“Here come some more,” Charley advised.
Erin looked up from the display glass she was polishing to see the Fosters coming up to the door of the bakery. She gave them a big smile. “Well, here’s my favorite customer. How is everybody?”
Mrs. Foster smiled and murmured a greeting while the children hurried forward to have a look at what was in the display case and negotiate what they were going to get. “Charley, this is the Foster family. Mrs. Foster with her son Peter, and Karen, Jody, and Traci. Peter is very sensitive to gluten and is one of my best missionaries. He is always telling his friends that they should come here.”
“Sometimes I think we single-handedly keep this place afloat,” Mrs. Foster sighed, giving a tired smile. “Considering the number of times a week I am in here and the amount I walk away with.”
“Well, we surely appreciate your business,” Charley said, nodding graciously. “We couldn’t do it without our customers.”
“Erin has been so good to us. It’s been amazing for Peter to actually have choices, instead of me having to run into the city to pick up a box of factory-produced cookies. He can have all kinds of wonderful baking that he wasn’t able to touch before.”
Charley nodded.
“Charley is my partner in the bakery now,” Erin explained, though Mrs. Foster probably already knew all of the details. “She’s the one who helped me to get the bakery going again after the fire. I couldn’t have reopened without her.”
Charley actually blushed. Erin laughed at her pink flush.
“And she’s my half-sister too, but we never knew each other growing up, so we’re still getting to know each other.”
“You two look alike,” Mrs. Foster agreed, looking from one to the other. “I can see the family resemblance. How nice for you to find each other. You don’t have any other siblings, do you?”
“No. I grew up with a lot of different families, so I did grow up with brothers and sisters… but none of them were my own blood, and they came and went. I don’t keep in close contact with any of them.” She thought about Reg’s visit and the odd phone calls that she occasionally got from the woman. She worried sometimes about what was going on with Reg. Erin shook off this stray thought. “Anyway, I’m really grateful for Charley. She came into my life at just the right time and really helped me to get back on my feet again.”
Charley got pinker still. Erin laughed and looked down at the children.
“So, have you decided what you want?”
“Could we have one of the chocolate chip cookies?” Peter pointed at them. “And one of the ginger cookies. And…” he looked at Jody, “the banana bread? Is that what you want?”
Jody nodded. “I like banana bread,” she told Erin, looking down at the loaf of bread in the display case.
“I do too,” Erin confessed. “And I like to think they’re better for you than the cookies. Less sugar, and the good vitamins and fiber from the banana.”
“Know what I like better?”
“What?”
“Pumpkin bread.”
“Oooh,” Erin nodded. “I’ll have to make sure I make some when pumpkins start showing up at the store for Halloween. I love pumpkin bread too.”
Erin started to get out the treats for the children. She looked at Mrs. Foster. “And do you know what you want today?”
Mrs. Foster tried to keep Traci from getting her fingers all over the display case. “I’ll need some sandwich bread for school lunches. And maybe some biscuits to go with the soup tonight. Do you need anything else, Peter?”
“Breakfast,” Peter contributed. “Could I have bagels or muffins?”
“Why don’t you just have cereal?”
Peter gave a martyred sigh. “I like muffins and bagels.”
Mrs. Foster rolled her eyes. “Fine, then. One or the other, not both.”
Peter looked into the display case. “Could I have… the bagels, then. Six?” he looked at his mother for confirmation.
“You make them last all week No more than one per day.”
“Okay.”
Erin nodded. “Six bagels for Master Peter.”
She packaged up the bagels and handed them over to Charley to ring through the till. Charley didn’t take them. Her eyes were on the door. Erin looked to see who was there. It was a woman she didn’t recognize. Middle-aged, dark hair, pleasant face. Her eyes were on Charley. Erin looked expectantly at Charley, waiting to be introduced. The woman entered and approached them.
“Hello, Charlotte,” she said, prompting Charley to wake up and greet her.
“Uh… hi, Mom.”
Erin blinked. Charley’s mother? She nudged Charley aside to ring through the transaction and handed the baking to Mrs. Foster. Charley was still standing there like she didn’t know what to do or say.
“Hi!” Erin said, holding out her hand to Charley’s mother. “I’m Erin Price.”
Mrs. Campbell smiled and shook Erin’s hand. “Pleased to meet you, Erin.”
“I’m Charley’s half-sister. Biological.”
Surprise registered on the woman’s face. “Charley’s sister?”
Erin glanced over at Charley. She had apparently not bothered to tell her mother about the discovery of her biological sister. Erin had thought that this would be big news, something that Charley would share with her family.
“Uh… yeah,” Charley agreed weakly. “Um… surprise!”
Mrs. Campbell looked at the two of them, making the usual comparison of their features. “There is a resemblance,” she admitted. “Have you actually done testing to see if you are?”
“Well, no. But Charley’s birth date and information all match up.”
“We were told that Charley was an only child. There were no siblings.”
Erin shrugged uncomfortably. “There were a lot of things said and done at the time that weren’t exactly ethical. I was told that my parents had died instantly in the accident, and they both lived for some months afterward. I was never told about Charley. I didn’t find out about her being born until I requested my DHS records.”
