Like Charley had said, it was fun to imagine. But that’s all it was, just make-believe.
Charley looked over the baked goods and picked out a hand-shaped loaf of multigrain bread and a couple of cookies. When she left and Erin looked around to see the rest of her customers, she saw Rohilda Beaven standing nearby, her expression thoughtful.
Mary Lou approached the counter. She seemed like she was in better spirits than she had been lately. Maybe things were going better for her little family. Erin didn’t want to inquire too closely, in case it made Mary Lou uncomfortable, but she was glad to see her friend in better spirits.
“I think maybe we’ll have a pizza night,” Mary Lou pronounced, looking into the display case. “I don’t know when the last time was that Josh and I just had a fun, mother-son time together. Things have been so stressful the last couple of years…” A shadow passed over her face. “I don’t want to lose him. He’s only going to be home a couple more years and I want to make sure we maintain a good relationship.”
Erin nodded. She pointed at the pizza shells. “You want the herbed crust? Or the one with cheese baked in?”
“The herbed looks very nice. And I don’t think it’s too… uh, highbrow for a teenager, is it? I don’t want to look like I think we can’t let down our guards and enjoy ourselves.”
“I don’t think it’s too high-brow,” Erin said. “Pizza is pizza. You’re just going to cover it up anyway. He’ll like it.”
Mary Lou nodded. “It’s a deal, then.” She looked over at Vic as Erin packaged the pizza shells up for her. “And how are you, Victoria? Enjoying your brother being in town?”
Vic froze, mouth open, hand hovering over the cash register as she moved to enter Mary Lou’s purchases.
“Uh… what?” she eventually managed.
“I saw your brother the other day. Tall boy, long blond hair?”
Vic nodded slowly. “I didn’t think he’d been out at all. Where did you see him?”
Mary Lou frowned. “Oh, you would ask me that, wouldn’t you? It was just casual, I didn’t stop to talk to him, so I’m not sure even what day it was… I think I saw him over at the business center? I assumed he was seeing a lawyer, maybe for your folks. But I really don’t know who he was visiting over there. There are a lot of different offices he could have been at.”
“Yes, that must be it,” Vic agreed. If she had continued to question Mary Lou about the meeting, she would draw attention to it, and that was not what she wanted to do. Why would Jeremy tell them that they had to keep his visit under the radar, and then go out during the day where anyone could see and recognize him? “It’s been nice to have a little visit with him. I don’t see my family often enough.”
“No,” Mary Lou agreed. “I imagine you’d see them more if you lived the values that you had been raised with.”
Erin gave Mary Lou a warning look. If she were going to go any further along that vein, she was going to get herself thrown out of Auntie Clem’s. Erin didn’t allow any harassment of her employees.
“Anything for dessert?” Erin prompted.
“No, with just the two of us, I have plenty in the freezer still.”
Vic rang up the purchase and completed the transaction. Mary Lou smiled politely and wished them both a good day before leaving the store. Vic looked over at Erin, her eyes wide.
“Why would he have been where people could see him?” Erin demanded. “I thought he didn’t want anyone to know he was here!”
“I don’t know. It’s bizarre. Maybe he did have to see a lawyer or do some business over there.”
“But if it were me… and I wanted to stay unseen… I’d ask them to come to my house. Or to see them after hours. I wouldn’t just go out in the middle of the day when anyone could have seen me.”
“Maybe she saw someone else and just thought it was Jeremy.”
“No… who else is she going to see that she could mistake for him? How many young men do you know of in Bald Eagle Falls who wear their hair long like Jeremy’s?”
“Well… I don’t know about at the high school. Some of the teenagers have less conservative styles.”
“But who is going to mistake Jeremy for a teenager?”
“I just don’t know.” Vic shook her head anxiously. “They might. I don’t understand what’s going on here.”
“Where did Willie hide him?”
Vic looked quickly at her. “Don’t talk about it. I don’t want anyone to overhear and figure it out.”
Erin thought of how Beaver had been standing so close, listening to everything that was being said when Charley was there earlier. She had been very stealthy. Erin hadn’t even seen her come in. She had just been lurking there, listening in on the gossip. A treasure hunter? Was that all she was? Someone who thought she could line her pockets with a quick job? Read some old blueprints, poke around, and find the secret lost treasure of…
“Erin.”
Erin snapped to attention, looking at Vic. “Sorry! Lost in thought.”
“I said I don’t actually know where Willie hid the you-know-what.” It took Erin an extra second to remember that Vic was talking about Jeremy, not some buried Confederate gold. “I figured the fewer people who know, the better. I can hardly slip up and give it away if I don’t really even know.”
“Yeah, good plan. I’m sure he knows lots of good hiding places.”
Willie was a kind of a treasure hunter himself, at least as one of his lives. He was the type who could never have his finger in just one pie. His mining was a kind of treasure-hunting, and he knew a lot of the natural caves and tunnels that went through the mountain.
“Terry was not too pleased that Jeremy took off,” Erin commented.
