Terry nodded. “Right. We’d have to go all the way to the city to get them.”
“And that’s not something Charley is going to want to stock, is it? She just wants a regular bakery, and most bakeries don’t do treats for dogs, gluten-free or otherwise.” She picked up her list and wrote the thought down.
“What else have you got on there?” Terry looked down at the short list. “What about the ladies’ tea?”
Erin had revived Clementine’s tradition of an after-services tea Sunday mornings for the churchgoing ladies.
“There’s nothing to stop Charley from doing a ladies’ tea,” she countered.
“Well, I suppose not, but people will go to yours because that’s where Clementine’s Tea Room was. Having it somewhere else wouldn’t be the same.”
“But you don’t think they’d choose Charley over me if she did offer one? Because I’m an atheist and she’s… not?”
“Charley isn’t exactly religious herself. Does she even attend services?”
“I wouldn’t know, since I don’t go,” Erin teased. “But seriously, no, I don’t think she ever has. And I don’t think she goes into the city or back to Moose River for services. But she’s Christian in name, and that matters to people around here. Better a Christian who beats his wife and goes fishing every Sunday than an atheist.”
“I don’t think they’re quite that bad.”
Erin considered. “Maybe not quite,” she admitted. She held up her fingers, pinched close together. “But it’s close.”
“Has someone been getting on your case?”
“No more than usual. I think they’ve adjusted to the idea that they’re not going to convert me, but they’re not happy about it and people still… make comments.”
“You’re never going to get people to stop talking.”
“No.”
They sighed in unison, then laughed.
“Does it ever bother you that I’m not a Christian?” Erin asked.
He raised his brows. “Me? Not a bit. Never even crossed my mind.”
“It doesn’t bother you that I’m not going to your heaven?”
“You might be surprised where you end up! No, it really makes no difference to me what you believe. I’m not entirely sure what it is that I believe. I’m born and bred Christian and have never considered myself anything else, but do I believe the whole thing?” He shrugged. “That the Bible and everything in it is meant to be taken literally? I don’t know about that. I’ll take it on faith for now… and see what happens.”
“Hedging your bets? Making sure you’re covered just in case it is all true?”
“Our society is built on the Ten Commandments and the Bible. That’s where our most basic laws stem from. So… yes. I’ll do my best to keep the top ten and uphold the law. Whether that will get me anything in the afterlife or just keep me on the right path in this life, I don’t know.”
Erin shook her head. “Okay…”
“What does that mean?”
“I thought one of those top ten was going to church on Sunday, and you don’t do that. You go to work like usual.”
Terry looked away, grimacing. “Well, it doesn’t exactly say that…”
“Oh.”
“It says to keep the Sabbath day holy, and I…” he trailed off.
Erin waited for him to finish. He didn’t come up with anything.
“You’ll take that one under advisement?” she suggested.
“Well, maybe I’ll do better at that one when I’m retired.”
“Sounds good to me.”
They sat in silence for a few minutes while the animals gathered back around them and found comfy places to nestle. Erin added the ladies’ tea to her list and read over it again. There still wasn’t enough there to keep a business running. If everybody who didn’t have to eat a special diet decided to go to The Bake Shoppe, Erin’s business was going to be in trouble.
Chapter Three
S
o while you’re trying to figure out how to deal with your sister,” Terry said, nodding to the list, “I’m still trying to figure out what to do about your former foster sister.”
“Reg?”
Terry was clearly about to say something smart to her like ‘how many foster sisters do you have?’ and then stopped himself as it came to him that she did, in fact, have a lot more than just Reg. Reg was the only one he had met and would have brought up, but she did have others.
“Uh, yes. Regina Rawlins. We haven’t been able to track her down.”
Erin shrugged. “She’s had plenty of experience with disappearing. She’ll be living halfway across the country under a new name. You might as well not waste your time.”
“You haven’t heard anything from her?”
Erin considered her answer, which made Terry straighten and look at her more closely.
“You have heard from her?”
“Well, sort of. Just one quick phone call, and it didn’t make a lot of sense.”
“Where was it from? When was this? Do you still have the number in your call log?”
“I tried it again later and it didn’t work. So just a burner phone, probably.”
“Where?”
Erin was reluctant to give him any information. She hadn’t liked having Reg around and had refused to get involved in any scams with her, but she wasn’t a snitch. She’d expect her friends and old foster families to keep quiet and protect her if she were in trouble. It was the code.
“Where was she calling from?” Terry repeated. “What was the area code?”
“Florida,” Erin said finally. But that was all she was going to tell him. There were lots of people in Florida, and Terry wasn’t exactly going to drive there himself to go looking for Reg. He could call it in to the locals or the FBI, but no one was going to care about solving the case of a small-town cop looking for a swindler who had walked off with certain pieces of jewelry belonging to her clients. It wasn’t like his investigation was going to go anywhere.
“Florida,” Terry repeated, thinking about it. “I had one query from Florida. I didn’t think anything of it, because the officer never returned my call when I called her back. Figured she must have sorted things out on her own. I’ll have to pull it out and have another look at it.”
