Flour in the Attic Page 5

  I walked into the bread shop hoping I’d find Martina behind the counter helping out, but no such luck. Instead, Maggie, the high school girl who worked part-time, was behind the counter. It looked to me like she’d dyed her hair darker than it had been, which made her alabaster skin look even paler. She listened as the customer she was attending to rattled off what she wanted. One by one, Maggie gathered the different breads, ending by putting two baguettes into thin brown-paper sleeves. She rang her up on the old cash register, and collected the money.

  Three of the scattered bistro-style tables had customers sipping tea and eating almond or chocolate croissants or savory scones, which, aside from her sugar skull cookies, were the closest things to traditional bakery items Olaya carried. Once in a while, she’d bake Mexican wedding cookies or, if she had a hankering for something sweet, she might make palmiers. Otherwise it was bread, bread, and more bread—which was fine with me.

  Maggie moved on to the next customer while I perused the display cases. One of Olaya’s traditional decorated skull cookies lay tucked behind a rye batard—a dark rye bread that Olaya made with a sourdough starter to add dimension and depth to the flavor. It had become one of my favorites lately, especially on a chilly evening, and was one I was trying to recreate in my home kitchen.

  The sugar skull cookies were her special treat for the kids of Santa Sofia, the tourists who came through town, and everyone in between. She made the cookies, decorated them, and hid them amidst the rest of the bread-shop fare, like Easter eggs to be hunted for. If I was lucky and encountered Olaya mid-decorating, I was able to sneak one for myself, but once they were hidden in with the other breads, they were strictly for Yeast of Eden’s youngest patrons.

  After Maggie finished with her customer, I approached the counter. She spoke before I had a chance to. “Olaya’s not here,” she said, “but Mrs. Branford was in looking for you.”

  “How long ago?” I asked. I hadn’t seen my elderly neighbor since before Marisol’s body had been discovered. I knew she was itching to get the lowdown on everything that had happened.

  Maggie glanced at the clock hanging on the wall behind the counter. It was three o’clock now. “About an hour?”

  “How about Martina?” I asked. “Has she been in?”

  “Actually, yes. She picked up Olaya. They went to talk to someone about the woman who just died.”

  This caught me by surprise. “Talk to who?”

  Maggie looked toward the ceiling for a second, trying to remember, but she shook her head. “Not sure.”

  I felt a frown tug my lips down. I was like Curious George; I wanted to know where they’d gone. But all I had to do, of course, was call one of them and I’d probably get my answer.

  Maggie snapped her fingers. “But I know they were going to the funeral home. We’re going to help cater the . . . what do you call it? Wake? Service? Funeral?”

  Good question. A funeral, I believed, usually included a burial, so I didn’t think it would be called that. A wake was typically a Catholic tradition stemming from the belief that the family and friends stayed awake all night to protect the recently passed from evil spirits until he or she could be properly buried. In my experience, a wake and a viewing were more or less the same thing now. The bottom line was that they all offered a chance for the grieving to pay respects to the family of the deceased, and to celebrate the life that had been lost. Whatever it was called, there would be memorial photographs celebrating Marisol’s life, and the cremation urn. And, apparently, baked goods courtesy of Yeast of Eden. “Probably a wake or a viewing,” I said, venturing a guess as to what they’d actually call it.

  The bell on the door dinged as two men and a woman came in. They chatted happily, their voices light and airy. They did not have death on their minds. I left Maggie to man the bread shop and headed back to Vista Ridge Funeral Home for the second time that day.

  The Yeast of Eden logo was a simple oval with the name of the bread shop in a classic typed font with “Artisan Bread Shop” written in cursive just beneath it. There it was in the funeral home parking lot, emblazoned on the side of the bread shop’s white delivery van. Olaya was an active member of the Santa Sofia community, participating in festivals and events. She also catered. The van was put to good use.

