Death Gone A-Rye

by Winnie Archer

  I’d filled in for her recently when she’d been sick, which was a rarity. All I can say is that I was glad when she was well again. I liked working at the bread shop and I wanted to learn everything Olaya had to teach me, but waking before the sun rose and going to sleep before Miguel’s restaurant even closed was not my preferred schedule.

  Once Maggie arrived, I retreated to the kitchen to help Olaya with preparations for the next day. She was in her office, a browser open on her computer showing a produce delivery order. The office was tiny, with barely room for the desk and her chair. I scooted by her and sat in the one other chair she’d managed to squeeze into the space. She looked up, giving me a smile. “The Vincent van Dough bread,” she started. “We will be making it early Saturday morning.”

  With all the prewedding preparations and events, I hadn’t been able to help her with the batches she’d made for Billy and Emmaline. Another chance? I was in! “Are you going to start carrying it in the shop?” I asked.

  Olaya hailed from Mexico, where her love of traditional long-rise bread had begun. She’d been in the States a long time, but she still had a slight accent and Spanish words often peppered her language. She tilted her head, considering. “I have thought about it, pero only for special occasions, I think.”

  “Why are we making more on Saturday?”

  “And Sunday,” she said. “The Spring Fling for the elementary school. I was asked to be a sponsor.”

  I sat up straighter. “You were?” My thoughts immediately went to how she was asked. “Did someone call you to ask?”

  “A woman from the school,” she said.

  From the school, not the district. So, Nessa Renchrik had called Miguel on behalf of the school.

  I leaned forward, propping my elbows on her desk, wondering if it had been Nessa. “Could it have been the school board president?”

  “The woman who was killed?” She considered, tapping her index finger against her lips, then held up a finger telling me to wait. She typed something on her keypad. “I wrote notes. Ah, here it is.” She read silently before saying, “Misty Jackson.”

  Huh. Nessa had limited her involvement to Miguel.

  My phone beeped and a text appeared on my screen: The medical examiner has concluded her report.

  Em was working, even from afar. Another text followed before I had a chance to respond to the first one.

  York has his eye on Miguel. Did he really date the woman?

  I replied with a quick: Yes. Then I added: But he didn’t kill her.

  Oh, God, of course not. Three dots flashed on the screen before a follow-up message popped up: I’m not sure I trust York.

  Bad hire? I typed, wondering if York would be myopic in his investigation now that he had Miguel in his line of sight. Would he follow the evidence he found, or would he find evidence to fit his theory?

  I don’t know yet. Keep your eyes and ears open, okay?

  She didn’t have to tell me twice. Already looking into it. I shifted gears: How’s Costa Rica?

  Dreamy.

  Olaya gave me a little wiggle of her fingers and pushed back from her desk and headed to the kitchen. I have to go, I typed to Emmaline.

  Keep me in the loop, she messaged.

  I started to tuck my phone in the back pocket of my jeans, then remembered what her first text had said. With my phone turned sideways, my thumbs flew over the keyboard. What about the medical examiner’s report?

  The three little dots appeared. I waited. And waited. Finally, the message came through. Blunt trauma resulting in internal hemorrhaging. No defensive wounds. She didn’t see it coming.

  That meant she’d had her back turned or she didn’t suspect that whoever she was with would do such a thing, I thought.

  With one of the chairs?

  Yes. No fingerprints. It was wiped clean.

  I started to type. To ask if one blow from the chair would kill her. As if she’d read my mind from her tropical paradise, a new text came in. She fell and was hit a second time. The leg of the chair made impact with the back of the head.

  Without thinking, I reached back and touched the nape of my neck with my fingertips. I couldn’t imagine. If I was attacked by surprise, I was sure adrenaline would kick in, but it seemed Nessa hadn’t seen the attack coming and had had no chance to fend off her assailant.

