Dough or Die

by Winnie Archer

  The room was stripped of personality, much like Mickey’s room had been. Just like Meg’s new room, a few boxes sat on the bed. The bed was made and everything seemed to be in order for the most part. Probably all the rooms were on the barren side, I thought. The battered women being helped here had most likely escaped their dire situations without the opportunity to bring decorative items along with them. I imagined most had suitcases or duffel bags filled with clothes and toiletries, maybe a few personal items and mementos, and that’s about it. It seemed to me that a little artwork on the walls could go a long way to bringing some positive mojo into the rooms. “Are all the rooms the same?” I asked.

  “Everything’s donated, but they all have pretty much the same things. A bed, a dresser, a nightstand.” She looked around, frowning. “Same room, different person,” she said softly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Mickey was in this room when I first got here. They moved her and they put me in here. Now it’s Esmé’s. It’s strange. So many of us here don’t have many personal belongings. Same room, different person. You can hardly tell them apart.”

  It was true. I’d now seen three rooms and they were each as depressing as the last. Esmé’s twin bed was covered with a simple light gray bedspread—donated by someone, I felt sure. A dresser sat against the back wall under a window. The accordion closet doors were open, revealing a few dresses, pants, and tops hanging on the closet rod. Two pairs of shoes—sneakers and black flats—sat on the floor of the closet. “Esmé’s stuff?” I asked.

  Meg glanced in the closet and at the nightstand where several books sat. “Yes.”

  I started at the closet, pushing the clothes aside. A single box sat in the back corner of the closet, taped up, the letters KM written on the side. Her boyfriend? Husband? The person she was here hiding from?

  I turned and strode to the bed. The two boxes stacked there were open, the flaps directed outward. I could see inside them without touching anything, which was some comfort. It made the invasion a little less . . . invasive. The boxes held clothes. Bras, T-shirts, shorts, a pair of pajamas. No great clue, I thought.

  I quickly pulled open a dresser drawer.

  Meg took a step toward me, arm outstretched. “You shouldn’t—”

  She was right. I shouldn’t. But I kept going, quickly looking through each drawer.

  Her anxious gaze darted to the door every few seconds, but the coast remained clear.

  Esmé didn’t have much more in her dresser drawers. Some underwear. A few more T-shirts. A belt and several fashion scarves, as well as a pale pink cardigan. The bottom drawer held a single picture book, a sketchbook, and a pale green knitted blanket. I moved the blanket aside and took out the sketchbook, taking a moment to flip through the pages. There were still-lifes of fruit and vegetables artfully displayed on a platter, individual pieces of fruit drawn to perfection, just the stem and a single leaf sketched out. The same male face was drawn over and over again—sometimes just the lips, sometimes the eyes, and even just an ear or the curve of a nose. There were other collections of people—a child’s face, a father and child, and the back of a head. The art transitioned to a series of trees, with studies on leaves and flowers. If Esmé was the artist, she was incredibly talented. To know every last detail of someone or something? It was astounding. The attention to detail and in-depth study of each subject portrayed in the pages of the sketchbook had taken skill and time and determination and practice.

  I put the blanket back the way it had been. It was soft and delicate, like the blanket for a newborn. “Does Esmé have a child?” I asked.

  Meg stood with her back to the closed door. “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Come on, we need to leave. This isn’t right.”

  But I couldn’t leave quite yet. Two books lay open on the little nightstand next to a small table lamp. The first, Tuesdays with Morrie, was creased along the spine. I’d read Mitch Albom’s book in high school and knew it was a comfort for a lot of people. It was rife with life lessons and bits of wisdom. For someone going through a trauma, like the women at Crosby House, I could see why it might resonate. The cover was frayed and worn. This was a well-loved book.

  I used one finger to peek at the book underneath. Looking for Alaska. I knew a few of the novelist’s other books. I’d never read this one, though. I didn’t know what Esmé’s story was, but if it were me and I’d come out of an abusive relationship, I’d have gone for something uplifting rather than a John Green tearjerker. To each her own, I thought.