  The lobby inside was empty, but voices drifted from the director’s office. The door was cracked open. The director, Mr. Alcott, wasn’t there this time, but Olaya, Martina, and Lisette were seated in the available chairs, turned so they faced each other. Olaya held a notepad on her lap, a pen in her hand, and as Lisette spoke, she took down notes. “I want it to be things my mother loved,” Lisette was saying when I scooted into the room. They all acknowledged me in their own ways: Olaya nodded, almost imperceptibly; Martina raised her hand and fluttered her fingertips; and Lisette lifted her chin.

  They spoke for a few minutes, with Olaya throwing out suggestions, Lisette countering with other ideas, and Olaya making notes she could come back to when she had time to sit and think about it. The one thing they agreed on at the moment was that Baptista’s would make carnitas, which would be served as sliders in small buns Olaya provided. Yeast of Eden would also make bite-sized scones, as well as mini pan dulce, lemon curd, strawberry butter, and whipped butter.

  “Will there be a viewing or a wake here, or at Marisol’s church?” I asked when they’d wrapped up the menu.

  “She didn’t go to church much,” Lisette said, “so no Mass. We’re doing a ‘memorial service.’ ” She made air quotes around the words.

  “But then we’ll take her ashes to the pier,” Martina said, confirming what Sergio and Ruben had wanted.

  It wasn’t quite a poetic full circle offering because the ocean hadn’t actually taken Marisol, but it was symbolic: The power and cleansing, almost baptismal element of the ocean had always spoken to Marisol, and her family knew it was where she needed to return to.

  Mr. Alcott returned a few minutes later. “Good to see you again so soon,” he said to me. “Are you a family friend?”

  I realized we hadn’t actually been introduced. “Yes, and I work in the bread shop,” I said.

  He clasped his hands in front of him in that mortician manner. “Excellent. We will take care of everything on our end, rest assured. We have the okay from the authorities to proceed. The memorial service will be Thursday.”

  Two days from now. It seemed so fast, and yet I knew those hours would creep by at the same time. Mr. Alcott led the four of us back through the main hallway to a room on one side. It was neutral and nondescript, with peach-tinged beige walls, several tall, cylindrical off-white ceramic pots with tame leafy plants in them dotting the room, and a sideboard with candles and flower arrangements as the centerpiece in the front of the room. There was also a small oak freestanding podium, microphone attached, and several wooden stands holding additional flower arrangements. In lieu of church pews, the room had six rows of attached wood-framed black upholstered chairs. As in a church, an aisle ran down the center of the room, dividing the rows of chairs into two sections.

  “Since there will not be a Mass or church service, we have two options,” Mr. Alcott said. “The first is to have the final ceremony here, as we did with your grandfather,” he said, specifically looking at Lisette. He swept his arm wide. “This is a lovely room, as you can see. With a cremation, of course, we don’t have a traditional viewing. The urn will be showcased, as will any memorial photos you’d like to feature. We will help you plan the ceremony, of course—who will speak, how to best celebrate the life of your mother, things of that nature. The reception would also be here—all the food must be brought in from the outside. We do not have any kitchen facilities. Or you can welcome the bereaved back to your home for a more personal setting.”

  “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” Lisette said. “We had the entire thing here for my grandfather. I didn’t think about doing it at the house.” She looked to Martina. “What do you think?”

  Martin
a’s eyes welled with tears, but somehow they didn’t spill over. She simply nodded. “If you think David would be up for it.”

  Lisette scoffed, dismissing any say David might have. “It’s not his house.”

  My ears perked up, first at the open disdain Lisette seemed to have for David—he and Marisol had been together plenty of time for Marisol’s grown children to accept their marriage, so why did Lisette resent him?—and second at her belief that David hadn’t inherited the house, which directly contradicted what David had said about he and Marisol having written wills. If they’d been happily married, and had made each other the beneficiaries, then it stood to reason that the house would go to David.

  But . . . maybe not. It was quite possible that Marisol had bequeathed her family home to her children, and not her husband. “It’s not David’s house?” I asked.

