Out of the Ashes

by Cynthia Reese

  Lack of sleep and her mom’s desperation fed the beginnings of a serious tension headache behind Kari’s eyes. The whine of the mixer wasn’t helping matters. Her mom was right about one thing, though. “Okay. You win. You’re right...they’d slap him behind bars quick as lightning. And I wouldn’t wish prison on my worst enemy.”

  Instantly her mom relaxed. She reached over and gave Kari a peck on the cheek. “Thank you, darling. I knew you of all people would understand. He just needs time, you know? He just needs to find...well, what you’ve found, with your baking. Something that he’s good at and enjoys, something that fulfills him.”

  With a fluff of her hair and a smoothing of her jacket, her mom was out the door, leaving Kari to ponder her mother’s words.

  Sure, Kari had her baking. She stared down at the fluffy peaks and valleys of the buttercream. On one level, tackling a project as ambitious as Mattie Gottman’s wedding cake did fulfill her, and she honestly hoped that Jake could find something like that.

  But...

  Inexplicably a sense of loneliness inundated Kari. Here she was, alone in her mother’s kitchen, talking to mixing bowls and spatulas instead of real people. Even in her old shop, she could go for hours without talking to anybody.

  Not always. Rob Monroe stops by a lot these days.

  The thought made her even lonelier. She hated the way she’d come to look forward to his calls and texts and even more to his visits and the time they spent together. She’d come to relish the prospect of seeing his goofy grin, how he seemed to know to give her space and wait for her to come to him.

  Once this case was over—even in the best-case scenario—he wouldn’t be coming around anymore. She couldn’t fool herself into thinking otherwise.

  And worst case? He was just stringing her along, giving her enough rope to hang herself.

  Or Jake.

  She shivered.

  She couldn’t let that happen.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ROB LINGERED OVER the boxed brownie mixes in the grocery store, turning first one and then another over in his hands.

  The brownies-in-the-box, he had to admit, were a stopgap measure for dealing with Kari withdrawal pains. Rob figured if he could treat himself to something sweet and chocolaty and fresh from the oven, maybe he wouldn’t be so tempted to drop by Kari’s mom’s.

  The aisle was thick with shoppers stopping by after work. Unlike him, they seemed to know exactly what they wanted. He started to ask one lady which brownie mix was the best, but she hurried off with what she needed before he could stop her.

  Just as he was about to give up and pick a box at random, a flurry of activity out of the corner of his eye attracted his attention.

  He turned and blinked in surprise. Was he missing Kari so much that he was seeing her wherever he turned? Kind of like a man dying of thirst in a desert stumbling toward a mirage of an oasis?

  But no. That blond curly ponytail did belong to Kari—she was feverishly scooping up every plastic bag of organic powdered sugar off the shelf.

  “Whoa. That’s a lot of sugar,” he commented. “Your dentist know about this?”

  Kari whirled around. He was gratified by the big smile that spread across her face and lit her eyes. “Hey, you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  Then her gaze fell on the box in his hand.

  “No, no, no,” she said firmly. She plucked the offending carton from his fingers and pushed it back on the shelf. “Honestly, it’s just butter, sugar, eggs, flour, cocoa and vanilla. You don’t even need a mixer. Pinky promise.”

  “But I’ve tried it,” he admitted. “I went home and went online and looked up a recipe, and it was awful.”

  Her blue gray eyes shone with compassion. “You tried to bake? From scratch?”

  “Proud of me?”

  “I am. But I’m sorry it didn’t go so well for you. I—” She looked down at the powdered sugar in her cart. “If I wasn’t neck deep in trying to rescue myself from Mattie Gottman’s wedding cake, I’d show you myself. Everybody needs to know how to cook brownies.”

  “How’s it coming? If you’re here and not in the kitchen, it must not be going well.”

  Kari put a palm to her forehead. “I realized that I’d miscalculated on how much icing I would need—plus Jake ate up half of the roses I’d made ahead of time, and I still have orchids and hydrangeas and calla lilies to make.”

  Something about her panicked desperation pulled at him. He found himself saying, “I don’t know much about decorating cakes, but Daniel says I’m a good gopher.”

  “Gopher?” Kari wrinkled her brow in puzzlement.

  “Yeah—I go for that, and I go for this.”

  She laughed. “At my house, we call that guy Stepin Fetchit.”

  Rob half expected her to say thanks, but no thanks—while the other half of him was wondering what had possessed him to volunteer to help. He couldn’t seem to resist, though. The truth was he missed her.

  “I’ll be your Mr. Fetchit,” he offered again.

  She seemed torn. He saw her buy time by grabbing yet another bag of sugar off the shelf, hold onto it longer than she needed to when she put it in the cart.

  “Okay,” Kari said finally. “My mom is having to work late to get through an audit at the medical office she works at, so I could really use a spare set of hands. But...can we not talk about the case? No questions about the fire? Either fire? And in exchange, once I get done with the cake, I’ll show you how to make my not-so-secret brownie recipe.”

  “You won’t have to kill me after you show me, will you?” Rob fell into step beside her as she headed for the checkout.

