Dough or Die Read online

  “I don’t so choose,” I said.

  “Someday you will,” she said.

  I shifted subjects. “How is Olaya?”

  She cocked a gray eyebrow at me. “Answer this for me. Why can you call Olaya by her first name, but not me?”

  “Because I met her as Olaya, but I met you as Mrs. Branford. I’m a creature of habit,” I said. I’d tried to call her Penelope and Penny, but calling Mrs. Branford anything other than Mrs. Branford was like trying to drop the Aunt or Uncle after a lifetime of that formality. It didn’t feel natural or right. “It would be like your students suddenly calling you by your first name. That would be weird, right?”

  She narrowed her eyes, considering my explanation. “It is . . . unfamiliar.”

  “Aha! So you’ve experienced that.”

  “I have. Every once in a while, I see a former student. They’re all adults now, of course, and sometimes they try out my first name. It is always unfamiliar, but not necessarily bad.”

  “You two need to go home now.”

  Mrs. Branford and I turned at the sound of Olaya’s voice. She stood in the hallway, her wavy iron-gray hair sticking up on end, her cheeks flushed, and her skin pale. I jumped up and hurried over to her, placing the back of my hand against her forehead.

  She shook her head. “I have no fever.”

  I eyed her. She felt a little warm to me. “I don’t know about that.”

  “I know,” she said, as if she had just this second accepted the fact that she was sick. “Pero, you can go home. Both of you. I can manage by myself.”

  “Of course you can,” Mrs. Branford said, “but friends help one another.”

  Olaya’s mouth lifted in the slightest hint of a smile. “Are we friends now, Penelope?”

  “I think we are, yes,” Mrs. Branford said. “I mean, I’ve seen the best and the worst, and despite our past, I’ve moved on. I accept your friendship if you accept mine.”

  I looked from one to the other—my favorite women in the entire world. They had a complicated history, but Mrs. Branford was saying aloud what I knew they both felt. Of course, I thought they’d already crossed this bridge, but what did I know. A man was involved in their shared past, and that always complicated things. Still, they were definitely, 100 percent, friends.

  Olaya sighed. “Pues. Fine. If you insist, I accept your friendship.”

  “Then sit down,” Mrs. Branford said.

  Olaya didn’t budge. “Why?”

  “We have something to tell you.”

  Olaya looked at me, a slightly bemused expression on her face. “What do you have to tell me?”

  Mrs. Branford drew in a breath, let it go, then said, “There’s been an accident.”

  Olaya stared. “What are you talking about?”

  I shot Mrs. Branford a reproachful look. Friends or not, Olaya was sick. She didn’t need to know right now. “It’s not important,” I said, instantly regretting the words and wishing I could take them back, because of course it was monumentally important to Ben Nader and to his friends and family.

  Mrs. Branford, for her part, lifted her eyebrow again in a way that said She needs to know.

  I sighed and nodded. “Ben Nader was hit by a car outside the bread shop today.”

  Olaya placed her hand against the wall to steady herself. “What?”

  “He was crossing the street, on the phone. He didn’t see it coming. He’s in the hospital.”

  “He will recover?”

  I didn’t have the answer to that, but my phone dinged with an incoming text, as if on cue. It was a text from Emmaline. Ben Nader in ICU. Swelling of the brain. Doctors putting him into a medically induced coma.

  I read it aloud. Olaya’s knees seemed to buckle under her. I helped her to the couch where she sat, back erect, next to Mrs. Branford. I sat on the chair opposite them and filled her in with whatever other details I knew.

  “It was not an accident?” she asked.

  “The sheriff doesn’t think so,” I said.

  She was silent for a minute, then propped her elbow on the arm of the couch and cupped her hand against her forehead. “I am sick.”

  Mrs. Branford smirked. “An astute observation.”

  Olaya ignored her and raised her eyes to me. “I cannot go to work tomorrow. Will you help, Ivy?”

  “Of course,” I said immediately. “Just tell me what you need.”