  “No way. It goes to me and my brothers,” she said without a moment’s hesitation.

  I’d caught a glimpse of Martina’s puzzled expression as Lisette spoke. She tried to tamp down her confusion, but she couldn’t erase it from her face. “I thought when they had their wills done—”

  Lisette cut her off. “When they had their what done?”

  Martina swallowed, her left eye twitching nervously. “Their wills.”

  Mr. Alcott melted into a corner. Smart man. I stayed still, listening. Watching. I’d learned that when you questioned people directly, they usually told you what you wanted to hear, but when you stood back and observed, they showed you things they didn’t intend. Marisol clearly didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news for Lisette; and Lisette, for her part, wagged one finger toward Martina, as if she were scolding a young child. “No, no, no. She would have told me if she changed her will. The house is supposed to come to the three of us. To me and Sergio and Ruben. It is not supposed to go to David,” she said, her voice dripping with contempt when she uttered her stepfather’s name.

  I wondered where the animosity came from. Miguel thought highly of the man, and I thought he was a pretty good judge of character. So why didn’t Lisette like him? That question flickered in and out of my mind, replaced by a better one: Why wouldn’t Marisol have told her daughter about her new will, if she’d indeed changed it? A couple of scenarios came to mind: One, Lisette and her mother—and her other children, presumably—had been at odds, enough for Marisol to change her will, which could be a motive for murder; two, David had manipulated his wife by forcing a change in the will, which could be a motive for David if Marisol had started to have second thoughts and/or if he hadn’t really loved his wife; and three, maybe Lisette was an Oscar-caliber actress and knew about the will, which still gave her a motive for murder.

  I looked at Lisette with a new perspective. Could Lisette or David have had anything to do with Marisol’s death? For that matter, Sergio and Ruben needed to be considered if they were no longer going to inherit their mother’s house. That cottage by the beach was worth a mint. People had killed for a lot less.

  “She could not have cut us out,” Lisette said again. “No way.”

  Martina was wide-eyed. A deer in the headlights. I knew she was wishing she hadn’t uttered a word.

  “Martina,” Lisette implored, her voice desperate. “Did she?”

  Martina threw up her hands helplessly. “They talked about it, and I thought they did because of your fath—” She stopped. Regrouped. “I do not know for certain.” Her Spanish accent was usually hardly detectable. She, like Olaya and Consuelo, didn’t use many contractions, and once in a while, their sentence structure followed the Spanish language rules instead of English. But, like her sisters, stress pushed the English to the back, the Spanish rising like yeast proofing. “I am sorry, mija. I do not know more.”

  “You were going to say she did it because of my father,” Lisette said. “What does he have to do with anything?” A flurry of emotions crossed her face: anger, hurt, disappointment, puzzlement. She cupped her hand over her mouth and closed her eyes, drawing in several deep breaths.

  I watched her, still questioning the veracity of her feelings and reaction to Martina’s bombshell. I hated the idea that Marisol’s own children or husband could have had something to do with her death, but Emmaline’s voice sounded in my head. Motive. Follow the motive.

  * * *

  Olaya, Martina, and I stood outside the funeral home and watched Lisette drive away. “Do you think she will be all right?” Martina asked.

  There wasn’t an easy answer to that. If she was guilty of killing her mother and I was able to prove it, then, no, she wouldn’t be all right. If her grief and distress were real, then who knew? People healed in their own time, and in their own way. I kept my thoughts to myself. Tossing around ideas in my head was one thing. Saying them aloud was another. I wasn’t ready to go there.

  “The shock of her mother dying followed by the news she just got . . .” Olaya stroked her chin thoughtfully. “It is a lot to take in. She needs time.”

  “I talked with David a while ago,” I said. “He’s kind of a mess.”

  “¿Que?”

  “He’s drinking.”

  “Too much pain,” Martina said. She turned to me, her voice quivering. “Ivy, is it true what the news is saying? Mari was killed?”