“Uh, no. I don’t think pleased is the word I would use.” Vic gave an impish grin. “Holy cow. You would have thought that Tom had let the crown jewels walk out the door while he was on watch. Tom did the right thing. He didn’t have any reason to stop Jeremy. He wasn’t under arrest. He could come and go as he liked.”
“Terry would have found some reason to take him in, I think.”
“Probably. But luckily, Tom is not Terry.”
Erin wiped down the top of the counter and then went around the display case with her cloth to wipe away children’s fingerprints and nose prints from the other side of the glass. “You don’t think there are really any tunnels between the old buildings, do you? Or lost treasures?”
“I would say no, that it was just a silly fairy tale… except that every few years, something like that turns up. Someone actually does find a treasure or a secret tunnel that was used for smuggling during the war. Just when you think you know what’s real and what’s not, something like that will come and knock you off your feet, and then for weeks after, you’re second-guessing everything you’ve ever heard.”
“Hmm.” Erin buffed the surface of the glass lightly to bring out the shine. “So, you think that’s really why Beaver is here? She really is looking for old gold? Some Confederate payroll or pirate booty? It just doesn’t seem like she’s the type of person who would be hunting that kind of thing. She seems to be so… I don’t know…”
“I still don’t know just what Beaver is and what she’s up to. I do know that I don’t like her hanging around here eavesdropping on conversations.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
E
rin descended the back stairs to grab another bag of buckwheat flour. There was a noise ahead of her that made her freeze for a moment on the stairs, listening for more and trying to identify what she had heard. Maybe she had just been hearing something from the bakery overhead. Vic had put something down on the floor, and the sound had carried through the joists, echoing to make it sound like it had originated downstairs instead of upstairs. Erin resumed her descent, holding on to the handrail for balance as she strained her ears for another sound. She reached the bottom of the stairs.
“Anyone down here?”
She listened, but there was no
response.
Going down to the basement still gave her a twinge of anxiety now and then, since that was where Angela had expired, and Erin had been the one to discover her body. Even though she knew it wasn’t her fault and that nothing like that would ever happen again, she couldn’t help feeling a pall every time she went downstairs. Not something she would ever tell Bella.
The basement consisted of both the tiny public restroom for customers and the storeroom stocked with dry goods. She hadn’t ever had any problem with customers going into the “employee only” area, but maybe she should put a locking door on the storeroom just to be sure. Especially with so many undesirables in town.
The door to the commode was slightly open, but the room was dark, the light switch turned off. Erin turned the other direction and looked around the storeroom, watching and listening for movement. There was no one there. It had to have been a noise from upstairs. Erin took one more look for anything that was out of place. She couldn’t see anything wrong, but had an unsettling feeling that things had been moved.
She hefted the large bag of buckwheat flour and took one more look around.
“It’s fine,” she murmured. “Everything looks just the same as always.”
As she went by one of the brick-faced walls, she couldn’t resist thumping it, listening for a hollow echo or feeling for some give indicating that it was a false wall, maybe on a swivel so it opened like a doorway to let her into some long-forgotten passageway like a scene out of Scooby-Doo. But it felt like a solid wall, just like she had always assumed.
She climbed the stairs back to the kitchen.
“Everything okay up here?” she asked casually before putting down the bag of flour.
Vic didn’t answer. Erin let the bag land on the floor with a little thump. She looked up, but Vic wasn’t there.
“Vicky?”
Erin walked out to the front of the shop, expecting to see Vic wiping out the display case or clearing the cash register. But there was no one there. Erin looked around, surprised, then returned to the kitchen. Vic had probably just taken the garbage out. She glanced toward the back door. It was not quite shut tight. Vic would return in a moment.
Erin waited. She measured out the flour for the various batters that needed to sit overnight. When Vic got back, Erin could tell her about her paranoia over something happening in the basement and they would laugh about it.
After a few minutes, Erin started to get worried. She went to the back door and called out toward the dumpsters in the alley.
“Vic? Everything okay?”
There was no answer. Erin stood there in the doorway, watching and listening. Vic was sure to come around the dumpster and see her standing there waiting any second. Maybe she had put her earbuds in and was listening to music or was on a call, so she hadn’t heard Erin.
But as the seconds ticked away, she knew something was wrong.
“Vic? Vicky, are you there…?”
The night was quiet. She could hear the occasional car making its way down the nearby streets, but nothing unusual. Erin stepped out of the safety of the bakery and walked, her heart in her throat, to the dumpster. There was no one around. Erin looked around. Had someone interrupted Vic while she was emptying the garbage? Someone had called her and she’d gone to talk? But there was no one in sight.
No one at all.
Chapter Thirty-Four
S
tay where you are, Erin, I’ll be right there,” Terry advised. “Did you try calling her on the phone?”
“No.” Erin patted her pockets for her phone. That was a good idea. Wherever Vic was, she would have her phone on her. “I’ll try that.” Her pockets were empty, and frustration boiled over. “I can’t find my phone! I don’t know where I left it!” She scanned the counter for it. Had she left it in the basement?
“Erin.”
“What?”
