by S Doyle
“Perfect,” I said, with a smile. She opened the door to what I guessed was the kitchen.
“Hey, Marie, we’ve got a customer waiting on the sticky buns.”
I heard a vague answer, then the girl headed to the register to ring me up.
“I’ll take a coffee, too,” I said, pointing to the pots behind her.
Three dollars and twelve cents of my precious savings. But now I knew Marie was actually here in the store.
“Did I hear you call the baker Marie? Is that the owner? Marie Campbell?”
“Yes, sir,” the girl, whose name was Candy, according to the tag over her right breast, replied cheerily. “She might be new at this, but in my opinion, she’s the best baker in town. Wait until you taste her coffee. She’s got a secret trick.”
“New at this, huh? I pictured a sweet, old grandmother doing the baking.”
I gave her a flirty smile and she turned pink. It was amazing how applying charm worked with people. It was a skill I had in high school, that somewhere I’d lost along the way.
“Oh, no sir, she’s the opposite of a grandmother. I’ll be right back with your bun.”
I watched her go through the swinging door and tried to catch an image of who was back there. I saw a flash of white apron and short-cropped hair, but that was it.
When Candy returned, she held out a white bag that proved warm to the touch. And a bunch of napkins.
“You’ll need them,” she said.
I nodded and considered my next move. I could simply ask to meet the owner, but thought that sounded forward. This Marie Campbell was a private person. Not prone to marketing herself, certainly. Not prone to providing any information that could be easily found.
So I took my coffee and my hot-out-of-the-oven cinnamon bun across the street to the park bench. One sip of the coffee confirmed Candy was correct. It was delicious. I didn’t know what the secret was, but it might have been the best damn coffee I’d ever tasted. Rich and strong, without any bitterness. How was that possible?
It didn’t compare to the bun, though. Soft, sweet, amazingly gooey. It was like biting into heaven, and I was pretty sure I was making humming noises as I ate it. God, when had anything tasted this good before? When had I ever felt so physically happy?
Then I remembered. In Vegas. After spending a night making love to my wife.
I took another sip of the coffee, tried to enjoy the rest of the sticky bun, and waited. The store hours were seven a.m. to two p.m. Sometime around noon, Candy left. The baking done, Marie was probably able to handle the front and back of the shop alone.
Then, just after two, another woman emerged. Short, thin, cropped red hair. Young. Her back was to me as she locked the store, but it was still evident. In her jeans, flowered T-shirt and Crocs. Too young.
Definitely not my mother.
Then she turned, and I caught a view of her profile and something instantly slammed me in the gut. Her chin, her nose. She looked like Ash, but of course, it wasn’t her. Just a young woman with short, red hair who looked a little like her. I watched her walk to her car. Nothing unusual there. She drove a nondescript, four-door sedan. As she got inside, her back again to me, I found myself wishing I could see her face full on.
If for no other reason than to prove she wasn’t the person I wanted her to be. She drove away in the opposite direction, preventing me from really seeing her.
She wasn’t my mother. There was no reason to pursue this any further. I needed to check this Marie off my list and move on to the next possibility. Only I knew that wasn’t going to happen.
Tomorrow, I would have to cough up another three dollars and twelve cents just to get a look at this woman’s face.
The next day
Marc
“You’re back,” Candy said with a smile.
“The best cinnamon bun and coffee I’ve ever had,” I told her, and it was the truth.
It was later in the day. Just after noon. I’d hoped Candy would have followed the same schedule as yesterday and already be gone, so Marie would have to serve me.
“I told you,” Candy said. “Well, the sticky buns aren’t hot right now, but I could warm one up for you in the oven.”
“That would be great. Marie done baking for the day?” I asked with a smile.
“She is. She needed to go pick up some supplies for tomorrow.”
That explained Candy working later. No doubt covering for her. It also meant she wasn’t here.
I took my coffee and bun to the bench and prepared to wait. Not as long this time. The minute Candy left, I’d go back for another coffee so I could get a look at the woman.
It was ridiculous. I still couldn’t explain the reason for my urgency. It was just there. I’d learned enough over time to just go with these instincts. This wasn’t the first time I’d gotten a little obsessed. It had happened a few times since I’d been out of prison.
A young woman with blond hair whom I’d caught in my peripheral vision made me stop what I was doing and follow her. Only to find out a couple minutes later, once I could see her clearly, she wasn’t Ash.
Another time, I followed a woman around a grocery store in North Carolina because I was convinced I’d heard her taking a hit on an inhaler. That wheezing sound, which I’d grown so familiar with around Ash, had penetrated my subconscious.
It had just been a woman with a cold.
This was no different. Sitting on a bench and waiting to see a woman, just to prove to myself she wasn’t Ash.
I wondered how long this would go on. How long was I going to wander around, always seeing faint hints of her until my brain caught up with the fact that I was never going to see her again?
A car pulled into the mall parking lot and I could see it was the redhead. She got out of the car, then opened the back door to pull out a sack of what I imagined were baking supplies.
