Bread of the Dead: A Santa Fe Cafe Mystery

 

Acknowledgments

M
any, many thanks to all those who helped and supported me in writing this book. I owe huge thanks to my awesome agent, Christina Hogrebe, and the team at the Jane Rotrosen Agency for believing in the book series and for finding it such a wonderful home at Avon/Harper­Collins. To Emily Krump, my fabulous editor, I am so grateful for your enthusiasm, insight, and guidance. I'm humbled to have the Harper­Collins team behind me, including publisher Liate Stehlik and marketing director Shawn Nicholls, as well as Eileen DeWald and Greg Plonowski in production. Thanks, too, to Tom Egner for the gorgeous cover design.

From start to finish I've been encouraged and inspired by many writers. My thanks to Kara for all our writing chats and to the ever-­encouraging Sisters in Crime Guppies and Pikes Peak Writers.

On the home front, I owe more than I can ever express to my family, especially my husband Eric for bringing joy to my life, and my parents Jane and Barry and parents-­in-­law Mary and Dany for their love and support. Most of all, my grandmother, Mary Myers, still writing in her nineties, is an inspiration to us all.

Finally, a heartfelt thank you to readers and lovers of books everywhere.

 

Contents

 

Chapter 1

I
love holidays, especially those with food, which is pretty much any holiday worth celebrating. I adore painting pants on gingerbread men and molding chocolate into bunnies, and I'll jump at any excuse to make and eat pie. But right now, lugging a box of skulls across downtown Santa Fe, I wasn't so sure about
this
holiday. Perhaps it was the weather turning blustery and cold, or my friend Flori, who was starting to worry me. Or maybe it was all the bones. I'm not a big fan of bones, but you can't have the Day of the Dead without them.

November first was a few days away and Santa Feans had decked out their adobe city in every manner of festive death décor, from painted skulls to dancing skeletons. I paused in front of a particularly elaborate window display, hoping to distract Flori from her complaints of the past several blocks.

“Check out this storefront, Flori,” I said to my elderly friend and boss. “There's an entire wedding party plus a mariachi band. Impressive!”

I peered in at a diorama populated by Barbie-­doll-­sized skeletons. They strummed guitars, danced, drank, and laughed, their chalky white figures adorned in colorful flowers and formal attire. A wall of disembodied skulls watched over the joyfully macabre scene. Like the skulls I was carrying, they were made of sugar, water, and powdered meringue, and decorated in rainbow swirls of icing.

Flori stopped beside me, setting down her bag and bumping her Harry Potter–style glasses against the windowpane. “Nice,” she said. “I do like a mariachi band. They make any event fun.”

My eyes kept returning to the bride and groom. Bony elbows linked, they raised champagne flutes, gazing at each other starry-­eyed.

“This whole holiday is kind of sad,” I muttered, my gaze fixed on the skeletal ­couple. If they'd found true love, they discovered it too late. A familiar anxiety prickled through my chest. Nearly three months ago my best friend Cass and I raised margarita glasses to celebrate my divorce from Manny Martin, Santa Fe's busiest philandering cop. I was the one to ask for the divorce, and I'm certain I did the right thing. Since then, however, I haven't worked out a new me to celebrate. I am once again Rita Lafitte. I am once again single. I am also forty-­one, living on a café cook's income, and sharing a seven-­hundred-­square-­foot cottage with a teenage daughter wrestling with her own emotions. It's not exactly the inspiring stuff of women's magazines.

Flori smiled up at me. ­“People will know you're not a local if you talk like that,
cariño
. Día de los Muertos is a holiday for the dead, but it's made for the living. It's a time of joy, a reminder that death comes to us all and we must enjoy our time in this world.” She gave my arm a squeeze. “And I would be enjoying too, if Gloria wasn't such a sneaky cheat.”

My eighty-­year-­old friend had relaunched her rant: her nemesis, Gloria Hendrix, and her alleged cheating at Santa Fe's Day of the Dead baking contest.

I tried to assure her, but I knew I might be fibbing. “You'll win this year,” I said, shifting my box of skulls to the opposite hip. “Your
pan de muerto
is the best.”

That part was true. Flori's
pan de muerto
, or bread of the dead, is utterly delicious, and I should know. I've eaten loads of it over the last several weeks, readily ditching dieting aspirations for the sake of taste testing. Imagine a French brioche, soft and golden with sinful amounts of butter and eggs. Then imagine that same pillowy bread scented with orange zest and anise seeds and shaped in the form of a toothy skull. That's Flori's
pan de muerto
. Our customers at Tres Amigas Café beg for it, and Flori has taken home blue ribbons in baking contests from Taos to Albuquerque.

