The Secret of Everything

  PRAISE FOR

  THE LOST RECIPE FOR HAPPINESS

  “A delectable banquet for the reader, celebrating the things that matter most—family, friendship, food, and the healing power of love.”

  —Susan Wiggs, New York Times bestselling author

  “As dark and deep and sweet as chocolate … I wanted to live in this book.”

  —Sarah Addison Allen, New York Times bestselling author

  “Beautiful writing, good storytelling and an endearing heroine set against the backdrop of Aspen, Colorado, are highlights of O’Neal’s novel. A tale that intertwines food, friendship, passion, and love in such a delectable mix is one to truly savoruntil the very last page.”

  —Romantic Times

  “The writing is both subtle and colourful. Elena, in particular, is an engaging, complex character, direct and driven like all gifted chefs.”

  —Sunday Morning Herald (Australia)

  “Plunges the reader into a world of gastronomic celebration that rings with authenticity.”

  —Courier Mail (Australia)

  “The food descriptions will be fun for foodies. When the protagonist makes notes for a menu, the descriptions are juicy…. Honest to goodness recipes, like the one for ‘Banana and Chocolate Chip Pancakes’ … focus a reader’s interest in O’Neal’s true-life culinary cache.”

  —Rocky Mountain News

  “Will appeal to women’s fiction fans and foodies, who will enjoy the intriguing recipes … laced through the book”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  ALSO BY BARBARA O’NEAL

  The Lost Recipe for Happiness

  FOR JIM HAIR.

  Because if all the fathers in the world were like mine,

  there would be a lot fewer broken women in the world.

  Thanks, Dad.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It would be impossible to get books out into the world without a solid network of help and support. My circle is rich, and they deserve the small moments of attention here.

  I could never do this without Neal Barlow, my beloved Christopher Robin, who is cheerful and unflappable and laughingly reminds me of all the things I say at the end of every rough draft. I’m also grateful for that fortuitous and terrible spider bite you picked up whilst orienteering. Your pain and suffering were not for naught.

  Thanks also go to Christie Ridgway, my lifeline on the end of the phone, for her infamous and incredible box plotting plan, which helped keep me on track with this complicated storyline; and to Teresa Hill for reading messy, messy drafts without freaking out.

  I could never get anywhere without the brilliant team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency, primarily my agent Meg Ruley, and Christina Hogrebe; and with deepest thanks to my editor Shauna Summers, for helping me find my best work, over and over again, and challenging me to be better than I think I can be.

  Special thanks to my aunt, Lisa Putman, a brilliant cook, who helped poke holes in the recipes and helped me find the best ingredients and ideas. (All mistakes are my own.) You were a great help, Auntie, thanks so much! Baked French Toast is her own Christmas morning recipe.

  Also, thanks to my mother, who reads cookbooks for fun, and turned me into a foodie a long time ago; to my sisters who sang the song in this book in rounds with me; and my brother who has more CDs than anyone I have ever met.

  And last on the page, but not in my heart, thanks to my readers. The circle is not complete without you, so thank you from the bottom of my heart. I love hearing from you and hearing your stories and getting your recipes. Find me online at www.barbaraoneal.com or send me an email at barbara@barbaraoneal.com.

  ONE

  On a foggy August morning, Tessa Harlow had finally tired of her long wallow on the Santa Cruz beaches. Leaving her father’s tidy little bungalow as she did every morning, she carried her breakfast down to the surf: a mango fresh from the local grocer, a hunk of sourdough bread, and a hefty cup of tea she bought from the stand on the corner.

  Settling on the sand, she skimmed the thick outer skin from the mango and bit into the buttery flesh, mopping the juice from her chin with a bandana. The tea was hot and milky, sweet with real sugar, and the bread—while not quite as tangy as San Francisco sourdough—complemented the mango perfectly.

  A woman walked purposefully along the water’s edge, her calves showing ropy muscle. Gulls wheeled overhead. For the first time in months, Tessa wished for her camera. She would shoot the isolated piles of homeless men sleeping on the buffalo grass, and the boats bobbing in the distance, and maybe even the stack of mango skins on the sand.