This time, she wore jeans that rolled to her ankles, and a different T-shirt. I had the same impression as I had yesterday. Young. Waifish. She certainly didn’t eat a lot of what she baked. A few minutes after she entered the store, Candy left.
I waited a few more minutes, then I rose and crossed the street. The bell over the door rang to announce my presence. Any second, she would come out from the kitchen. Any second, the door would open, and I would see that, while she had Ash’s nose and chin, she looked entirely different. Any second, I would feel that hopeless sense of grief because the person who’d been part of me for so long was gone forever.
“Hi. Can I help—”
Her words stopped abruptly when she saw me. Her entire body froze.
It took almost a full minute for me to breathe. A minute for my brain to make sense of what I was seeing. This was an illusion. Some trick of the mind. I didn’t need a grief therapist to explain it.
But all the other times I’d seen those women who reminded me of Ash. Heard sounds that reminded me of Ash. Every time I confronted that person, it wasn’t Ash.
This was different.
This was Ash. Ashleigh Landen, standing frozen behind a counter of cupcakes, with short red hair and eyes so blue they hurt to look at them. I had this thought I should apologize to her. To tell her I was sorry for replacing what must be her true face, with the face of someone else.
Only I never got that chance. Because the next thing she said was…
“Marc.”
5
Marc
It could have been a second or an hour. I don’t know how long I stood there, staring at her. Taking in the fact this was real. She’d said my name. With a voice I thought I’d never hear again.
In a sudden, quick move, she sprinted through the door. Back into the kitchen. She was running. She was running from me.
Instinct sent me vaulting over the counter to chase her. I ran through a narrow kitchen filled with shiny silver bowls and kitchen machinery, to a back door she’d already pushed through.
I followed her outside, around the length of the strip mall. She w
as sprinting across the street toward the park. I didn’t stop to see if there were cars before I chased after her. I heard a horn blare, but it didn’t slow me down. She wasn’t fast. Her lungs had never allowed her to be so. In two strides, I had her from behind. Lifting her off her feet, caging her in my arms so she couldn’t run from me again.
I kept her like that. In my arms. Not moving, not willing to put her down.
“Marc, put me down.”
Never. How long could I hold her like this? Forever?
“Marc, put me down before you attract police attention.”
The word police got my attention. Carefully, I set her on her feet. Then I fell to my knees. “Don’t run from me,” I croaked out.
I felt her turn, felt her fingers drift through my hair.
“Marc…”
“No! Shut up. Don’t say anything. If this is a dream, I don’t want it to be over yet. I don’t want to wake up.”
Now, both her hands were in my hair, gently stroking my head as if I were a child. Like my mother had done for me before she abandoned me.
“It’s not a dream.”
I looked up at her face. I looked into her eyes and knew, now, without a doubt, this wasn’t a mistake or a dream. This was real. Ash wasn’t dead.
Ash wasn’t dead.
Ash was alive, living in Florida, working at a bakery. Using the name Marie Campbell. My mother’s name. And she’d let me think…this whole time…
I ducked my head, unable to look at her. Unable to understand how she could have been so heartlessly, so magnificently cruel.
“How could you?” I whispered. I felt my hands shaking.
“Marc, we need to talk. I didn’t make a plan for this. I honestly didn’t know if this day would ever come. ”
Slowly, I got to my feet. My whole body now trembling. “You lied to me. You let me think you were dead.”
“I had no choice,” she said softly.
“You let George believe you were dead. He had a fucking memorial service! Alone. Because I was in prison.”
She lifted her hand to touch my arm, but I pulled away from her. I couldn’t see through the madness of what she’d done.
“Please, come sit over here and I’ll explain.”
It was strange, because part of me wanted to walk away from her. To no longer feel this horrible sense of betrayal. It was worse than grief. It was worse than anything I’d ever imagined. She hadn’t run away. She hadn’t disappeared.
She’d died.
The finality of her abandonment was so utterly devastating I found it hard to breathe.
This is what it’s like for her. When her lungs get tight and she struggles to breathe. Easy in, and out.
Taking time to catch my breath, to regain some equilibrium, I finally joined her on the park bench. Where yesterday, I’d sat and watched her lock the store thinking she looked a lot like Ash. So much so, that I’d had to come back here just to prove to myself it couldn’t be true.
Except it was. All of it. True.
I didn’t look at her, just stared straight ahead at her store. I could feel her fidgeting next to me. Her hands twisting in her lap, her sneakered foot bouncing on the ground.
“I don’t know how to start,” she said finally. “I didn’t think you would ever come. You were so adamant that day about not finding her, and it’s been so long since you’ve been out…”
That I would ever come? How was it possible to come for her if I believed she was dead? Except I had come for her.
Wait, no. I’d coming looking for my mother.
“You took my mother’s name,” I said dully, still trying to push through the shock of seeing her.
“I’m sorry, Marc. This, along with everything else, is going to hurt you. Your mother died. About seven years ago, of an overdose.”