  On the floor, just out of sight under the bed, was a journal lying open and faceup. I picked it up and glanced at the open page.

  It’s eating me alive. I can’t keep quiet anymore. I’m going to talk to them. They can’t do this to me. To us. They cannot keep him from me.

  Meg gasped when she saw me. “You can’t read that! It’s personal.” She strode across the room and snatched it away from me. She closed it and put it on top of the other books on the nightstand. “She’s going to know. We shouldn’t be here.”

  I gave a backward glance at the journal, a thread of guilt weaving through me. Meg was right, I had no right to be invading Esmé’s privacy like this, but I couldn’t help but wonder who she had been talking about in her journal. I quickly looked back at the labeled box in the closet. Poor Esmé.

  “Come on,” Meg prodded.

  My guilt multiplied. I had no valid reason to suspect that she had anything to do with Ben Nader, and other than the reality TV show, nothing at all to link her to Sandra Mays. I was grasping at straws. Esmé had her own troubles without me adding to them by suspecting her of being involved in something unsavory. More than anything, I just wanted to find her and make sure she was okay.

  Meg and I left the room just as we’d found it. We exchanged cell phone numbers before I thanked her for her help with the garden and told her I’d be back in a few days to check on it. “Make sure you water tomorrow, and compost!” I called. She stood at the door and waved at me. No smile. She was still freaked about sneaking into Esmé’s room, and I didn’t blame her. I hadn’t only had her help me with the garden. I’d led her down the garden path and the guilt was already turning black inside her.

  I felt the same way.

  Chapter 18

  I went straight from Crosby House to Yeast of Eden. Olaya had said she didn’t need help, but I wanted to check on her all the same. Felix, his friend Kimi, and Olaya, along with her regular morning crew, had managed all the baking for the day, and had prepped the long-rise dough for tomorrow. The kitchen was spotless and the day’s bread was nearly sold out.

  I needed to feel productive, and distract myself from the guilt I felt from snooping in Esmé’s room, so I worked in the front of the store, cleaning the display cases and tidying the local Yeast of Eden merchandise and other bread-making supplies and knickknacks Olaya sold. The bread shop’s phone rang, jingling from its place on the wall behind the cash register. When someone called Yeast of Eden, you were never sure what to expect. Some of the most common questions were What time do you open? What time do you close? and Do you have sourdough bread? The answers to those questions were: seven a.m., whenever we run out of bread for the day, and yes.

  We also got an array of more specific questions, too. Do you have gluten-free bread? Answer: We’re in development now and will have it soon. Question: What kinds of grains are in the multi-grain loaf? Answer: Wheat, millet, flax, oats, sunflower seeds, amaranth, barley, rye. Question: What type of olives are in the olive loaf? Answer: Juicy kalamata and oil-cured olives. Question: How many skull cookies are hidden right now? The answer to that is always: I have no idea.

  I reached for the ringing phone and answered with a cheery, “Yeast of Eden, how may I help you?”

  Emmaline’s sheriff voice came back at me, short and clipped. “Heads up. Tammy Nader is on her way to the bread shop.”

  “The wife?”

  “She’s upset. She wants to know how it happened.”
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  Of course she’s upset, I thought. Her husband was hit by a car. But none of us at the bread shop had any extra information that she didn’t already know from the incident report and police. “What does she think we can tell her?”

  Em sighed. Heavily. “I wish I knew, Ivy. She’s a little unhinged, to be honest. What she wants is for you to suddenly remember some elusive detail that will reveal who did this to her husband. The reality is that you’re going to have to suffer through a conversation with her, trying to get her to understand that you don’t know anything.”

  I cupped my hand to my forehead and dipped my head. I’d seen plenty of people grieving, and I’d had up-close-and-personal experiences with my own, so I knew what Tammy Nader was feeling. With luck, her husband would come out of his coma and be okay. That fact, however, didn’t alleviate the pain and helplessness Tammy Nader was feeling right now.

