Kneaded to Death

by Winnie Archer

  “And six months later Jackie was killed,” Olaya said.

  “They have to be related.”

  She took a bite of the chocolate croissant she’d brought out with her, and continued a moment later. “Entonces, Jackie died because she knew the same thing your mother did?”

  I shrugged helplessly. Truly, I had no idea. I could speculate all I wanted, but as of now, all I had was a feeling. Intuition. A suspicion. And Emmaline was forever telling me that only hard and fast proof was worth anything in the eyes of the law.

  “Hola!” Consuelo strode down the sidewalk toward us, waving her hand. Her style was so completely opposite of Olaya’s. She wore jeans and a T-shirt that hung loosely on her rounded midsection. She was casual, whereas Olaya had style. Still, it was obvious they were sisters. Same nose. Same lips. Same almond-shaped eyes.

  Martina trailed behind Consuelo, her cell phone pressed to her ear. I looked at the three sisters, noticing how different Martina looked. I already knew she was the quiet one, but she also had a much darker complexion, dark eyes instead of the green of her sisters, and almost black hair. Her features were more refined than those of her sisters. An aquiline nose, big round eyes, and defined lips. She was trim and was dressed in white fitted capris and a blue and white tunic. Her style was younger and hipper than her sisters’, and she was definitely the one who stood out and didn’t look like the others. Still, it was clear that their connection ran deep.

  “Buenos días, mis amores,” Consuelo bellowed as she reached us. She breathed in. “Ah, qué rico. I love the smell of the bread shop, even from outside. Eh, Martina?”

  Martina had put her phone away, and now her eyes were closed and a soft smile graced her lips. “Oh yes. Delicioso.”

  Consuelo looked from Olaya to me and back. “Qué pasa? What is going on with you two this morning?”

  With a nod, I gave Olaya my okay to share what we’d been talking about. After Olaya brought her sisters up to speed, Consuelo tapped her finger against her upper lip.

  “Many rumors went around about Jackie and Gus’s divorce. Jackie never talked about it to us. Not even to Olaya, and they were closer than any of us,” she said.

  “What kind of rumors?” I asked.

  “Some people said Gus had an affair, but I don’t believe that,” Olaya said. “He loved Jackie. But he never would say what happened. He said it was his business and no one else’s. I have to respect the man for that.”

  “I can’t figure out what my mom meant when she said, ‘But what about Gus?’ To me that means that whatever my mom knew and wanted to talk to Jackie about affected Gus somehow.” I’d been thinking about it. Could it have had to do with their house? “Was Gus okay with moving out?”

  Olaya answered. “Yes, yes. Jackie bought him out when the divorce was final. He didn’t care about that house—”

  “It wasn’t the house,” Martina said. “He hated the politics of that street.”

  Olaya nodded to me. “Ask Penny Branford about that. Jackie said Gus got into it a few times with someone on the street.”

  I’d lay odds that that someone had been Buck Masterson.

  Olaya went on. “After the divorce, Gus moved out. After twenty-five years, it was over. It all happened so fast, but now that I look back on it, I think it was actually a long time in the making. She always did her best to be happy, pero I know she was not.”

  Martina swallowed the bite of her sister’s croissant she’d taken. “I remember there was a time when I stopped by her kitchen to drop off bread for you, Olaya. When I went to the back office, I found Jackie crying.”

  “Yo recuerdo,” Olaya said. “You called me, and I came over right away. Hugged her and hugged her, but she would not say what had her so upset.”

  I remembered what Gus had said to me earlier. Relationships are complicated. Secrets and lies. “Was she always secretive?”

  “No, not at all. That is the strange thing, you know. Jackie and me, we have been friends for many, many years. We told each other everything. But then divorce . . . and even before that . . . something changed.”

  I remembered what Olaya had said about the falling-out between Jackie and her daughter. “With Jasmine, too, you said?”

  “Jasmine was so angry, but I do not know why. Jackie kept it—how do you say?—close to the chest.”

  I tried to put myself in Emmaline’s police shoes. What would she do next? “Maybe we should talk with Jasmine,” I suggested. Even if they’d been at odds, she was still Jackie’s daughter. Without police resources, it seemed like the logical next step to me.