  I repeated the story I’d already told Olaya, ending with the fact that Marisol’s recovered body didn’t have the characteristics of a drowning, and the ME’s report on cause of death.

  Martina grew pale. She blinked heavily, as if she were trying to erase the image of what I’d described. “But why?” she asked, more to herself than to either of us specifically. “Who would want to kill her?”

  Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder in the direction Lisette had just driven off in. When I turned back, I took the opportunity to probe Martina a little bit. “You were Marisol’s running partner?”

  “For, mmm, two or three years now, yes. I run to be able to eat Olaya’s bread,” she said with a small smile, “but Mari, she liked to compete. There was something inside of her. What is that expression? Like a dog with a bone? She set her mind to something and she never let go.”

  Just then, the door to the funeral home opened and a woman emerged. She wore jeans and a long sleeve T-shirt. Her short, dyed red hair was brassy and harsh against her pale skin. She looked to be in her fifties, but the angled cut of her hair and the dark makeup around her eyes told me that she was fighting against the idea of growing older. She strode down the walkway, holding something to her lips and puffing, intercepting us a moment later. “Afternoon. How are you ladies doing?” she said, taking another puff and smiling in that subdued way Mr. Alcott had.

  Olaya and Martina nodded their greeting. I bounced an “Afternoon” back to her. “Do you work here?” I asked, realizing she held a vape pen.

  She held it to her mouth again and took a drag as she nodded. “Suzanne Alcott,” she said, extending her hand.

  Ah, the sister Benjamin Alcott had mentioned.

  “We know you have a choice in Santa Sofia,” she continued, “so we appreciate your business. You’re with the Ruiz party, is that right?”

  Her words were almost verbatim what her brother had said to Marisol’s children. There had to be a playbook of standard phrases to use with the bereaved.

  Olaya spoke up. “We are helping to cater the memorial service.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you were with the family.”

  “We are,” I said. “Olaya owns Yeast of Eden. She and Baptista’s Cantina and Grill are catering the food. But we were all close friends of Marisol’s, too.”

  Suzanne Alcott nodded. “Death is so hard to cope with, especially when someone was so full of life. When you add in foul play, well . . . It’s hard to make sense of any of it.”

  “How do you know there was foul play?” I asked. I didn’t think the circumstances of Marisol’s death were public knowledge yet and I wondered how much Emmaline and her people shared in a situation like this.

  She
took another unhurried pull from her vape pen before responding. “We work with the local authorities on the timeline so we can prepare the deceased for the service and work with the family so they understand what’s happening. I spoke with someone from the sheriff’s office this morning who shared the preliminary findings. Poor woman. It can be so difficult to wrap your head around the idea that someone who was so alive, who you just spoke to, is now gone.”

  She’d put into words precisely what we all felt. “Did you just speak to her?” I asked.

  “Pretty regularly since her father passed. She came to sit in the memorial garden to mourn him. She felt connected to him there.”

  I remembered the urn David had shown us. “But didn’t she have his ashes?”

  Suzanne Alcott took a puff of her vape pen, giving a long blink. “I believe so,” she said, “but that’s not really the point. People process through their grief in different ways. They bring blankets to a gravesite, and lie down alongside the deceased; they sprinkle ashes in a favorite location; they cry; or they may not shed a single tear; they pray in church to feel closer to their lost loved one. Marisol seemed to find solace in the memorial garden.”

  “I worried if she would ever get over losing her father,” Martina confirmed. “She did all of those things. She cried, then she didn’t cry anymore. She was angry, then she wasn’t. I stopped her from throwing her father’s urn in the garbage can. She said none of it meant anything, but then she went to church to pray even though she was not religious.”

  Suzanne Alcott held her hand up as if her take on the deceased had just been validated by Martina. “We see it all here.”

  “That must be hard,” I said. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being surrounded by death every single day.

  She took another drag of her liquid nicotine. “I imagine it’s kind of like being a homicide detective or a medical examiner. You learn to turn if off at the end of the day. If you don’t, it can be like a poison.”