Bread of the Dead: A Santa Fe Cafe Mystery (12 page)

“We're sorry,” I said again, reaching out a hand to let Celia know that it was time for us to leave. “My daughter is grieving the loss of a dear friend, but that is no excuse for illegal behavior. Please give me the ticket and we will pay it.”

Walker insisted on paying half, a generous offer, as was his promise to inform Cass. I appreciated both, but I firmly rejected any payment. I knew the memorial picnic hadn't been Sky's idea. Besides, how bad could one ticket be? I could make Celia work it off.

Sergeant Day tore off a ticket sheet. “You can pay online,” he said. “By the deadline or you'll be in court.”

I was glad that he and Jake had started talking basketball again. I didn't want the fancy lawyer to see me gawping at the bill. One hundred eighty-­five dollars? “Come on,” I told my daughter grumpily. “We'll talk about this when we get home.”

“What are we going to do, walk home? Our car's at Dad's.”

“
My
car is at your father's,” I corrected. “Where you'll no longer be staying unsupervised. You're coming home with me.”

Celia, to her credit, didn't argue. She did put in a snipe when Jake said he'd be driving us home.

“Way to go, Mom,” she said, sarcasm oozing. “Now I know why you didn't answer your phone.”

 

Chapter 13

I
asked Jake to drop us off at Manny's house, hoping Manny would be out working and that Celia could, as she promised, find the car keys in her room. Her spaces were messier than the interior of my purse.

“I can wait,” Jake offered. We sat in his warm car, watching as Celia trotted to the front door of Manny's adobe-­coated rancher. It had been his grandparents' house, and I'd never considered fighting for it in the divorce. The house was his, too much so for me to want to live there. Still, it did hold some fond memories. Celia lit lights, and I pictured the familiar rooms and hallways she was walking through.

I turned to Jake, noting again how good he looked in his scarf. “You've already done so much for us,” I said. “It's okay. We'll get our car and go straight home.”

“We should do this again sometime,” Jake said as I reluctantly made moves to leave the heated leather seats and warm male companionship. “I mean, not
this
in particular. Perhaps coffee without any police involvement?”

I got out thinking of my moratorium, but mostly about Celia. She was clearly hurting. I had to focus on her. On the other hand, wouldn't it be rude to refuse coffee with the man who drove me to not one but two law-­enforcement meetings in a single day? I agreed that coffee would be nice. “My treat,” I insisted.

He smiled, his blue-­gray eyes twinkling. “Shall I call you, then, or expect to find you hitchhiking on the street?”

Calling definitely seemed like a date, I worried, as I wrote my number on the back of a grocery receipt. As he drove off, I worried some more. What did that grocery store receipt reveal? A run for snack food and chocolate? I assured myself that it didn't matter. Jake wouldn't call anyway, not after reconsidering the day of driving me around. Moratorium or not, I realized I'd be disappointed if he didn't.

“Hey, Mom, snap out of it.” Celia appeared beside me, dangling keys. She had a duffel bag over one shoulder and her favorite faux-­feather pillow under her arm. “I left Dad a note. You know he's going to be ticked, 'cause I told him I was staying a few more nights.”

She opened the garage door. There my car was, in my old parking spot right next to the moving boxes I'd never unpacked. At first I'd told myself I was too busy to fully unpack. I had to help Celia adjust. I had to find my own way around and learn my new job. Down deep, however, I'd known that my marriage was crumbling. Part of me had been poised to move back home, until I realized my home was here, in Santa Fe.

I squeezed through to the driver's-side door, glancing at box labels as I went.
Kitchen pans: Bundt, muffin, popover. Books, crafts, gardening. Albums, Celia.
Nostalgia hit me. I missed parts of my old life, and I definitely missed my collection of miscellaneous cookware. It's not like I needed to make cakes shaped like pumpkins or churn ice cream in winter or whip up golf-­ball-­shaped Danish pancakes in my ebelskiver pan, but I sure liked the idea that I
could
if I wanted to. I almost regretted negotiating a year's storage of my stuff as part of the divorce. I couldn't afford a private storage facility, though, and the tiny casita could never accommodate the mountain of cookware. I peeked in one of the boxes.