  “Nope. I’m not telling you all my secrets,” Kari joked. She must have realized what she’d said, because she bit her lip and looked away.

  Rob let it slide. He began tossing the packets of powdered sugar on the conveyor belt. “This all you need? Nothing else?”

  “Oh, two more experienced cake decorators to help me dig my way out of this hole would be nice.”

  “I think they’re on aisle four if you’d like me to go check.” He gave her a wink. “Then again, maybe I’m—”

  Just then, he looked past her. There, staring hard at the two of them, was Sam Franklin.

  The district attorney was standing just behind Kari, a loaf of bread and a jug of milk in his hands.

  “Mr. Franklin.” Rob stuck out a hand in greeting.

  Franklin gave him a sour smile. “Kind of got my hands full, Rob. I see you’re hard at work solving the downtown arson case.”

  Kari’s face turned as green as it had the day she’d caught her mother’s kitchen on fire. She pushed past Rob and snatched one of the bags of powdered sugar out of his hand. “Thank you for your help, Mr. Monroe,” she snapped. “I’ll take it from here.”

  Franklin smirked. “Looks like it’s my lucky day. Lane four just opened up with no waiting.”

  Kari didn’t watch him go, just ducked her head and shoved her credit card through the scanner. Rob found himself in a fast trot to keep up with her as she took off for her minivan.

  “Kari! Wait!”

  She spun around. “No, you wait. I thought you were genuinely offering to help, not spy on me.”

  “I wasn’t spying on you—”

  “Yeah? Tailing me to the baking aisle of the grocery store?”

  “I was here before you, thank you very much,” he pointed out. “Remember?”

  For a moment, she was completely flustered. She fumbled for the keys to her van, dropped them, and knelt down to scrabble for them on the pavement. Rob bent down beside her. His hands slid over the wayward keys, which he handed to her. “Here,” he said. “And I really was offering to help. Ma says you’ll never hear the end of it if you screw up Mattie Go
ttman’s cake. And believe me, I’m in a position to know. I dated her for all of thirty seconds about three years ago. My name’s still mud in the Gottman circle of associates. I can’t imagine why I rated an invite to the big day.”

  Kari unlocked the door and pulled it open. The ancient hinge squeaked in protest, and Rob could see that the worn fabric on the door’s liner had given way. Specks of orange-colored foam spilled out of the tattered upholstery.

  “I don’t know...” she said.

  “Do you or do you not need that help you were talking about?” he pressed.

  “Why do I think I’m going to regret this?”

  “Because I’m the world’s worst at frosting any sort of cake known to man.”

  Kari chuckled. “You think I’d let you anywhere near Mattie’s cake?”

  “There are dishes to be washed, right? And things to be handed? And I can hold a cup of water with a straw—you can prevent dehydrating that way.”

  “You are a goofball, aren’t you?” Now the hesitation and worry had evaporated from her eyes.

  “Hardly words to motivate me to help you—first, you call me a spy, and then a goofball.”

  “Maybe I should just quit while I’m ahead and call you a godsend.” She tossed the bags into the passenger seat. “Okay, you want it, you’ve got it. I hereby deputize you as my assistant cake decorator. Get ready for the crazies.”

  * * *

  IF DANIEL AND ANDREW could see me now.

  Rob was most certainly glad they couldn’t, not as he tried for the fourth time to imitate Kari’s deft moves with a stick and a pastry bag.

  “I give up,” he groaned. “My rose looks like a lump of modeling clay left in the dryer, and yours—well—yours—”

  Hers had taken all of sixty seconds to whip into shape. He couldn’t even follow her moves when she’d slowed it down.

  “No, no, don’t give up...you can do this, you’re getting the hang of it.” Kari closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. He could tell her tension was mounting, and that she was in an even deeper panic than she had been earlier at the grocery store.

  Otherwise, she’d never have taken the time to try to teach him how to create a rose out of the best frosting he’d ever tasted.

  They’d been at this for two hours. He admired her persistence, not to mention her patience with him as she taught him what to do.

  “How did you ever learn this?” he grumbled. “How were you ever brave enough to tackle the main event of somebody’s big day?”

  Kari stopped mid swirl of what she called the crumb coat. “I guess it was just being naive and maybe even a bit foolish? Maybe I just didn’t think through all the things that could possibly go wrong? At least, not until I stared down three large unfrosted layers and that doesn’t even touch the first time I delivered the cake to the site.”

  “But you’d been trained how to do it, right?” Rob prompted. “You worked at a bakery?”

  Suddenly she dissolved into giggles. “Yeah, but I was in my second week at the bakery when I did that first wedding cake. It was...oh, a nightmare. A disaster. I’d offered a—well, a friend that I would bake her wedding cake for her wedding present. She’d seen me do really simple birthday cakes, and she was always blown away by my designs.”

  “I’m thinking it was a little more involved.”

  Kari swiped at her eyes with her forearm, tears of mirth threatening to spill over onto her cheeks. “AJ would have been fine with just this really simple cake, right? But, no, I had to go all fancy on her, and I promised waaaay more than I could deliver. I had no idea how long any of it would take, no idea how much icing to make. I must have made three different batches of icing. I stayed up all night to bake that thing, and then I fell asleep in the wedding.”