  It was only after I hung up that I realized I hadn’t mentioned my discovery that Esmé and Ben Nader knew each other through Crosby House. I’d tell her at the family dinner tonight at my dad’s.

  Ten minutes later the bell on the front entrance to Yeast of Eden dinged. The woman who entered looked to be in her mid-fifties, with slightly saggy jowls and eyebrows that had faded and thinned with age. Her face was drawn, her eyes red-rimmed. From the looks of it, she was barely keeping it together. She didn’t even so much as glance at the display cases, which were empty anyway, but which reinforced the idea that she was not here to buy a loaf of bread.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, although there was no doubt in my mind about who she was.

  “I hope so,” she said, her voice stronger than I thought it would be given the way she wrung her hands and clutched a wad of tissue. “I’m Tammy Nader. Ben’s wife?”

  I gave her a sympathetic smile. “I’m so sorry about what happened.” I gestured to one of the bistro tables. “Would you like to sit? Can I get you some tea or coffee?”

  Her eyes glazed as she looked around the empty bread shop. For a second, I thought she was going to refuse the offer to sit, but then her feet shuffled forward and she lowered herself into a chair. “Some water would be good.”

  I left her to fetch a glass of water from the kitchen, returning with it a minute later. “The sheriff called and said you might be stopping by,” I said as I sat down in a chair opposite her. “I was here when you called and spoke to Sandra Mays the other day.”

  She looked at me like I had horns growing from my head. “You were?”

  I nodded. “It’s such a tragedy, her death. And on the heels of Ben’s accident—”

  “Sandy and I went way back,” she said.

  “I had no idea,” I said, not that I would have, but I wasn’t sure what else to say. “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  She gave an irreverent shrug. “We weren’t close anymore.”

  “Oh . . .”

  I left the word hanging there. I’d learned that silence often compelled people to fill it. She didn’t disappoint. “We had a falling out years back. Ben always thought he could still trust her, but she changed.” She sighed. “As people do,” she added.

  Had Sandra betrayed Tammy’s trust in some way, I wondered, or was the implication that she could no longer be trusted more of a general observation? The thing that screamed out at me was: Motive! “Celebrity can do that,” I said.

  “Hmm.”

  It sounded to me like she thought it was something other than Sandra’s celebrity that made her untrustworthy. “Do you have any ideas about what happened to Sandra? Who she fought with?”

  “I didn’t know her anymore.”

  “What happened between you two?” I asked, hoping she wouldn’t think I was prying too much.

  She shrugged. In a different situation, it would have been nonchalant, but given everything else, Tammy’s shrug was tortured. “You know how it can be. I confided in her, and she betrayed that confidence.”

  “Did you know her separately from Ben?” I asked, curious about their relationship. Sandra and Ben hadn’t seemed close, but Sandra had become unglued when she’d seen him laid out on the road. Was that reaction simply based on their working history together, or something more? Could the betrayal Tammy mentioned have to do with a romantic entanglement between her husband and Sandra? But no, she’d said she’d confided something to Sandra, so that couldn’t be it.

  She stared out the window, her eyes glazing over like she’d gone into a trance. Then she started talking. “Our kids were the same age. We met through a mom’s group. Ben already worked at the station. When Sandy got the job, she got a nanny and dropped out of playgroup. She became a career woman, whereas I was just a mom. Just a mom, as if that’s not the hardest job on the planet.”

  Tammy looked to the ceiling as if she had the superpower of seeing right through to the rooftop above. “I heard she was on the roof here. . . where Ben used to go as a kid.”

  So she knew about her husband’s childhood secret. “Did Sandra know about the rooftop access?” I asked, hoping my voice didn’t pull her out of her narrative.

  Tammy gazed right, then left as she thought. “I don’t know. Ben took our son up there once or twice when he was little. It was a big thrill for Grant. Maybe Sandy was around at that point? I really can’t remember. She must have known about it, though, if she was up there.”

  “Right,” I agreed, unless someone else had arranged the meeting up there. But who else knew about it?

