The Walking Bread

by Winnie Archer

  She faced the display cases, pressing her hands to the top and stretching her arms out, hanging her head. “Pero it was not Vicente. I promise you that.”

  Olaya spoke to her sister in Spanish. Consuelo joined in, and before long the three sisters were wrapped up in a conversation I couldn’t follow.

  Miguel leaned toward me. “They’re trying to convince her to call Vicente,” he translated. “She’s afraid.”

  I didn’t blame her, but I had to believe that Martina wouldn’t fall for a killer. She was a better judge of character than that. Martina had sunk down at the table again, her head in her hands. Olaya came to stand beside her. She put her hand on her sister’s back, lightly rubbing it. “Hermana, he is a good man. Not capable of murder. If he can help find who is, then . . .”

  She let the words hover in the air, let them sink into her sister. “Claro. He is a good man,” Martina said. “He did not do this thing.”

  “Call him,” Olaya urged. “Help Ivy.”

  Martina pushed herself upright and moved back to the table, digging her phone from her purse. After a few taps on the screen with the pad of her index finger, she held the phone to her ear.

  I held my breath, hopeful that our luck was finally going to change. Vicente could fill in the blanks and tell us whatever Mr. Wellborn had left out of the story.

  But Martina pulled the phone away from her ear. Her shoulders drooped, and she hung her head. “Nada.”

  No answer.

  I tried to keep my expression even, to not betray my frustration. The walls of the bread shop seemed to close in around me. I felt like Alice in Wonderland as she shrinks, growing smaller and smaller, the room growing bigger and bigger, the walls distorting. I couldn’t breathe. My lungs seized.

  Olaya left Martina’s side and came to stand beside me. “Está bien?” she asked. I nodded, but Olaya didn’t believe it. She disappeared behind the counter, bent to pull something from one of the display cases, slipped it into a bag, and handed it to me. “For later,” she said. “Trust and believe, yes? Ivy, trust and believe.”

  Chapter 19

  Vanessa arrived at my house the next morning at nine o’clock on the dot. I opened the door to her, greeting her with a friendly smile, but the moment she laid eyes on me, her jaw dropped. “You?”

  I smiled sheepishly. “After meeting you, I found myself wondering if I needed a spiritual advisor, and since you’re the only one I know of . . .”

  She looked more like I imagined a spiritual advisor might look this time around. Standing in the threshold of my doorway, she looked positively New Age. Her blond hair was pulled back into a loose bun, wavy strands haphazardly framing her face. Her long skirt dusted the ground, and her dangling bracelets and beaded necklace gave her the look of a fortune-teller.

  “You’re not really a friend of Max’s, are you?” she asked.

  “Not exactly, no,” I said.

  She started to back away, but I stretched my arm out, taking her hand in mine. “Vanessa, wait. Please.”

  She turned. “You don’t really need a spiritual advisor—or a life coach. So what do you want? Why did you call me here?”

  I could lie to her again, but I found that I didn’t want to. “I need to find out what happened to Max,” I said.

  “But you just said you weren’t friends.”

  “He had a big impact on my life,” I said. It was cryptic, but I couldn’t give her more than that. As much as I wanted it to be true, I didn’t peg her as a killer. Worst case, I was wrong and had put myself in danger by having her come to my home. Best case, she had some information that would help me.

  “He had that effect on a lot of people,” she said, her voice almost reverent.

  “I didn’t think you’d come if you knew I was the same person who’d shown up at Max’s door—”

  “You’d have been right,” she said, but her voice wasn’t cutting like Mrs. Wellborn’s had been. “I’ll ask you again, why did you call me here?”

  “The idea of a life coach is kind of intriguing. Everyone could use one, right?”

  She finally managed a little smile. “In my opinion? Yes.”

  Agatha had been behind me, but scooted into view as I held the door open. I was hoping Vanessa would come in instead of going back to her car. She hesitated, but then she saw Agatha, gave a smile that reached her eyes, and stepped inside. I ushered her out to the back patio, Agatha in tow, brought out a pitcher of iced tea, and we settled in on the Adirondack chairs.