“You know Dad wants to throw all this stuff out,” Celia said. “He wants to get a motorcycle and maybe an ATV and put in a workbench and a punching bag and stuff. I told him that he could toss my old kid junk.”

If he tossed my ebelskiver pan or sentimental items from Celia's babyhood, I'd want to use him as a punching bag. Feeling slightly panicked, I grabbed the first thing I found at the top of the box—­my waffle maker—­and vowed that as soon as life got back to some semblance of normal, I'd find a new storage option.

Driving is not the best time for imparting life lessons. On the other hand, Celia couldn't tromp off and avoid me if she was buckled into the front seat. At the first stoplight, I turned to my daughter and asked her point-­blank whether she was drinking.

She shrugged and stared out the window.

“Celia,” I said, aiming to sound gentle but firm. “I smelled alcohol on your breath the night of Victor's . . . the night Ariel brought you home. Is that why you left the car parked downtown?”

I focused on the narrow street and avoiding pothole craters. In my side vision I saw Celia fidget. I waited her out, an interrogation technique I learned from Flori.

“Yeah, fine,” my daughter said under my gaze at a four-­way stop. “I was at Gina's place, and her sister's in college and some of her friends were there having drinks and gave us some. I only had one hard cider. Maybe one and a half.”

Celia and I have had the no-­drinking/avoiding-­peer-­pressure talk before, several times in fact. I struggled to find the right words, all of which were met with rote, “I know, I know” responses from my daughter.

“And the beer?” I asked. “Where did you and Sky get that?”

Gina's sister was again implicated. “I've been helping Gina study for her SATs,” Celia said. “We were all hanging out there and I saw the beer and thought of Victor.” Her voice wobbled and my sternness caved.

“You know how I feel about this, Celia. But you did the right thing getting a ride the other night.” I glanced over to see her staring out the side window.

“Yeah, I know,” she said again, before adding, “I ran into Ariel. She's the one who insisted on driving me back home. She's cool.”

She was cool, I thought, feeling unexpected gratitude for Manny's girlfriend.

Our serious talk ended in the driveway. Celia jumped out before I'd fully stopped the car and bolted inside, hugging her pillow. I got out too, clutching the waffle maker and shivering from both the cold and the chilly darkness of the main house. No candles would light Victor's altar. I wondered if I should make my own altar. Maybe his spirit would visit. His haunted spirit. In the distance, the Japanese-­style lanterns atop Broomer's walls flickered. Their prettiness angered me.

For a moment I considered a Florilike maneuver of hoisting myself over his wall to spy. Then logic took over. What did I expect? To catch him videotaping a confession or laughing about murderous deeds with co-­conspirators? Unlikely. I was about to go inside when movement caught my eye.

“Hello?” I put down the waffle maker and fumbled to light the miniflashlight on my key chain. Swinging its weak beam into the darkness, I anticipated the glowing eyes of a raccoon or the toothy sneer of a coyote. The clang of glass and metal came from the area by Victor's back door where he kept his recycling bin.

“Is someone there?” I clapped my hands. “Shoo, get out of here!” Wildlife frequently visited our yard, following the creek downstream from a nearby bird sanctuary and open space. The sanctuary connected to pine and piñon-dotted hills and miles of forest, home to deer, foxes, coyotes, and even some mountain lions and bears.

This was no coyote, and it startled me more than a bear. A human form, hunched and massive, appeared in the thin beam of my flashlight and then quickly disappeared into the shadows.

“Hey! Come back here!” I yelled. I immediately regretted these words. A giant was skulking around a murder scene and I yell for him to come on over? To my horror, the figure reappeared under Victor's bluish porch light, where he stopped. I froze too, afraid to move but ready to bolt for the casita if he approached. The front door would likely be unlocked. That thought also filled me with horror. Celia was inside. What if he reached the door before I did?

“I'm calling 911!” I bellowed, reaching for the waffle maker and waving it wildly as I backed toward the door. “Nine-­one-­one!”

The figure spun and disappeared, leaving only the sounds of rustling brush. Celia appeared at the door, wide-­eyed.

“Mom? What's going on?”

“Coyotes,” I told her, pushing her inside and then locking the dead bolt and the chain lock.

“You told coyotes you're calling the cops? Gosh, Mom, Victor's death really is getting to you.” The kettle, having called the pot black, made a huffy snort and returned to her bedroom.