  * * *

  What Olaya needed was for me to take her place beginning at four thirty in the morning. I would do anything for her. The woman had helped me grow in ways I hadn’t known I could—or that I’d needed. But when my alarm went off at four o’clock the next morning, my eyelids felt like lead and I would have given anything to sleep another two or three hours.

  But a promise was a promise, and Olaya was the most independent woman I knew—right alongside Penelope Branford. She didn’t ask for much, and I felt that I owed her a lot. The bread shop was a Santa Sofia staple. It was closed on Sundays and Mondays—and on major holidays, of course—but other than that, Olaya never closed it for any reason. I wasn’t going to let her down.

  Agatha was curled in a ball at my feet. I sat up in bed, rubbed the sleep from my eyes, and poked her with my toe. She gave a grumbly snort, raised her head just slightly, then lowered it again, closing her eyes and sinking back to sleep. “I don’t blame you,” I said, leaving her be while I got myself ready for the day. Just before I headed out, I tried to rouse her again, to no avail. She did not want to wake up. I scooped her up into my arms and carried her hefty body outside, putting her down in her favorite flowerbed. She groaned again, but circled around and took care of her business. Back inside, she jumped up onto the couch and settled into sleep again. “I’ll be back,” I said, giving her a head a little rub.

  A short while later, I had let myself into Yeast of Eden’s kitchen, the list Olaya had dictated to me the night before on the stainless steel counter in front of me. Lucky for me, Olaya’s bread-baking philosophy was all about the long rise. That meant that much of the bread for the day’s offerings was already made and in the walk-in refrigerator, just waiting to be baked. The croissant dough had been filled with butter, folded, rolled out, folded, rolled out again until it was ready to be cut, shaped, and baked. I’d worry about making new dough for tomorrow later. Dinner rolls, baguettes, French loaves. The list went on and on. I set to it, working my way down the list. With each passing minute, I was more and more in awe of Olaya. How she did this day in and day out was astounding.

  At five fifteen, the kitchen door leading to the outside parking lot opened. In walked a young man who looked to be in his twenties. His eyes were light in contrast to his black skin, and he wore an amiable smile that etched a tiny dot of a dimple into one cheek. His white chef’s shirt with three-quarter sleeves and buttons running up the right side strained against his rounded belly. His hair was shorn close to the scalp.

  “You must be Ivy,” he said, walking right to me. My hands were elbow-deep, kneading a massive mound of dough. He bent his arm and bumped my elbow. His smile never waned. He was the kind of person, I realized, who was inherently happy and whose lips always curved upward. “And you must be Felix,” I said. “I can’t believe we’ve never met.”

  Olaya had hired Felix Macron a few months prior to help her with the morning baking routine. She’d come to rely on him. Experiencing the work for the first time, I could see why she needed the help and I couldn’t believe she’d waited this long to bring someone else in. Based on the amount of bread she made throughout nearly every single day, I think she needed an entire team.

  In that moment, I decided that I was going to increase the hours I worked at the bread shop. There was no way Olaya could keep up the pace she was going. She needed others to take some of the workload off her shoulders.

  “My hours here have been pretty limited,” he said, “but that’s changing. I want to learn every last bit of what Olaya has to teach me.”

  The dough I’d
been working had transformed from a sticky mass to a soft ball. I set it aside and turned to Felix, giving him my full attention. “Olaya mentioned that. You’re always gone before I come in. So you’ll be staying longer now?”

  “Five to noon,” he confirmed. “I don’t know how she’s managed all this time without more help,” he said, saying aloud what I’d just been thinking.

  Felix moved to the sink and gave his hands a good scrubbing. “So, where are we?”

  I breathed a sigh of relief that he was here and consulted my list. “Croissants are baking. Baguettes are formed. We need the wheat and rye breads next.” I followed his gaze to the empty bakery racks. “Or, you know, basically everything.”

  “We’ll get it done.” He moved around the kitchen as if he owned it. He knew where everything was and got right to work, starting with the massive floor mixer, fitted with a giant dough hook. Before long, he had the ingredients added and formed a dough.

  “You’re quick,” I said. Thank God, because I was not. The skill and speed needed to bake the vast quantities of bread that Olaya made on a daily basis far exceeded my abilities. Felix was a lifesaver.

