Flour in the Attic

by Winnie Archer

  “It goes to her husband, with a provision that he does not sell it for ten years. At that point, it is to be sold to her three children for a price of—get this—one dollar.”

  I stuck my finger in my ear and wiggled it, wondering if I’d heard correctly. “Let me get this straight. David inherits the house, which is worth a pretty penny—”

  “In excess of a million and a half, I’d say. At least.”

  “—but he can’t sell it for ten years. And whenever he does sell it, assuming he does—”

  “No, the way it reads, he has to sell it at ten years—”

  “But only the Ruiz kids can buy it?”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “Is that enforceable?” I asked. “I mean, can you make that kind of a stipulation in a will?”

  “We’re looking into that, believe me. Whether or not it’s enforceable, though, the three kids have something big to gain. They also had a possible grudge. Ten years is a long time to wait if you want something now.”

  “But that would be a motive to get David out of the way.”

  “True.”

  What was Marisol’s state of mind? Her kids might have grounds to contest her will if they thought she’d not been of sound mind. If she’d been worried about her mental health or her brain function, that might be enough for them to stop David from inheriting. They might not want to wait ten years. They could easily say that he’d coerced her, or that she’d been mentally incapable of looking out for her own best interest, although he would gain only an awesome house to live in rather than a million-plus dollars.

  But then there was the issue of the swimsuit. Her children would have known about her superstition.

  I could hear the tap tap tap of Emmaline’s fingers as she typed something on her computer keyboard. She was a multitasker, and since she’d become the sheriff, she was rarely able to devote even five undivided minutes to someone on the other end of a phone call. When we were together in person, she was present, but across cellular waves, she was always thinking about something else at the same time she was talking or listening to me. I knew she was thinking about the motive for Marisol’s murder.

  “Gotta go,” Emmaline said abruptly, severing the connection. I tucked my phone away, uneasy. Why would Marisol have cut all of her kids out of inheriting the house immediately upon her death?

  “What is happening with the investigation?” Olaya asked, closing up the computer and heading into the kitchen.

  I told her what Emmaline had said about the will and the house. Olaya tsked. “How well does Miguel know this man, David Ruiz?”

  “That is a good question,” I said. Miguel and I had made plans for dinner with his sister and her husband. Sergio might be able to shed some light on his and his siblings’ relationship with their mother. In the meantime, I decided to track down Ruben.

  “Take them bread,” Olaya said after I told her where I was headed. She thought for a moment, then nodded. “Crusty sourdough, I think.”

  “David’s not the only suspect in my mind,” I told her as I pulled two loaves of sourdough from a bakery rack and slid them into paper bread bags.

  “Who else?” she asked. She had pulled out containers of flour and salt and had set to work creating a dough out of just those ingredients. She measured, mixed, and then turned the mixture onto her work surface, creating a trough in the center of the pile. She added water and deftly fluffed the mixture, repeating until it started to clump together.

  Puff pastry, I realized as she pressed it all into a ball, rolled it up in plastic wrap, and placed it in the refrigerator to chill. Later, she’d roll it out with her French rolling pin, lay a slab of butter in the center, and fold the dough in on itself before rolling it out again and repeating. The process of rolling the butter into the dough created the flaky layers of puff pastry.

  As she set to work making another batch, I summed up my wonderings about Johnny Morales, ending with, “He’s obviously not going to tell me if he’s involved in anything shady, so I’ve been thinking about how to find out.”

  Her hands had continued to work the dough while she’d listened. Now she looked up at me, her fingertips resting lightly on the countertop. “When I was a girl in Mexico, my sisters and I, we did not have many toys or books. There was not much to do in our little village. We had to entertain ourselves. Games of the imagination. I remember there was a time when our uncle, he acted very strange. Suspicious, as if he had something to hide. We were obsessed about it, my sisters and me. For days and days, we followed him, sometimes on foot, sometimes on our rickety bicycles, but always with stark determination. I baked bread for him, thinking that if I added certain herbs, the truth would be revealed to us somehow. Of course I was not well-versed in my baking at that time.”