“You’re not going to find Reg if she doesn’t want to be found. Why don’t you just let it go?”
“She stole from your friends. You don’t think they deserve some justice?”
“I just know Reg. You’re not going to find her. And… I don’t know… she sounded kind of strange. Wasn’t making a lot of sense.”
“Drunk?”
“Maybe. I never knew Reg to get like that when she was drinking before, though.”
“What exactly did she sound like?”
“Kind of… hysterical. Upset or excited. Not slurring her words or anything.”
“You ever know her to be like that before?”
“Well… maybe.” Reg had behaved strangely before. Sometimes Reg’s behavior could be very bizarre. “There have been a couple of times when she’s… gone off the rails.”
Terry leaned in closer, frowning in concentration. “Off the rails? What does that mean?”
“She’s been hospitalized. For… things like depression or… hallucinations.”
“Psychosis? Is she schizophrenic?”
“No. I mean, she’s had a lot of different diagnoses over the years, and I wouldn’t doubt that schizophrenia is one of them… but she’s not. She’s just… different.”
“So, when you called her back, it was to check on her? To make sure she was okay?”
“Yeah. But like I said, the number wasn’t in service anymore. She knows not to keep the same number for long. She probably just bought it for that phone call, or to make a bunch of one-off calls, and then she tossed it.”
“But if she’s trying to run a business passing herself off as a psychic or whatever she’s up to now, she’ll need to have a number peop
le can reach her at.”
Reg nodded. “But I doubt if it will be anything you can track. You might as well just not waste your time.”
Terry studied Erin. She knew he thought she was just trying to protect her friend.
And maybe she was.
Chapter Four
E
rin was happy to see Mary Lou Cox come through the door the next afternoon. Mary Lou had been keeping a pretty low profile since her husband had been arrested for the murder of Joelle Biggs. He was still in hospital or some other facility being evaluated so they could decide how to deal with him. Erin hoped that he didn’t end up in prison. It seemed obvious to her that he didn’t have all of his faculties.
“Hi, Mary Lou. How’s it going?”
Mary Lou was neat and well-tailored as always, her gray hair in a sleek, short style. She gave Erin her usual pleasant-but-reserved smile, then glanced back over her shoulder as if she were worried someone else might have followed her in. She turned back to Erin, the smile a little less certain.
“I’m as good as ever. Things have just been so busy lately, I haven’t been able to get around…”
“Busy at the General Store?”
“Well, that and home life and… just everything. I’ve been keeping myself busy.”
“Well, good.” Erin gestured to the display case. “What would you and the boys like today?”
“Campbell has gone away for a while, so it’s just Josh and me. Going from four people down to two… I admit, I’m not doing much meal planning anymore. We just fend for ourselves, mostly. But I feel like I’ve neglected Josh a little, so I thought…” Mary Lou gazed over the day’s offerings. “Everything just looks so good. Maybe some of those cranberry muffins for breakfasts. And m&m cookies for a treat.”
“Sounds good,” Erin agreed. She let Mary Lou finish browsing over the contents of the case and deciding how many of each item she wanted, then started to package it up. Vic walked in from the kitchen.
“Hello, Mary Lou. I hope your day is going well.”
Mary Lou’s smile at Vic, who she was usually uncomfortable around, was a fraction warmer than usual. Maybe she was getting more used to Vic and appreciating the fact that unlike some of her older friends who were not supporting her, Vic hadn’t turned against her and started treating her like a pariah during her recent trials.
Or maybe she appreciated that Vic hadn’t asked her how she was doing. She probably got tired of people being overly interested in her life and in having to come up with an acceptable answer as to how she was doing when her life was in shambles.
“Nice to see you too, Vic.”
Vic went over to the cash register and started to punch in Mary Lou’s order while Erin got it all packaged up.
“Where is Campbell, then?” Erin asked. “I hadn’t heard that he was leaving.”
“He’s… pursuing other options. I’m not sure what he’s going to do… he always did so well in school, but since Roger… he just seems to have lost the will to put in any effort.”
“Maybe he’s been having trouble with the other kids,” Vic suggested, not looking up from the register.
“I expect the boys have had at least as much trouble as I have, and that has not been pretty. I always thought… I don’t know. People suddenly seem very shallow. I thought we were such good friends, but suddenly other things have become much more important in their lives.”
Erin shook her head. “Well forget them. We will always be there for you, Mary Lou. And anyone who isn’t, they just aren’t really a friend, are they?”
“I know. It’s just a little sad to find out that the people you thought were real friends… well, that they aren’t.”
“I know,” Erin agreed. She’d been through it herself. People pretending to be friends, acting like they cared, and then suddenly they were gone when they were needed the most. It was easy to say just forget about them, but Erin suspected that Vic too had lost her share of friends when she had transitioned. She glanced over at Vic. Vic flushed a little pink and nodded, as if she had read Erin’s mind.
“I know it’s not easy to just forget about them. But it’s still good advice. You can’t eat yourself up over someone who never really cared in the first place.”
Mary Lou sighed. “Of course you are right. And I’m sure it will all turn out just fine. Opposing forces increase strength.”
