The Steeping Room Mysteries

My name is Margot Baptiste, and I've made a habit of starting over. I did it at twenty-two when I left Trinidad for Sydney with a chemistry degree and a man who made me laugh until I couldn't breathe. I did it at fifty-six when that man died and took the laughter with him. And I did it again three months ago when I sold our house, packed a cat and twenty-seven jars of tea into a rented van, and drove to a coastal village where nobody knew my name.

The Darjeeling was misbehaving.

I held the tin up to the early light and frowned at it. Good first flush, Castleton estate, exactly the kind of base that should play nicely with dried lavender and a whisper of orange peel. But the sample cup on my counter smelled wrong. Too floral. Not enough spine.

"What do you think?" I asked Professor Whiskers.

He was sitting on the far end of the blending counter, tail curled around his considerable ginger body, watching me with the expression of a being who had never doubted himself in his life. He blinked slowly. This was not, I understood after eight years of cohabitation, an endorsement of the blend. It was an observation that I had not yet produced his breakfast.

"Helpful as always."

I adjusted the ratio, less lavender, a pinch more peel, and started over. The Steeping Room at 5:30 in the morning was my favourite version of itself. No customers yet. The morning dark still pressed against the windows. Just me, the cat, the brass scales, and twenty-seven jars of tea arranged by region across the shelves David had built the year before he died.

David. My husband. Eighteen months gone and I still reached for his coffee cup every morning before remembering. Not the grief of the early days anymore. That had been a tsunami, indiscriminate and obliterating. This was a tide. Predictable. Manageable. Sometimes I barely noticed it. Sometimes it knocked me sideways at the kitchen sink because I'd found one of his socks behind the dryer.

The new blend was better. Warmer. The orange peel had found its voice.

"Morning Courage," I said to Whiskers, writing the name on a label. "Darjeeling, lavender, orange peel. For mornings that require bravery."

He jumped down from the counter, which in Professor Whiskers meant he was ready for his morning walk. Our routine, established in the three months since I'd opened the Steeping Room, went like this: wake at five, blend until six, walk Whiskers to the harbour and back, open by seven. The walk was technically for him, but I needed it too. The harbour path followed the curve of Pearl Bay, past the fishing boats and the crab pots and the old stone seawall where the pelicans sat in a judgmental row every morning like a panel of magistrates.

I clipped on his harness (a walking harness, not a leash, because Whiskers had opinions about his dignity) and we stepped out the navy blue door into the grey morning.

Pearl Bay at dawn was a watercolour. The sky hadn't decided what colour to be yet. The sea was flat and silver, the air tasted of salt and eucalyptus, and the only sounds were the clank of the harbour rigging and the screech of a cockatoo who had strong feelings about the sunrise.

I loved it here. That still surprised me.

Three months ago, I'd been standing in the empty Sydney house David and I had shared for twenty-eight years, surrounded by boxes, wondering if I'd lost my mind. Fifty-eight years old. Retired from teaching. Widowed. Selling the house to open a tea shop in a town where I knew exactly nobody.

My daughter Simone, pragmatic to her bones, had said: "Mum. Are you sure?"

My son Marcus, who had his father's gift for gentle honesty, had said: "Dad would love this."

Marcus was right. David would have loved this. He'd have been building shelves and arguing with the plumber and making terrible jokes about how the tea was "steeped in tradition." I missed his terrible jokes most of all.

Whiskers and I took the harbour path. The tide was out, which turned the harbour into a study in geometry. The boats sat at angles on the exposed mud, their reflections gone, looking stranded and slightly embarrassed, like guests who'd arrived at the wrong party. The crab pots were stacked at the end of the fishing jetty, and the air smelled of brine and diesel and the particular muddy sweetness of low tide.

I liked to walk slowly. Whiskers liked to walk even slower, stopping to investigate every post, every rope coil, every crab carcass the seagulls had left on the path. I let him. My phone was in my back pocket playing an audiobook I'd been failing to pay attention to for three days because my brain kept drifting to the question of whether cardamom would work in the Harbour Fog blend.

Probably not. Cardamom was pushy.

We were halfway along the seawall when Whiskers stopped. Not his usual investigative pause. This was different. His body went rigid. His ears flattened. He made a sound I'd only heard him make once before, when a brown snake had appeared in the courtyard garden: a low, guttural growl that seemed far too large for a house cat.

"What is it?" I looked where he was looking.

Down in the harbour. Between the fishing jetty and the seawall. The mud was dark and gleaming where the water had retreated, and the crab pot lines stretched from the jetty posts in long, slack arcs.

Something was tangled in the lines.

My first thought was a seal. We got them sometimes, the big Australian fur seals that came into the harbour to raid the bait buckets. They got caught in lines occasionally. It was sad; the fishermen hated it.

But this wasn't a seal.

I stood very still. My reading glasses were hanging around my neck on the beaded chain my students had given me when I retired, and I pushed them onto my nose even though I didn't need them to see this. I think I was stalling. I think some part of me knew what I was looking at and was giving the rest of me time to catch up.

