Kneaded to Death

by Winnie Archer

  My cell phone ringing made me jump. Agatha yelped, and together we hightailed it to the sidewalk.

  Olaya Solis’s voice filled my ear. “Dónde estás, m’ija?”

  I had a basic knowledge of Spanish, thanks to high school, college, and a childhood spent in California. “On Maple Street,” I answered, smiling inside that Olaya didn’t feel the need to make small talk or offer pleasantries. It was like we were family . . . or old friends. We were neither, but I had the feeling we’d get there sooner rather than later.

  “Qué bueno! Great minds,” she said.

  “Oh?”

  “I am also on Maple Street. Come join me.”

  I spun around, looking up and down the street, thinking she might materialize right in front of me. “You’re here? Where? Why?” I asked.

  “Aquí, Ivy, aquí!”

  I heard her voice calling me and turned to follow the sound. Finally, I spotted her. She waved her hands over her head. “I am here!”

  My jaw dropped. She stood on the front porch of the Tudor house I’d instantly fallen in love with just hours before. I checked the street for cars. The coast was clear, so I jogged across the street, Agatha keeping pace with me. “Is this your house?” I asked as I slowed to a walk on the cobbled path and joined her on the stone porch.

  “No, no,” she said. Her smile didn’t reach her glassy eyes. “This is . . . was . . . Jackie’s house.”

  I hadn’t been expecting that, and a new wave of sadness washed over me. It was easy to see a person who’d died as simply gone. I hadn’t even known Jackie Makers, and her horrible demise had shaken me. But at this moment, she became more to me than just a woman I’d briefly met who died. Looking around and into the house, I began crafting together the life she had lived. She’d picked out the furniture. She’d created this space. She’d had a daughter and friends and a job and enemies and people who felt hollow inside with the loss of her.

  Jackie Makers suddenly became 1000 percent real to me, and I ached inside for Olaya. I knew what she was going through. I knew firsthand the emptiness she felt. I knew, and it made my own ache grow even stronger.

  Olaya opened the door for me to follow her in, but I stopped, pointing to Agatha.

  “What a sweet baby!” She crouched down and used the pads of her fingers to scratch Agatha’s compact little head. Looking up at me, she asked, “Is she housebroken?”

  “Completely.” It had taken a good year or more for Agatha to realize that I wasn’t going to abuse her. When she crossed that hurdle, she also figured out that outside was the place for pottying. It had been a tough year for both of us, but now I couldn’t imagine my world without her.

  “Come on, then,” Olaya said, stepping aside for us to enter.

  Olaya followed me and Agatha in. I gazed at the arched doorway as I passed through. I hadn’t even seen the inside yet, but something about the house filled me with warmth and comfort.

  “The police have finished their search,” she said, answering the unspoken question in my mind as to why she was here. “Jasmine finally called. Said she wanted to start sorting through her mother’s stuff and asked if I’d help.”

  “So here you are.”

  “Here I am.” Her voice cracked with emotion, and her chin quivered. She swallowed hard. “It feels too soon. I cannot understand. She is gone, and Jasmine wants to forget.”

  “People grieve differently,” I said, laying my hand on her arm in comfort. “Can I help?”

  She let herself smile slightly. “Just what I was hoping you would say.”

  “You’re boxing things?”

  “Jasmine wants to sell the house.” She gave me a quick tour. The master bedroom had French doors leading to the immaculate backyard. Jackie had had a knack for gardening. Flowers bloomed in abundance, and it was more of an oasis than any backyard I’d ever seen. The room itself was a pale, warm yellow and had the same arches and architectural details as the front entry.

  There were two other bedrooms, a living room, and a small informal family room off the kitchen. The garage, also off the kitchen, housed two cars.

  “The police towed Jackie’s car back here,” Olaya said. “The other one is Jasmine’s old one. There are a few dents. Some chipped paint. I guess we will get them fixed and sell them, also.”