  It was time to get back to her life. She walked to the edge of the waves, dipped her right hand in the water, and washed her face and the fingers sticking out of the turquoise cast on her left arm. Letting her skin dry in the air, she sat back down with her cell phone and a sheaf of papers she’d printed out yesterday at the Internet café near her father’s house. Luddite that he was, he didn’t have a computer of his own, and Tessa had lost hers in a river three months ago.

  Three months. The weeks had gone by in a wash of aqua and pale gray, deep-blue afternoons that she spent reading whatever she found at the laundromat or the local youth hostel—battered thrillers, dog-eared romances, ancient sagas. Whatever.

  Three months. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. In Tessa’s case, the nail was a spider that had crawled into her bed in the Rocky Mountains and bitten the sole of her left foot. Not such a big thing, ordinarily. It wouldn’t have been this time, if she had paid attention to it right away.

  Or if the rain had not been quite so persistent, so unexpected.

  Or if the deluge had not softened the earth so completely that a tree fell sideways, taking the trail and her entire tour group down the mountain.

  Or if the river had not been quite so high.

  Or if …

  Oh, so many details. For want of a nail, the kingdom was lost, and Tessa washed up on the beach here in her father’s land.

  Lately it had begun to creep into her mind that she couldn’t exactly live this way. Her wounds, if not healed, were at least pretty well scabbed over. Mostly she could sleep again. Mostly she’d stopped having panic attacks and flashbacks. She had not purchased a new camera, but she would. Much as Sam, her surfer father, would love to have Tessa join him in his aimless drift, sooner or later she needed to explore the memories that had surfaced when she nearly drowned in Montana. Yesterday she’d spent a couple of hours online exploring the town she wanted to visit and had assembled a pitch for her boss.

  Flipping open her cell phone, she dialed his number. “Hey, Mick,” she said when he answered. “It’s Tessa. How are you?”

  “Well, hello to you, gorgeous,” her boss said. “It’s so good to hear from you. How are you?”

  “Definitely getting there.” She traced a long mark on her foot. “They gave me a new cast last week, this one only up to the elbow, and my foot should be a hundred percent before too much longer.”

  “I’m glad. How long do you wear this cast?”

  “Only another four weeks or so.”

  “That’s terrific. Is it tacky to ask when you might be coming back to work?”

  “I’m not up to a tour yet.” Maybe she wouldn’t be again. “But we have been talking about the economy and the fact that overseas travel has been so expensive that we need to set up some food and hiking tours in the U.S., right?”

  “True, true. You have something in mind?”

  “I do.” Tessa shook hair out of her eyes. Too long. She hadn’t cut it in nearly a year, and the humid salt air made it curl. “Have you ever heard of Los Ladrones?”

  “New Mexico?” She heard his skepticism. “Pretty rustic for a food
ie tour, isn’t it?”

  “Some of it. But Los Ladrones is a very chichi spot these days, lots of Hollywood types drifting north from Santa Fe and Taos.” She leafed through the pages in her lap. “A lot of really good restaurants—like, more than a dozen high-end places—and a big organic farm with a vegetarian cooking school, kind of new, small, but getting some attention.”

  “Huh. Sounds intriguing. What else?”

  “On the weekends there’s a big market in the plaza, with local artisans and all that, and there’s a café that’s been written up a couple of times, in Food and Wine and—” She scowled, flipping through her notes. “Can’t find the other one. Anyway, it’s on the plaza, called The 100 Breakfasts Café.”

  Mick was silent, and she gave him space to digest. In her imagination, she could see him sitting at his desk in Santa Monica, drawing cartoon faces down the margins of a yellow legal tablet. “All good stuff, Tessa. What else can we do with it? Hiking? Rafting? There’s gotta be some outdoorsy stuff in the mountains of New Mexico.”