The last two years, however, Flori has lost to Gloria Hendrix. That's where my fib came in. I feared that Flori might be defeated again, and I didn't like it any more than she did. I wasn't upset because Gloria was a relative newcomer like me. I didn't mind that she was from Texas, a state that native New Mexicans like Flori love to loathe. I didn't even care that she was a flashy socialite who threw around her money and influence. What bugged me was Gloria's boasting, her bragging about a bread that—­if the rumors were true—­she didn't make herself. Word in my culinary circles was that Gloria's housekeeper, Armida, baked the victorious loaves. So far I hadn't sifted out the truth. However, Armida flees across the street whenever she sees me or Flori coming. This, in my mind, is evidence enough of Armida's co-­conspirator guilt.

Flori wasn't fooled by my words. “I might not win, Rita, and I wouldn't mind being beaten by Armida if she entered in her own name. She comes from a cooking family. Her mother did a fry bread that could make grown Navajos weep.”

She picked up her bag and took off down the street. I had to jog to avoid being bested by a petite octogenarian with bad knees. Flori, however, wasn't carrying around a dozen extra heads at seven thousand feet above sea level.

“It's the principle,” I agreed, siphoning air through my teeth to hide my panting. “Gloria shouldn't be bragging about something she hasn't done.”

“Exactly.” Flori's mica eyes had a dangerous sparkle. She slowed and looked furtively over her shoulder, as if checking for Gloria and her spies. “I have a plan,” she whispered. “A way for us to catch Gloria and Armida in the act.”

I feared what Flori was cooking up. My elderly friend is famous around Santa Fe. She's renowned for her tasty tamales, her fabulous frijoles, and her amazing
carne adovada
. She's also a well-­known snoop, with a sixth sense to boot. When I started working at Tres Amigas, just after moving to Santa Fe some three years ago, I had no chance of hiding my own sleuthing tendencies from her. But I was always a reluctant sleuth, and now I was giving it up for good. If only Flori would listen . . .

“We'll get out my new zoom lens,” she was saying. “Then we wait until dark and hoist you over Gloria's garden wall. You find yourself a view of the kitchen and wait until you can catch Armida in the baking act. Photographic evidence. That's what we need. We'll get them both disqualified. Ha!”

I struggled to find a nice, polite way to say,
No way
!

Flori kept going. “I've already checked out her perimeter. No sharp pointy bits on the wall that I can see, and all those home security signs are probably fakes.”

“But Flori—­”

“Don't worry, Rita. I'll fix you some snacks in case you have to stay out there awhile. What would you like?
Frito
pie? That worked well last time, except for the chili con carne going cold and getting in your hair when you tangled with that cactus.” She chuckled at the memory of my
frito
fiasco.

I didn't care what she said. I wasn't about to be hoisted anywhere. The last time I heaved myself over a wall on one of Flori's snooping quests, spilled chili wasn't the worst of our problems. Drug dealers were, and we hadn't gone looking for them in the first place. That was the old me, though. New me wouldn't chase after criminals or stick her nose into investigations or sit out in coyote country with snack food. New me would embrace low-­stress hobbies like landscape painting or herb gardening or perhaps yoga.

Flori was eyeing me expectantly, tugging at my resolve.

I didn't want a cheater to win either, but there had to be a better way to reveal Gloria's deceit. I needed to squelch this plan before it got started, or at least change the subject. I looked around for another distraction. This time, however, I was the one distracted.

A silhouette approached us, backlit by the afternoon sun and framed by the covered walkway along Palace Avenue. The scene was straight out of the Old West, from the cowboy hat and boots to the flash of a silver belt buckle and hint of a swagger.

“Oooo . . .” Flori elbowed me. “Here's a handsome sight. Put your flirting eyes on, Rita. Loosen up that scarf a little too.” She reached over to fiddle with the chevron-­print scarf looped around my neck as protection against the late October chill.

I grunted in irritation. As I'd also been reminding Flori, flirting—­like sneaking over walls—­was not part of my immediate plans. Flirting could lead to dating, something I wasn't ready for yet. I'd never be ready for online matchups, blind meetings, or beautifying tortures involving hot wax and lasers, all of which well-­meaning friends and nosy acquaintances kept urging me to try. To ward off such pressures, I'd set a one-­year moratorium on dating. The moratorium, I assured myself, could be extended.

My irritation wasn't with Flori. She's an irrepressible flirt. No, I was ticked about my heart doing a two-­step. My emotions clearly hadn't gotten the no-­romance/no-­stress memo from the sensible rule-­setting side of my brain.

Flori yanked my scarf into a noose.