  “I grew up eating Yeast of Eden’s bread. It’s what made me want to run my own bakery. She’s been mentoring me since middle school.”

  “You’re going to run your own shop one day?”

  “You better believe it. But not here,” he added quickly. “I’d never compete with Olaya. I’ll go up the coast, or maybe down to L.A. Of course you have La Brea down there, and plenty of other artisan shops. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out when the time is right. I have too much to learn still. If it wasn’t for Olaya, I don’t know what I’d be doing. Not this, that’s for sure.”

  “She has a habit of saving people,” I said.

  He looked at me, his smile growing bigger. “You too?”

  I realized that just like I knew next to nothing about him, he probably knew nothing about me. Olaya kept other people’s stories to herself. It was one of the many things I loved about her. “Me too.”

  We worked in companionable silence for the next three hours, making our way through Olaya’s list of daily baking. By eight o’clock, the morning crew had clocked in, the coffee was made, and the bakery cases were filled with enough breads, croissants, rolls, and everything in between to open the doors. The regulars shuffled in, standing in line to get their cup of joe and their morning carbs.

  After the rush died down, I left the front and rejoined Felix. Another of Olaya’s late-morning crew showed up. After another few hours, with Felix’s help, we’d finished the baking and had cleaned the kitchen. I tossed my apron into the laundry bin Olaya kept just outside her office, debating whether or not I should log on to the computer and spend some time working on the bread shop blog, go home to take a nap, or stop by Baptista’s Cantina and Grill to visit Miguel.

  It wasn’t a hard decision. I was off to Baptista’s. “I’ll see you in the morning,” I told Felix, planning to be back. If Olaya was still sick, I’d fill in again. If she was better, I’d help out so hopefully she wouldn’t relapse.

  He gave me a playful salute and said, “Okay. See you mañana, as Olaya says.”

  “See you mañana.”

  I was halfway to Miguel’s restaurant when my cell phone rang. I’d programmed in ringtones, so knew right away that it was Emmaline. “Hey,” I said after pressing the button on my car’s system that allowed the phone call to play through the speakers. We were a hands-free state, after all, and I wasn’t willing to get a five-hundred-dollar ticket for anyone.

  “Hey. I have two things for you,” she said, cutting to the chase. She was a busy person with a busy job, and it was the middle of the workday. No time for chitchat.

  “I’m all ears.”

  “First, Billy and I set a date.”

  It took a second for her words to register, and then I screeched. “Whaat! When?”

  “Let’s go to dinner and I’ll fill you in. Baptista’s at six o’clock?”

  Her demeanor changed instantly, her voice dropping to a low tenor and losing its happy tone. “Ben Nader. I’ve viewed the bystander video a dozen times. I’m convinced it wasn’t an accident.”

  This sucked the joy over my brother and my best friend getting married right out of me. If it wasn’t an accident, it was attempted murder.

  “Ivy?”

  Em’s voice in the car brought me back to her. “Yeah, I’m here.”

  “But here’s the thing. So far, the guy comes across as squeaky clean. He volunteers at the women’s shelter and doing handyman stuff. No traffic citations. He and his wife go to church every Sunday. He keeps to himself, donates to the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization. I have to assume that his philanthropy comes from a personal place. The Naders’ son and his fiancée died in a car accident ten years ago. They’d been in Europe. Ben and his wife, Tammy, have been raising their orphaned grandson ever since. Tammy, as you can imagine, is a mess. Doesn’t know how their grandson is going to handle it. She says the boy and Ben are very close.”

  “The wife has an alibi for the time of the hit-and-run?” I asked. Possibly a little blunt, but I knew from Em that the spouse was always a likely suspect.

  “She was home with the grandson. Phone records show that Ben was on the phone with her when he was hit.”

  So she’d heard it all. I couldn’t even imagine what had gone through her mind. “Okay, and you have no other suspects?”

  “None. According to everyone we’ve interviewed, he’s well-liked at work. We have nothing so far.”

  I pulled into the restaurant parking lot. “What about the car?”