  “You fell asleep?” Rob could imagine the scene. “Tell me you weren’t the maid of honor.”

  “Nope. You know, I’ve never been a maid of honor, or a bridesmaid for that matter. Girls come into my shop all the time fussing about what a bother it is, but I think it could be kind of fun.”

  Rob gave her a dubious look. “From the experience my sisters have had, I’d count yourself lucky. They must have been in a gajillion weddings by now.”

  Kari dragged her spatula through the cloud of white frosting and sighed wistfully. “I don’t know. It must be nice to have someone want you to be a part of your big day. How about you? Have you ever been a groomsman?”

  “Yep. I’ve been roped into wearing the old penguin suit more than once. I guess the guys have it easier than the girls.”

  “And...you said you’d never been married.”

  This, Rob noted with a prickle of awareness, was delivered with a studied casualness while Kari made a big deal of focusing on the icing. “I came close. Once. She was my high school sweetheart. We’d dated all through our junior and senior years, and everybody always assumed we’d get married eventually. I guess it finally hit her that I was really going to be a firefighter after she went off to college and I stayed behind to sign up for the academy. I think she was convinced Ma would talk me out of it.”

  “What’s so bad about being married to a firefighter? Didn’t she want her own personal hero? I mean, you came in handy the other day when I nearly burned the kitchen down.” She winked as she slathered on still more frosting.

  Rob paused. “Sheesh. People will die of a diabetic coma after one slice,” he observed. “That’s a lot of sugar.”

  “I know.” Kari grinned like a kid with her hand in the cookie jar. “But what’s a cake good for but gobs and gobs of frosting?”

  Rob chuckled. He admired how she’d managed to keep a positive attitude and her sense of humor through everything that had happened lately.

  Their laughter faded. “She really didn’t marry you just because you wanted to be a firefighter?” Kari asked.

  “Really. I can’t blame her. It’s a lot of stress, and for guys who aren’t used to it, it’s not much of a family life. You’re on a twenty-four-hour shift, then off for forty-eight. And that’s not counting the potential for...well, the worst that could happen.”

  “You’re thinking about your dad, I guess.”

  “Yeah. Well, no. I’m thinking about Ma. Dad was prepared. He knew the stakes going in. And Ma...she was the epitome of what it took to be a firefighter’s wife—cool and calm and unflappable. She just always concentrated on the positive and tried to remember that Dad was trained to do what he did. She wasn’t a drama queen about it. It was hard at the time, but I realized it was a good thing that Charlotte took a hard look at us and decided to pull the plug when she did. She said she couldn’t do it, couldn’t face it, which was fair enough. I respected her honesty.”

  “Still, like you said, it must have been hard.”

  “It stung at the time, but when I look back on it, I think I knew the way the wind was blowing long before we broke up.”

  “How was your mom? You know, when...the fire happened?” A shiver visibly ran through Kari’s slim shoulders.

  “While he was in the hospital, she was great. Pillar of strength. Never showed him how scared she was. But she’d come home to, you know, check on us, get fresh clothes, and I’d hear her crying her eyes out. And after Dad was killed, she was a wreck for a real long time.”

  “Fire ruins everything,” Kari muttered.

  Rob nodded. “Yes. You’re right about that.”

  * * *

  AN HOUR LATER, Kari was anything but quiet. She was freaking out over not having enough roses for the cascade. It seemed there was only so much frosting two people could do with a looming deadline.

  “There’s nobody else you can call? No 911 alert to fellow bakers? What about that friend of yours, Alice?” he asked, staring at the stick in his hand with its less-than-optimum rose. “I just don’t want to le
t you down, okay? I’m trying, but I don’t want to mess up this cake.”

  “You won’t. You won’t. You’re doing great. Besides, let’s face it, I can’t afford to lose you now. And Alice, she’d be glad to help out, but she lives two hours away. So it looks like it’s just you and me.” Kari laid her tools aside and put her hands over his. Her fingers were so incredibly tiny compared to his. She smiled up at him. “Let’s try it this way. Maybe I can show you another way to do it.”

  Together, they worked through the making of a buttercream rose. At first, all Rob could think about was how good her fingers felt on his, how close she was to him. He wanted to kiss the worry that was etched into her face, tell her it was all going to be okay—but it wouldn’t. Not unless some fairy godmother with a magic wand that spat out buttercream roses came and bopped him over the head.

  And then suddenly he got it. Rob beamed at her.

  “Look at you. And you said you weren’t a Mr. Fix-It. You’re very good with your hands,” she said primly.

  What he wanted to do with his hands was sweep her up and kiss her senseless—but first he had to help her make about a jillion roses.

  They worked until his hands screamed in agony. “Okay, I think that’s enough roses for now...” she said. “I’ve got to get started decorating the cake proper. She wants Swiss dots and scrolled Cornelli icing on alternating layers—I can teach you that pretty quick—don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be perfect.”

  At 9:00 p.m., when Chelle Hendrix came in with bags of fast food, Rob could have hugged the woman. How he could be starving in the middle of all this frosting and cake, he couldn’t figure out.