afternoon. We might still catch some of the fall leaves. I wanted to ask you to come along, but this has to be a crazy day for you.”
“Well, actually, things are just about done here.”
“How’d you manage that?”
How, indeed? She didn’t want to get into her suspicions about the powers of the box. “We got an early start and everyone just pitched in.”
“So you might be able to break away for an afternoon drive?”
“It sounds wonderful, Beau, but I better not. I left Kelly and Jen baking at home today. They’re probably up to their ears in it by now. But thanks for the invite. Enjoy your day with Iris.”
She ended the call and walked back to the front of the shop to find the others readying to leave.
“I don’t know how to thank you, everyone.”
Zoe and Darryl needed to get back to their B&B—more guests arriving in a few hours. They took Troy and Gus with them. Rupert said he would take Sam’s van back to her house, trade it for his own car, and get back home where Victoria’s characters were in some kind of romantic mess that he needed to straighten out in the current manuscript. Riki offered to stay longer, but Sam couldn’t really think of much else that needed to be done. The dog groomer helped clear the remains of their impromptu brunch and then walked back to her car.
Sam locked the front door behind the rest of them and stood in her shop. Tomorrow the paper signs would come off the windows, to be replaced soon by her logo painted in purple and gold. Jen would be behind the counter, the shelves filled with all the new goodies, and Sam would actually ring up her first dollars in sales in her real shop. A lump formed in her throat at the realization that her dream was about to become reality. She quickly swallowed that lump as her phone rang again.
“Mom, help!”
Chapter 9
Sam’s heart raced. “Kelly, what’s wrong?”
“The oven quit on us. We had two pans of pumpkin bread in there and it’s just not baking. The oven is barely warm.”
Oh god, a baking disaster.
“I’m on my way.”
Sam rechecked the lock on the back door, switched off lights and headed out to her truck. She arrived at home to find Rupert in the kitchen with Kelly and Jen, staring into the oven at pans of flat pumpkin bread with a much too liquidy sheen on top.
“Call Zoe and see if we might get these into her oven. Quick! We might still be able to save them.”
While Kelly made the call, Sam fiddled with the buttons on the oven. These electronically controlled things had always spooked her.
“Zoe says yes. I’ll take the pans right over.” Kelly set both partially cooked loaves onto a tray and headed out the back door.
“Is there anything I can do?” Rupert asked, looking sort of helpless. Art, writing, cooking—he could handle those things. Electronics, forget it.
“No, we’ll sort it out,” Sam said. “Go on and get back to your book.”
He looked relieved as he practically dashed out the back door.
“Jen, looks like you’ve got the rest of the day off,” Sam said. “Get some rest and be ready for tomorrow. I’ll bring all the stuff we’ve already baked and we’ll get set up. Meet me there at six, we’ll open the doors at seven?”
Jen gave her a high-five and left.
Now what?
Sam stared at the blank readout on the oven where digital numbers normally gave the status of the appliance. Rats. She pulled the range away from the wall and reached behind to unplug and re-plug the cord, hoping that something might reboot and get it started again, but no such luck. A baker without an oven isn’t going to be very successful, she thought. She put all she could into praying, wishing, hoping that the guy from Albuquerque showed up as promised and installed her new ovens tomorrow.
Meanwhile, she surveyed the results of the past two days. Dozens of cookies and brownies waited in bakery boxes on the kitchen table. In the fridge, six cheesecakes in four flavors looked delicious with their crumb crusts of chocolate, vanilla and ginger. Sliced and arranged in the cases, she hoped they would entice the midday customers. For the early crowd (ha—she hoped), breakfast quiches, crumb cake, pumpkin bread and apple streusel should work. She closed the refrigerator door and hoped she’d guessed correctly on the quantities. Either too much or too little could spell disaster.
So far, all her bakery business had been custom order; now she was guessing at what it took to fill the needs of the walk-in trade. With Jen at the counter, she planned to work in the back and produce decorated cakes that could be ready for spur-of-the-moment purchases. Each day might be an adventure until she got this whole thing figured out.
She placed a call to an appliance repair shop and left a voice message to the effect that she needed to set up an appointment. So many other things needed to be addressed but a Sunday afternoon wasn’t the time to reach a lot of people. After a quick call to find out how the baking was going at Zoe’s and leaving Kelly with instructions for the finished pumpkin breads, Sam decided this might be her best chance to do what she could to finish the cleanup job at the Adams place.
For the first time in days Sam felt like the bakery wasn’t the top thing on her mind as she drove through town. Most of the golden leaves had fallen from the cottonwoods that normally shaded Paseo del Pueblo Sur. October would soon be gone and the grayer days of November would begin. Her birthday would be here in less than three weeks. She felt startled at that realization, that she’d not even remembered a date that used to be all- important. She supposed that birthdays and the passing years either became less important or more important to a person after fifty. She squeezed the steering wheel of the Silverado, reminding herself that some of the best times of her life had happened these past few years.
After a frankly boring childhood in small-town Texas, an adventure working in a pipeline camp in Alaska and then arriving in Taos—pregnant and single—more than thirty years ago, Sam’s life settled into the routine of raising a daughter and simply staying employed. Being a line cook in a restaurant, taking in sewing at home while Kelly was an infant, working at a family-owned insurance firm where the owner allowed her to bring her preschooler along. That lasted until old man Sanchez died and his wheeler-dealer son sold the agency to a big Albuquerque firm. Sam, then the mother of a teen, couldn’t ever seem to blend the stresses of corporate demands with those of teenaged hormones on the rage. She’d hung in there—barely—until Kelly graduated and then began baking and living off her savings until the job with the USDA came along. What the Department of Agriculture had to do with home mortgages, she never quite understood, but the money was good enough to see Sam past her days of complete frugality. Telling people that she broke into houses for a living elicited reactions from shock to laughter. What she didn’t tell them was about some of the weird, strange and awful things she learned about people in those houses.
Now she pulled into the driveway behind the coyote fence at the newest of her break-ins, wondering once more what had gone on here. The blood on the saturated trench coat didn’t belong to the female owner of the house, and Sam’s half-joking idea that the coat was tied to Beau’s dead PI had no proof to back it up.
Sam retrieved the key from the lockbox on the front door and opened it. Ever since the discovery of the bloody garment, a nagging doubt had hovered at the edges of her consciousness. Had she inadvertently thrown out some important clue that would help solve Beau’s newest case?
The house had the stale smell of dust and old food, of meals prepared a long time ago, of things that children had left behind, like dirty mouths wiped on a towel and the towel thrown into a corner and forgotten, of diapers and spit-up. Although Sam had spent hours working on the place already, there was still much to be done before it could hope to appeal to a buyer.
She sighed and wondered where to start first. Beau probably wouldn’t want her to throw out anything more, now that he was actively looking for the homeowner’s whereabouts. Although he knew Cheryl Adams wasn’t the victim, he couldn’t exactly rule her out as a suspect.
