Kneaded to Death

by Winnie Archer

  “Is it always like this?” I asked. I’d been in at various times of the day, but I’d never seen it so swamped.

  “When the temperature drops and the wind picks up, it is always busier.”

  Outside the wind howled. The heavy breeze from earlier had turned into whistling gusts. I could see why people would want the comfort of freshly baked, warm bread. I went back to check on Agatha. Back at the bread shop, we worked for the rest of the day, closing the door and flipping the OPEN sign over at four o’clock. One of Olaya’s afternoon workers came in to help with the day’s cleanup, which allowed Olaya and me to set up for the evening’s baking class.

  One by one, the women in the class trickled in. Becky, Sally, and Jolie came in together, followed by Consuelo and Martina. As usual, Mrs. Branford sauntered in last, swinging her cane, apron on, white hair perfectly coiffed. She looked around.

  “No Nanette?” she asked.

  I frowned. “Not yet,” I said, but at that moment, Nanette Masterson walked into the kitchen. Her thin bright red hair was slicked back, and her heavily drawn eyebrows framed her eyes.

  “Bienvenidos, Señora Masterson,” Olaya said. “Glad to see you back here.”

  Nanette checked her watch and nodded. “I wouldn’t miss it. What are we making today?”

  “Seeded pull-apart rolls,” Olaya answered.

  Sally placed her hand flat on her stomach. “Sounds so good,” she said.

  Becky grabbed Sally’s arm. “Doesn’t it? My stomach’s growling!”

  We all went to our stations and followed Olaya’s directions for making whole-wheat dough. “The pull-apart rolls begin with this,” she said. We followed the process of mixing the ingredients and setting our dough aside to rise. Meanwhile, as with the baguettes, Olaya began pulling out dough she had mixed and readied for us the day before. “This is one of those recipes that you can make a day ahead. In the interest of time, I have prepared the dough. Now we will create the seeded rolls.”

  I glanced at the clock hanging above the door that led to the bread shop lobby. Five on the dot. I peeked at Nanette and caught her looking at her watch. I’d been doubting my intuition, wondering if I was completely off the mark about what I suspected, but seeing her check her watch again two minutes later alleviated my misgivings. Something was definitely up, and if I was right, Buck Masterson was en route to my dad’s house at this very minute.

  I moved quickly, rolling my dough into a rectangle, then cutting it into twenty-four pieces. The women in the class laughed and chatted, none as focused as I was, because none of them had somewhere to be, like I did. I rolled each piece of dough into a ball, then rolled each of the balls in one of the three bowls of seeds I had set out. Before long, I had twenty-four balls, each coated in either toasted white sesame seeds, untoasted white sesame seeds, or black poppy seeds, laid out on a cookie sheet.

  Nanette was at the station next to me, still pressing her ball of dough into a rectangle. “You’re fast,” she said, eyeing my tray of seeded dough balls.

  “Getting better every day. I love it!” I took my camera out and snapped a few pictures, then left the camera on the counter. “I’ll be back in a minute,” I whispered to Nanette. “Watch my rolls?”

  “Where are you going?”

  I held up my cell phone. “Checking on my dad. He’s working late tonight.”

  “What a good daughter,” she said. Her smile reached to her eyes, but I suspected it was because it meant clear sailing for her husband’s breaking-and-entering gig at the Culpepper house, not because I had compassion for my father.

  “I try.” I nodded toward my phone and walked out of the kitchen.

  Once I was out of sight, I grabbed my purse from behind the counter and hightailed it out of Yeast of Eden. If I was right, Nanette was on her own phone, giving her husband the “all clear” signal. I had only a few minutes to get to the house.

  I made it in record time. I parked down the street, just in case Buck Masterson was lurking around somewhere already. I’d grown up on this street, and I knew every nook and cranny. Billy and I had spent our childhoods climbing fences, sneaking through backyards, and being as stealthy as we could to stay out as late as we could. Now, nearly twenty years later, I was reliving those moments on Pacific Grove Street. I tucked my purse under the front seat of my old car, pocketed my keys, and cut through Mr. and Mrs. Buffington’s side yard. They lived two houses down from our house. They’d been in their sixties when I was a teenager, so by now they were in their eighties. I hoped me sneaking around their property didn’t send them into heart failure. I’d have to explain it to them later.