  One of the things I adored about Olaya was her storytelling. She could weave a tale as easily as she could bake a loaf of bread; neither were particularly easy to do, but she did both with aplomb. “Did you find out what he was up to?” I asked.

  “Yes and no. We found that when you want to see something suspicious, you can make yourself believe anything. If he blinked, we thought our uncle was surely hiding something. If he sneezed, we thought he was evading a question. When he made a phone call, we knew he was talking to someone he should not be. We were very certain that he was in a relationship with someone off-limits. A married woman, we thought. Or another man, posiblemente. But, alas, it was not those things.”

  “What was it?”

  “It was nothing!” she said. “He felt himself being followed, pero he did not know it was his nieces playing detectives. He was in a relationship with a woman—an eligible woman—but he thought that maybe her father did not think him good enough. He thought that perhaps the man was trying to scare him away.”

  “But he wasn’t.”

  She shook her head, amusement crossing her face. “He was not. It was Consuelo, Martina, and me. We created a story where there had been none.”

  “Did your uncle end up with the woman?”

  She laughed, waving her flour-coated hand in the air. “No, no. She was no good. She had too many men. We saved our uncle from that mistake, even though he did not see it at the time.”

  “I’m not sure what this has to do with Johnny,” I said, knowing that it did in some way, shape, or form.

  “We suspected our uncle. We were wrong, but if we had not followed him, he would have found out the hard way about his woman.”

  Her point dawned on me. “So you’re saying I could be wrong about Johnny, but if there’s no one else to prove or disprove my theory, then I need to follow him and he’ll lead me to the truth.”

  “What I am saying, mija, is that what we think we see or know may not be the truth at all. We must break through the surface to find out what lies beneath.”

  Chapter 14

  I put aside the notion of tailing Johnny Morales until after I’d spoken to his son Ruben and had dinner with his other son, Sergio. Part of me felt determined to build a case against Johnny, but in reality, I couldn’t get Marisol’s children and the very real motive of them inheriting Marisol’s house off my mind. My head swam with indecision.

  A conversation with Ruben was warranted. I’d texted Miguel to find out where Ruben worked, hoping it was the kind of place where I could just drop in.

  He works at a solar panel company, Miguel texted. Why?

  Paying a visit, I replied.

  The three little gray dots flashed at the bottom of my phone’s screen so I knew he was writing something back. It didn’t take long. Ivy, was all it said. I could hear the warning tone in the single three-letter word.

  I tapped my thumbs across my phone’s keyboard. Miguel.

  The three dots flashed, then after a minute, they disappeared. No text appeared.

  “Come on, Miguel,” I muttered under my breath.

  And then his text appeared. Because I know you’ll track it down one way or another, he wrote, followed by the n
ame and address of the solar panel company Ruben Morales worked for.

  I sent him a kissing-face emoji in reply, noted the address, and before long, I was walking into a solar panel showroom. A variety of panels were displayed around the perimeter of the room, but I bypassed them, heading directly to the man who’d come out of a small office to greet me. He held out his hand, welcomed me to Sun Solar, the solar panel experts of California, and offered to set me up with a free home estimate. The guy cut to the chase.

  “Actually, I’m looking for Ruben Morales,” I said, taking a step back to show him I wasn’t actually in the market, at least not at the moment, for solar panels.

  His posture changed, as did his expression. His congeniality when he thought he could sell to me evaporated. He held up a finger, and without another word, turned, poked his head into another little office, then retreated back to his own.

  The guy could turn it on and off. Kind of amazing, I thought. If I ever did decide to put in solar panels, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be seeking him out.

  A figure emerged from the second office. “I’m Ruben, can I help—” He broke off when he recognized me. “Hey,” he said.

  “Hi. We met the other night—”

  “I remember. You’re Miguel’s, mmm, girlfriend, right?” he asked.

  It sounded juvenile to put it that way given that we were in our midthirties, but I nodded anyway. “Ivy Culpepper.”

  “Yeah. David said you could help figure out what happened to my mother.”