  “How’s your husband doing?” I asked. “Any change?”

  She wrapped her hands around the water glass, gripping, releasing, gripping, releasing. She was trying to control her distress. My heart went out to her. It took her another minute to gather her thoughts before she finally spoke. “The swelling on the brain is going down. The doctors are watching him closely. They are”—she paused—“cautiously optimistic.”

  I nodded encouragingly, knowing there was nothing I could say to make things right for her. It was going to take time, and all we could do was hope for the best.

  “I just . . . I don’t understand who would want to hurt Ben like this.” As she continued, her voice grew shrill. “He doesn’t have any enemies. He keeps to himself. He’s just an ordinary man. My ordinary man.” She looked up at me. Met my eyes. “We just had our anniversary. Twenty-seven years together. That’s a long time. You get to know a person in twenty-seven years. I know Ben. He doesn’t have secrets from me. He didn’t have enemies. I was on the phone with him, and then suddenly . . .” She broke down as she said, “Suddenly I wasn’t.” She pressed her hands to the sides of her head as if she was hearing the sound of the impact replaying in her mind and wanted desperately for it to stop. Finally, she looked up at me again. “Wh-who c-could have done this to him?”

  “Mrs. Nader, I wish I had some answers for you, but the car, it just came out of nowhere. It didn’t slow down. He didn’t see it coming.”

  “The doctors say he didn’t feel any pain, but I don’t know if that can be true. Can it? Can you get hit by a car and not feel pain? Did you see it? Do you think it’s true, that he didn’t feel anything?”

  My own mother had died from a hit-and-run, and I often wondered the same thing. Ben, when and if he recovered, would be the only person who could answer that question for her. “Like I said, the car came out of nowhere and it hit him hard. I think the sheriff is probably right. Once his head hit the ground . . .” I trailed off.

  “Nobody saw it coming? Nobody screamed for him to get out of the way?”

  “It came out of nowhere,” I said again.

  A pained sob escaped her lips. I put my hand on her shoulder to comfort her. It was all I could do. After a minute, I spoke again. “Mrs. Nader, do you have anyone to help you?”

  She turned the glass in her hands, focusing intently on it as the water churned from the movement. “Our son is gone. He died in a . . . in a car crash,” she said, barely holding in her emotions. What a horrible coincidence, I thought, and prayed, for h
er sake, that her husband would survive his ordeal. “Kevin—” She stopped. Collected herself. “That’s our grandson. He’s staying with a friend. My parents live in the Northeast. Ben’s parents are gone.”

  “And your daughter-in-law?”

  She balked. “Margaret? No. She was in the accident.”

  Poor Kevin. “Can I call someone? A friend?” I knew that without Emmaline, my brother Billy, and my father, I wouldn’t have made it through the grief of losing my mother. People need other people. It was a simple truth. We grieve alone, but we process through the events of our lives with the people we are closest to. We are stronger because of our villages. Our communities. Without them, we wither. I firmly believed that, and I hoped Tammy Nader had a village of her own on which she could rely while her husband fought for his life.

  She stood and moved to the window overlooking the street. It was exactly where I’d been standing when Ben Nader had been hit. “That’s where it happened,” she said, pointing. It wasn’t a question, but a statement of fact. A cross and collection of flowers had appeared on the side of the road. Prayers for his speedy recovery.

  “He’s going to be okay,” I said, coming to stand next to her. I only hoped I was right.

  She looked at me with her watery eyes. “He has to be. I don’t know what I’d do without him. He lights up a room.” At this, her tears spilled over her eyes, streaming over her cheeks. “He has to be all right.”

  I placed my hand on her shoulder in what I hoped was a gesture of comfort. Of camaraderie. “If I can do anything to help, please let me know,” I said.

  She suddenly looked up at me, her eyes wide and full of . . . terror? Or was it shock? “You don’t think . . .”

  “What?” I asked, prodding her.

  “Could the same person that ran Ben over have killed Sandra?”

  It was my working theory, but I played innocent. “Why would you think that?”