  “What room are you starting with?” I asked as we came back in from the garage.

  “The kitchen. Jackie loved to cook. I’m the baker, but if I brought her a chicken and some vegetables, she could whip up a gourmet meal.” She ran her fingers under her damp eyes. “Chicken and dumplings. That was her specialty.”

  The kitchen had a brick arch over the stove, with a window behind it overlooking the front yard. An island in the middle with bar stools gave it a homey look, and the pale yellow cupboards were the perfect complement to the honey-colored wood floors. An empty pink bakery box with cupcake remnants was open on the counter. Fruit flies buzzed around the rotting bananas and apples in a three-tiered rack. It was a beautiful kitchen.

  “My mom loved to cook, but she always said we could and should hone our skills. ‘There’s nothing worse than growing old and growing lazy,’” I said, quoting her when a memory spirited into my consciousness. “She and my dad were taking lessons together. She had decided that he should finally learn to cook like a Food Network chef.”

  It was as if my mom had had a premonition, I realized. Maybe not that she was going to die, but that for whatever reason, my dad should learn to cook for himself.

  Olaya’s brows tugged together. “Did she? I wonder . . .”

  I pushed the emotions of my mother’s sixth sense away. “Wonder what?”

  “Jackie ran a cooking school. Well Done. It’s a little kitchen over on Bissonet Street. Is that where your mom and dad took their classes?”

  Well Done. I repeated the name of the cooking school in my head. It didn’t ring a bell, but then again my mother might never have mentioned the name of the actual business. “That would be a small world, wouldn’t it?” Another way Olaya and I were connected, even if that particular thread was tenuous.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. Jackie’s was the best cooking school in Santa Sofia. There was competition for a while. What was that place called?” She tapped her chin with one finger, thinking. “Divine Cuisine, I think. Anyway, it went out of business, and Well Done had a corner on the market. Now I guess I’m it for cooking classes in town.”

  “Why did she take baking classes from you if she ran a school of her own?”

  Olaya took a cookbook from one of the two black baker’s rack shelves and flipped through it. It was based on the blog Smitten Kitchen. I’d read posts by Deb Perelman and drooled over the photos of her recipes. If Jackie had used all these cookbooks in her cooking school, no wonder it had been so successful.

  Except, of course, that she’d been killed. Viciously murdered. Could her death have had anything to do with her school? I guessed there was no way to know the answer to that.

  It was so tragic that Santa Sofia had lost two successful, smart, and accomplished women in Jackie Makers and my mother, Anna Culpepper, in just six short months.

  “When you think of chefs,” Olaya said, “they tend to specialize in something. Perhaps one is a saucier or a pantry chef or, like me, a pastry chef. Even I specialize within the realm of baking. Bread is my passion, although I am perfectly skilled at producing sublime cookies and cakes and pies and anything else dessert related. Jackie was trained at the Culinary Institute in the Napa Valley. She was a personal chef for many years. She took the required pastry classes, of course, but that was never her specialty. But when she opened up her business, she wanted to incorporate pastry and bread components into her sessions.”

  “But didn’t that conflict with your classes?”

  Olaya waved away the question. “Not one bit. What I do is magical. People like Becky and Sally may learn the fundamentals of baking, but they will never come away with the deeper understanding of how bread c
an change lives. You, on the other hand . . . There is something about you that makes me think you have something different inside you. Maybe because your mother taught you to cook. Or maybe because you see things through the lens of a camera. You see the details. The creativity that exists in baking. The cracks in the crust. The texture of the dough. The final crumb.

  “These are things that can be taught, but you, I think, already possess them. Jolie shows promise. So does Jasmine, but then her mother was gifted, so that makes good sense. My sisters, of course, have it, although not to the degree that I do. Penelope Branford.” Olaya drew in a deep breath and held it for a moment, as if she was deciding how kind to be about Mrs. Branford. “She has it.”

