Bread of the Dead: A Santa Fe Cafe Mystery (4 page)

 

Chapter 4

W
e've gotta call Dad.” Celia punched numbers into her phone.

My mind spun. I couldn't fully comprehend what had happened, but I knew I couldn't cope with Manny. Not now, not for Victor.

“No!” I said, too loudly, and then registered the hurt and anger on my daughter's face. “I mean, call 911, honey. The dispatcher will send an ambulance and whoever's on duty. It's fastest.”

“It's okay, Cel,” the young woman standing beside us said. A streak of blue ran through her cascade of shiny black hair. A tiny jewel sparkled on her left nostril and a curvy tattoo peaked out from her cleavage. “I just texted him.”

She texted Manny? Manny texts? What sort of person texts a suicide?
Suicide. My whole body trembled. Poor, dear Victor. I should have checked on him after the argument. Gabriel outright told me that Victor was depressed.
Why hadn't I checked?

“Go over by the car,” I urged Celia and her text­ing companion. “Keep together and wait for the police.”

My daughter narrowed eyes lined in thick, Egyptian mummy-­style makeup. “Where are you going?” she demanded as I started toward Victor's door.

“I'm going to check on Victor . . . I have to check.”

“There's nothing
you
can do, Mom. I should have called Dad first.” Celia's shoulders heaved in the motions of exasperation, but her voice cracked and tears glistened behind her harsh eye makeup. She and Victor had talked art together. He encouraged her to paint, morose fairies or anything else she wanted to. She'd be crushed by this.

I hesitated, torn between helping my daughter and helping a friend who was likely beyond help. I had to know for sure. Hoping that my sock feet wouldn't land on a cactus, I cut across the rocky garden to Victor's front door. It was locked, as I expected, but I twisted the knob and pounded the wood anyway until my palms throbbed.

Then I remembered Gabriel. Maybe he could get in. When I reached his side, I rapped the metal knocker and held down the doorbell, pausing occasionally to listen for movement inside. I heard none.
What if something had happened to Gabe too?
Thinking of Broomer and his threats, I banged harder, gripping the metal door handle to brace myself. Surprisingly, it moved, and not merely a wiggle. The latch opened and the door swung inward silently.

“Hello?” I called, stepping into the foyer. “Gabriel?” When no one answered, I tried the door to Victor's hallway. It was locked, but why was the front door open? Had someone broken in? Fear buzzed through my body. It wasn't the only buzzing. From the other side of the foyer came the fuzzy sound of an off-­air TV station.

I followed the noise across the living room and down a hallway to a closed door. Although I tried to tell myself that Gabriel probably fell asleep with the TV on, my brain churned awful possibilities, especially when I cracked the door and peeked inside. I could make out a bed and on it a figure that had to be Gabriel. He was flat on his back, arms straight down at his sides as if laid out in a coffin. The blur of noise harmonized with the blood swooshing through my head, and I fumbled to find a light switch. Finding none, I took a deep breath and tiptoed toward the bed, stealing myself to feel cold, unresponsive flesh.

Tentatively, I reached for Gabriel's neck to check for a pulse. To my relief, he turned out to be very much alive. To my horror, I'd discovered that he slept with a white noise machine and a gun on his nightstand.

At my touch, he jolted upright. His hands flailed, pushing me away as he yelled like a zombie Clint Eastwood. “I'll shoot! Holy Mary, Mother of our Lord, I'm armed!”

I fell backward, grasping for the nightstand. Instead, I latched onto the noise machine. I punched its buttons, frantic to turn it off. Not a good idea. The white noise changed to the roar of a flooding stream and screaming crickets.

“Gabriel, it's me—­Rita, your renter,” I yelled above the raging chirps, pressing more buttons. Crashing ocean waves filled the room. Another press brought the thump of a single heartbeat.
Dum dump, dum dump, dum dump.
My sister had used a mechanical heartbeat to soothe her newborns. Here, it sounded like the dreaded heart of Edgar Allan Poe.

My own heart outpaced the mechanical one. In the din, I imagined I heard the cocking of the gun. I screamed and scrambled toward the door. Despite the darkness, I squeezed my eyes shut, dreading the imminent blast, thinking of my daughter. Would she have to find my body too? Would she paint
I told her so
on my grave? She'd have the right to. If I got out alive, I vowed I'd be a better, unshot mom.

“Rita, you fool, what were you thinking?”

Blinding light and a hand came from above. A handsome face frowned down at me. It wasn't a heavenly helper with a five o'clock shadow. It was my ex and he wasn't happy.

Manny dragged me upright as his partner, a muscle-­bound woman named Bunny, calmed and disarmed Gabriel.

Gabriel was swearing and demanding answers as he yanked pink foam plugs from his ears and mercifully pulled the plug on his infernal noise generator.

“Gabriel, I'm so sorry,” I said. “It's Victor, he's—­”

Manny clamped a hand over my mouth. The hand smelled gross, like fried food, a major component of Manny's diet.

