Bluegrass Hero. Allie Pleiter

sort itself out in her brain, that she couldn’t pick out exactly what she smelled and why she liked it. She used scents all the time in her home and at the shop, and she’d been sensitive to them her whole life. Her father had been a real estate broker, and she remembered him putting vanilla extract on the light bulbs in a home for sale, because it gave off the faint aroma of baking. And baking always smelled like home. Scents could calm or enliven. Scents could trigger memory or emotion as easily—perhaps more easily—as words.

      But scent did not answer prayers or build character or make Ethan Travers instantly attractive.

      So why did someone like Gil Sorrent get all hyped up about it? He forbade her to sell the soap to his employees. She found that highly irritating, even if she did somewhat understand his motives. His guys were young, granted, but they were adults capable of making their own decisions. Even if Gil felt them to be poor ones. These men were eager to be her customers, and unconventional as they were, she didn’t think she could afford to refuse their business.

      Lord, I need a way to know if I can give that speech. I’ve also got to find a way sell the soaps but not tick off Gil Sorrent. She sat cross-legged in pajamas on her living-room rug and pondered. She made lists, charts, pro and con tables and generally paced around until at least one of the solutions came to her.

      Sell, don’t scalp. Of course.

      That was the solution: Sell Lord Edmund’s Pirate Soap, but don’t scalp it. Sell for the same price as all the other Edmundson soaps. If men were rushing into her shop to buy soap, then they would get a fair deal, and the clear explanation that they would get nothing from the transaction except clean. It was, after all, the easiest antidote to the uproar: Soap that did nothing would kill the rumors about its wonder-working properties. Men liked hard evidence, Ash had always said. Well, she had thirteen bars of hard evidence, and they were going to do their job. Even Barbie Jean Blabbermouth couldn’t override good, hard evidence.

      Then maybe, she mused, I can get a few of them to go home with a second bar of some other soap. Herbal hand cleaner, I’ll call it. Emily grabbed her notebook, drew up a plan and packed everything up before going to bed. The soap matter, at least, felt sufficiently resolved.

      As for the speech, well, that would have to wait until another day.

      Tuesday morning, Emily remembered her pledge to have a second cup of coffee, ensuring she was wide awake before she began her morning tradition of praying over her to-do list. She and God walked through her schedule and her task list, and she asked for help with the challenges of the day. It was an especially nice day for January, clear and crisp with invigorating morning sunshine. Emily opened up a bar of Edmundson’s Joy Soap for her own personal use. It had a pleasant, lemony scent cut with verbena and another floral essence she couldn’t identify. True to its name, it was a happy soap. A high-quality soap, too. The Edmundsons had achieved a lush, silky soap at a price that suited her shop and her clientele.

      “With more sales like that I can save enough to take out an ad next month,” she told Othello as she scratched him behind the ears at breakfast. “I bet I can even draw up an annual marketing plan. Love soaps for Valentine’s Day. Faithfulness for anniversaries. Kindness soap as a thank you gift. Peace for Christmas. I could put a card in the gift wrap with the verse from Galatians.” Othello blinked. “Then, if it works out, I could give a special price for the eight-bar set—it’d make a great confirmation or baptism gift, wouldn’t it?” The possibilities spread themselves out before her.

      Othello wound his way around her legs and stared up at her with his round yellow eyes. Sounds brilliant to me, he seemed to say.

      “I’ll let you know how my plan works out at dinner, Othello. Maybe we’ll have to celebrate a successful day.”

      This plan really seems brilliant, she thought as she walked to work, enjoying the beautiful day.

      And then she turned the corner onto Ballad Road and saw the line. A dozen or so men stood waiting outside West of Paris. Emily’s beady-eyed top customer defending his spot at the very front of the bunch.

      The Homestretch Farm workers: her newest, unlikeliest patrons. Those young men looked every bit the hard cases she’d heard they were. Some people said every one of them had had a criminal record before his sixteenth birthday. Every spring when the new hands came onto the farm, the town quietly held its breath because they looked like such a crop of miscreants. They seemed to look tougher and meaner every year. Emily was afraid of half of them, quite honestly, even though she felt bad for feeling that way.

      She’d been against the farm when it had first opened three years ago. It seemed like far too big a risk for so small a town. However, Sorrent’s farm hadn’t given Middleburg much trouble. He’d kept it under tight control and even joined the town council. There had been very few complaints.

      But that was before this morning. Emily wasn’t sure she was ready to get so friendly with Homestretch’s questionable residents. Still, she told herself as she walked up the street to her shop, they look no meaner than a banker would look foreclosing on your loan. Smile, and remember how long it’s been since you made a dozen sales before eleven.

      She clutched the plan in her basket of work papers and reminded herself she’d come up with a brilliant solution. If she could just stick to it and hold her ground with these men, her problem would be solved before noon and the whole absurd episode of Lord Edmund’s Pirate Soap would be over by day’s end with nothing but clean men to show for it.

      “Good morning, gentlemen,” she said as the bodies split into a human hedge leading up to her door.

      The Latin-looking one—the one with the silky voice who had winked at her the other day—winked again. “Morning, Miss Montague,” he said.

      “No work today?” She turned the key in the lock and heard their feet behind her. She wanted to ask, “Does Mr. Sorrent know you’re here?” but couldn’t bring herself to do it. Of course Sorrent knew they were here. He knew where they were every second of every day.

      “We got to be back in half an hour,” one of them said. “So we gotta work fast.”

      “I want two bars!” a lanky boy who barely looked old enough to drive said from the back of the throng.

      “Me, too!” cried another. “I’ll pay ten a piece.”

      “Fifteen!” came another shout.

      Emily stilled the key and turned to face the crowd. She was glad to count only ten faces—that made things easier. The plan. Work the plan.

      “Let me make one thing perfectly clear: you’ll pay the regular price of four dollars, and I’ll sell each of you one bar of soap—no more.” A chorus of moans rose up from the band of soap-seekers. “And I want you to understand clearly, in no uncertain terms, that these soaps will do nothing but get you clean. They’re soap, and nothing else, and I’ll have a bone to pick with any of you that claims otherwise.”

      There was a moment of thoughtful silence, and Emily heaved a sigh of relief as she opened up the shop and let them inside. Was it possible that she’d gotten through to them?

      “Sure, Ms. Montague,” said the oldest of them, “whatever you say.”

      He must have thought he’d been hiding the smirk on his face, but it became instantly obvious to Emily that they hadn’t absorbed a word. They’d still have plunked down twice as much with glee. Well, that couldn’t be her problem. She’d come up with her best possible solution—whether those men learned from it was going to have to be Gil’s—or God’s—problem.

      Emily did, in fact, make her midweek income goal by noon. Suddenly the Homestretch Farm men weren’t looking so scary. She was pretty sure, however, that Gil Sorrent would show up sooner or later, and sure enough she was sorting through the noon mail when he skulked through the door. It struck her, as he made his way to the counter, that she’d never seen him happy. Or laughing. She’d seen a smile or two—mostly when he won his point soundly at a town hall meeting—but that didn’t really qualify as happy.