  “Nothing new on that. We know the driver had on a baseball cap and sunglasses. He—or she—held a cell phone at the steering wheel, but it doesn’t look like it was in use. Video doesn’t show the license plate. Dark-colored sedan is the best we can do right now.”

  “Can you tell if it’s a man or woman?” I asked.

  “Nope. I’m telling you, Ivy. There are witnesses, but they haven’t given us anything useful. We have nothing.”

  “Did you talk to Sandra Mays?” I asked as the woman’s face flashed in my mind. She was the type of person I could see attempting murder if it suited her in some way. I’d gathered that she and Ben had some sort of history. Did it go deeper than I’d imagined?

  “Yeah, I interviewed her, for what it was worth. She’s a prima donna,” Em said. “Ben Nader’s current situation is definitely more about her than it is him or his family.”

  I knew exactly what she meant. I could see the reality TV host wringing her hands and bemoaning the loss of her cameraman. He was the best . . . The station won’t be able to find anyone good enough to replace him . . . What will I do without him? He always made me look so good!

  “I have to go,” Em said. “Keep your eyes and ears open for me, okay? See you tonight.”

  “I will,” I told her, taking her request as a green light to ferret out whatever information I could. It was only after we hung up that I realized I hadn’t told Emmaline about my encounter with the SUV the night before.

  Chapter 9

  Out of sight, out of mind. I’d been able to put the incident of the car following me the night before out of my mind, but getting out of my car in Baptista’s parking lot in broad daylight, the evidence of the collision was front and center. Instinctively, I turned and scanned the surrounding area. Nothing jumped out at me. No dark scary SUVs were in the parking lot. It didn’t offer me any comfort, though. All I could think was that it was ironic that what I was going through with an unidentified car was the same thing that Em was investigating connected to Ben Nader. For a fleeting moment, I had the thought that maybe I was the intended victim yesterday, and not Ben. But that idea went as fast as it had come. Not even someone with cataracts would mistake me, with my long spiral-curled ginger hair and curvy figure, for Ben Nader’s trim and authentic male form.

  Two different automobile incidents, with two
different targets. I just had no idea what the motive could be for either one.

  I stared at the smashed bumper of my car, looking up only when I heard footsteps approaching. My heartbeat ratcheted up a notch in response, but calmed again when I saw it was Miguel striding across the asphalt toward me. Although we were back together again after too many years apart, a charge of electricity still went through me whenever I saw him. His years in the military had given him broad shoulders and a lean body that I was slowly getting to know again. He was a year older than me, and dang if he didn’t wear his thirty-seven years really well. We’d found each other again, and he looked at me with the same adoring eyes I had for him. Young-ish . . . and falling in love again. It was a great feeling.

  “Hey, whatcha doing?” he asked, but stopped when he saw the car. “Holy sh—What happened?”

  As I told him about the drive to Olaya’s the night before, he slipped his arm around me and pulled me close. We stood side by side, looking at the damage to my car. “You’re okay?”

  I waved away his concern. “I’m fine. Just a little spooked. I was at the wrong place, wrong time, that’s all.”

  He looked down at me skeptically. “You’re saying it was just some crazy person acting out?”

  That was what I was saying, but I didn’t know if I actually believed it. “It must have been. I can’t think of anyone who’d do that to me on purpose”

  The pads of his fingertips tapped against my shoulder. “You’ve been involved with some sketchy characters lately.”

  “What, you mean with Marisol’s funeral?” I asked, talking about a local investigation we’d both played a part in—and had helped solve.

  “That, and the poker room, and—”

  “I’m sure it was nothing.” I rotated my body to face him. I’d planned on his arms circling around me as I stretched up to kiss him. Instead, he moved his hands to my shoulders and looked me square in the eyes. “Ivy, this is not a joke. Someone rammed into you last night. You could have been hurt.”

  I’d tried to make light of it and ignore the niggling concern in my gut, but Miguel was right. The car on my tail, right on the heels of Ben Nader’s hit-and-run, had me spooked. “I know it’s not. I just don’t know what this is,” I said.