirties. She left an unhappy husband and a troubled marriage behind but no kids. In fact, according to my mother that was one reason Great Aunt Gertrude’s marriage was so unhappy—she didn’t want children and made no secret about it.
“She just never had any use for them,” my mother said, shrugging. “After she disappeared, they tried to say that Great Uncle Lou killed her but they never found her body, so they couldn’t make it stick. He moved out to California and married again and had three sons and two daughters, so I guess that made him happy.”
“But what happened to Great Aunt Gertrude?” I asked, focused on the mystery that surrounded my long-lost relation.
My Mom shrugged.
“Nobody knows. It was strange too—she disappeared in the middle of the day and didn’t take a thing with her. One minute she was in the kitchen making supper for Uncle Lou and the next minute she was gone. He said he smelled burning and ran in to see what was happening because Great Aunt Gertrudeneverburned anything. In fact, her cooking and baking were wonderful—he always said it was the only reason he stayed with her.”
“So whathappened?”I asked, impatient with the tangent she’d gone off on. “Where did shego?”
“Nobody knows, but she left a batch of her famous butter rolls in the oven to burn and didn’t take a thing with her,” Mom said. “Not a single piece of clothing—not even her purse or a sweater. She just vanished in the middle of a regular, ordinary day and she was never seen again.” She sighed and got a sad look in her eyes. “It’s a shame I didn’t get some of her recipes before she went—she made the most mouthwatering pastries. I remember looking forward to her lemon cream tarts and her apple hand pies all year.”
So that was all I knew about my Great Aunt Gertrude until I got the mysterious card in the mail. The minute I read it, I wished I could call my Mom—but she and my Dad were long gone by then. Dad died of lung cancer—he never could quit smoking—and my Mom just kind of faded away a year afterwards. They’d always been extremely close and though it didn’t make any medical sense, I had the strong feeling that she’d died of a broken heart. That was the kind of love I was looking for…but I had never found it.
I have a younger brother, as I think I mentioned before, but we aren’t close and there was nobody else to call. I sat there reading and re-reading the card and finally I said aloud,
“I’d help if I could, but she didn’t even leave me an address or a phone number!”
At that point, it was like an invisible finger tipped in fire began drawing in the empty air in front of me. I stared in shock as it formed a door…a door which opened onto a beautiful Fall landscape even though it was blazing hot summer outside my own front door.
The minute I walked through the doorway—because of course I did—I was greeted by a little old lady with sparklingblue eyes, much like my own, and pure white hair done up in a fashionable twist at the back of her head.
“Oh,thereyou are!” she exclaimed, holding both hands out to me. “I’m so glad you agreed to come help!”
It was my Great Aunt Gertrude, of course. She had also received a magical invitation to Hidden Hollow, much like the one she’d sent to me. And since she wasn’t happy in her marriage to Great Uncle Lou, “All that man wanted was food and sex and someone to clean up after him! I was tired of being his maid and his cook and his whore and not getting paid in anything but insults and complaints!” she said—she stepped through the doorway just as I had and found herself in Hidden Hollow.
Great Aunt Gertrude explained to me that only humans who have magic or Creatures—who are magic by their natures—are able to live within the magical bubble that protects the town. I protested, of course, that I had no magic at all.
“Nonsense!” she said briskly, frowning at me. “I’ve been watching you for ages—you never burn anything and everything you bake comes out perfectly. Doesn’t it?”
“Er, well…I guess so,” I admitted. I had never given this much thought before. It wasn’t like I baked for a living back then, though I had always had a passion for it. I had a business degree and I was working at an accounting firm—a job that was duller than dirt but paid my bills and kept a roof over my head.
