Kneaded to Death

by Winnie Archer

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Nanette said under her breath beside me.

  “What?” I had heard her perfectly well but wanted to see if I could get her talking.

  She kept her voice low so only I could hear. “That woman is a busybody. Always in other people’s business. She’s too old to get a life, but she needs one.”

  “She seems nice to me.” It was an understatement, but I was playing a role. My hackles were up, and I wanted to defend Mrs. Branford. From what I’d already seen, Nanette Masterson was the one in everybody’s business. In Jackie Makers’s, anyway.

  “Don’t let the sweet old lady performance fool you. It’s just that, a performance. She’s . . .” She looked around to make sure no one was listening and then dropped her voice a bit more. “She’s diabolical. She’s turned the Historic Landmark Commission against my husband and me. We are looking out for our entire district. For all the home owners. For everyone! But that’s not good enough. No, the HLC has called us out. Like we’re the bad guys. She’s almost as bad as Jackie was. The two of them have been thorns in our sides for as long as I can remember.”

  I couldn’t believe she’d opened the door for me by bringing up Jackie Makers. I feigned disbelief. “Really? That’s awful.”

  “This one?” She held her thumb up like she was hitchhiking and directed it at Mrs. Branford. “She’s underhanded.”

  I had kept tabs on the other women in the class, noting that they had all left their bread to rise and had gone to wash their hands at the sink in the back corner of the kitchen. Nanette Masterson and I were alone.

  “But why would she want to get you in trouble with the HLC?”

  Nanette threw her flour- and dough-covered hands up. “Good question.”

  “How do you know it was Mrs. Branford? Maybe it was Ms. Makers?”

  She hesitated. “I think it was both of them. My husband? He confronted Jackie the day she died. Told her to back the hell off and leave us alone. Do you know what she said?”

  I shook my head, holding my breath, afraid that the slightest move or sound would wake her up and make her realize the extent to which she was spilling the beans.

  “That we deserved her wrath. She actually used that word. Wrath. Well, someone got wise to her and gave her a dose of their wrath.” She blinked, and her eyes suddenly grew wide. Realization had hit, and suddenly she was backtracking. “Not that I’m glad she was murdered,” she quickly said. “Oh my, no. And not that we had anything to do with it. Buck—that’s my husband—he told me Jackie wasn’t feeling too well, so he just up and left. Told her he’d talk to her about their issues some other day.”

  “So he left her in the car?”

  “She was alive when he left—” She stopped, eyeing me sharply. “I didn’t say they met in a car.”

  Shoot. I kicked myself for revealing that tidbit. “Oh, it was just a guess. Jackie said she had been at her own class, then had rushed over here. When you said they talked before she died, I assumed you meant right before she died.”

  She still looked suspicious, but she relaxed slightly. “She was alive when he left her,” she repeated, as if saying it enough times would make people believe it was true.

  “Did you tell the police? It could help them with the investigation.”

  She grimaced. “Yeah, by giving them a suspect with motive and opportunity. We’re not fools, Ms. Culpepper.”

  “Don’t you think they’ll find out?”

  “Why? Are you going to tell them? What’s any of it to you?” She sounded harsh, but it was an act. I could see the fear in her eyes. She didn’t know me from Adam, and yet she’d just handed me a suspect and motive for the murder of Jackie Makers. I couldn’t help but rationalize that if Buck Masterson was involved, then my earlier thought that my mother’s and Jackie’s death were somehow related had simply been a case of my imagination getting the better of me.

  “I was just making conversation, Mrs. Masterson. Don’t worry about me.” It was an outright lie, but what could I say? Emmaline’s warning that Buck and Nanette might be the killers, and that if they were, they’d be willing to kill again to stop the truth from coming to light, surfaced front and center in my mind. Diffusing the situation was the only sane thing to do.

  “People like her and that Jackie Makers,” she said, glancing once again at Mrs. Branford, “they’re the menace.”

  I bit my tongue, stopping myself from accusing her and her husband of exactly the same type of behavior. “Hmmm,” I said, as noncommittal a response as I could muster.