“That all seems very… unlikely.”
“You can look at them if you want to. Charley is my mother’s daughter. And she did have a DNA test to prove that she was Adam Plaint’s daughter. She…” Erin made a motion to include her surroundings. “She inherited this place. So then we went into business together…”
She was probably saying too much. Wasn’t it up to Charley to tell her own family about everything she had discovered? Erin didn’t really know much about their relationship. Maybe Charley didn’t want her family to know anything at all about Erin’s mother and Adam Plaint. Erin looked over at Charley, who was still standing there looking thunderstruck that her mother had shown up in her bakery without any warning.
“Charley… do you want to show you mom around or offer her a free muffin?”
“What are you doing here?” Charley finally managed to ask.
“I came to see you. I don’t understand why you didn’t come home. If you finally decided not to have anything to do with that awful gang, then why didn’t you come back home? And why all of the secrecy about this?” She pointed to Erin.
“I just want to live my own life. You don’t control me. I can make my own decisions and go wherever I want.”
“Clearly,” Charley’s mother agreed.
“I didn’t want to come home like a boomerang kid. You guys don’t need that. There’s no reason you should have to support me when I’m an adult. I can take care of myself.”
“You don’t have to do it all on your own. We’d be happy to help. You know that. We’ve called. We’ve left messages. I don’t know what else to do to convince you that we just want to be a part of your life. Don’t cut us out.”
Charley’s expression was uncertain. She looked at Erin, then back at her mother.
“I think I should check on those cookies,” Erin offered, turning to retreat to the kitchen to give them a chance to sort things out without an outsid
er listening in on their private conversation.
“No,” Charley caught her by the sleeve. “I don’t want you to leave. It’s okay. I’m trying to figure this out. I don’t know what to do.”
“Well…” Erin looked at Mrs. Campbell and shrugged. “Don’t you want your parents to be a part of your life? Just because you’re working here and we’ve reconnected, that doesn’t mean that you can’t still be part of your family too. If they want to keep in touch…”
Erin didn’t say how much she wished she had a family of her own to connect with. It would be so nice to be able to call up parents whenever she got lonely, to have plans with them for Christmas, to have someone to talk to when she was anxious, who was older and wiser and could give her advice. She had friends, but she would have given anything to have a family like Charley did too.
Maybe Charley sensed some of that. She looked away from her mother, biting her lip. “I should have called you back. I’m sorry. I’ve been sort of a brat. I know you still want to stay in touch.”
“You know that the problem we had wasn’t with you, it was with the choices that you were making. The people you were hanging around with. But this is nice. You’ve really turned things around. That makes me proud.”
“You didn’t come see me when I was in jail.”
Mrs. Campbell didn’t have any answer to that immediately. She looked into the display case at the various baked treats.
“I don’t know what to say, Charlotte. You’re the one who didn’t want anything to do with us. And you expect us to swoop in the moment you get arrested? We told you that your lifestyle was going to get you in trouble. You pursued it anyway. You suffered the consequences. We couldn’t change those consequences. That was something you had to deal with yourself.”
“You could still have visited.”
“I’m sorry that hurt your feelings. I hope you’ll think about how we felt, hearing that you had murdered someone. That everything we had told you was going to happen did. We didn’t know what to do or how we would be received if we did try to visit you. You are the one who broke off contact with us and made it clear that you didn’t want us to be a part of your life.”
“I know.”
Erin stared into the display case, hot and uncomfortable. “How about a free muffin?”
Charley and her mother looked at Erin, brows drawn down, their movements mirrors of each other. Charley spread her hands out.
“Why not a muffin?” She said. “Do you want a muffin, Mom?”
Mrs. Campbell pointed to one of the chocolate chip ones. “I know I should probably go with a bran muffin, but those look so good.”
Erin got one out and handed it across to her in a napkin. “They are really good.”
“So, this is a specialty bakery?” Mrs. Campbell looked around. “You have a section that is gluten-free?”
“Everything is gluten-free,” Erin informed Mrs. Campbell as she bit into the muffin, rolling her eyes at the moist muffin studded with chocolate chips.
“This is gluten-free?”
“Yes. Everything.”
“How do you do that? Do you have a special kind of flour?”
“Most of them are combinations of flours,” Charley jumped in, eager to impart what she had been learning. “There isn’t one gluten-free flour that can substitute satisfactorily for wheat or other gluten flours. You need a few different ones to mimic the properties of wheat flour.”
“Why did you name it Auntie Clem’s? Couldn’t you name it after one of your real aunties?”
“Oh, that’s me,” Erin explained. “I operated the bakery across the street before it burned down. Charley helped me get back on my feet, and I helped her open the bakery. She wanted to keep the name of Auntie Clem’s because it had a good reputation. People knew what it was and what we offered already.”
“You could have named it something else,” Mrs. Campbell asserted, looking at Charley.
“I know I could. But that’s what I wanted. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“No, of course not,” Mrs. Campbell said.
“I wanted Erin on board, and I wanted her goodwill. So I used her name. It’s sound business practices.”