“You need to just calm down. You’re talking to me on your phone, so stop looking for it. I’m going to hang up so you can try her. I’ll be there in two minutes.”
“Oh.” Tears sprang unexpectedly to Erin’s eyes. “Right. Okay. See you in a minute.”
She ended the call and hit the shortcut for Vic’s number.
“Come on, Vic. Answer the phone.”
But the phone just kept ringing until it went to voicemail. Erin stared down at the phone in disbelief.
“Come on!”
“Erin?”
Erin looked up and saw Willie standing in the back door. She breathed out a sigh of relief.
“Willie! Vic must be with you!”
He shook his head. “No, I just came to pick her up.”
“But…”
“We were supposed to go out tonight. Isn’t she here?”
“No. She was… and I went downstairs to get some flour, and when I came up, she was gone.”
“What do you mean, she was gone? Where did she say she was going?”
“She didn’t say she was going anywhere. She just wasn’t here anymore.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Willie looked around, his eyes worried, as if she might just appear.
The front door bells jangled, making Erin jump. She whirled around and looked out through the doorway to the front to see Terry walking in with K9. She blinked at him in surprise. “Did you pick the lock? How did you get in?”
“It was unlocked.”
“No, it wasn’t. I’d already locked it for the night and turned the sign over.”
Terry looked back at the door. “The sign is flipped over, but maybe you got interrupted before you locked it. Is that when you realized Vic was gone?”
“No. I locked it before I went downstairs. I haven’t been back out to the front since then.”
“Let me and K9 have a look around.”
Terry walked through the main floor of the bakery and didn’t appear to see anything amiss. He went down to the basement, taking the back stairs down and then the front stairs up.
“Everything is quiet. No sign of anyone else here. Just… no Vic.”
“I don’t understand it.” Erin’s voice was too high and strident. “I just went downstairs!”
“She can’t have gone far. You called me right away, right?”
“Yes. It was just a few minutes… I came up and I thought she was outside for a minute… but she never came back in.”
“I want you to think about what you heard while you were downstairs,” Terry said calmly. “Were there any voices? Could you hear her moving anything around? Doors opening?”
“I thought I heard something downstairs. But there couldn’t be anyone downstairs, so I thought Vic must have put something down or knocked something over in the kitchen, and it just sounded like it was downstairs.”
“What did it sound like?”
Erin tried to replay it in her mind. “Like… somebody brushed by something in the storeroom. Like they were wearing or carrying something metal that dinged off of a shelf support. Not loud. Just… it was out of place, because I knew there couldn’t be anyone down there.”
“But there could have been.”
“I’d already locked up, so no one could get in the front. The customers had all gone. It was just me and Vic.”
“But you don’t track everyone coming in and going out. You wouldn’t necessarily know if someone went down to the loo and didn’t come back up again.”
“That couldn’t happen again.”
“It could. You can’t watch everybody at the same time. You have your own jobs to do, and so does Vic. You trust people to go down to the restroom and come back up again without any direction or supervision.”
“But I went down there, and there was no one there.”
“Not that you saw,” Terry agreed, “but the front door was unlocked.”
Erin deflated. “If the front door was unlocked, that means someone unlocked it and went out that way after I had locked up. I was on the back stairway, so they used the other and got out. But I didn’t s
ee anyone down there.”
“Would you have seen someone going up the stairs when you were going down the others?”
“No… but if the noise I heard was in the storeroom, like I thought, then they didn’t have time to get to the other stairs.”
“What about the restroom? Did you check inside?”
“Yes. It was empty.”
“You checked? You went in?” Terry persisted.
“I… I looked in the door. It was cracked open. The bathroom was dark… so I didn’t go in.”
“So someone could have hidden there until you got your flour and went back up, then they just went up the stairs at the same time as you did.”
“But that doesn’t explain what happened to Vic. If someone was downstairs, what happened upstairs? Where did she go?”
Everybody was called in. Once again, the Bald Eagle Falls police force was stretched to its limit trying to help Erin. She felt guilty at having called them in yet again, but what else was she supposed to do? She couldn’t just ignore Vic’s disappearance.
Terry walked around the outside of the building with K9 before anyone else could get there and mess up the scent trails. When he came back, Erin raised her eyebrows hopefully, but he shook his head. “Nothing, sorry. He’s not a scent dog, but I was hoping he might be interested in something that would give us a clue… but he just sniffed around a bit in the back parking lot and didn’t find anything.”
“If somebody was here… Vic might have gotten into a vehicle there, and K9 couldn’t follow her scent any farther than that.”
“Yeah, it’s possible. This whole thing… it’s unbelievable. For her to just disappear into thin air like that!”
“She didn’t disappear into thin air. Somebody took her. Somebody else was in the bakery, and they took her.”
“Whoever was in the basement went out the front door. They wouldn’t take Vic out that way. People would see and would know something was wrong.”
“Then there were more than one of them. Someone went out the front door, maybe to keep a lookout, and someone else came in the back while I was still downstairs, to take her away. I can’t believe that she didn’t scream or fight or something.”
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