Flour in the Attic

by Winnie Archer

  She dragged her fingers under her eyes, smearing her mascara and eyeliner as she swept away her tears. She cradled her head in her hands. “God, I have a headache.”

  Crying messed with my head, too. “We should go back inside. Get you some water.”

  She nodded, but didn’t move. She gripped the edge of the wall with the heels of her hands, her fingers curling over the edge. “He was supposed to be wearing that suit,” she said. “I don’t understand. My dad is buried, but not even in his own clothes. It’s like, one job, right? How can they make a mistake like that? Tomorrow morning we’re supposed to go to the pier to scatter my mother-in-law’s ashes.” She looked at me questioningly. “Should we have done that with our father?”

  “I think it’s a personal choice, Laura. Whatever happened with your dad’s suit was probably just a mix-up. You said your goodbyes. You have to let it go.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, then she drew her lips in, pressing them against each other, and nodded.

  I stood, holding out my hand. “Come on. Let’s go back inside.”

  She took my proffered hand, hauling herself upright, teetering a moment on her wobbling ankles. She found her balance and we walked back to the building. During the time I’d been gone, the reception room had cleared out. Olaya had finished stacking the trays and packing up the boxes. Sergio and Ruben had put the photographs of Marisol in a box, and had moved them, along with the flowers and the urn with their mother’s ashes, to one of the sideboards in the entry. Now they were gathered around, dry-eyed and weary—and focused, not on their grief, but on Miguel and Benjamin Alcott.

  The two men stood facing one another in what I could only describe as a standoff. Miguel’s hands were fisted by sides. The tendons in his neck strained. The funeral director, on the other hand, looked conciliatory with his hands up, palms facing Miguel. We’d walked in mid-conversation, but Alcott was clearly trying to calm Miguel down.

  Miguel, however, didn’t want to be placated. He wanted answers. “How did this happen?” he demanded.

  “I apologize, sir. It must have been mixed up with someone else’s,” he said, but Miguel shook his head, not buying it.

  “That makes no sense. If it was mixed up, that other person would be wearing my father’s suit. That’s not the case. Is someone buried naked, then?”

  “Mr. Baptista, please,” Alcott said, patting the air with his open hands. “Give me a little time. I’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Miguel’s nostrils flared as he drew in a stabilizing breath. “You do that, and fast. I’m this close to filing a complaint against this place. This is unconscionable.”

  Alcott’s Adam’s apple slid down his throat as he swallowed. “I agree, it should not have happened. Rest assured, I will get to the bottom of it.”

  With his scowl, and piercing eyes staring Alcott down, Miguel looked menacing, but he relaxed his hands, blinked to break the tension, and nodded.

  Benjamin Alcott made himself busy and tried to be invisible in the front of the room while Miguel grabbed one of his boxes, told me he’d be right back, and strode out with it. I think every one of us wanted to get out of there and go back to something familiar. For Miguel, that probably meant Baptista’s. He had the dinner service starting, David’s chef position to fill, and probably myriad other tasks to do that could distract him from the day. For Olaya, it was Yeast of Eden. The bread shop was closed for the day, but she had to be there bright and early, before the crack of dawn the next morning, so I knew she’d go check on the state of the kitchen, make sure the closing procedures were followed, and would possibly go home from there. Or she might find Martina so they could comfort each other.

  My familiar place was my house. I’d pick up Agatha, then go home, where I would bake a loaf of bread and immerse myself in sorting through the photographs I’d taken over the last few days. I didn’t know what Marisol’s children would do now that the funeral was over. Would they stay together, or go to their own homes? Who would keep their mother’s ashes until they gathered tomorrow to scatter them? And finally, what was their plan?

  Sergio answered that last question a moment later. “We’re meeting at the pier by Baptista’s tomorrow morning at ten.”

  Miguel had come back into the room in time to hear the plan for the morning. “I’ll have a table ready for lunch afterward,” he said. He believed in breaking bread together, in this case to celebrate Marisol—and David—one last time at his restaurant.