A man. Face down in the harbour mud, arms caught in the tangle of crab pot lines. He was wearing a dark jacket, expensive. The kind of waxed cotton jacket people from the city bought when they wanted to look "coastal." One shoe was missing. His hair was dark, plastered to his skull with mud and something else.

The chemistry teacher in me took over. Thirty years of lab safety training, of assessing hazards before entering a workspace, kicked in before the rest of me could fall apart.

Don't touch anything. Don't step into the scene. Call triple zero. Note the time.

6:14am. I noted the time. I pulled out my phone. My hands were steady, which surprised me. My voice, when the operator answered, was not.

"I need police and ambulance to Pearl Bay harbour. The seawall path, about halfway along." I swallowed. "There's a man in the water. In the mud, I mean. The tide's out. He's — I don't think he's breathing. He's tangled in the crab pot lines."

The operator was calm and specific, the way I'd trained myself to be calm and specific with panicking Year 10 students who'd knocked over the Bunsen burner. She asked me questions. I answered them. No, I hadn't touched him. No, I couldn't see anyone else. Yes, I would stay on the line.

Whiskers pressed against my ankles, still growling.

The ambulance arrived first, then a police car. I stood back and held Whiskers against my chest like he was the only warm thing in the world. He didn't complain. He let me hold him, which told me he understood the gravity of the situation, because Professor Whiskers was not a cat who tolerated being held.

A young constable took my name and a preliminary statement. Very young. My God, they looked like sixth-formers now. He was trying to be professional but his hands were shaking worse than mine.

"Did you recognise him?" he asked.

"I only saw him from behind. From above. I didn't go down."

He nodded. Scribbled. Nodded again.

From where I stood, I could see the paramedics on the mud. Their body language told me everything. No urgency. No CPR. They moved slowly, carefully, the way you move around something you can't help anymore.

And then the detective arrived.

She came around the corner of the harbour master's office in a dark jacket, badge on her belt, a takeaway coffee cup in one hand and an expression that suggested she'd been expecting this day to be ordinary and was recalibrating. Tall, sharp-featured, dark skin, close-cropped natural hair. She surveyed the scene, the seawall, the constable, and me — a fifty-eight-year-old woman in a turquoise linen tunic, holding a fat ginger cat and standing exactly where a civilian should not be standing.

"Detective Senior Constable Sarah Okafor." She didn't extend a hand. "You found the body?"

"Margot Baptiste. Yes."

"And you are?"

"I own the tea house. The Steeping Room, on Main Street."

Something moved behind her eyes. Not recognition, more like filing. A box labelled civilian, tea lady, nuisance potential: moderate.

"Walk me through it. Start from when you left your house."

I walked her through it. She asked good questions, the kind that circled back on themselves to check for consistency. I recognised the technique. I'd used it myself, in a different context, when Year 9 students claimed the missing sodium had "probably just evaporated, miss."

She took my phone number, told me someone would follow up for a formal statement, and dismissed me with the particular politeness of a professional who needed me to leave.

I turned to go. Whiskers was still tense in my arms, ears flat, tail rigid.

And then I stopped.

I looked back at the harbour, at the crab pot lines still stretched taut between the jetty posts and the mud where the body lay. The police had begun cordoning the area, blue and white tape fluttering in the early breeze. From this angle, I could see where the lines had been pulled and knotted around the victim's arms. The paramedics had cut some of them, but the intact sections were visible.

The knots.

I had been tying knots for thirty years. Lab equipment, tent ropes on school camps, the rigging on David's little sailing dinghy that still sat in our — my — garage. I knew knots the way I knew chemical compounds: by shape and function.

The knots on those crab pot lines weren't crab pot knots.

Fishermen tied bowlines and clove hitches and round turns. I knew this because Rick Sullivan at the fish market had spent twenty minutes last month showing me the difference while I waited for my weekly order of smoked trout. He'd been proud of them. "Forty years of tying the same six knots," he'd said. "My hands do it while I sleep."

Those knots weren't any of Rick's six. They were something else. Something neater, more square, more... deliberate.

I'd seen that knot before. I was sure of it. But the memory sat just out of reach, like a word in a language I'd once spoken fluently but hadn't used in years. It nagged at me. Pulled at me.

I walked home. I put Whiskers down. I opened the Steeping Room at seven, like I did every morning, and I made tea for the three early customers who came in, and I smiled, and I chatted about the weather and the new blend.

But my hands smelled of salt and mud, and every time I closed my eyes I saw the geometry of those knots, precise and wrong, and I couldn't stop the feeling, quiet, insistent, certain as a chemical reaction, that something about that harbour was very, very wrong in a way that went far beyond the tragedy of a man tangled in fishing lines.

Professor Whiskers sat on the true crime shelf and watched me through the morning, and I swear, I absolutely swear, his expression said: Well? Are you going to figure it out or not?