  Without missing a beat, Olaya sauntered inside. We followed and gathered around as she picked up the phone and dialed. A moment later she was talking to Jasmine.

  “Cómo estás, m’ija?” she said. They talked for a minute, and then Olaya cut to the chase. “Bueno. See you then.”

  I hadn’t realized I’d been holding my breath until Olaya hung up the phone. What if the secret my mother had uncovered had to do with Jasmine? What if Jasmine Makers, daughter of Jackie and Gus, had killed my mother, then killed her own mom? It seemed unfathomable, and yet I knew stranger things had happened. Emmaline had told me on more than one occasion that people killed for the most trivial reasons. And as Gus had said, the most obvious reason was usually the right reason. I doubted my mom had somehow become privy to an elaborate corporate embezzling scheme or some political corruption in Santa Sofia. Her discovery had probably been about something so banal that she never could have imagined someone would kill over it.

  I released the air trapped in my lungs. But someone had killed over it.

  “You will come with me,” Olaya said to me. “If Jasmine knows anything, we may be able to get it out of her.”

  “Look at you two,” Consuelo said. “You are like two real-life detectives. Como Jennifer Lopez in that police show.”

  Whereas Consuelo looked amused, Martina seemed far more serious. “Con cuidado. You must be careful. Remember, someone killed Jackie. And if you are right, Ivy, someone killed your mother, too.”

  It was sobering, but accurate—and exactly what Emmaline had said to me. Olaya and I had to be very careful. This was no game. This was murder.

  Chapter Nineteen

  I’d seen Jasmine Makers from the back as she sat in a front pew at Jackie’s funeral, but now, at Jackie’s house, I had the opportunity to get a closer look and really develop a first impression. I’d seen her father up close more than I’d seen her mother, but there was no doubt that she was a combination of the two. With a white mother and a black father, she’d ended up with blue eyes and skin the color of milky hot chocolate. With her cropped hair, she was refined and stunning from head to toe.

  Olaya greeted her at the front door. Jasmine gave her mother’s oldest friend a hug, and from where I stood, it seemed genuine.

  “M’ija,” Olaya said. “You look good.”

  Jasmine smiled wanly. “I guess.”

  As I watched them, I felt for Jasmine. Beautiful as she was, she looked worn out, with dark circles under her eyes. I wondered if she’d slept a full night since her mother’s death.

  “I brought you something,” Olaya said, leading her into the kitchen.

  “Olive loaf?” Jasmine asked. Her eyes remained flat, though, a sign that she was trying, but that her emotions had a strong hold on her.

  “Your favorite. You have not been in to the bread shop in a long while.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. Just busy, I guess.”

  Olaya gestured at me. “Have you met Ivy Culpepper? She is a wonderful photographer, pero now she is my apprentice at the shop.”

  I was? Her apprentice? That was news to me. I was loving baking bread, but I didn’t think I had the inherent talent to be Olaya’s apprentice. Nevertheless, I smiled softly and greeted Jasmine. “Nice to meet you. I’m very sorry about your mother.”

  She gave me the same detached smile, and I suddenly understood the depth of the rift between her and
Jackie. It was a deep chasm that, at least for Jasmine, seemed unbridgeable even in death.

  “Ivy lost her mother about six months ago,” Olaya said, pulling out a chair at the kitchen table. She sat, and then Jasmine and I followed suit. “She was a teacher at Santa Sofia High School.”

  Understanding crossed Jasmine’s face. “That was your mom? The one hit by a car?”

  I blinked away the emotion. “Mmm-hmm. It’s been difficult. I know just what you’re going through.”

  A hardness settled onto her expression. “No offence, Ivy, but I don’t think you do. Your mom . . . the accident. That was tragic, but my mom was killed. Murdered.”

  “Jasmine!” Olaya pronounced the name as any Spanish speaker would, saying the J like a Y. “They are both tragedies.”

  I brushed aside Olaya’s indignation. “It’s okay, really. But, Jasmine, I want to tell you this. The reason I’m here.”