  I studied Nanette Masterson. Her dyed red hair was short and in need of a wash. She couldn’t be older than fifty—at least that was my guess—but her frumpy clothes gave her an extra ten years. She had thin lips, which she was pursing. Her anger was palpable. . . and from where I sat, it seemed wholly unwarranted.

  “They shouldn’t get involved in things that don’t concern them,” she said.

  I wanted to set her straight, tell her what Mrs. Branford had said, warn her to mind her own business, but instead I said, “Huh.” I waited a moment, watching Olaya lead the other class members to the front lobby of the bakery, and then said, “So you and Jackie weren’t friends, I take it.”

  “Not even close. I didn’t wish her dead. Let me be clear about that. But now that she is, let’s just say we sleep easier at night knowing we aren’t going to wake up to some new terror she decided to inflict on us.”

  All I could think to say was, “Wow,” but I kept that to myself. Nanette Masterson was a piece of work. “I helped Olaya clean out some things in Jackie’s kitchen,” I said, wanting Nanette to know I’d been on Maple Street.

  She pursed her lips tighter. “Is that right?”

  “Beautiful kitchen. Beautiful house, actually.”

  She grimaced. “She ruined it. Painted authentic wood trim inside. White. Why would she destroy something that had been so carefully crafted? That’s the problem with the people in the historic district. My husband and I work to preserve our town’s history, but people like Jackie Makers, they just destroy it on a whim.”

  “You mean the moldings? What’s wrong with white?”

  “Not. Authentic.”

  “But it’s pretty. It makes the house feel so clean and open. And it was her house, right?”

  She gave me a withering look that I could translate only as “You’re an idiot.” “You don’t move to the historic district and ruin a landmark house. The people who live there want to preserve history, just like me and Buck. That house . . .” She shook her head, as if she still couldn’t believe what Jackie had done to it. “It should not have a green roof. And new windows? What was she thinking? You never replace windows in a historic house. The windows are its soul. That house has lost its soul.”

  “Because of new windows?” I happened to think the white grids and frames of the windows, edged by brick-red trim, were lovely. And new windows were probably far more energy efficient. If that house were mine, I wouldn’t change a thing. In my opinion, it had plenty of soul.

  “Clearly, you are not a historic home owner.”

  “No, not yet. Hopefully someday,” I said, once again feeling that my future did include living in a house like Jackie Makers’s or Mrs. Branford’s.

  She eyed me, seeming to take a closer look. “Have we met?”

  Not in so many words, I thought, remembering seeing her and her husband the first day I’d met Mrs. Branford, not to mention the stakeout, during which I’d seen Nanette Masterson break into a dead woman’s house. “I don’t think so,” I said.

  She wasn’t going to let it go. “You look familiar.”

  I shrugged it off. “I must have one of those faces.”

  “Red hair, freckles, those green eyes. You definitely do not have one of those faces.” She stopped suddenly, and I could see her mind working. “Wait a minute. Six months ago. Maybe longer. I saw you at Jackie Makers’s house.”

  I shook my head. “Um, no.”

 
; “Oh yes. I’m sure it was.”

  “It couldn’t have been. Six months ago I lived in Austin. I came back here when my mother died—”

  She inhaled sharply. “The woman who died in that hit-and-run?”

  I breathed in, bracing myself for the wave of emotion that always came when talking about the tragedy. “Anna Culpepper.”

  “You look like her, don’t you?”

  “Most people think so.”

  “Then it must have been her I saw.”

  “I think she took cooking classes from Jackie, but I don’t think they were friends.”

  As I said the words, I wondered if they were true. I hadn’t lived in Santa Sofia for years; there was no way to know if my mom had become friends with her cooking teacher—and maybe the parent of a former student.

  Nanette shrugged, her mouth pulled down in an exaggerated frown. “Perhaps not, but I’m sure I saw her—” She broke off, and a lightbulb seemed to go off in her brain. She pointed at me. “Wait. I know where I saw you. You were on Maple Street.”