  She paused for a second, letting her angst about Mrs. Branford slip back into a corner of her mind before she continued. “Jackie didn’t want to delve into baking bread like I do. She wanted to master her own skills so she could incorporate a bit of baking into her school and her catering business.”

  From the way Olaya spoke, I could tell there had been no competition between the two friends. People killed for all sorts of irrational reasons. A business rivalry wasn’t too far-fetched as a motive. Emmaline telling me that the Solis sisters were suspects had never left my mind, so to hear Olaya dismiss any conflict was a relief for a worry I hadn’t known I’d been feeling.

  Once Olaya found a soft blanket for Agatha, my little pug promptly went to sleep. She and I then worked in companionable silence, starting with Jackie’s cookbooks. I handed them to Olaya, and she perused them and then placed them into one of two piles: books to keep and books to donate.

  “Jasmine doesn’t want to go through them?” I asked after a few minutes. My brother, Billy, my dad, and I still hadn’t gone through my mom’s things. It was too emotional of a job, and we’d been putting it off. It was a step we needed to take, a step Jasmine Makers was taking already. If we followed suit, then maybe we could start to heal and accept my mother’s death.

  But it wasn’t healing that Jasmine was doing, apparently.

  Olaya said, “She’s eighteen. She’s holding on to her grudge. She won’t have anything to do with any of this. She just wants it done.”

  How could she hang on to her anger? I wondered. What was her anger even about? Her mother was gone. For good. The complicated relationship my mother and I had had—that any mother and daughter had—had evaporated into simple grief when she died. It was a loss I could never fully accept. It had happened too quickly. Too unexpectedly. In the end, none of the rest of our ups and downs or disagreements mattered. I couldn’t understand Jasmine’s distance.

  “So she’s leaving it for you to do?”

  Olaya nodded as she picked up a copy of Joy of Cooking. “I don’t mind,” she said. “We were friends for thirty years. She was with me through so much.”

  “Through losing James?” I asked, testing the waters.

  Olaya’s head snapped up. “That and more.”

  She handed me Joy of Cooking. “This is a keeper,” she said.

  “For Jasmine?”

  “For me. Jasmine doesn’t want to keep anything. Nada.”

  One by one, we went through the shelves of cookbooks. Olaya had commentary on about half of them, and she kept that many in her keeper pile.

  “Tell me about James,” I said to her after another stretch of silence.

  She raised an eyebrow and shot me a suspicious glance. “Why?”

  I shrugged. “Just curious. Was there never anyone else . . . after?”

  Olaya picked up the next cookbook, this one a tome on vegetarian cooking. “Love is love. Sometimes things are not meant to be, that is all. I never wanted anyone else.”

  “But don’t you think there’s more than one person we can fall in love with?” I asked. An image of Miguel Baptista came to me. He was my first love, but I’d been in relationships since. I’d been married and divorced, but I didn’t want to believe that my relationship failures were because Miguel was my one and only.

  “For most people, yes,” she said, sensing my disappointment. “It was simply not in the cards for me.”

  “He was older than you?”

  She straightened up. “You remember everything, yes?”

  I nodded, smiling. I was blessed with a good memory.

  “The years, I am afraid, were significant.”

  They were, I agreed, but if I was right, it was more significant that he was married. “Is that why it didn’t work out?” I was fishing, searching for confirmation that the love of Olaya Solis’s life was also Penelope Branford’s deceased husband, but Olaya waved her hand in the air, and it was clear she’d decided she was done talking about her past relationships.

  “Would you go through the papers in this? Make sure there is nothing important stuck in there?” she asked me, handing me a file folder filled with recipes that looked as if they’d been printed from the Internet.