  We sat in silence for a few minutes, sipping our tea and breathing in the spring air. I waited, sure she’d break the silence before long. After another long minute, she put her glass down. “Tell me about your relationship with Max,” she said.

  I managed a light laugh. “Where to start? He’s a Santa Sofia icon. I can’t really think of a time when I wasn’t at least aware of him.”

  She interlaced her fingers, holding her clasped hands under her chin. “And did you like him?”

  “I can’t say that I knew him well enough to say whether I liked him or not as a person.”

  “Fair enough,” she said. “Let me put it a different way. What was your general impression of him?”

  I hesitated, not wanting to speak ill of the dead, and not wanting to reveal the depth of my animosity toward Max. He’d worked so hard to thwart Billy’s success and had cheated people out of their hard-earned money. Finding anything positive to say was a huge stretch.

  She gave her head a slight shake and waved one hand to stop me. “Clearly your impression wasn’t good. I get it, but I want you to know, he was trying to change. He wanted to make amends to the people he’d hurt. It was an active pursuit, actually.”

  “What, like a twelve-step program?”

  “Exactly like that. Max’s life was hollow. A vacuous existence, if you will. He wanted more.”

  I’d often thought about how sad his life seemed. No partner. No children. No one to come home to at the end of the day. But what facilitated his desire to change? I thought about the old dog, new tricks maxim. It was true. While he hadn’t spied on Billy’s art car this year, the condo scam had been a relatively recent act. I had to wonder if his so-called desire to change his ways was more about having Vanessa Rose in his life than actually recalibrating the way he lived his own.

  “If you weren’t friends, why are you so interested in Max?” she asked, reaching down beside her to scratch Agatha’s head. After a minute, Agatha laid down beside Vanessa’s chair. A few seconds later, her steady snore filtered up to us.

  I saw no reason to keep the truth from her. “You know the art car competition?”

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “My brother and Max have been what you might call art car rivals pretty much forever.”

  She started. “Your brother? You mean Billy Culpepper?”

  Now I sat up. “Did Max mention him?”

  “A better question would be when did he not mention him? Your brother was like Max’s lifeline in a lot of ways. He never told me his last name, so I didn’t put you together with him.”

  I glossed over the revelation that Max had Billy at the forefront of his mind, instead zeroing in on the other part of what she’d said. “What does that mean, that Billy was his lifeline?”

  “Everyone has a lifeline. A person who pushes them, who creates a situation or situations that allow one to become a better—or sometimes worse—version of him or herself. It’s a yin-yang. Balance, although often the balance is uneven. Conflict is everywhere, but the challenges we face are the things that define us. It’s not really about the conflicts themselves, it about how we respond to them.”

  “There was definitely conflict between them, but how was that a lifeline?”

  “Max hit a breaking point recently. A defining moment, if you will. He had gotten to the point where he couldn’t look himself in the mirror. Couldn’t stand some of the things he’d done, and was continuing to do, to the people around him. Your brother epitomize
d that breaking point, but it was also his lifeline. If he could make amends with Billy, he could forgive himself.”

  The shock must have shown on my face. “Are you being serious right now?” I asked. I was having a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that maybe Max Litman wasn’t as bad as I’d made him out to be in my head. Or at least that he had been trying not to be.

  “Completely. He was battling demons. He wanted to reach out, but making peace with Billy was his most difficult obstacle. He apologized to others, but it didn’t always go well. You are not the only skeptical one in Santa Sofia,” she said, acknowledging my feelings. She was good. “He felt that what he’d done to your brother was somehow worse than the injury to those he’d taken money from. If those people rebuked him, he was afraid Billy would, too.”

  I had no idea how Billy would have responded had Max offered him an olive branch. I liked to think that our parents raised us with the capacity to forgive, but Max had done a good number on Billy. That chasm ran pretty deep. I also wasn’t sure I completely bought the story Vanessa was weaving.

