Bitter Sweet (15 page)

The three of them took chairs at
one of the bistro tables and Renata continued. “A wedding cake. We’re holding a
reception for some friends—I guess you would say, after the fact. We got
married at a private ceremony in Santa Fe, where James lived, then spent two
weeks on Maui. My friends here in Taos are only now meeting him.” Renata beamed
at the groom. He crossed his legs awkwardly.

“How nice. Well. What kind of
cake did you have in mind? A traditional wedding cake or something smaller?”

“Oh a traditional one, of course.
Right, Jimmy?” Again with the moon eyes.

James draped an arm across the
back of her chair. “Anything you want, baby.” He shifted his gaze to Sam. “And
money is no object. Big and showy.”

“How many people will we be
serving?” Sam asked.

Renata and James exchanged a
glance. She spoke first. “I think we invited about twenty-five people? Maybe a
few more will come. But I don’t want to make the cake too small. It will look,
how do you say, skimpy?” She pointed to one of the display cakes in the front
window, one that could easily serve a hundred-fifty guests. “More like that
one.”

Not one to turn down a big order,
Sam nevertheless tried to explain how much cake would be left over. But Renata
loved the look of that cake and, as James had pointed out, money was no object.
They ordered it anyway.

Sam wrote down the details—four
tiers, covered in ivory fondant with cascades of white forget-me-not petals and
framed oval cameos. “And when is your party?”

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Renata announced.

“Oh, my. That’s really short
notice.”

“But you can do it, right?” James
said. “If we pay a rush fee or something.”

Wedding cakes weren’t often
requested for Thursdays and Sam knew if she put them off they would either go
elsewhere or cancel the order altogether. They certainly wouldn’t change the
date of their party. And Renata was Ivan’s friend.

“As long as there are no changes
once you sign the order, I think we can do it,” she said.

Renata signed the order form with
a flourish. While she wrote out a check, Sam edged to the kitchen.

“I need round tiers of almond
poppyseed
cake—sixteen-, twelve-, ten-and eight-inch ones.
Julio?”

“Right on it, boss.”

“Becky, can you take a peek and
be sure we have at least an extra twenty-five pounds of fondant?”

Becky gave her the nod and Sam
turned back to the customers. James was standing in front of the display case,
facing the chocolate éclairs but eyeing Jennifer’s v-necked shirt.

“Jen?” Sam said through her
teeth, giving a head-jerk toward him.

Jen turned toward the back
counter and got busy stacking paper bags.

“We’re all set,” Sam said to
Renata, who had wandered to the window display, smiling over the design she’d
chosen. “I will deliver it tomorrow between noon and three.”

“Ivan told me you would be
wonderful to work with,” Renata said with a dimpled smile. “Thank you so much,
Sam.”

The glamorous client stood at the
door, waiting for her new husband to open it.

“Looks to me like she’s used to a
little higher level of male attention than this one knows how to deliver,” Jen
said as they watched the couple drive away in a tan Mercedes.

“Glad I wasn’t the only one who
thought the guy definitely married up.”

“Sam, this top isn’t too low-cut,
is it?” Jen asked.

“No, sweetie, it’s just fine.
That guy . . . Well, I better get busy on this order.” Sam kept the rest of her
thoughts to herself. With the new groom ogling other women already, she
wondered how well this marriage would go.

In the kitchen, warm almond
batter sent a heady fragrance through the room.

“The large tiers are in the
oven,” Julio said. “Small ones will go in as soon as those come out.”

“Perfect,” Sam said. “Now I need
to ask everyone to kick into high gear on the fondant flowers. Julio, roll and
cut. Becky, watch how I do this. We need about eight hundred small flowers and
around two hundred big ones.”

Becky stared at her with wide
eyes.

“I know, I should have talked her
into something simpler. I don’t know what came over me. I’ve accepted the order
though.” She squared her shoulders and pulled a tub of white fondant from the
storage shelf.

Julio fed hunks of the claylike
sugar dough through the rolling machine and began to apply the larger of the
flower-shaped cookie cutters, his hands moving rapidly. Sam scooped up the
five-
petaled
shapes and demonstrated for Becky.