  “Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There are hot springs, and a pilgrimage trek that goes to a famous shrine on the mountain, and a river, and a big lake up in the trees. It’s also one of the oldest towns in the area, which means really old, like 1630 or something. A lot of history.” She shrugged. “I can send you all the notes in email. You can give it some thought.”

  “Tell you what—send me the notes, but I’m onboard if you want to do the research. It’s worth a week. Look around, see if you think it might actually work for our demographic.”

  She nodded, drawing a big heart in the sand beside her. “Excellent. I’ll get out of here tomorrow if you want.”

  He chuckled. “Little stir-crazy, sweetheart?”

  “Mmmm. Could be. I mean, how long can a person just lie around on the sand?”

  “I’m glad. If this is viable, maybe we can get it on the schedule for next year. We have the new catalogs going out in late November.”

  As clearly as she could remember, today was August 25 or 26. “I’ll email you the reservations and flight info this afternoon.”

  “Good. Welcome back, babe.”

  “Thanks.” She hung up and sat with the phone in her palm, feeling both anxious and relieved. It was time. Time to get moving again. Time to open the Pandora’s box of memories that had been haunting her since the Montana debacle.

  Now to break the news to her dad. She gathered her flip-flops, her book, and her straw hat. Dressed in an embroidered Mexican peasant blouse and a pair of baggy capris that were so faded they no longer had a discernible pattern, she headed for the boardwalk.

  Her father, surrounded by his three rescue dogs, was repainting the menu at his margarita shack in a careful, elegant hand. He’d studied calligraphy at some point and took pride in his lettering. She loved getting cards in the mail from him. “Hey, kiddo,” he said. His voice was as gravelly as a gizzard. “You’re back awfully early.”

  When Tessa was a child, Sam had been everybody’s favorite dad. She felt sorry for other kids, who had to go home to somebody normal or—this being coastal California, after all—a pothead who couldn’t keep his sentences straight. Sam was neither. He’d made his living as a magician, so he could do a billion tricks, and his vagabond life meant he had a store of adventure stories he told at random, and he could make a grilled cheese sandwich exactly right, with the bread turned just barely crispy, light golden brown. In his pockets, he carried Tootsie Roll Pops, which he gave away when you skinned your knee or got in a fight or fell for some whopper of a fish story he told.

  This little margarita shack had been his dream for a long, long time. Tessa had helped him buy it seven years ago out of money she’d saved over a ten-year period. “Like Elvis,” he said with his sideways grin. “Buying a house for his mama.”

  Sam surfed most mornings, talked all afternoon and evening with whoever stopped by Margaritaville. He wasn’t much of a drinker himself, a help if you owned a bar.

  This morning he wore long shorts and bare feet and a loose, ancient Hawaiian shirt. His skin was tanned even darker than Tessa’s. He’d recently shorn his steel-gray hair into a crew cut, making him look younger than his sixty-two years, and it was a rare woman who could remain immune to the twinkle in his eye.

  “I have something to tell you.” She sat down on one of the stools in front of the bar. “I got a phone call. A job offer.”

  “You ready for that?”

  “I won’t be leading anything. Just doing some preliminary research for some possible food tours in New Mexico.”

  “New Mexico?” He dipped his brush into shamrock-green paint. “Whereabouts?”

  “Los Ladrones.”

  He put the brush down, but not before she saw a faint tremor pass through his strong brown hands. “That’s a bad place.”

  Tessa raised her eyebrows. He believed that your animals reincarnated, that the Great Spirit sent messages via feathers, and that there was magic in drums.

  She believed in none of those things. “C’mon, Dad.”

  “I’m serious,” he said in his drawl. “There are bad spirits there.”

  “Dad. Bad spirits?”

  His lips twitched beneath a thick, glossy mustache that he wore without the faintest self-consciousness. “That’s where you fell in the river when you were little.”

  “I know where it is—that’s the reason I’m going.” She drew an X across her chest. “Promise I won’t fall in the river again.”

  “Go ahead, make fun of me. But I don’t have to like it. You damned near got yourself killed in the Rockies, so I’m allowed to worry.”