  I let out the breath I’d been holding. I’d been worried about broaching the subject of Ruben’s mother and David, but in less than a minute, he’d brought it up. “I’m trying,” I said. I looked around. No one else was in the small showroom, but it still felt too open. “Is there someplace private we can talk?”

  “My office,” he said, then he led me back to the room he’d come from. As I followed him, I noted the similarities between him, his brother Sergio, whom I’d met several times, and his father. Now that I’d met Johnny, I could see how closely Ruben resembled him. Marisol hadn’t been tall—maybe five feet four inches, or so, and she’d been lean. Ruben had gotten his mother’s green eyes, but physically, he was much more like his father. Stocky. Thick neck. Wide shoulders. Narrow hips. From appearances, I thought he might come across as gruff, but he indicated a chair for me to sit in, then pulled it out for me before taking his own seat behind his desk, wiping away that snap judgment.

  He spoke before I had a chance to. “Did you figure something out? About my mom, I mean?”

  “No,” I said slowly, keeping my theories to myself. “But I’ve heard that your mom wasn’t quite herself lately. That’s why I’m here. I wanted to ask you about that.”

  “Not quite herself,” he repeated. “That’s an understatement. She thought she was getting dementia. Or Alzheimer’s, like my grandfather. None of us—my brother and sister and me, I mean—we couldn’t figure out if it was the chicken or the egg.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Just that she thought her mind was going, so then did it get worse, or did she make it get worse subconsciously, or was her mind actually going and it was bad enough that she started noticing?”

  “Did you think she was losing touch with reality?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer immediately, instead taking a moment to really consider the question. When he answered, it was noncommittal. “After her father died, she changed.”

  Lisette and David had said something similar. She hadn’t coped well with her father’s death. “Changed how?”

  “She couldn’t sleep. She trained all the time. It was like she was trying to do whatever she could so she didn’t have to think.”

  “Did she tell you about her nightmares?”

  His eyes had become red-rimmed and glassy, and from the way he held his mouth—straight and taut—I could see that his carefully buried emotions were bubbling up inside of him. “I know David was pretty worried about her. He didn’t know how to help her get better.”

  “Are you on good terms with him?” I asked, surprised. I’d assumed Ruben and Sergio felt the same about David and Marisol as Lisette did, but maybe not.

  He shrugged noncommittally. “He’s a nice enough guy.”

  “But your sister, she doesn’t like him, does she?”

  “Lisette and my mom, they had their mother-daughter baggage,” he said dismissively. “The guy made our mom happy. That’s all I cared about.”

  “And your brother?”

  He tapped his curved fingers against his chest. “Same as me.”

  Ruben was being incredibly forthcoming. And he seemed like the furthest thing from a killer. I debated how much to push my luck, but went for it. “Why doesn’t Lisette like him?”

  He responded with a shrug. “My sister is angry at the world. She hated that our parents got divorced. They had a sort of fairy-tale romance. High school sweethearts, and all that. But half the freaking world is divorced. It’s cliché, and it’s stupid because we’re adults, you know, but I think she somehow thought that our parents might get back together someday. In her eyes, David ruined that.”

  He was right, it was a ridiculous thought for a woman in her thirties to have. For a young child? Sure. Even for a teenager. But Lisette should have been mature enough to accept what was, and also to see her mother’s happiness with David. From our last conversation, I knew she had regrets. I just hoped she could come to terms with them and move on.

  “Sounds like she blamed your mom more than your father,” I commented.

  Ruben eyed me sharply. “What are you talking about?”

  “I talked to him yesterday,” I said. “He told me a little bit about what happened. That there was, um, an affair.”

  Ruben’s demeanor changed, his shoulders straightening, his voice more stern. “My dad is a lot of things, but an unfaithful husband isn’t one of them. He loved my mom. He never would have cheated on her. That is not why they got divorced.”

  Whatever I’d expected Ruben to say, it wasn’t that. “Oh . . . I . . . um . . . maybe I misunderstood,” I finally said.

  Ruben leaned forward. “What do you mean? What did he say?”

