SummerSimo Travel Troubles Notes and The Purring Page

The autumn sun in Speranza remained the color of aged parchment, stretching long, lazy shadows over the cobblestone alleys. Inside “La Pagina che Fa le Fusa,” the air was a sanctuary of rosemary, old paper, and the rhythmic, comforting hum of sleeping felines. I, Moira Hopes, sat behind my heavy oak counter, watching Toe, my sleek black shadow, bat at a sunbeam while Ashwaganda, the ginger sage, occupied his usual throne on a stack of first editions.
The peace was interrupted not by a scream, but by the frantic arrival of my three dearest friends, the pillars of Speranza’s social and sensory life: Altea, Anna, and Marisa.

• Altea, the owner of the Cigars House, carried the faint, earthy scent of fine tobacco.
• Anna, who ran the Coffee Taverna, was as energized as a double espresso.
• Marisa, the curator of Mint Chocolate, our local treasure house of precious sweets imported from every corner of the globe, looked uncharacteristically pale.
  “Moira, you must come at once,” Marisa whispered, her voice trembling like a leaf in a Hitchcockian storm. “A shipment of rare Ruby Cocoa from the Amazon has arrived, but something else was tucked inside the crate. Something that doesn’t belong in a house of sweets.”
  As we hurried toward the Mint Chocolate House, the atmosphere shifted from the cozy warmth of the tea shop to a slow-burn of Poirot-like dread. Marisa led us to the back cellar, where the scent of rich, dark chocolate usually reigned supreme. Now, a sharp, metallic odor pierced the sweetness.
  There, resting atop a bed of cocoa beans, was an antique silver snuff box—the kind one might see in a Poirot mystery—engraved with a sleeping cat curled around a key. It was an exact match to the emblem on my book, Days of your Dreams.
  “I didn’t open it,” Marisa said, her eyes wide. “But I saw who delivered it. It wasn’t our usual courier. It was a man with a limp and a distinctive gray coat—much like the one described in the Blackstone affair”.
  I felt a jolt of recognition. The shadows in the cellar seemed to lengthen, casting a silhouette against the wall that looked remarkably like a noose. In the world of Speranza, I was beginning to realize that the most “fabulous mysteries” often began with a touch of magic and ended with a very real, very dangerous truth.