  “Where’s Lisette?” Ruben asked.

  They all looked at each other. Looked around the room. The brothers gave each other knowing looks. They’d seen the state their sister had been in when she’d arrived—barely on time, words slurring, unsteady on her feet. Their expressions, almost identical to one another, seemed to indicate that they knew she’d gone to drown her sorrows on her own.

  We all walked out of Vista Ridge Funeral Home together, each of us carrying something—a piece of the day—but there was no closure. With Marisol’s killer still out there, and none of us closer to knowing why she died, there was no sense of peace as we left.

  All there was were questions.

  Chapter 20

  After I’d helped Olaya unload the Yeast of Eden van and clean up, I picked up Agatha from Billy’s, went home to change, and took an evening walk with her around the neighborhood. Mrs. Branford must have seen me coming because by the time I got to her house, she was outside on the porch sitting on her worn wooden rocker, creaking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. She waved me up the walkway, gesturing so I’d sit in the other rocking chair.

  “Such a sad turn of events,” she said, shaking her head sadly.

  I hadn’t had time to sit and really think about the fact that David was dead, too. It was beyond tragic. “Did everyone hear?”

  “I’m sure they did. Benjamin Alcott—you know he was a student of mine back in the day—”

  “Everyone was a student of yours back in the day,” I remarked.

  “How right you are. That is the byproduct of living a long, long life in one place. You see a lot of people come and go, but it’s the ones who stay that you never forget. Anyway, I spoke with him earlier and he told me, and then, of course, it was discussed quite a bit throughout the service. Lots of speculation.” She lowered her voice ominously. “Was it murder?”

  “Looks that way,” I said.

  “As I feared. So much gossip. People love to be the first to tell a story, you know. Being early in the know makes people think they have power or authority. It’s akin to being an early adopter of the newest technology. It elevates one’s status, even if only in one’s own eyes.”

  My cell phone rang. It was Emmaline. I’d called her back from the bread shop, but, not surprisingly, she hadn’t answered. Instead of leaving a message, I’d texted just three words: Tag, you’re it. Six months ago, I would have said it was rare for her not to answer my call, but since she’d moved from deputy sheriff to the head honcho, it was more fifty-fifty. She was busy leading Santa Sofia’s entire law enforcement community within the sheriff’s office, so she couldn’t always drop whatever she was doing to talk to me.

  “Hey,” I said. “I heard about David.” Cut to the chase. With Em, there was no need for preamble. “Miguel said it was suffocation?”

  “Right. He said he had information about his wife’s death, but we have no idea what that information was.”

  “We saw him last night,” I said, bracing myself for her chagrined reaction, but she was calm.

  “Miguel told me about your Mrs. Branford’s poker playing and the letter David showed you.”

  “Did you find it? The letter, I mean.”

  “No sign of it. If that was what he wanted to share with us, then I assume that’s why he was killed. Someone at the bar may have overheard him sharing it with you, or maybe he told someone else. Whatever happened, it’s gone.”

  My heart dropped. I’d told Johnny. “That may have been what he wanted
to show you,” I said, “but I’m not sure. He left really suddenly, like he’d thought of something.” I thought back to his reaction after he’d shown us the letter. He’d said Oh my God, Johnny had appeared with Mrs. Branford, and then he’d vanished, letter in hand.

  “We’ve searched the house again. Nothing.” She sounded exhausted. Two murders in her Santa Sofia jurisdiction meant she was burning the candle at both ends.

  “He figured something out,” Mrs. Branford said from her rocking chair, jumping into my side of the phone conversation.

  I put Em on speaker and held the phone out between us. “He had to have. He figured something out, left the bar to pursue it, somehow alerted whoever is behind Marisol’s death, and that’s why he’s now dead.”

  “That’s the thing I don’t understand,” Em said from wherever she was. I never called her at her office and she rarely called me from her office phone, instead opting for her cell. I had no way of knowing where she was. Her office? Back at Billy’s house? At her own apartment? “Why would he have alerted the killer that he was wise to him?”