“We are refined by fire,” Vic agreed.
Mary Lou paid the bill, nodded at them each, and headed out. Just as she left the shop, Charley came in. Her face was flushed pink and she looked happy for once instead of stressed and irritated.
“Hey, Charley,” Erin greeted.
Charley marched up to the display case. “You are so good at this,” she said. “You always have something new in there that I haven’t seen before.”
Erin warmed at the compliment. “Well, thank you. I’m always experimenting with something new.”
“And it seems like they all turn out! Even things like this,” she pointed at the pastries. “I’ve never seen gluten-free turnovers anywhere else. I would have said they couldn’t be done. But those look just like regular turnovers. I would swear you were using wheat flour.”
“They’re pretty tricky. They take a lot of fiddling. I found that if I freeze the butter, and then grate it fine between each layer, and then roll the layers just as thin as I can… something like this can take twenty layers, and if it gets too warm, it won’t work, so you have to keep stopping and chilling it…”
Charley shook her head. “I can’t imagine the patience. I buy the pre-made filo pastry, and pre-made fillings, and put them together. They turn out pretty good. But you can’t buy pre-made gluten-free pastry like that.”
“Nope. Maybe someday, but until then, if people want gluten-free turnovers, they’re going to have to come here.”
Charley grinned. She pulled out a small spiral notebook and, looking into the display case, started jotting down notes. Erin looked at Vic, who was frowning.
“What are you doing?” Erin asked.
Charley didn’t look up from her notes. “I’m just writing down what you’re selling. You have such a good variety of different things. I want to be able to do the same kind of thing at The Bake Shoppe.”
Erin remembered one foster mother telling her repeatedly that imitation was the sincerest form of flattery. It had driven Erin crazy when the younger kids would mimic her, and she would run to her foster mother complaining.
So what if Charley was planning to copy her lineup? There was nothing wrong with two bakeries having similar offerings. How could they not be similar?
“You have to find your own thing,” Vic told Charley. “What’s your specialty going to be?”
“I don’t need a specialty. There’s already a specialty bakery. I’m the one who is going to carry the normal baked goods.”
“I’ve got to check on some cookies,” Erin announced, and retreated to the kitchen. She didn’t really have anything she had to check on, but she washed some dishes and stayed out of the way for a few minutes while she tried to regain her equilibrium. She knew she should go back out front when she heard the front door bells jingle. Either someone else had come in and Erin should help wait on them, or Charley was gone, and she didn’t need to hide out anymore. But Erin wasn’t in any hurry to get back out to the counter.
“Are you okay?” Vic asked, entering the kitchen.
“Oh, I’m fine.”
“No offense, but that sister of yours shore rubs me the wrong way sometimes. The nerve of her, coming in here just to copy your lineup!”
Erin looked up from her dishes. “So I’m right, that was weird, wasn’t it? Who does that? Is she really planning to offer exactly the same foods as I am, or is she just gaslighting me?”
“I don’t think she’s that subtle. And yeah, it is weird. She should be making her own specialty, not baking goods just like Erin, only normal.”
Erin shook her head. She dried off her ha
nds and went back out to the front of the shop with Vic. “I just have visions of all of my customers going over to her bakery. Even the ones who have to eat gluten-free. That’s what Carolyn was like. She just wanted to be normal and eat normal food. We didn’t have all of this kind of thing. Our foster mom tried, but all we had were these loaves of rice bread that were always so dry. Or she would try to make a birthday cake, and it would be so gritty, so obviously not normal. Carolyn wanted so much to just eat normal food. So she did.”
Vic grimaced. “Some people want so badly to fit in… they’ll do anything. Even when they know it’s foolish or dangerous.”
“She knew it made her sick, but she didn’t care. It was more important to be sick and normal than to stay healthy.”
“And in the end, her system was too messed up to recover.” Vic had heard Carolyn’s story enough times to know how it had ended. Carolyn was the reason Erin had learned to do gluten-free baking in the first place. Trying to make nice things for her foster sister or for others who were in the same position.
Vic put her hand on Erin’s shoulder. “You are doing exactly what you set out to do. You’re making life better for people like Carolyn. Look at little Peter Foster. He adores your baking. Without Auntie Clem’s, he would have to rely on packaged gluten-free goods from the city. He wouldn’t get any of this nice stuff. He wouldn’t have any choices. And when he went to friends’ birthday parties, they wouldn’t have anything for him to eat. The Fosters are not going to go to The Bake Shoppe when it opens. They’re going to keep coming here.”
“Mrs. Foster will come here to get things for Peter, but what about the rest of the family? It will be cheaper for them to go to The Bake Shoppe. And I don’t think I can survive if only the people who have to come here do.”
Vic gave her shoulder a squeeze and let go. “That’s not going to happen. People don’t just come here because they have to.”
“They come here because it’s the only bakery in town. The grocery store can’t carry everything they need and doesn’t have freshly-baked goods, and they don’t want to drive all the way to the city for it, so they come here. But when there is a normal bakery available, they’re going to go there.”
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