  I wondered if she’d been able to fight, would she have been able to save herself? From what I’d gathered about her so far, though, she used her Machiavellian mind to manipulate people. She probably didn’t have a clue how to defend herself from a physical attack. If her assailant caught her unawares, she’d never had a chance.

  “Why didn’t she run?” I wondered aloud.

  “Cómo?” Olaya poked her head into the office as she tied a white apron on. “Are you talking to me?”

  I told her what Emmaline had conveyed about the medical examiner’s findings. I played the scenario in my head. “Let’s say Nessa was in the board meeting room. It was a Saturday. Not open to the public. It wasn’t like a surprise assailant could have happened upon her, but she couldn’t have been surprised. Could she?”

  “The building, it was locked?”

  One hundred percent. Mrs. Branford and I had had to jump through hoops to get through during regular business hours. The school district was a government office. Open eight to four Monday through Friday, and closed on the weekends. “Unless she left it unlocked when she went in, but I don’t see why she would do that.” I remembered the side door Candy and I had gone through leading to the parking lot. It was possible Nessa had left it unlocked, but why would she?

  “Let us assume it was locked, then.” Olaya leaned against the doorjamb. “How would someone have gotten in?”

  I snapped my fingers. There was only one reasonable answer. “Because she let that person in.”

  “Maybe she was meeting someone there,” Olaya said.

  “A prearranged appointment.” She hadn’t run from her assailant because she hadn’t suspected whoever she was meeting was going to attack her.

  I went back to my phone, my fingers once again flying over the screen. Was her purse at the scene? Was anything taken?

  I pressed Send and the message fluttered away to the nearest cell tower before it was delivered to Emmaline.

  Em’s reply came moments later: Her tote bag with her phone, wallet, keys, and the board agenda was there. Nothing appears to have been taken. Her husband confirmed that.

  She knew her attacker, I texted.

  Again, Em’s response was almost instantaneous: Seems likely.

  Her main phone was found, I thought. What about the other one? Vanessa’s phone? Had the killer taken it?

  I looked up at Olaya and related what Em had texted. “Nothing was taken, so it wasn’t robbery.” Not that I, or anyone else, had thought it had been, but eliminating the possibility helped me focus. I continued my thought process aloud by asking, “Who knew she was going to be there?” Then I answered my own question just as quickly. “The other board members?” Would she have told them she’d be stopping by the district office? “Her husband, of course.”

  “Not of course,” Olaya said, “but probably.”

  She was right. Who knew what Nessa Renchrik’s relationship with her husband was like? Had the almost-affair with Miguel been a one-off, or had she strayed regularly in her marriage? Did her husband know?

  I’d spent enough time on the district website over the past few days to know that the meeting agenda was posted, although I hadn’t read the entire thing. What was on that agenda, and could it have anything to do with the murder? Did someone want to stop a vote from happening? It seemed ridiculous to think that anyone would kill over stopping a vote on adding crosswalks or approving a new employee, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. Murderers, by definition, were not rational thinkers. “There could be any number of people who knew her routine.”

  Olaya lifted her shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. “You, Ivy Culp
epper, will find out.”

  I wasn’t as optimistic as she was. Nessa had been murdered, and if that murder had anything to do with her position as a school board member the fact that the meeting agenda was posted well before the actual meeting meant that the suspect pool could be well beyond what we originally thought. It left the door wide open for the killer to be . . . anyone.

  I felt my expression grow stony. “They had a closed-door session planned before the meeting.”

  “Closed session? What does that mean?”

  “When the school board has things to discuss that are personnel related or are not part of the public meeting, like trainings and things like that, they hold closed session meetings before the public meeting. At least I think that’s what it means,” I said. I’d looked it up, but my explanation was my interpretation of what I’d read.

  Olaya made a sound acknowledging my explanation.

  “I have an old friend on the school board,” I said, referring to Candace Coffey. “She told me that Nessa was in the habit of going in on the weekend to review the board packet. Anyone who knew her well enough to want to kill her probably knew her habits. They’d have known where she’d be.”

