The Recipe Book

Sunday morning at the Savannah market was a different animal.

Fewer people. Slower energy. The vendors who showed up on Sundays were the ones who loved the market more than they loved sleeping in. They talked to each other across the aisles. They shared food. They looked after each other’s stalls when someone needed to use the bathroom.

It was, Anya thought, the closest thing to a neighbourhood the market had.

She arrived at nine o’clock, the green notebook in her bag, a story prepared in case anyone asked why she was back so soon. Grandma forgot to buy provisions. It was a weak story. She was counting on no one asking.

Reyah was already there, sitting on the low wall near the roti stand, eating something that smelled like fried plantains. She waved with her free hand.

“Simone’s not here yet,” Reyah said.

“Where is she?”

“Her mother made her go to church.”

“Which church?”

“I don’t know. One of the ones that takes a long time.”

Anya sat down beside her. The sun was already hot — the specific heat of a Port of Spain morning in June, the kind that sat on your shoulders like a hand. She took out her notebook and wrote the date at the top of a fresh page.

Sunday. Savannah Market. Second visit.

“What’s the plan?” Reyah asked.

“We watch. We listen. We don’t ask questions yet. Yesterday they were expecting us. Today they won’t be.”

“Today they’ll be at church.”

“Mrs. Harrinarine will be. I don’t know about Mr. Harrinarine.”

Reyah nodded. She finished her plantains and wiped her hands on her shorts. Anya did not comment on this.

They walked toward the Harrinarine stall.

The stall was closed.

Not empty — the display was still there, the currant rolls under their plastic cover, the bottles of ginger beer in their cooler. But the counter was clean. The lockbox was locked. And no one was sitting on the stool.

Anya stopped walking.

“They’re not here,” Reyah said.

“I can see that.”

“So what do we do?”

Anya didn’t know. She had planned for watching. She had planned for listening. She had not planned for absence.

“Maybe they’re at church too,” Reyah offered.

“Maybe.”

But something felt wrong. Anya couldn’t say what. The stall looked the way it always looked. The currant rolls were there. The ginger beer was there. The lockbox was there, closed, the small brass padlock hanging from its hasp.

The padlock.

Something about the padlock.

Anya stared at it.

“What?” Reyah asked.

Anya didn’t answer. She walked closer to the stall, close enough to see the padlock clearly. It was a small brass lock — the kind you could buy at any hardware store. The key was small. Easy to lose. Easy to borrow. Easy to copy.

But that wasn’t what bothered her.

The padlock was closed.

If someone had stolen from the lockbox yesterday, the padlock would have been open. Or broken. Or missing.

It was none of those things.

“The lock wasn’t broken,” Anya said slowly. “Mrs. Harrinarine said someone took the ring from the lockbox. But the lock wasn’t broken.”

Reyah’s eyes widened.

“Which means whoever took it had a key.”

“Which means whoever took it is family,” Anya finished.

They stood there in front of the empty stall, the sun hot on their necks, the market moving slowly around them.

“The son,” Reyah said. “Kareem. He just moved back home. Maybe he needed money.”

“Or the daughter. Mariam. She’s engaged. Weddings are expensive.”

“Or Mr. Harrinarine himself.”

Anya looked at her.

“He had a key,” Reyah said. “And his hands were shaking. And he didn’t count the change. And he said me too like he didn’t mean it.”

Anya wrote this down.

Then she heard footsteps behind her.

Simone arrived looking like someone who had been to church and was not happy about it. Her dress was too starched. Her hair was too neat. She was carrying a bag of mangoes that her mother had sent her to buy.

“Did I miss anything?” she asked.

“The Harrinarines aren’t here,” Reyah said.

Simone looked at the empty stall. Then at the lockbox. Then at Anya’s notebook.

“The lock wasn’t broken,” Simone said. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” Anya said.

“So it’s family.”

“That’s what we think.”

Simone nodded. She set down her mangoes. She walked around the stall slowly, looking at everything — the display, the counter, the cooler, the lockbox. She crouched down to look at the padlock from a different angle.

Then she stood up.

“The padlock is new,” she said.

Anya blinked. “What?”

“The padlock. It’s new. Look at the brass. No scratches. No tarnish. It hasn’t been outside for more than a few weeks.”