  The ocean breeze picked up, bringing a chill to the air. Vanessa crossed one side of the lightweight sweater she wore over the other. “I know what you’re thinking,” she said.

  “Do you?” I asked.

  “You’re wondering if Max turning over a new leaf was just pretense. A means to some other end.”

  God, she wasn’t good, she was great. “Did you know that he spied on my brother every single year just so he could win the Art Car Show?”

  She blinked slowly as she nodded. “That was one of his first confessions to me.”

  “It’s not life and death. Billy and I, we get that. But Max was underhanded and dishonest, and he cheated every single year. He didn’t care how he won, only that he did.”

  We fell silent for a moment. I stared at the sky while Vanessa closed her eyes, her hands intertwined, and her index fingers steepled and pressed to her lips. “He was on a spiritual walk, Ms. Culpepper,” she said.

  My skepticism flared. “What does that mean? He found God? He was born again?”

  “That is what it means for some,” she said. “For Max it mostly meant he realized that he was walking a path that teetered between right and wrong—”

  “He was walking a path that was firmly wrong,” I corrected.

  She dipped her chin, which I interpreted as a concession. “I was helping him build his spiritual foundation.” Tears pooled in her eyes. Real emotion. “I got to know the real Max Litman.”

  After seeing her at Max’s house, I’d entertained the idea that she’d been after his money—more gold digger than advisor—but maybe I’d pegged her all wrong. She dragged her fingers under her eyes, whisking away her tears. “He was a good man. He really was. He just didn’t let people see it. I helped him appreciate that there is a power that’s greater than man’s. Greater than his could ever be. That money and winning, in whatever way he sought those things, could never give him power that would be peaceful—power with no strings attached.”

  Vanessa’s manner was calm. Accessible. I waited, letting her gather her thoughts and continue.

  “He had to understand that his way of life was poisonous, not just to others, but to himself. He had to dig deep. To take stock and find his moral and ethical deficits. Part of that process is confessing these failings to someone else. He did that with me. I saw him when he was most vulnerable. When he thought there was no chance of redemption. And then I held his hand and we prayed together.”

  “He told you he swindled people out of their life savings?” Ten that I knew of with the condo deal, but I had no doubt that there were others.

  “He was trying to make that right,” she said. “He had every intention of paying that money back to each one of those people. He was walking a spiritual path.”

  Again, doubt crept in. Did he really want to make it right, or was that just something he’d said to win her trust? What if Vanessa Rose was just a conquest for Max? “Do you know who they are? The people he swindled?”

  Her response was a slow shake of her head. “I don’t ask specific details like that.”

  “But he told you Billy’s name.”

  “As I said, Billy was the lifeline.”

  I leaned my head back against the hard back of the chair, cursing under my breath.

  She angled her body toward me. “You came to Max’s house. You brought me here. What are you hoping to gain or understand?”

  “He’s dead, and the sheriff has Billy pegged as the murderer. I’m trying to find out what really happened. You were trying to free Max. Well, I’m trying to free Billy.”

  She gave me that slow blink again. “I wish I could help you, Ivy,” she said. “I really do. Please believe me when I tell you that Max really was regretful.”

  I wanted to believe her, but I wasn’t sure if I did.

  Chapter 20

  The lemon-thyme bread Olaya had given me the day before melted in my mouth, but it didn’t instantly fill me with renewed hope. I did, however, have the strong impulse to act. Maybe her intention had not been for me to simply maintain my belief that Billy would be okay, but believe it enough to get out there and fight.

  So fight I would.

  Miguel was at the restaurant. It could run without him, but only for so long. Olaya couldn’t leave the bread shop. What I had in mind might require some stealthy sneaking around, so I opted not to risk Mrs. Branford’s hips. I even considered summoning my dad as my sidekick, but in the end, it came down to either Billy or Emmaline.