  “Entonces, that is motive, no?” Olaya said as she walked to her baking station. She picked up a foamy concoction that I knew was a preferment. She’d mixed flour, cool water, and yeast together the day before so it would be ready to use today. I’d seen her use this process before. Olaya was a firm believer in the long rise and a long fermentation process. It evoked a deep nutty sweetness in the grain and enhanced the texture. “You can allow this to ferment for three or four hours, but overnight is better,” she’d told me when she had first explained the process.

  She poured the goop into a bowl, added warm water and a tablespoon of yeast, then dipped one hand into the mixture, letting her fingers break apart the preferment. Next, she added cup after cup—six in total—of her special bread flour and whole wheat flour blend, some of it ground right here in the kitchen in her grain mill, plus salt, and olive oil. She attached the dough hook, set the mixer to low, and turned back to me. “I am making another sample before we do the bake for the Spring Fling.”

  “Do we get to decorate it today?”

  “Oh yes, in a few hours. It must rise first, of course,” she said. “Now, back to the problem.”

  We shifted gears to the school board. “The posted agenda is possibly a motive, but it seems farfetched, doesn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?

  I searched the school district on my phone, navigated through the site until I found the agenda, and scanned it. It seemed like basic stuff. Presentations from a few schools about their programs, a discussion regarding one of the high school graduations, the hiring of a new central office employee. “Nothing here seems really volatile. Nothing worth murdering someone over.” Not that there was ever a good reason to kill someone, but on a sliding scale, this seemed to fall on the low end.

  “But the closed meeting you mentioned. What is to be discussed during that time?”

  I didn’t have the answer to that question. It was a behind closed doors meeting for a reason. The subjects to be addressed were private or sensitive in some way. Did Nessa’s death mean a postponement of one of the agenda topics? I doubted it. It seemed to me that school district business was still school district business. The show had to go on, even in the aftermath of tragedy.

  I tucked my phone back in my pocket as Olaya checked her dough. She stopped the mixer, removed the dough hook, and covered the bowl with a clean cloth. The dough had to rest before she did a stretch and roll process with it, allowing it to rest in between the three actions.

  “I have another theory,” I said.

  Olaya looked at me expectantly and I relayed what Candy had said about Nessa’s husband possibly not being the father of their son.

  Olaya’s eyebrows lifted, her forehead crinkling. “She does not sound like a good woman.”

  “You’re not the only one who thinks that,” I said. “Nessa Renchrik seemed to have a bit of an entitled personality. She wasn’t very nice to the people who worked for her or who provided services to her—”

  “Like the hairdresser you mentioned?”

  “Like the hairdresser. It seems like there are a lot of people with possible motives.” I wondered if Nessa had gotten her hair done on Friday before the charity event she’d gone to. I added that to my list of questions to find answers to. I hadn’t mentioned Lulu Sanchez-Patrick. And it had crossed my mind that there could be others like her. “Four school board members, who knows how many disgruntled community members, her husband, the hairdresser. That could add up to a lot of people.”

  Olaya moved to the industrial-sized stainless-steel sink and wetted her hands. Back at her station, she began working the dough while it was still in the bowl. She stretched it, then folded it over itself, turning the bowl and repeating the process. I kept my eyes on the angled mirror above the workstation, watching her work the dough in this way, stretching and folding, until it became a smooth ball. I caught her looking at me and I knew she was trying to figure out what was going through my mind.

  I couldn’t tell her because I wasn’t entirely sure. My mind felt like the preferment she’d just used in the focaccia dough—a goopy mess. “I’ll be back in a few hours,” I told her. “Don’t do the van Dough art without me!”

  “I will wait for you,” she said. “And, Ivy.”

  I turned.

  “Be careful.”