  How did I answer that? I replayed my conversation with Johnny. He’d started to say that he’d met someone, then that he’d made a mistake. I’d filled in the blanks, assuming the someone he’d met meant an affair. “He said he made a mistake. I guess I just assumed—”

  Ruben cut me off. “Oh, he made a mistake all right. It just wasn’t that kind of mistake.”

  I debated asking the next question, but went for it. “What kind was it?”

  Ruben had been more open than I’d thought he’d be, but turns out he had limits on how much he was willing to say. “The kind that made it smarter—or better, I guess—for them to split up. Lisette blamed our mom for being willing to bail on their marriage.”

  I thought about this. “So it wasn’t that they didn’t love each other? Or that they really wanted to get divorced, it was . . . necessity?” I asked, wondering if I was interpreting his words correctly.

  Ruben rested his forearms on his desk, interlacing his fingers, his hands flat against the black blotter. “They loved each other,” was his answer.

  Which, to my mind, meant that no, they didn’t really want to get divorced. The idea that Johnny was involved in something illegal resurfaced. I’d learned that the best way to keep a person talking was to create space for them to do so. I kept quiet, hoping Ruben would elaborate. He didn’t. Instead, he glanced over my shoulder at the clock hanging on the wall. “Ms. Culpepper—”

  “Ivy,” I said.

  He nodded and blinked in acknowledgment. “Ivy. I appreciate your help. We all do. We want to know what happened to our mother.”

  I waited for the but.

  “But I have an appointment across town I have to get to. These solar panels don’t sell themselves,” he said with a wan smile.

  I stood. “Sure, I unders
tand. Thanks for talking to me.” The thin brown paper bag holding the bread I’d brought crackled in my arms. “Oh! This is for you,” I said, holding it out to him. “Sourdough.”

  If he thought it was strange that I’d brought him a loaf of bread, he didn’t say. “From Yeast of Eden?” he asked, breathing it in. I nodded, and he smiled. “I love that place. God, I’d be three hundred pounds if I bought bread there as much as I want to.”

  That was a danger of spending too much time at the bread shop, I agreed. “Too much wouldn’t be good, but when you indulge, they’re calories well spent,” I said.

  “We’ll have it tonight,” he said. “My wife’ll love it.” He thanked me and walked me out. As I watched him drive out of the parking lot in his Sun Solar truck, I thought about our conversation. The biggest takeaways were Lisette’s anger with her mom, and the fact that the Ruiz divorce hadn’t been because of adultery, but rather something they did in order to be “smart.” What exactly, I wondered, did that actually mean?

  Chapter 15

  I hadn’t yet been to Miguel’s house, and if I was being honest, I was a little bit nervous. We’d spent countless hours at Baptista’s Cantina and Grill, and our lives were busy, so when we had time together, we tended to spend it at my house, where Agatha was. I’d actually wondered what kind of place Miguel lived in, and I’d even contemplated—more than once—looking up his address and driving by to scout it out. In the end, I decided against stalking and had waited until I’d been invited.

  Tonight was that night.

  Within hours of talking with Ruben, I’d be spending time with Sergio. With any luck, I would be able to get his take on his sister, her anger, and the revelation that Johnny hadn’t been unfaithful to Marisol. But first, I got myself ready, dressing in a white V-neck T-shirt tucked into jeans that folded up at the ankle to create a wide cuff. I slipped on a pale pink fringe-edged jacket, and black block-heeled loafers that looked like they’d been inspired by menswear and had antique hardware detailing. It was dressier than I usually was, but my first time at Miguel’s house felt special. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my hair. I stood in front of the mirror, holding my curly strawberry locks up, then dropping them down. No matter what I did with it, it never looked neat. I called it disheveled; Miguel called it sexy. The truth was probably somewhere in between. The ginger color set off the emerald of my eyes, whichever way I wore it. Given the color of the pink jacket, I decided up was best. I secured it in a messy bun, ringlets softly framing my face, and headed across the street with Agatha. The poor sweet thing had been crated too much today.