  Sneaking through their yard, I felt like Peter Rabbit hopping around Mr. McGregor’s garden. I jumped the fence between the Buffingtons’ yard and the Martinezes’, dodged the Martinezes’ German shepherd, and climbed under their fence to sneak into my childhood backyard. I looked high and low. No sign of Buck Masterson. I let myself into the house through the back door, got to work, and a few minutes later I sat down by Agatha to wait.

  Twenty minutes passed. My eyes drooped, and I’d begun to wonder if I’d completely missed the mark. Just as I stood to stretch my legs, Agatha’s ears perked. She jumped up and faced my dad’s bedroom. She was on full alert. Any second, she’d bark and wreck my plan. I snatched her up, shushing her, and cuddled her like an upset child. Agatha held her bark. We sank back into the shadows just as the bedroom door opened.

  Agatha started to growl, but I quickly held her flattened pug muzzle and whispered in her ear. She relaxed and seemed to accept that the stranger in the house was, at least in this instant, okay.

  I watched as the figure crept forward. With the fading sun, I couldn’t make out any details. The man slunk closer, then quickly closed the blinds in the front windows. My heart beat wildly. My dad’s worry and Emmaline’s warning that I be careful resurfaced. What was I doing?

  But my trepidation couldn’t stop me now; I was in it up to my neck, and there was no backing down. I took in his stringy hair, which was slicked back; his narrow eyes; and his thin lips, drawn into a tight line. Buck Masterson stood across the room, just as I’d known he would.

  It took him only seconds before he spotted the dining-room table. I held my breath, and he made a beeline for it. He bent over the table and grumbled under his breath. “I knew it.”

  He acted quickly, gathering up the pictures I’d laid out on the table, the pictures Mrs. Branford had found under her couch cushion. He rifled through them and then tucked them in his jacket pocket. But he didn’t turn to leave. Just as I knew he would, he turned to his right. It took a few seconds before he surged forward, staring at the second set of photographs I’d arranged on the kitchen counter.

  “Son of a . . . ,” he snapped, leaning over to get a closer look. These were the photos I’d taken on my stakeout with Mrs. Branford. They weren’t the highest-quality pictures, but they certainly did their job. Buck Masterson’s hands shook as he gathered up the pictures. Several fell to the floor. He crouched and collected them, then stood slowly.

  His phone buzzed, and he looked at the incoming text. “What the—”

  As he raced to the window, cracked the blinds, and peered outside, I realized what the text must have been: Nanette alerting him that I hadn’t come back after the phone call to my dad. He was afraid I was on my way to the house.

  Too bad for him, I was already here.

  Instead of seeing a car pull into the driveway, though, he heard a siren. I gasped, dropping Agatha. The pug zipped toward Buck Masterson, letting loose the barks she’d been holding back while I’d held her. Agatha was mostly bark and little bite, but she charged him, looking up and down, growling, yapping in her high-pitched way, then backed up, sucking in a raspy breath, and charged forward again.

  He whipped around and finally spotted me. “What the—”

  I moved into the light but kept my distance. This was the one risk in my plan. I didn’t know if Buck Masterson had killed my mom
or Jackie Makers, and I had no idea what he’d do if he was backed into a corner. “I see you found the pictures I left for you.”

  He scowled, waving the prints at me. “You took these?”

  “I did. I was pretty surprised to see your wife sneak into Jackie’s house. Were you looking for the pictures or for the letters the neighbors wrote against you?”

  His face turned beet red. “Wh-what letters?”

  Agatha had run back to stand next to me, but her tail was straight and hung down at her back legs, and her tiny teeth were bared.

  “Seems to me that the neighborhood is pretty divided. It was Team Buck or Team Jackie.”

  He scoffed. “She didn’t understand that I only want to help the historic district. She was a thorn in my side. She needed to be stopped.”

  “A thorn in your side,” I repeated. They’d been the exact words Nanette had used at Yeast of Eden.