  “I’m sorry,” Tessa said. “You’re right. You don’t have to like it, but I am going. My boss is pretty excited about it, honestly.”

  “Can’t imagine why. There’s nothing there.”

  “Wasn’t much there,” she corrected, tugging a thin blue bar straw out of the glass on the bar. “Evidently it’s a fashionable resort town these days.” Chewing on the end of the straw, she added, “Maybe all the rich people drove out the bad air.”

  “There you go, laughing at your old dad again.”

  “Gotcha.” She pointed at him with the straw. “Did we live in town?”

  “Nah. That was the commune days.” He shook his head. “Bunch of crazies.”

  “Huh. Imagine that! Commune, crazies.”

  “Not the commune. The town, the place. There are old things afoot there.”

  “C’mon, Dad, admit it. You just want me to stay here.”

  “Maybe. Is that so bad?”

  “No. It’s sweet, and I do appreciate how much you’ve done for me, letting me crash at your house for so long.” She reached out and touched his arm. “But I really am feeling better, and you know as well as I do that I’ve got to get back to work, back into my life. You can’t run away from yourself.”

  He nodded. But he put his focus on painting a perfectly elegant G, and she had the feeling he was a lot more upset than he let on. “You’re right. You’ve gotta do what you’ve gotta do.”

  • • •

  It was Sam’s habit to head out in the early morning to surf before the world arrived. This morning, he dutifully carried his board down to the deserted beach, but once he got there, he had to admit there wasn’t much point. The ocean was gray and dark, restless in a petulant way that might prove dangerous. The thought pricked him like a red ant. His younger self would have scoffed at these conditions—what the hell was wrong with him these days?

  Old, that was the trouble. He was getting old.

  For long moments he stood there, dressed in a wet suit, his board by his feet, his narrowed eyes trained on the water. Thick fog obscured most everything, leaving him in a pocket of silence broken only by the sibilance of the waves ruffling against the beach. Not far out was a boat, rocking hard, back and forth, back and forth, at anchor. He wouldn’t want to be asleep on that baby, that much was sure.

  Damn.

  He sat dow
n, waiting for the dogs to tucker themselves out. No reason they couldn’t have their romp. Wolfenstein, a giant yellow Lab, and Loki, a black springer mix, raced down the waterline, their paws making a braid in the wet sand. Loki found a stick and raced gleefully back toward Sam with it. Peaches, a raggedy old poodle mix who was defying records at age twenty-three, was asleep back at the house, snuggled on Tessa’s legs. Peaches would miss Tessa as much as Sam would.

  She was headed out this morning to Los Ladrones. Just the name made him feel sick to his stomach, a combination of memory and dread, worry and knowledge and superstition. Before Tessa took off, he had to make some decisions. There were a couple of pieces of her childhood he’d kept from her, things it would only have hurt her to know, things he’d pretty much made up his mind long ago that she would never know. The life they’d lived might have been a little eccentric, but it was better than she would have had back there in that pissant little town.

  Which really was riddled with all kinds of bad spirits. Maybe it was old missionaries slaughtered by the Indians, or maybe it was the Indians slaughtered by the conquistadores, or the seven women who had been carried off in 1826 by the Comanches—or maybe by a campful of miners. No one really knew. Lot of blood spilled in that little valley. Lot of people murdered for land, for money, for women. Sometimes, in the dark of a new moon, the screams of those ghosts echoed down the river with a terrible noise. Some people said it was a trick of the rocks lining the canyon; some said it was La Llorona, the weeping woman of the rivers.

  Drawing his knees up to his chest, he took in a deep breath. For all that Tessa insisted she was fine, she hadn’t fully recovered from her ordeal. She was a lot better, and God knew she looked a hell of a lot further along than when he’d finally got her home, rail-thin and hollow-eyed.

  Still. She was the very center of his life, the one thing he’d done right over a life mostly wasted, and he didn’t want her pushing too hard, too fast. He’d done some time in Vietnam. He knew how deep things could go. You couldn’t unsee a thing once it was seen, unknow it once it was known.