  Chapter 7

  As of Monday night, after the visit from Captain York, I no longer cared that I hadn’t known Nessa or that I wasn’t a police detective. Miguel was a suspect in Nessa’s murder. Emmaline wasn’t here to be a buffer between York and his theory. I couldn’t fill Em’s shoes, but I could do everything I could to prove Miguel’s innocence.

  My handy notebook—thank you, Mrs. Branford—was in my purse. I left Yeast of Eden and headed straight for the district office. I had no legitimate reason for visiting Dr. Sharma and I was afraid that if I called ahead of time she wouldn’t take a meeting with me. My solution to that was to show up unannounced and hope for the best.

  The same not-so-chipper receptionist from my first visit with Mrs. Branford manned the front counter, but I knew the routine now. I withdrew my driver’s license from my wallet and scanned myself into the kiosk system. A name tag printed out, which I affixed to my Yeast of Eden T-shirt before stepping up to the counter. The receptionist’s hair was in the same style as before—pulled back into a ponytail. Her Angelina Jolie lips were adorned with the same rosy pink lipstick.

  “Hi!” I smiled big, hoping she’d recognize me and let me in without issue. “I’m here to speak to Dr. Sharma. Ivy Culpepper.”

  She glanced at my name tag and frowned. “Do you have an appointment?”

  My heart sank. This wasn’t going to be easy. “No, but I—”

  “Dr. Sharma isn’t available for drop-in visits.”

  “Yes, but I—

  She cut me off again, speaking more slowly this time and with a pointed stare. “Dr. Sharma is not available for drop-in visits.”

  “Ivy?”

  I looked past the receptionist to a woman in the hallway beyond. It took me a second to place her, but with a final blink, I did. “Mei?”

  Mei Masaki came up next to the receptionist and smiled at me. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  My mind pivoted. I’d seen Mei at Billy’s wedding. She was married to Terry, Billy’s best friend. She and Terry had met in college, gotten married, and moved back to Santa Sofia to raise their family. I didn’t know her well, but there was no time like the present. “I didn’t know you worked here!”

  I was maybe a wee bit over-enthusiastic, but I went with it.

  She came around and opened the door leading to the offices. “I work in HR.”

  The receptionist sat up straighter and pointed at me. “She can’t—”

  “It’s okay,
Tonya. She’s with me.” She glanced at my name tag. “And she’s already signed in. Perfect.”

  Tonya exhaled her objection, but Mei ignored her and led me to her office. Mei was petite. She wore chunky heels under her slacks, but even so and even with my sneakers, I was a good head taller than her. I looked at each door we walked by, noting the names. No Dr. Sharma, so we hadn’t passed the superintendent’s office.

  The placard hanging outside the door where we stopped said: Mei Masaki, Assistant Director of Human Resources. The phone rang as we entered her office. “Excuse me a second,” she said, hurrying to her desk and reaching for the handset.

  “Of course. No problem.” I took the opportunity to look around. The lowest section of a dark wood bookshelf held a slew of binders marked with labels about district and HR procedures and information. More resource books lined the other shelves, as well as a few photographs of Hana as a baby and through her toddler years. A family shot of Mei, Terry, and Hana on the beach under a large colorful umbrella sat on Mei’s desk. Her desktop computer monitor screensaver was the Santa Sofia Unified School District logo.

  Mei hung up the receiver of her office phone and sat at her desk, pointing to another chair for me to sit in. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  I hadn’t spent much time with Mei at the wedding. Then she’d been wearing a spring dress that hit at the knees, and a coral lightweight cardigan. Today she was in her professional clothing—a pair of black slacks and a button-up white blouse with black polka dots. Her black hair had been down and wavy at the wedding. Now it was pulled back into a slick low bun at the nape of her neck. Her oval eyes angled up, a fold of skin over the upper lids. Mei was nothing short of beautiful. Next to her, I felt a little frumpy and unkempt.

  I hadn’t thought of how to explain my mission, so I pivoted again by saying, “How long have you worked here?”