  His upper lip curled. “It’s like she had a vendetta against me.”

  The sirens that I’d heard passed, and it was completely quiet outside. Another drawback in my plan was that I hadn’t planned for the cavalry to ride in and help wrap things up. No one, aside from Mrs. Branford, actually knew I’d left Yeast of Eden, and no one, except Mrs. Branford, knew I’d planted enough seeds in hopes that Buck Masterson would do just what he did and break into my dad’s house. I was on my own, but thankfully, Buck hadn’t budged from where he stood near the kitchen counter.

  “She must have thought she was doing the right thing,” I said.

  “The right thing. Pft.” The way his upper lip caught on one of his teeth made him look a little like Agatha. “She was messing with my reputation. I asked her to stop. I asked for her support,” he said, as if asking was all he’d needed to do. “She wouldn’t stop.”

  I’d set this little sting up, thinking he hadn’t hurt Jackie, but the way he was talking made me wary. I didn’t want to ask, but I had to. “Did you . . . were you the one . . . Did you kill her?”

  He recoiled, flinging his hand to his chest. “Me? Are you crazy?”

  “No, not crazy,” I said. “You just said she needed to be stopped.”

  “But not by murder!” His voice was shrill. “And definitely not by me. That was just dumb luck.”

  He charged toward the door, the pictures still clutched in his shaking hand. Just as he reached for the door handle, someone on the outside turned it. My dad!

  Buck jumped back, looking shocked and trapped. I’d moved forward, effectively blocking his path back to my dad’s bedroom, where he’d managed to break into the house, and to the kitchen, which was the only other way out. He couldn’t go anywhere unless he barreled right past me, knocking me over in the process.

  It wasn’t my dad’s voice I heard, but my brother’s. He laughed and talked, and then a woman responded. I could almost see the wheels turning in Buck’s head. If he made a run for it, there’d be a chase, and it would be three against one. The odds were not in his favor.

  I called out to my brother. “Billy! We have a little situation in here.”

  He stopped short just as he came into view. “I thought you were at your baking class,” he said, but then his attention shifted to Buck Masterson, who was standing in the center of the room, looking like a kid who’d gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “Hello. What’s this?” He sounded casual, but his body tensed, and I knew he’d gone on high alert.

  “This,” I said, “is Buck Masterson.”

  Billy’s smile vanished, and he stood light on his feet, ready to break into a run if Buck took off. “Should I know that name, Ivy?”

  “He broke into Dad’s house—”

  I stopped as I caught a glimpse of the woman Billy was with. Her black hair hung in curls around her face, and her cell phone was pressed to her ear. Deputy Sheriff Emmaline Davis. She wore civilian clothes—a flirty floral dress with coral flats. She looked beautiful, but at the moment, she did not look relaxed. Of course not, I thought. I’d interrupted their long overdue date.

  She shot me a look that said, “What in the hell are you doing, Ivy?”

  “I’m stopping him from stealing something that doesn’t belong to him,” I said, answering the question she didn’t actually ask me.

  Buck spun around, looked from Billy to Emmaline to me. The color had drained from his face, taking it from tomato to ghostly white. “It’s just a misunderstanding.”

  “Oh yeah? How’d you get in?” Billy asked, folding his arms over his chest.

  Buck glanced toward the bedroom.

  “Well now. Let’s try this again. If my sister didn’t let you in the front door, did you break in?”

  “It’s a mistake—”

  “It’s a yes-or-no answer,” Billy snapped. “Either you broke in or you didn’t. Which is it?”

  Buck’s eyes bugged. He was busted, and there wasn’t any way he could talk his way out of it. “Y-yes, but—” He flung his hand out, pointing at me. “It doesn’t belong to her.”

  Emmaline stepped past Billy, her phone in her hand, her purse slung over her shoulder. She patted the air with her hands to calm him down. “What doesn’t belong to Ivy?”

  He crumpled the photographs in his hand.

  Emmaline’s gaze dropped to his fist. “What do you have there, Mr. Masterson?”

  He tightened his fist. “Nothing.”