Erin looked again toward the kitchen and the fictional burning cookies. She really didn’t want to stay there and listen to Charley and her mother bickering. Some people enjoyed getting into arguments or watching other people’s arguments. Erin was not one of them. She was an avoider, through and through. She did whatever she could to avoid getting in the middle of an argument, especially somebody else’s argument.
“Are you going to be in town for a while?” Charley asked her mother, looking at the clock on the wall. “We could get together for dinner before you go home, if you want to talk. If you really want to visit,” she added, “and not just criticize.”
“Of course I do! I would love to get together for dinner. Why don’t you come home and we could have dinner there?”
“Mom… I’ve got to work. I don’t have time to drive out to Moose River, have supper, and then drive back. If you want to stick around for a little while, I’ll join you when I’m done here. Otherwise, we can set up another day.”
“And you’ll answer the phone?”
Charley rolled her eyes. “I’ll answer the phone.”
“What time are you off?”
“We close at five, and then I need to help with the cleanup and tomorrow’s prep—”
“I can do that without you today,” Erin said. “It won’t take up that much time. Then your mom can still get back to Moose River before it’s really late.”
Charley shot Erin a look, then gave a grudging nod. “Does that work?”
Mrs. Campbell nodded. She smiled at them both. “How lovely. I’m so looking forward to it. Thank you for being so generous, Erin. And thank you for the muffin. They really are fantastic.”
Erin nodded. “You’re welcome. Come again.”
Mrs. Campbell waved and left the bakery. Erin forced a smile at Charley. Charley put her face in her hands, clearly not happy.
“What have I done now?”
Chapter Twenty-One
W
illie rolled up to the house and honked the horn. When Erin and Vic didn’t immediately join him at the truck, he locked it up and went up to the house. He knocked on the door and tried the handle. It was unlocked, so he went in.
“You girls ready to go?” he asked, looking through to the kitchen.
“Just about,” Vic promised. “We’re just finishing up on some sandwiches. We’ll be well-supplied.”
“You didn’t need to make anything,” Willie said. “We could have just picked something up on the way.”
“I wanted to contribute something,” Erin explained. “I don’t have any caving equipment or expertise, but I can do sandwiches! This way we won’t have to stop for food, and we’ll have enough that we don’t have to stop if you guys are into something and want to keep working.”
Willie walked into the kitchen and helped himself to a slice of bacon before Vic could stop him. She tried to slap his hand, but missed. Willie shoved the bacon into his mouth, grinning.
“Okay, I approve.”
“I’m still worried about this,” Erin confessed. “What if something happens…? I don’t want you to get trapped underground.”
“No one is going to get trapped,” Willie assured her. “I spend half my life underground. I know what I’m doing.”
“But this mine is old. We don’t know what kind of condition it is going to be in.”
“That’s why I’m going to have a look,” Willie said patiently. “I’m not going to go in if it’s unsafe. If we need to shore up the walls, we can get started on that. If it’s collapsed, then we can take a look around and see if there is another way to go in. I’m not going to just rush into a mine without being absolutely sure that it’s safe.”
“But something could happen.”
“No. Nothing is going to happen.”
> “That time before, you got hurt. You hit your head, and there was a pool of blood, and we were so worried about you.”
Willie held her gaze. His face was perfectly calm. “Erin. You know I didn’t just happen to bump my head. Somebody helped me along. And I’m not going to be alone today. Vic is going to come. Jeremy is going to come. None of us are going to be alone. You’re welcome to come along too, if you like.”
“No way,” Erin said. “There is no way you’re getting me underground.”
“You go downstairs. It’s really no different. It’s perfectly safe. I’m not going to take Vic or you anywhere that I think there is any danger of either of you getting hurt. It wouldn’t be anything like when you were underground before. We’ll all be working together and helping each other out.”
“I’m not going,” Erin maintained. “I’ll stay outside and then I can call for trouble if anything happens.”
“Nothing is going to—”
“I know. But I’m going to be there just in case. Besides, whenever you have someone there in case of an emergency, you end up not needing them, right? So as long as I’m there watching for trouble, there won’t be any.”
Willie sighed and shook his head at Vic. Vic rolled her eyes and shrugged with one shoulder. “You’re not going to convince her,” she said. “I’ve done my best. But Erin has already had a couple of negative experiences. It’s not because she just doesn’t like tight spaces.”
Erin shuddered. She started wrapping the sandwiches they had made, neatly tearing the plastic wrap off of the industrial-size roll, wrapping the sandwiches tightly and stacking them to the side. Willie watched her.
“You’re not a coward,” he told her.
Erin looked at him, her face getting warm. “I sort of am,” she said. “I could try to go into the mine with you. I’d have an expert right there on hand. I know in my head that nothing could happen to me down there with you right there. But I don’t even want to try. I just want to wrap a blanket around myself and wait for you to come back out.”
“That’s okay. Vic is right, you do have good reason for not wanting to go down there. That doesn’t make you a coward. You are a brave person.”
Apple-achian Treasure (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 8) Page 13