  My nerves stabbed in my gut. Had she seen me in the stakeout car, spying on her? “Um—”

  “I saw you on Penny Branford’s porch. It must have been a few weeks ago. You do know her.” She leaned against her workstation, accusation in her voice.

  I feigned innocence. “I remember! I was looking at the houses on your street with my father. He’s the city manager.”

  “And Penny—”

  This line of questioning felt like the Inquisition. At least she hadn’t noticed the stakeout. I resisted filling the empty space with further explanation and just said, “She was outside.”

  “What? Are you watching the dough rise?” Nanette and I both turned as Sally sashayed into the kitchen. “Come on. Olaya sliced a lavender loaf.”

  We joined the group and savored a slice of heaven.

  Mrs. Branford caught me by the arm as we retreated to the kitchen afterward. “Got anything good? Did she confess, for example?”

  “Ha! Not even close.” I recounted the conversation as quickly as I could. “She doesn’t like you.”

  She swung her cane and tapped the floor with the rubber-tipped base. She definitely didn’t need it. “The feeling’s mutual.”

  I separated from her before Nanette saw us talking, and then I returned to my station. As if by magic, my baguette dough had risen and was full of bubbles.

  Olaya came around and punched each of our bubbly loaves, deflating them by releasing the air. “Now, we let them rise again for three hours.”

  A series of gasps and disbelief circulated in the room.

  “Three hours!”

  “That’s crazy!”

  “I have things to do tonight!”

  “Cálmense. Relax.” Olaya smiled, and I knew we wouldn’t be here all night long. She disappeared back into her secret corner of the kitchen and returned a minute later with a shiny silver baking tray dotted with perfectly smooth and rounded dough mounds. “I have prepared the dough to this stage for you all.”

  She made the rounds, stopping once again at all our stations. We each took one of the soft, elastic mounds Following her directions, I divided my dough into three equal pieces. After flattening them into ovals, we let them rest for a few minutes. “So the gluten can relax like you just did,” Olaya said.

  She modeled the next step at her teacher’s station, and we observed by watching her in the angled mirror above her area and followed her lead. First, we shaped one of the ovals into a rectangle. Next, we folded the rectangle in half and sealed the edges with our fingers. We flattened, folded, and sealed it again.

  “Now look!” Olaya held her hands together in a prayer-like position. “See how it has stretched from about eight inches to ten? It is magical. It is bread.”

  It was pretty amazing. We laid the seam side down and gently rolled our rectangles with our hands, working from the center to the outer edges.

  “Not too hard,” Olaya warned. “We don’t want to make the dough tough.”

  After going through the same process with the other two pieces of dough, we placed the three fifteen-inch loaves on the three-welled baguette baking trays Olaya had given us.

  “Your loaves will bake on your baguette pans, but I will have to move mine. I use a couche to let the dough rise rather than the baguette pan. It is the French method,” Olaya said. She demonstrated with the loaves at her station, first sprinkling flour on a linen towel and then rubbing it in. She laid her three loaves on the towel, cradling them between the folds she created.

  We cleaned our stations while the loaves rose for the final time.

  “The final step,” Olaya said when we were finished and after she’d moved her loaves to a baking sheet, “is to spritz them with water. This will give them their crunchy outside.” She then scored each loaf three times at a forty-five-degree angle. “This gives the baguette its signature look.”

  “I don’t care about their signature look anymore,” Sally whined. “I’m tired.”

  “You will care when they come out of the oven.”

  The loaves were placed in the kitchen’s professional-grade ovens.

  “Four hundred fifty degrees until they are a golden brown,” Olaya told the women.

  Before long, the aroma of baking bread filled the space.

  “Okay, maybe I do care. When will they be done?” Sally asked, and everyone laughed.

  Olaya grinned. “Soon.”

  “Time to set the table,” Consuelo announced. She’d stepped into a closet. When she came back out, her arms were laden with brightly colored place mats, spoons, bowls, and small plates.