Anya looked. Simone was right. The padlock on the Harrinarine stall was noticeably newer than the padlocks on the neighbouring stalls. It shone in the sun while theirs were dull.

“The old lock might have broken,” Reyah said. “People replace locks.”

“People replace locks when they lose the key,” Simone said quietly. “Or when someone they don’t trust has a copy.”

The three of them stood in a triangle, the empty stall between them.

“Mrs. Leung,” Anya said suddenly.

“What?”

“Mrs. Leung. The lady with the coconut sweetbread. Her stall is right there.” She pointed to the stall next to the Harrinarines’. “She might have seen something yesterday.”

They crossed to Mrs. Leung’s stall.

Mrs. Leung was a small woman with fast hands and faster eyes. She had been selling coconut sweetbread at the Savannah market for nineteen years. She knew everything that happened on her row because she made it her business to know.

“No,” she said, when Anya asked if she’d seen anything unusual yesterday. “I didn’t see anything. I was too busy.”

“Too busy with what?” Reyah asked.

Mrs. Leung’s hands stopped moving.

“I had a customer,” she said. “A young man. He asked a lot of questions. About the market. About the vendors. About who had been here the longest.”

“What did he look like?” Simone asked.

“Young. Maybe twenty. Blue cap. Kept his head down. I didn’t see his face clearly.”

A blue cap.

Anya wrote it down.

“Did he buy anything?” Reyah asked.

“He bought a slice of sweetbread. Paid in cash. Left.”

“And then what?”

“And then I went back to work. And when I closed up last night, I noticed —” She stopped.

“What?”

Mrs. Leung looked at the Harrinarine stall. Then she looked at her own lockbox. Then she looked at the girls.

“My recipe book is gone,” she said. “The one with my mother’s handwriting. The one I’ve had for thirty years.”

The words landed like stones.

“Someone took it,” Mrs. Leung said. “From my lockbox. Sometime yesterday.”

“Was your lock broken?” Simone asked.

Mrs. Leung shook her head.

“Did anyone else have a key?”

“Just me. Just my husband. Just my daughter.”

“So it was one of you,” Reyah said.

Mrs. Leung’s face went hard.

“My daughter is in Canada,” she said. “My husband is dead.”

Anya felt the ground shift beneath her feet.

The lock wasn’t broken. The only people with keys were Mrs. Leung herself — and someone who wasn’t alive.

“No forced entry,” Simone murmured. “No broken locks. But two thefts. Two different families.”

“The same person,” Anya said.

“Or the same method,” Simone said.

They looked at each other.

Someone had figured out how to open the lockboxes without a key. Someone who wasn’t family. Someone who could walk up to a stall in the middle of a busy Saturday and take what they wanted without anyone noticing.

A young man in a blue cap.

Reyah’s phone buzzed. She looked at the screen.

“It’s my father,” she said. “He’s outside the market. He says he’ll drive us home.”

The girls looked at each other.

“We’re not done,” Simone said.

“We’re done for today,” Anya said. “We have more than we had yesterday. That’s enough.”

“It’s not enough,” Simone said.

“It’s enough for now,” Anya said. “We come back tomorrow. We ask more questions. We find out who the young man in the blue cap is.”

Simone wanted to argue. Anya could see it on her face — the frustration, the impatience, the specific feeling of knowing something was wrong and not being able to fix it immediately.

But she nodded.

They walked to the gate where Reyah’s father was waiting, his white taxi idling in the heat.

That night, Anya couldn’t sleep.

She lay in her bed in the room at the back of her grandmother’s house, the window open to catch the breeze that came off the Gulf. Her grandmother was watching television in the living room — the volume low, the way she kept it after Anya had gone to bed.

Anya stared at the ceiling.

A young man in a blue cap. Two thefts. Two unbroken locks. Two families with secrets.

She sat up.

She opened the green notebook and wrote:

Questions I need answers to:

1. Who is the young man in the blue cap?
2. How is he opening the lockboxes without breaking them?
3. Why is he taking sentimental things instead of money?
4. Why did Mrs. Harrinarine look at her husband like she was afraid of him?
5. What does Mr. Harrinarine know that he’s not saying?

She stared at the list.

Four questions about the thief. One question about Mr. Harrinarine.

She underlined question four.

Then she closed the notebook and tried to sleep.

She couldn’t.