There was no room in my skull for more pain or grief. My mother, for all intents and purposes, had been dead to me since she’d left me that last time. Left me for Florida. Surely, there was irony in there somewhere. I just couldn’t figure that out at the moment.
“You took her name,” I repeated dully, trying to form some pattern in her actions that made sense.
Leaving Evan made sense. Dying. Not telling me. That was a form of cruelty I didn’t think she was capable of.
“I thought maybe you would look for her. I told you that you needed to. For closure. But then you said it would never happen, and I believed you. I believed I would never see you again. You have to know how much that hurt me, but I had no choice.”
I let her words sift through my brain, trying to put the pieces together. I still couldn’t look at her. I couldn’t look at her face without hating her, and that was its own kind of pain. I’d wanted to see her, just one more time, for so long, so desperately.
“How long?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“How long had you planned all of this?” I asked, pointing in the direction of the bakery.
She sighed. “It’s a long story.”
“Got nowhere to be just now.”
“The night you got arrested back when I was in high school—”
“Prom night,” I said thickly.
“Prom night,” she repeated. “That night, my father was so enraged to see what I was wearing, knowing you were taking me, he hit me. He’d never done it before, and I think it shocked us both. He sent me to Arizona, and I thought, what if I don’t do what he told me? What if I went somewhere else, instead? So I went to San Diego. He had someone track me down. So easily. That’s what planted the seed. I knew if there ever came a time I had to run away, I had to be smarter. I started to plan. But you have to know that plan always included you, Marc.”
She touched my arm, and I flinched as if it physically hurt to be touched.
“Only I ran out of time,” she said softly.
“Why?”
“I’ll tell you that. I will. But I have to know first what your plans are.”
My plans? I shot up off the bench and started to pace. My plan was to take down Evan Sanderson for the murder of Ashleigh Landen. My plan was to destroy him and his whole damn world. This was my only mission in life, but now I knew he was innocent of all of it.
No, not quite all of it.
“Why couldn’t you just fucking divorce him?” I snapped.
She shook her head slowly. “I knew too much. If I threatened to leave him, if I told him I wanted out, he would have killed me. He was capable of it. I had to kill myself before I could let him do that. It was the only way.”
I closed my eyes and my head fell back. I wished I could call her a liar. I wished I could say it wasn’t true and she’d hurt us for nothing. But I knew she was right. Sanderson wouldn’t have hesitated to take her out if she became a problem for him.
“What did you know?”
She made a face. “He likes underage girls. He pays them for sex. Fifteen, fourteen years old. It doesn’t matter to him. He told me, when my father sold me to him to pay off his debt, he considered me first as a sex slave. But having a wife who couldn’t talk about his proclivities, as he called them, who made him look like a respectable politician, was even better. I was his long-term plan. He believed he owned me. There was no divorcing him. This was my only way out.”
“No, it wasn’t. You could have told me. You could have told George,” I insisted, looking at her now, sitting with her head down and her fingers linked together.
“George would have attempted to come after me. I couldn’t risk it. I couldn’t take any chances, and I can’t tell you why now, you just have to believe that there were bigger things at stake.”
I looked down at my hands. At the fingers and knuckles I’d broken slamming them, over and over again, into a concrete wall. Something, anything to pull the pain from the inside and put it on the outside.
“I have evidence,” she said.
“What?”
“I have proof of what he did. After we got back fr
om Las Vegas, when my father locked me in the house, I was able to remove the door handle on my door so I could get in and out when I needed. I got access to his computer in his study. I told you the password was most likely my mother’s birthday, and it was, but it was a convoluted order and used numbers for some characters. He’d documented everything. The money he borrowed from Evan to cover his investment losses, the clubs they used to frequent together. My father, it seemed, shared Even’s interest in young women. There were pictures.”
“You have all of that?”
She nodded. “It was my safety net. In case Evan found me. I also planted a nanny cam in his bedroom at the Harborview house. He spent most of his time in New York, but now that he’s running for senator, he’ll be in New Jersey more. I don’t see him changing his habits. If anything, he’ll need to be even more discreet. Fewer private clubs, more activity in places he can control.”
“You think someone running for senate is going to risk that by messing around with girls?”
She looked at me, and her face, her precious face, almost knocked the wind out of me again. “He’s a man who believes he can do anything. He thinks he’s impervious and in total control. The type of person who thought he could own me.”
“I want it. The evidence.”
She bit her bottom lip. “I don’t know.”
“Give it to me and I’ll take him down. He ended you. He took more than a year of my life. He took my future. I was going to destroy him because I thought he’d had you killed. But I’ve still got enough motivation to end this guy, now that your father…”
Shit. Did she even know?
“Now that my father what?”
“He’s dead, Ash. He killed himself. A couple months ago. Shot himself in the head.”
She let out a slow, deep breath. “Okay. He’s dead. Then that’s it.”
“It’s not it,” I said. “There were two of them. They did this to you. To me. Let me end it.”
She closed her eyes. “He’s so connected, Marc. So much money, so much power. If you don’t do this right, if you swing and miss, he’ll come after you.”