  We all followed her to a back area of the kitchen. Cream window panels hung on either side of an archway. Martina pushed them aside, letting Consuelo and the other women pass through. I hadn’t known this cute room existed. A rectangular walnut table sat in the middle of the space. Twelve chairs were positioned around the table. They were red, turquoise, yellow, and green and were arranged around the table in a pattern.

  “It’s beautiful!” Jolie walked the perimeter of the room, taking in the delicate lamp in the corner, the story quilt hanging on the wall, the metal sheet with the words Buen Provecho cut out in an angled cursive font. A primary-colored Mexican flag banner was strung across the top edge of one wall.

  Consuelo and Martina quickly set the table. They did it with an expertise that told me this wasn’t their first time doing this particular job. When they were finished, candles flickered across a lace table runner, and each place setting had a sprig of lavender tied to the napkin. I completely agreed with Jolie. It was warm and inviting.

  “Did someone order soup?”

  I immediately recognized that male voice. Miguel stood in the archway. His mahogany hair was windswept, and his smile was enticing. He met my gaze, and I got the feeling the smile was just for me.

  Olaya surged toward him. “Just in time.” She took one of the bags he held, set it on the sideboard, and removed two tall containers. “Poblano corn chowder. Perfecto, Miguel. Muchas gracias.”

  “De nada,” he said, unloading the second bag.

  Martina set two soup tureens on the sideboard, and Olaya carefully poured the soup, one container at a time, into them. Miguel carried them to the table and placed one on either end, between the candles.

  Consuelo had disappeared back into the kitchen and soon returned with a wooden tray and three of the freshly baked baguettes.

  We sat at the table and broke bread as Miguel ladled soup into our bowls.

  Mrs. Branford sat next to me. She took a bite of the bread and breathed in the scent of the chowder. A slow smile spread across her face. “Olaya Solis, it pains me to admit it, but this is quite spectacular.”

  Olaya bowed her head once in acknowledgment. I could see the pride on her face. Coming from the woman who had been her archenemy just days before, this was a big deal. “I also hate to admit it, but, Penelope, your approval, it makes me quite happy.”

 
Chapter Sixteen

  I brought leftover poblano corn chowder and baguettes home. The hours my dad was working were getting longer and longer—a way to escape his pain—which I understood, but I missed him. And I worried about him. I’d texted him that I was bringing dinner, but he wasn’t home when I got there. I set the table and readied the soup and bread so that I could reheat them.

  And then I leashed Agatha and headed out for a walk. Instead of taking our normal path to the beach, I stayed on the sidewalk and in the neighborhood. Agatha trotted along, her bug eyes facing forward, her ears flattened back as she walked, her tail curled up tightly in a little loop. She didn’t have a care in the world. I was envious.

  As I was heading back, I saw my dad’s car parked in the driveway. I pushed my worry aside for the time being, and my pace quickened. Agatha’s little legs worked double time. A short while later, we were sitting at the kitchen table.

  “Good day?” I asked. The small talk seemed so banal and pointless, yet I knew we had to keep moving forward in hopes that one day the unimportant stuff in our day-to-day lives would be worth thinking and talking about again.

  “Normal day, I guess,” he said. “Soup’s good.”

  Billy, Dad, and I had all had to redefine what ordinary was. Billy was a lone wolf, so I didn’t actually know how he was coping. He internalized everything and didn’t share what he was feeling. My dad was the same way. He had nothing new to take his mind off things. Work, work, and more work was his only outlet. I, on the other hand, had Olaya Solis and Penelope Branford and my newfound baking classes, not to mention the amateur sleuthing I was becoming slightly obsessed with. It didn’t make coping easier, but it did give me something else to think about.

  “You’ll never guess who made it.”

  He looked at me, the interest on his face genuine, if clouded by his numbed emotions. “Who?”

  “Miguel Baptista. You remember him, right?”

  Dad half scoffed, half chuckled. “How could I not? I think you cried for six months after he left Santa Sofia.”

  I slapped his hand playfully. “No, no. Maybe six weeks. He did break my heart, after all.”