Maggie Garnet

Ruby's Love Spell Summer Maggie Garnet

In the summer of 1929, occasional flapper and always modern-minded Ruby Pritchard takes a chance on her Great Aunt May's Appalachian love spell, with curiously exasperating and enjoyable results.

The July new moon spell step had Ruby making a pie of the "choicest summer fruit," which she was supposed to leave upon her windowsill to cool and lure in a delicious love. She was getting rather good at pie-making, though baking a pie in summer heat wasn't the most fun she'd had in her life; she did as instructed, however, and produced a ripely delectable strawberry pie with a perfect lattice crust and crimped edges. It was a pie worth taking a picture of, only she didn't have a camera. It was a pie that she placed on the windowsill and let the south wind carry the delicious scent of to whomever, and it was a pie that disappeared about half an hour later while Ruby was washing the rolling pin and scraping the hardened dribbles of strawberry juice off the bottom of the stove. She thought at first that it might have been squirrels or even someone's wandering dog or children at work, but a glance around the yard showed no knocked-over pie tin or traces of pie, just pure pie thievery.

From Ruby's Love Spell Summer