  She looked at me, a wall still up between us. “Okay . . . ?”

  I’d contemplated how to approach the subject. Should I be cagey and subtle and try to pull information from an unwitting suspect, or should I be direct? In the end, I opted for direct. I wasn’t trained to investigate anything except a sunrise with my camera and the best light in which to photograph someone. Trying to act like Miss Marple or Jessica Fletcher seemed like a very bad idea. “I’ve come to believe that my mom was also . . .” I swallowed hard to get the final word out. “Murdered.”

  Whatever reaction I’d been expecting from Jasmine, it wasn’t what she gave me. She scoffed. “So, what? You want to form a murdered daughters’ club? Bond over our dead mothers and sing ‘Kumbaya’?”

  I felt like I’d been slapped, but Olaya reacted for me. “M’ija, what is wrong with you?”

  Jasmine shoved back from the table, nearly knocking the chair over behind her. “What’s wrong with me is that people need to stop thinking they know what I’m feeling. Olaya, I love you. But you don’t know what my mom did. She betrayed me. She betrayed my dad. She . . . she . . .”

  Olaya reached for her hand, pulled her close until she could wrap her up in a mama bear hug. “It is okay, m’ija. People make mistakes. Holding on to your anger, it is hurting you. Only you.”

  Jasmine’s hard exterior cracked under Olaya’s motherly embrace. Her shoulders heaved, and a sob escaped, muffled against Olaya’s shoulder. “She lied. All these years, she’d been lying to us.”

  I held my breath, hardly daring to exhale for fear any sound would snap Jasmine out of her safe zone and back to her protected reality.

  Olaya patted her back, comforting her. Encouraging her. She wanted the truth as much as I did. More maybe, since Jackie had been her closest friend. “Lying about what, m’ija?”

  Jasmine pulled away, wiping away a tear with the back of her hand. So she wasn’t the coldhearted young woman she presented herself as. She was hurt. Betrayed. And I felt for her. “She had a baby, Olaya.” She sucked in a shaky breath. “A daughter.” She shook her head, as if she were clearing cobwebs away, and her voice dropped to a whisper. “I have an older sister somewhere.”

  Olaya looked taken aback. It was clear she’d never suspected that this was the source of discontent between Jackie and Jasmine. “A daughter,” she said quietly, as if she were trying to make sense of that bit of information and the fact that she hadn’t known about it. How was that even possible? She snapped her head up. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m positive. I got a letter in the mail. At first I thought it was a joke, right? I didn’t believe it. But I asked her.” Her voice escalated. “I asked her straight out, and she couldn’t deny it.”

  I rewound. “You said you got a letter in the mail?”

  She nodded.

  “When was that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. A year and a half ago?”

  So that explained the big falling-out Jackie and Jasmine had had, then.

  “Where is she? Your si . . . , Jackie’s other dau . . . child?” I said.

  Jasmine shrugged and looked at Olaya. “She cheated on my dad, you know. He was in the marines way back before I was born. They hadn’t been married that long, but she got pregnant by someone else. She kept it a secret for a few months, and then he was deployed. She had the baby while he was gone, and gave it up for adoption.”

  “And years and years later your father found out,” Olaya said, nodding to herself, as if it all suddenly made sense. “The reason for the divorce.”

  When I’d first heard of the rift between Jackie and her daughter, I’d thought that Jasmine was selfish and not a very likable person. That was before I’d heard her story and learned about the bombshell dropped on her life. My perception of her had been instantly reshaped, and I felt for her. I still wished, for her sake, that she’d been able to be in a better place with her mom before her death, but I understood now why they’d fallen away.

  Gus’s words came back to me. Secrets and lies. They were hard to overcome. “Your dad must have been devastated.”

  “That’s one way to put it. He always said she was the love of his life, but when he found out, he just couldn’t forgive her. It wasn’t even that she’d cheated on him and had another baby—okay, well, it was—but it was more that she’d lied about it for so long. He said their entire marriage had been built on this faulty foundation, you know? Everything was a lie.”

  Olaya looked shell-shocked. “How could I not have known?”

  “You were friends back then?” I asked.