“Quiet,” he demanded. “Stay out of this.” To indignant, sputtering Gabriel, he said, “Sir, I apologize for this woman. There has, however, been an
incident
involving your brother.” That said, he pushed me out the bedroom door. “Go outside and don't even think about meddling. I'll take your statement later at the station.”

F
lashing lights illuminated the pathway and Celia, flanked by a small cluster of hand-­wringing neighbors. She wiped her eyes quickly when she saw me coming and stiffened when I hugged her.

“Dad's here,” she informed me, unnecessarily.

“Yeah, I saw him.” I dreaded seeing more of him. I released her, feeling my limbs sag, heavy from the realization that Victor would never serve cookies or make beautiful art again.

“Oh Rita!” Dalia Crawford, a neighbor from across the street, stepped up and enveloped me in a bone-­crushing hug. She didn't let me go until I'd sobbed out the barest explanation of what I'd seen.

“Sorry,” I said, wiping at the soggy spot I left on her shoulder. Dalia didn't care. A forever flower child with a tech-­wizard's income, she wasn't one to worry about her clothes, which she wore in floaty tie-­dyed layers.

“I warned him . . .” she murmured. “I said there was danger . . .”

Her words stopped me mid-­dampening of my own sweater sleeve. “Warned him?”
Why was Victor in danger?

Dalia stared up at the night sky, sparkling with constellations you only see away from city lights. “I sensed a negative aura,” she said, her tone as dark as the heavens.

I let out the breath I hadn't realized I was holding. Dalia and her divinations. She was a certified tarot master, as she pointed out frequently, and a little too eager to offer her celestial ser­vices. I tended to politely fend her off. So did Victor. Perhaps we should have listened.

Dalia tugged her long chestnut braid across her chin. “He should have let me read his cards. Maybe I could have foreseen his inexorable forces.”

Maybe I should have seen them myself. I might not be certified in anything but pastry, but why didn't I notice that my friendly neighbor was hurting? Dalia's husband Phillip moved in to comfort her, giving me the chance to slip away. Celia stood in front of the ambulance. Its lights flashed, but the siren and engine were silent. There would be no desperate race to the hospital.

“Hey,” I said, touching my daughter's elbow.

She flinched.

“Come on, sweetie, let's wait inside. The police will know where to find us if they need to.”

“I want to see what happens,” Celia said, without conviction. She stared toward Victor's house. The living room was bright with lights and camera flashes.

No you don't, I thought, and I didn't want to see either. I made her an offer that even her teen self usually can't resist. “We'll have some cookies. Your friend can come too if she wants.”

My daughter twisted her spiky hair. “Okay, if you want, but you, like, know who she is, don't you?”

Y
our father's girlfriend?” I failed to keep a snarky emphasis off
girl.

The woman in question sat in her orange Jeep a few yards away, seemingly texting and singing along to music. This is not how you behave at a tragedy, I thought. Then I acknowledged that at least she hadn't barged in and terrified the victim's brother.

“Yeah, whatever,” my daughter said, in classic teen understatement. “She's cool.”

She might be cool. She was definitely young. I'd guess she was a good fifteen years younger than Manny or, put another way, not that much older than Celia.

“Oh,” I said, to avoid saying something I might regret.

“You're not weirded out by this, are you, Mom?” Celia asked, her tone changing from weepy to well-­honed defiant. “You're the one who wanted to divorce Dad.”

The latter was true. And no, I assured myself, I didn't give a pancake's flip that Manny was dating again. Why should he stop now, after he'd had such an active social life during our marriage? I was, however, a bit weirded out by the thought of him dating someone so close to Celia's age. I also didn't like the idea of Celia becoming best friends with her father's girlfriend.

“No,” I said, for the sake of her feelings and my pride. “I'm not weirded out. But it looks like she's busy, so let's go inside by ourselves.”

“Okay, I'll tell Ariel where we're going.”

Ariel?
Celia jogged off past the cluster of neighbors, leaving me to come to terms with my ex dating a young, cool, Jeep-­driver with a cleavage tattoo and a Disney character's name.

I
set out a few of Victor's
bizcochitos
for Celia as the clock inched past midnight. A new day, the first without Victor. I didn't think I could taste the cookies without tearing up so I made a milky decaf for myself.

Celia came in, thankfully alone, and dropped her backpack by the fireplace, where a few embers glowed.

“Have some cookies, honey. Then let's try to get to bed.”

Celia nibbled a cookie and poked at her smart-­phone screen while I took a stab at grief counseling. “A loss like this is hard to understand.”

This platitude was met with sniffles and heightened tapping on the phone. I persisted. “We can't always know how others are feeling, their pain.”

“It sucks,” my daughter said, turning away to wipe her eyes. Celia took after her dad in hiding emotions. I handed her a tissue and we sat for a few minutes in silence, until pounding on the door rattled us and the house. I didn't need Dalia's psychic powers to guess who it was.