The Orchard Bloom
(2026)(The fifth book in the Mosswood Apothecary Mystery series)
A Story by Cordelia Clark
The orchard at the south end of Mosswood blooms in November.
That isn't right. Apple trees don't flower in October. Not on bare branches, not with the grass winter-flat beneath them. But seven trees are in bloom, and then twelve, and then twenty-two, and Petra Hawthorne has been the Keeper long enough to know the orchard doesn't do anything by accident.
Someone has also been cutting pages from her cellar archive. Neat, precise, blade-close to the spine. The missing pages come from the apothecary's oldest record — the one that documents who held the Keeper role in 1891 and what she built, and what she broke, and how she repaired it.
The woman who checked into The Three Crossings seven months ago says her family founded the apothecary. She believes it. She came to Mosswood with evidence. What she doesn't know is that someone else pointed her here — and that the pages she needed most were already gone before she arrived.
Miriam Ash established the Mosswood arrangement in 1891. She planted the orchard as a weather eye and seated the components in their current positions and made one catastrophic mistake and repaired it and documented everything. Her records have been waiting in a locked strongbox for a hundred and thirty years.
What Petra finds inside them will change how she understands the Keeper line she's standing in.
And the orchard is still blooming.
The Orchard Bloom is Book 5 of the Mosswood Apothecary Mysteries — cozy, layered, atmospheric fiction set in a small Ozark town where the apothecary keeps more than remedies.
Genre: Cozy Mystery
That isn't right. Apple trees don't flower in October. Not on bare branches, not with the grass winter-flat beneath them. But seven trees are in bloom, and then twelve, and then twenty-two, and Petra Hawthorne has been the Keeper long enough to know the orchard doesn't do anything by accident.
Someone has also been cutting pages from her cellar archive. Neat, precise, blade-close to the spine. The missing pages come from the apothecary's oldest record — the one that documents who held the Keeper role in 1891 and what she built, and what she broke, and how she repaired it.
The woman who checked into The Three Crossings seven months ago says her family founded the apothecary. She believes it. She came to Mosswood with evidence. What she doesn't know is that someone else pointed her here — and that the pages she needed most were already gone before she arrived.
Miriam Ash established the Mosswood arrangement in 1891. She planted the orchard as a weather eye and seated the components in their current positions and made one catastrophic mistake and repaired it and documented everything. Her records have been waiting in a locked strongbox for a hundred and thirty years.
What Petra finds inside them will change how she understands the Keeper line she's standing in.
And the orchard is still blooming.
The Orchard Bloom is Book 5 of the Mosswood Apothecary Mysteries — cozy, layered, atmospheric fiction set in a small Ozark town where the apothecary keeps more than remedies.
Genre: Cozy Mystery