“Lay them on the shaping foam,
take the ball tool and give ’
em
a little roll, like
so.” The edges of each petal curled and rose under her touch and she deftly
pinched the center to bunch the little piece into the shape of a flower. “Set
them over here in the candy molds until they’ve set, then we’ll let them dry on
parchment overnight.”

Becky messed up the first couple
but soon she was turning out flowers pretty efficiently. Sam went into high
gear, her hands working in a blur. By the time she paused to take the first
batch to the drying rack, she ran a rough count and saw that they had only
about fifty large flowers. It promised to be a late night.

By six o’clock when Jen came back
to say that the sales area was clean and shut down, all the layers were baked
and cooled. Julio offered to stay long enough to get the initial dirty-icing
done so the layers could set up well overnight in the fridge. Becky gave Sam an
apologetic look.

“I’d stay but Don has tickets to
the circus and we’ve been promising the kids for two weeks . . .”

“You go. It’s not your fault this
last-minute order came in.”

Becky gratefully removed her
apron and left. Julio already had two of the four tiers iced and Sam marveled
at how deftly he handled cake, a task that wasn’t nearly as easy as he made it
look. By seven she had the place to herself, with only five hundred flowers
left to go. There was no way she would get them done tonight, and assembling
the cake would take all her attention tomorrow. Only one answer presented itself.

She slipped out the back door and
into the van. At home, all was quiet. Kelly must have had other plans. Sam went
to her bedroom and picked up the wooden box from her dresser. Sitting on the
edge of her bed with the box on her lap she spread her fingers to touch the
full width of its carved surface. Immediately the wood went from yellowish
brown to rich gold. The varnish began to glow and soon the red, blue and green
cabochon stones sparkled with light. In under two minutes the surface warmed,
then became hot. She pressed down, the heat practically singeing her palms. Her
hands flew away from the box and she waved them in the air for relief.

The energy traveled into her legs
and spread throughout her body. Her heart raced. Gingerly, she picked up the
box with her fingertips and set it back on the dresser. Deep breath. Another.

“Ready,” she said to herself as
she strode toward the back door. In the kitchen she picked up an apple and a
protein bar. Not much of a dinner, but she wolfed it down on the way to the
shop.

Small forget-me-nots and fluffy
multi-layered roses magically slid from her fingers to the drying racks as she
worked the pliable white fondant. Muscle memory took over and the flowers
formed effortlessly while her mind wandered back to Beau’s phone call from Ted
O’Malley’s cousin. They both felt frustrated over the deaths of the two elderly
women and the fact that it seemed the two men knew each other. She realized
just how frustrated when she twisted one of the little flowers too hard and it
turned into an unusable glob. She forced herself to concentrate in the quiet
kitchen with only the ticking clock for company.

It ticked around to one a.m. when
Sam set the final tray of flowers aside. More than a thousand flowers, and well
over five thousand individual petals.
My wrists will be speaking to me
tomorrow
, she thought.

The effects of the magic box
would soon wear off and Sam realized that she better sneak in at least a few
hours’ sleep or she would be dead on her feet before she could ever get this
cake delivered. She locked up and headed home, parking beside Kelly’s little
red car and tiptoeing through the dark house to brush her teeth and fall into
bed.

Four-thirty came way too early,
but then it usually did. Sam had discovered that using the box’s magic powers
to put in extra time at the job usually backfired when she found herself
operating on a few hours sleep. As with an addictive drug she wanted more of
that energy the next day. She gave the box a tiny pat on the lid but resisted
picking it up.

Julio was waiting outside the
back door and he quickly started mixing and baking the standard breakfast items
while Sam pulled her stack of orders, rechecked that the components for the
major projects were already made, and organized the orders by delivery time.
When she set the trays of fondant flowers for Renata Butler’s wedding cake on
the work table, she caught Julio staring.

“I worked all night,” she said.
“Just went home for a shower and got right back.”