  Olaya nodded. “Oh yes. She was the first person I met when I moved to Santa Sofia. It has been, oh, thirty years now. Pero she was not pregnant—” She broke off, her eyebrows lifting as she realized something. “After Gus, your dad, was deployed, she went away for a few months. I’m trying to remember. . . .” She thought for a minute, then snapped her fingers. “I think it was for a cooking program, but I wonder . . .”

  “Maybe it was so she could go off and have the baby?” I asked.

  “It is the only thing that makes sense. If she was here, she could not have hidden it.”

  For more than twenty-five years, Jackie had kept her secret well hidden. She must have felt unhinged when Jasmine confronted her about the child she’d long since forgotten.

  The child who had found her birth mother and her sister.

  I slipped my cell phone from my back pocket, stepped away from the table, and leaned against the slick cement countertop in Jackie’s kitchen. Jasmine’s story had created an entirely new possibility for Jackie’s murder, and I had to tell Emmaline. I quickly texted her the abridged version of Jasmine’s story, ending with:

  Maybe Jackie’s daughter was mad enough to kill her mother over being abandoned by her. It’s possible. And if my mom figured it out somehow . . . it could all be connected.

  I tapped the pads of my fingers on the counter while I awaited her reply. “Come on, Em,” I said under my breath. She was taking too long.

  Finally, her response came.

  Wow. What a soap opera. Good work, Detective Culpepper. I’ll see what I can find out.

  Another text came immediately after.

  Could you be careful, though? Statistically, if a person has killed once, it’s easier for them to kill again. I prefer you alive.

  I told her I’d be on high alert at all times, then smiled to myself. I was proud. I wasn’t a detective, but I’d succeeded in finding a new possible motive for Jackie Makers’s murder.

  What I hadn’t done, however, was find a link between that and my own mother’s death. But a possibility came to me the next second. “That essay,” I said.

  Olaya and Jasmine both looked at me.

  “What essay?” Jasmine asked.

  “Olaya, that day we went through the cookbooks. We found a school essay with Jackie’s things. We thought it might have been yours, Jasmine, but what if it wasn’t?” My heart was in my throat. Had I just figured out how my mom was involved and why she was killed? I leaned forward. “Olaya, do you still ha
ve it?”

  Her face clouded for a moment and then cleared as she realized why I was asking. She went to the cookbook shelves we’d sorted through and searched through a stack of papers and books she’d set aside. “Right here,” she said, holding out the sheet of paper.

  The typed and double-spaced piece of writing felt powerful in my hands. I knew that it held a clue to my mother’s death. I reread the prompt, silently at first, then aloud to Jasmine and Olaya. “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.”

  Jasmine looked from Olaya to me. “I don’t understand. What is that?”

  I tried to tamp down my beating heart and the wave of heat that was pooling in my head. “I think this is the reason my mom was killed.”

  Chapter Twenty

  First, I studied the notes in the margin. They were faded and scribbled, but the more I looked at them, the more confident I was that they’d been written by my mother. This prompt had been given to her students. Which, if I was right, meant that Jackie Makers’s other daughter had been the one in my mom’s class.

  What it didn’t necessarily mean was that the girl was a killer. It was one thing to write an anonymous letter to your sister saying that you existed, but it was quite another to kill your birth mother over giving you up for adoption. It was a stretch that even I couldn’t quite believe.

  And it didn’t explain a motive for killing my mother, either.

  When I’d first read the essay, I’d thought, as my mother had commented on in her margin notes, that it was cryptic and incomplete. Some lesson was alluded to but never stated directly. But now, as I reread it from the lens of it being Jackie’s unwanted daughter, I filled in the blanks. It felt more like a threat than anything else. The lesson was that people made their choices and had to live with the consequences. If I read between the lines, the message was that Jackie had chosen to give her child up, and now, years later, she had to face the truth about that decision with her other child and her husband. The secondary message was that the decision to give up her child hadn’t affected only her. Decisions, by their very nature, had a long reach, often far beyond what we thought they did. In Jackie’s case, the choice to give up her daughter had affected the child’s life, of course, but much later it had also had a major impact on Jasmine’s and Gus’s lives.