  Outside the front door, tires squealed and doors slammed. Two uniformed police officers rushed in, then stopped to take in the scene and confer with Emmaline. She directed one of them to the bedroom.

  “Check the window,” she ordered.

  The officer returned a minute later with the report that the window had been jimmied from the outside.

  Emmaline looked at Buck. “Breaking and entering? Mr. Masterson, you have the right to remain silent.” She proceeded to read him his rights, and her officers took him into custody. “Bag the photographs,” she told them. The officers gathered up all the photos and slipped them into a clear plastic bag. “Did he take anything else, Ivy?” she asked as the officers led Buck to their cruiser.

  “That’s it. That’s what he was after.”

  “I don’t think he’s the one who killed your mother, Ivy. There’s no motive. No connection.”

  I hung my head. What had any of this accomplished, other than payback for him making Mrs. Branford’s life miserable? “I know, Em. I know.”

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Emmaline’s words invaded my sleep. “I don’t think he’s the one who killed your mother, Ivy.”

  I felt as if I were an airplane circling the landing strip, but there was no chance of ever getting clearance to touch down. I might not have had an ounce of proof—yet—but I knew in my gut that my mom had been murdered. I had theories, sure, but in reality, I was no closer to figuring out why and by whom than I’d been a week ago. All I’d succeeded in doing was getting Buck arrested for breaking and entering. It was a minor win for Jackie Makers, but not for my mom. I ran through the possibilities in my head, along with the hows and the whys, jotting down my own notes in the back of my mom’s journal.

  Buck Masterson. He’d said he’d had nothing to do with any killing, and I believed him. I didn’t think he was guilty of killing the two women, but could his wife, Nanette, be? Maybe she’d been so angry with Jackie over her vendetta against Buck that she’d taken matters into her own hands.

  Jasmine Makers. She and Jackie had been at odds because of Jolie and the lies. Could she have felt so betrayed by her mother that she’d kill her?

  Jolie Flemming. The daughter Jackie gave up could certainly have been hurt and angry enough to have killed her mother for revenge.

  Gus Makers. He and Jackie had ended up divorced, according to Jasmine, at least in part because of the affair Jackie had had years and years ago, and the daughter she had had and had given up. Maybe he’d killed his ex-wife over her betrayal of him. In his eyes, their entire marriage might have been nothing but a giant lie.

&n
bsp; Jolie’s father, whoever that was. He’d been deprived of being a father for twentysomething years. Was that enough for him to kill Jackie over? Of course this theory hinged on some assumptions, namely, that Jolie’s father had discovered that Jackie had had a child that she’d given up for adoption, and that he’d actually been upset that he’d not had the opportunity to be a father to her. An added complication was that, with Jackie gone, there was literally no way to know who the father was.

  I breathed out a frustrated sigh. Any of these could have been a motive for killing Jackie; I had no way of knowing which was most likely or which was the truth. And none of these scenarios helped me figure out my own mother’s connection.

  Everything, I realized, came down to what my mom knew . . . and who she told. If I was operating under the notion that my mom’s and Jackie’s deaths were connected, then my mom was collateral damage. Which of the scenarios was bad enough that my mom was killed to keep her quiet?

  I had one last thought. It was more of a Hail Mary than a fleshed-out concept, but I wrote it down, anyway. According to my mom’s calendar, she’d been planning to meet with the owner of Divine Cuisine. Renee. Meeting with her was now on my list of things to do.

  The more I thought of all of this, the more I knew I needed someone to bounce ideas off of. I considered whom I wanted to call to talk this all through with. Olaya? I was beginning to think of her as an aunt. I worried that I was using her to fill the void in my heart from my mom. I wanted to turn to her, to confide in her, to tell her everything, but I also wanted to pull back, not to overstep, to be cautious.

  Mrs. Branford? I wanted to be Penelope Branford when I was in my eighties. She was spritely, feisty, and still quick-witted. But I didn’t want to burden her with all the different scenarios. I’d seen what Buck Masterson had done to her, and I didn’t want to add to her load.

  I considered waking up my dad or calling Billy. I even considered Miguel, but in the end I went with my oldest friend. We’d always told each other everything. Or at least we had . . . until she’d stopped.