“Sure, boss.” His tone wasn’t
disrespectful, but she saw a large dose of skepticism in his expression. She
would have to be careful about trying to pull any tricks around him. This guy
knew baking, knew what was impossible.

Becky walked in just then and
noticed the trays of flowers.

“Wow,” she said as she pulled on
her baker’s jacket and washed her hands. “I’ve seen you work fast, but this
time you must have pulled an all-nighter.”

Thanks for the validation of my
story, Sam thought as she smiled and walked to the fridge. She set the
sixteen-inch tier for Renata Butler’s wedding cake on the table.

“The orders are stacked over
there,” she told Becky, with a nod toward the corner of her desk. “Remember,
that sport-themed one is being picked up at ten. Maybe you could do it first?”

The round cake was to be covered
in fondant cut to the shapes of footballs, baseballs and soccer balls. Sam made
sure that Becky located the edible-dye pens for the details and cutters for the
various shapes, then she turned her attention to the assembly of Renata’s cake.

She tinted large balls of fondant
a light ivory and sent them through the roller, smoothing the resulting sheets
over the tiers, then stacking and checking to be sure everything was
symmetrical. Lacy cameos provided focal points around the sides of each tier,
then she began applying the hundreds of pre-made flowers with a little thinned
fondant to stick them in place. By midmorning the cake looked like an elegant
structure with froths of delicate white cascading down the top and between the tiers.

“Wow, Sam, it’s amazing,” Becky
said. She had finished the sports cake and was well into a set of pastel
“packages” wrapped with large fondant bows and adorable same-shade daisies for
a bridal shower.

“Thanks. What about this for a
topper?” Sam held a fistful of curved white wire strands, each covered in
strands of forget-me-nots. She placed the spray of flowers on top of the cake
and fussed a moment to be sure they would stay in place.

“That wedding party better be
impressed,” Becky said.

Julio walked around the table,
admiring the cake. “She’s right. It’s a stunner.”

Sam found a deep box that would
protect the sides against an accidental bump that might crush the delicate
flowers, and Julio helped her carry it to the fridge.

The rest of the morning passed in
a flurry of cupcakes for a kid’s birthday party, an anniversary cake for a
couple who seemed surprised they’d made it ten years, and seven dozen cookies
for the crowd who always seemed to fill the place for coffee and a snack around
mid-afternoon.

A glance at the clock told Sam
she better getting moving with Renata Butler’s cake—the deadline was upon her.

The address was an upscale
condominium complex where old-style Taos adobe blended with modern chic in a
setting among ancient leafy trees with views of Taos Mountain. The units were
situated so that one would never guess there was a town within a stone’s throw.
Architect and landscape artists had worked to make this spot seem as if it
existed in a world of its own. From what Sam had heard about the prices, it
pretty much did. Movie stars and tech-company founders tended to be the
majority owners here. She wondered how Renata and James made the cut.

She located their unit by the
sounds of laughter and clinking glassware from an upper veranda. Double parking,
she left the van’s air conditioner running while she prowled among the walkways
and shrubs to find their front door.

Musical chimes, then a woman
answered assuring Sam she was in the right place and offering to help carry the
cake if necessary. The two of them got it inside and Sam looked around, hoping
they had a table already prepared for it.

A wide foyer with decorative tile
on the floor opened to a living room that featured one of those unhindered
views of the mountains. Sam noted elegant side tables and expensive wall
hangings as they carried the cake toward a kitchen that the woman assured her
was “just through here.”

They found an empty spot on the
granite countertop and she lowered the sides of the box so she could slide the
cake out.

“Oh, Madame Samantha! You are
here!” Renata’s slightly Russian accent commanded the attention of her guests.
“Everyone! The cake is here. Oh, my, Sam. It is fantastic!”

“Where would you—?”

“Oh yes, just over here.”

Renata pointed to a table
decorated with white flowers, situated in what was probably the breakfast nook,
between the upscale kitchen and sliding doors that led to a large patio. A
dozen or more people were outside, standing at the built-in adobe bar or
lounging on the plump cushions of wicker furniture that formed cozy little
groupings.