  I rattled off the reasons I could think of. “Blackmail is the obvious one. But what if he wanted revenge and decided to go all vigilante? He could have figured out who the killer was and gone to confront him—”

  “Mmm, but we found him in his house,” she countered.

  I wasn’t ready to give up on my theory. “There’s no doubt about that? He couldn’t have been killed somewhere else and taken back to his house to make it look like he died there? It happened with Marisol. She was dead when she went into the water. This could be the same.”

  “Sure, it’s possible,” Em said, but she sounded skeptical.

  “No letters or journals?” I asked. Johnny had said Marisol had journals, so where were they?

  “Nothing. I’ll let you know if we find something, though,” she said before signing off.

  Agatha hopped up when I tugged on her leash. I stood, too, ready to go home and crawl into bed. After a good night’s sleep, maybe I’d see things more clearly. I wished Mrs. Branford a good night and headed down the walkway. She called after me just as I reached the sidewalk. “People hide their diaries, you know.”

  I turned to look at her, Agatha stopping alongside me. “What?”

  “Diaries are, by nature, private. One doesn’t leave them out for the world to find, wouldn’t you agree?”

  “Yesss,” I said slowly. It was true. As a child, I’d tucked mine under the mattress of my bed. My mother, perhaps an anomaly, had kept hers at her bedside, faithfully writing in it each morning, but I’d been afraid of my parents’ discovering my girlhood secrets. If Marisol had written in a journal about whatever it was she’d discovered, she wouldn’t have kept it in the open for anyone to find. She would have hidden it away in a safe place.

  But where? Her house had been searched. She didn’t seem to have confided in her children. My mind skidded to a sudden stop. I thought back to the funeral when Miguel and I talked about the fact that David wasn’t there yet. Miguel had said that his mother had seen David at the restaurant this morning, but there’d been no sign of him since. “Oh my God,” I said.

  Mrs. Branford perked up from her rocking chair. “You figured something out?” she asked.

  “Maybe.” I ran my fingers through my tangled curls and spoke aloud, processing through my thoughts. “If Marisol was keeping notes or a journal, where are they? We’ve checked everywhere logical. No journals or notes or letters at her house. Or with her kids. Or in her locker at Baptista’s. We checked there,” I said. My heart thudded, because the one place we hadn’t checked was David’s locker at the restaurant.

  Chapter 21

  “Go, my dear,” Mrs. Branford said. She stretched out her hand, wiggling her fingers. “Give me Agatha.”

  I took the porch steps in a single leap, Agatha scurrying up them on her short little legs. “Thank you,” I said breathlessly, handing her the leash. “I’ll keep you posted.”

  Both sets of eyes were on me, I knew, as I raced across the street. I grabbed my purse from where I’d left it on the kitchen counter.

  A minute later I tore down the street in my pearl-white Fiat crossover.

  Twelve minutes later I barreled through the door of Baptista’s Cantina and Grill.

  Miguel’s mother perched on her stool at the entrance. She kept one eye on the portion of the dining room she could see, asking questions of the hostess who was seating people so she stayed informed about what was happening in the rest of the restaurant. She kept her hair dyed chestnut brown. I remembered the days back in high school when I’d spent a lot of time at the Baptista household. She’d walked around the house with sections of her hair haphazardly wound around hot rollers and stuck to her head with metal butterfly clips. I couldn’t help but smile. Her hairstyle hadn’t changed in twenty years.

  Her gaze fell on me the moment I was through the door. She started to smile, but stopped when she saw the grim urgency on my face. “¿Qué pasó?” she asked. “What has happened? Are you okay?”

  I put my hands on the counter, calming my breath. “Hola, señora,” I said. “I’m okay. Um, Miguel—is he here?”

  “Sí, sí. En la cocina.”

  I started through the dining room, but thought better of it. I turned back to her. “Is it okay? Can I—?”

  She gave one succinct nod and waved her hand, signaling me to keep going.