  I sat on a backless wooden stool at the kitchen’s center island. The island itself was painted a warm olive gray-green and had open shelving on either end. Coffee cups and a few decorative cookbooks adorned the shelves. The dark wood of the island countertop was pristine. The buttery white of the cabinets, complemented by wrought-iron hardware, and the dark wood frames of the leaded windows gave the kitchen an old-world feel reminiscent of the 1920s or 1930s. I glanced at the wrought-iron light fixture above the island. It was a horizontal circle with six yellow glass tubes affixed to it. They mimicked the look of candlelight. The light fixture illuminated the exposed dark beams on the peaked ceiling above. The kitchen was a place I never wanted to leave. Cooking here would be a dream.

  I opened the file folder and flipped through the pages one by one. I read recipe after recipe, observing the notes written in neat script in the margins. Measurements had been crossed out and adjusted. Cooking times had been changed. Wine pairings had been added. Jackie Makers was thorough and looked at every aspect of her cooking, I thought.

  The last few pages in the folder were not recipes. I started skimming the first page, then paused and started again, this time reading more slowly. It was a photocopy of an essay, typed and double-spaced, but there was no name on it, and no title, date, or other identifying information. Those had all been removed before the copy made. Still, I felt sure it was a high school paper. The prompt was written on a sticky note, which was paper clipped to the top of the page.

  Write a story about a time when you taught something to someone. What you taught could be a song, an activity, a game, a way of figuring out a homework problem, or something else. Be sure to narrate an event or a series of events and to include specific details so that the reader can follow your story.

  I read the prompt, then went back to the essay, all the while wondering why it was here in Jackie’s recipe folder. The essay itself was decent, well written, even if it didn’t quite address the prompt. The author had written about teaching a lesson rather than a skill, song, or activity. It felt cryptic somehow, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on why or how. The whole thing was about choices and how one decision could impact that person’s life, as well as the lives of others. There were a few comments written in the margins. Things like More detail needed. What is the lesson, specifically? This touches the surface; go deeper. And How do you factor into this lesson?

  I left the folder on the counter and went back to the cookbook shelf Olaya was still going through. “I don’t think anything much in the folder is worth saving. They’re all recipes and nothing original of Jackie’s,” I said. “But,” I added, “I did find this.” I handed her the essay.

  She put down the book she’d been perusing and scanned the page. She frowned and uttered a puzzled “Huh.”

  “There’s no name on it.”

  She tucked it into the oversize brown leather bag that was on the floor next to her. “I’ll ask Jasmine about it. Must be hers.”

  I nodded. Of course. That made perfect sense. Jackie would keep her daughter’s essay. Odd t
hat it was randomly tucked into the file folder of recipes, but I often stuck things somewhere convenient rather than taking the time to put them away where they belonged. It was a bad habit and one my mother had tried to break me of. To no avail. Her propensity for organization hadn’t been passed on to me. She’d organized every bit of her classroom and every corner of the house she shared with my dad. She knew where everything was, and she had a firm philosophy about loose papers and random stuff. File it, deal with it, or toss it. If you couldn’t do one of those three things, your life would end up in disarray. It was true; I was living proof. I had stacks of bills and papers that stymied me. I didn’t know where to begin, and so I did nothing, and the stacks grew until I was forced to tackle them in their entirety. My mother had tried to teach me, but my brain didn’t work that way.

  Maybe Jackie’s hadn’t, either.

  Olaya and I spent another twenty minutes finishing the cookbooks and were just ready to move on to the first cupboard when a knock came at the front door. Olaya peered through the kitchen window, then quickly withdrew so she wouldn’t be seen. I leaned over her and saw Penny Branford.

  “What does she want?” Olaya demanded, as if I had invited Mrs. Branford and was personally responsible for the fact that she was now standing, stoop shouldered, on the old brick porch.

  I shrugged helplessly. I liked both of these women, but it seemed evident that they were never going to like each other. I couldn’t choose between them, but somehow I got the impression that this was what Olaya wanted. “I’ll go see.”

  A minute later, I walked back into the kitchen. Mrs. Branford sauntered in behind me, the hook of her cane looped over her wrist.