I
f the police did drive by during the night, as the dispatcher assured me they would, I didn't notice. They surely didn't come down the driveway or I would have heard them. During the long night, I woke to the slightest groans of the old beams and rustlings of leaves. When I did sleep, my dreams morphed into anxiety nightmares. By five-­forty, unable to keep my eyes closed any longer, I gave up and got up, pulling on jeans and a sweater. Bits of colored icing clung to the cuff. I brushed them off, wishing the laundry would do itself. It wouldn't, and neither would the grocery shopping, finding storage space in my tiny home, and sorting out the new me. My dwindling supply of clean clothes also meant that I'd have to visit the little utility room and laundry attached to the main house, exactly where I'd seen the creepy lurker last night.

I peeked out the living room windows, checking for anything or anyone unusual. The only eyes that looked back belonged to two ravens playing with an old apple. One tossed the withered fruit in the air as the other cawed, flapping its glossy black wings and dancing on springy toes. Some ­people disparage crows and their bigger brethren, ravens, as nuisances or bad omens. I've always admired these impressive, intelligent birds and was happy to discover that they're celebrated in New Mexican art and lore. However, as the two crows flew off to join others, a darker thought struck me. A murder . . . that's what a group of crows was called. The flock gathered in a giant cottonwood, directly over Victor's house, cawing madly.

Coffee didn't help my edginess. Nor did the lack of food in the house. I was about to resort to an expired granola bar when I heard footsteps crunching on gravel, moving toward the kitchen window. Fear spun up the adrenaline of too much caffeine and too little sleep. Grabbing a marble rolling pin, I tiptoed to the window, ready to roll out some serious defense moves.

Through the cotton curtain, I spotted a blurry form moving near the window. What if last night's intruder was scoping out more break-­in prospects? I decided to make the first move.

“Make my day!” I yelled, yanking open the curtain and waving the rolling pin. This was another move I immediately regretted. Not only did I sound like an idiot, I pulled down the curtain rod and tipped over a sugar canister and a potted basil. That, and Flori looked ready to wet her knickers from laughing so hard.

“Oh dear,” she said, removing her glasses to wipe away tears of glee as I let her in the front door, the place most ­people would go instead of skulking around the windows. “I shouldn't be laughing, but surprises make me giggle.”

“Is the doorbell not working?” I asked.

“Now now, don't be cranky,
cariño
. I didn't want to wake you up after your big date and all that police fuss over in Tesuque. I thought I'd peek and see if you were up. You're the one waving around that rolling pin and yelling like Dirty Harry.” She carried a canvas shopping bag in one hand. Binoculars big enough to spy on Albuquerque swung from her neck.

“It wasn't a date,” I muttered. The binoculars were an ominous sign. Flori was not a birdwatcher. And I wasn't going to bother asking how she knew about my night. Dancing, drinking cocoa, and meeting with law enforcement in public places would be as easy as candy on Halloween for her gossip network. Still, I couldn't help being a little impressed. And a little suspicious.

“You don't have a GPS device stuck to me, do you?”

My elderly friend made a snorting sound, waving off modern tracking devices as if they were useless newfangled trinkets. “I could give you the details, but we don't have time.” She brushed past me to the kitchen. I recognized the bakery box she pulled from the shopping bag.

Any lingering grumpiness vanished. “You went to Clafoutis! You're an angel, Flori!” I reached for the box, anticipating the treasures it held. The owners of Clafoutis, bona fide pastry chefs straight from France, made delectable goodies using sinfully perfect loads of butter. My savory favorite was their flaky, buttery croissant wrapped around ham and cheese. On the sweet side, I could barely pick a favorite because everything was so good. I loved the éclairs and the moist little almond cakes and of course their namesake tart. A clafouti is like a flan, but firmer and studded with fruit. Cherries are the typical choice, although the bakery also makes versions with plums, berries, or bananas.

My hand hovered over the box as I imagined the possible treasures inside. A firm slap ended the fantasizing.

“Not yet,” Flori said, pushing the bakery box aside. “We'll get to that later. Right now we have to get going. I don't want the whole world up and seeing us.”

“And what are we doing?” I asked, looking longingly at the pastry box.