  “Thank you!” I said, then hurried on through the busy dining room and pushed through the right swinging door to the kitchen. The restaurant’s cooks operated on the line with their steaming pots and pans on the commercial stoves. They also manned the ovens, while the other kitchen workers handled the salad, soup, and sauce stations. The waitstaff snatched freshly garnished plates, carefully balanced in one hand, and backed out of the kitchen to deliver to their tables. They were a team performing a dance, and executing it expertly.

  I’d observed the kitchen before, reveling in how different it was from Yeast of Eden’s. Olaya’s space was calm and serene by comparison. Her traditional bread-making took time—the long rise, the shaping of dough, the bake. The frenetic energy of Baptista’s kitchen was absent from the bread shop’s, yet both produced such fine food.

  My preference tended toward the relative calm of Olaya’s kitchen, while Miguel thrived in the exhilarating activity of his restaurant’s kitchen. He’d taken what his father had created and had expanded it, making it truly his own.

  I searched for Miguel amidst the steaming pots, spotting him at last in front of the comal, a large griddle sizzling with what looked like corn cakes. Once they were crispy on the outside, he transferred them to a baking dish and slid them into the oven. I didn’t want to interrupt him or the flow of the kitchen, so I waited, tapping my foot impatiently, looking over my shoulder at the stairs leading up to the staff room. Should I go up without him? Search all the lockers? But no, Emmaline could do that, but only with a search warrant. Other than that, only Miguel, as the owner of Baptista’s, could decide to open David’s locker.

  At long last, he looked my way and I caught his eye. He immediately sensed that I needed him—that something big was happening. He held up his finger, telling me to wait. He took the corn cakes from the oven, deftly slicing them in half. He slathered guacamole on one side, spooned on black beans, layered roasted plantains, and topped it with chopped purple cabbage and cilantro. He plated them, slid them onto the center table for the waitstaff to take, then whispered something to the woman manning the fryer. She said something back to him, tore a piece from one of the corn cakes, and tasted it. Then, almost dismissively, she lifted her arm as she turned her back and returned to the fryer.

  Miguel rolled his eyes. “She’s a diva in the kitchen, but she’s good,” he said as he came up to me, but then he took my hand and pulled me to a small section of the kitchen that was isolated from the rest and out of earshot. “What’s going on?”

  I took a deep breath and spilled out my
theory. “I’ve been trying to make sense of what happened to David since we saw him last night. Something Johnny said stuck with me.”

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “He said it was rough that David had to be the one to find Marisol’s letters and journals. David found that partial letter, but when he realized that we thought it was a first draft or only part of something more, I think he went to find the rest of it.”

  “Or,” Miguel said, “he may have realized that Marisol had to have notes or letters or journals somewhere else.”

  I pointed at him, the idea developing even as we spoke. “Right. What if he realized that whatever had turned up in the house wasn’t all there was?” I let this idea sink in before continuing. “What if the rest of it was here?”

  “But—”

  “Think about it. Where was Marisol’s life? At her home, training . . . and here. Her house has been searched. Nothing. We found her training bag. Nothing. But Johnny said she wrote and journaled and had letters. So where are they?”

  “David was here this morning,” he said slowly. “My mother saw him come in.”

  My skin pricked. “Did he find something?”

  “She didn’t see him leave,” Miguel said.

  I slowed my brain down, thinking only about what I knew. “He was here. He went to the funeral home after that.”

  “Right,” Miguel said. “He brought the picture of Marisol for the easel.”

  “Did he plan on coming back for the service? Maybe not. Maybe he came early to say his goodbye.” I couldn’t answer that question, so I backtracked. “He came here to get Marisol’s journal or notes. Did he find them? And if he did, did he take them with him, or leave them?”

  Without another word, Miguel grabbed my hand and pulled me up the staircase, down the narrow hall to the break room with its lockers and couch and table. I stood in the doorway, trying to see it with fresh eyes. The round table and five chairs; the kitchenette; the brown couch; the six-foot-tall lockers.