“Moratorium!” I gasped as she chattered on about how I should “show some interest.”

“What?” she demanded, yanking harder. “I can't understand you. Your scarf is so tight you can't talk, let alone flirt.”

I wouldn't be able to breathe at this rate. I set down the box of skulls, pulled free of Flori, and loosened the noose as the cowboy silhouette morphed into the real-­life form of Jake Strong, lawyer, gentleman rancher, and all-­around hunk.

“Ladies. May I be of assistance?” He tipped his hat. I wished he wouldn't do that. As an expat midwesterner, I find hat-­tipping way too sexy.

“Rita's loosening up,” Flori replied, with her usual knack for sounding inadvertently inappropriate.

“I see that.” Jake's smile, accompanied by a wink, didn't help my composure. A blush flared across my cheeks. If scientists ever discover the cure for blushing, I'll buy it, whatever the cost. My red-­faced reaction wasn't merely because of Jake's twinkling eyes or hat-­tipping or good looks, which definitely lived up to the Strong name. Think George Clooney only more chiseled and rugged, with hair the color of espresso, steel-­blue eyes, and the feature I loved most, a warm smile that triggered well-­hewn laugh lines. Yes, Jake was a hunk, but he flirted mildly with Flori too. I'd told myself that he was simply nice to everyone. Flori, however, had dispelled that illusion.

She's the one who pointed out that Jake had been stopping by Tres Amigas a lot more since my divorce. Flori also subjected the tough attorney to questioning. She discovered that he can bake biscuits from scratch, has an English bulldog named Winston and a family ranch along the Pecos, and grew up in Las Vegas. Las Vegas, New Mexico, she'd specified approvingly, not that flashy Vegas over in Nevada. I love biscuits and wrinkly bulldogs, and a cowboy on his ranch is the stuff of fantasies, but they weren't what rattled my moratorium resolve. It was Flori's confirmation that Santa Fe's most handsome lawyer was, indeed, feeling out my interest.

Beside me, Flori rooted around in her shopping bag. “I can't find anything in all this baggage,” she complained, hauling out a scarf, a stop watch, and a pair of binoculars.

Baggage, I reminded myself. I certainly didn't need to tote around anyone else's emotional baggage. Flori additionally reported that Jake became an eligible bachelor when his wife left him to pursue Hollywood filmmaking about five years ago. That he didn't date for several years, hoping for her to return, sounded sweet. That he then engaged in several short-­term relationships with tall blondes resembling his ex-­wife sounded like big-­time baggage. Not to mention too much competition. I'm five-­foot-­five with curly brown hair that the dry Santa Fe air turns into a static-­charged hazard. I patted my curls, which had gone vertical in a gust of wind. Chunks of icing fell out. Not only was I not a statuesque blonde, I was likely splattered in multicolored sugar paste.

Jake smiled down at me. “I stopped by the café, hoping for some of your fine and fiery green chile stew. It's a nice consolation that I ran into you here.”

I stammered something dull about chile peppers and chilly weather for Halloween. It was this kind of nonscintillating small talk that I'd have to give up if I started dating again. How I was going to become scintillating, I had no idea. I supposed I'd visit the library and check out some self-­improvement guides.

“Aha!” Flori straightened her small frame and held out a Ziploc. “Here, you're a discerning man, Jake, try out this bread and tell us what you think. Rita decorated this one so it's extra sweet.”

“It does look awfully sweet,” he said, admiring the contents. “Nice teeth too.” Inside was a golden skull complete with a toothy grin and crossbones dusted in colored sugar. Jake opened a corner of the bag and sniffed. “Heavenly. I can tell already that this is a winner.”

“And you are a sweet man.” Flori patted him on the arm. “If we weren't in public, I'd pinch your butt.”

“And I'd haul you into court for sexual harassment,” he countered.

Flori whooped in delight and picked up her bag. “Wish that Rita and I could stay and flirt with you, Mr. Strong, but we have a delivery to take to the Galisteo Gallery.”

I took this as my cue to avoid more blushing and reached for the box of skulls. What I grabbed onto were two warm, masculine hands.

“Oh,” I said, continuing to show off my sparkling conversation skills.

“Please, let me.” Jake managed to dodge my forehead, which in my haste to straighten up came close to head-­butting him, another move to avoid in future dating.

“What do you have in here?” he asked, after righting his hat and handing me the box. “Boulders?”

“Skulls,” I said, suppressing a groan. I cracked the lid and extracted a skull painted in swirls of vibrantly colored icing. Purple suture marks formed grim lips. Red flowers filled the eye sockets, and yellow and orange swirls decorated the cheekbones.