  I knew Em would want to be there, but I decided I needed Billy by my side for this particular adventure. Thirty minutes after I’d eaten the last of the lemon-thyme bread, I pulled up in front of Ruby’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor, the same place I’d gone with my dad. I saw Billy from half a block away, ball cap pulled low over his eyes as if he were hiding. The slump of his shoulders and the depth of his hands in his pockets betrayed his emotions.

  I pressed the heel of my palm to the center of my steering wheel, giving the horn three sharp blows. He jerked his head up at the sound. Once he saw me, he turned sideways so he could squeeze between two cars angled into tight parking spaces. He had the passenger door of my car open and had maneuvered himself into the seat before I’d rolled to a stop. Saying he was worse for wear would be an understatement. His six o’clock shadow was going on three days now, and his cheeks and raccoon eyes made him look gaunt. A little feral, truth be told.

  “I thought the focus was going to be on these investors,” he said, looking straight ahead as I started to drive again.

  The investors in Max’s condo fail were still at the top of my list, but what if it wasn’t one of them? Losing money—even hundreds of thousands—didn’t automatically make someone a murderer, so I couldn’t just stop digging. “It is,” I said, “but we don’t even know who they are and I can’t sit around just twirling my thumbs.”

  “Me either,” he said.

  He was telling the truth, but his agitation ran deeper than mine. Innocent people were often found guilty of a crime, and those convictions weren’t often overturned. Billy was thinking of the life he was on the verge of losing. Even in death, Max Litman had succeeded in taking him down.

  “Who else had a motive?” he asked.

  I’d thought long and hard on this question—and I’d come up with a new possibility. “Mr. Zavila,” I said.

  Silence hung between us for a long few seconds. Finally, Billy shook his head. “Why would he kill Max? He was his informant.”

  “I know, but what if something had turned sour between them? It seems like Max did a lot of people wrong. What if Mr. Zavila was one of them?”

  Billy stroked his chin, considering the question. “I guess it’s possible,” he finally said.

  “Anything’s possible when it comes to murder.” It sounded like a hollow platitude, but since returning to Santa Sofia, it was one thing I’d learned with utter certainty.
r />   “So, what, we’re just going to barge in and grill him about Max?”

  “Absolutely. We can play it casual, like he did all those times he came sniffing around to check out your art car. Tit for tat,” I said.

  Billy side-eyed me. “I’m glad you’re on my side.”

  My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Always.”

  We drove in silence until we reached Santa Sofia High School. School was over for the day so there was only a spattering of cars in the student parking lot. From the looks of it, quite a bit of the faculty had left for the day, but I remembered Mr. Zavila usually staying late when I’d been in school; I figured there was a good chance he was still on campus.

  I parked off in one of the side student parking lots, as far as possible from the staff lot. Neither Billy nor I wanted to come up close to the spot where our mother had died in a hit and run. Being on campus was close enough, and we didn’t relish even that. Our dad still hadn’t been able to set foot on the school grounds. Aunt Josie, who was not really our aunt, but had been our mom’s best friend for as long as we could remember, taught history here. She, Billy, and I had packed up our mom’s classroom. I’d seen her a few times since then, but always on neutral ground, someplace away from the school. Josie couldn’t avoid it, so she’d figured out how to come to terms with being here day in and day out. I was getting there, and so was Billy. I’d been thinking about how to help our dad; a tribute of some sort was the obvious choice. Maybe a plaque or a bench placed under a tree on campus. But lately I’d been thinking that a college scholarship in her name was the thing to do. It would honor her and her love of books, writing, and education in general. I hadn’t figured out how to fund it on an ongoing basis, but it was always in the back of my mind.

  Security at the school was much tighter than it had been when Billy and I were students, but our mother had taught here for years and years. We were known by most of the teachers. If we were lucky, someone we knew would be able to let us in. Billy and I strode across the parking lot and circled to the front entrance, but it was locked up tight. We peered through the glass of the front doors. Not a soul in sight. So much for luck.