Gluten-Free Murder (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 1)
Page 5
“Gema?” She stopped herself from asking what she was doing there. Gema held a cardboard tray with two cups of takeout coffee and a brown paper bag.
“I figured you could use some company and a real breakfast this morning,” Gema said. “Did I wake you up?”
Erin smoothed her messy bedhead. Gema's gray hair was pulled into a neat ponytail and she looked polished and professional and there Erin was in her ratty housecoat, hair a mess, makeup-less. She guessed by the scratchiness of her eyeballs that they were probably bloodshot.
“You’ll feel more human once you’ve had some java and fuel,” Gema assured her. She entered and Erin ushered Gema into the kitchen to sit at the table.
Gema looked around. “You haven’t changed anything.”
“No. Not yet. I’ll add my own touches… sometime.”
Gema nodded understandingly. “When you’re more comfortable with it being your own.”
Erin shrugged. Gema passed her one of the tall coffees and indicated the sugar and creamer packets. “I don’t know how you take it.” She opened the paper bag and pulled out a couple of chocolate chip muffins that looked suspiciously like Erin’s own. “I didn’t know what you could eat, so I thought I was best going with something you had made,” Gema said with a laugh.
Erin smiled. “I actually don’t have any special dietary needs. It’s a passion, not a necessity. But I do enjoy the fruits of my labor. Thank you, this was really thoughtful of you. I’m feeling a little… off-kilter this morning. I just don’t know what to do with myself.”
Gema took a sip of her coffee, her eyes wide. “Wasn’t that just the craziest thing you’ve ever heard? Fancy Angela dying like that, right in your bakery! After all the close calls she has had, she dies in the one place that should have been safe.” She covered her mouth. “I don’t mean it was your fault, of course, or that your bakery wasn’t safe, except… it wasn’t!”
“She’d had a lot of close calls?”
“Oh, Dinah! Had she! Why, everyone in town knew about her allergy and about her carrying one of those pen-needles? If she ever had an attack, she said, just pull off the cap and jab it straight into her leg and hold it in there a while. I don’t know if I ever could have done it myself. I cringe over popping balloons!”
“I wish someone had been there to do it. When I think about her down in the basement, all alone, with no one to help her…” Erin trailed off. Gema’s expression sobered and she looked down.
They both picked at their muffins for a few minutes, thinking over it.
“Such a tragedy,” Gema said. “Always sad to see a life cut short.”
But Erin thought she seemed just a little too philosophical over it. She had thought that they were friends, that all the women who had visited her and declared their loyalty to the established bakery were friends of Angela’s. But Gema wasn’t with her church friends, mourning the loss together. She was breaking bread—or muffins—with Erin, the instrument of Angela’s death.
“Had you known Angela for long?” Erin asked.
“Well, now, she’s not my generation, but I reckon I’ve known of her since she was born. I can’t say we spent a lot of time together, but I knew who she was and I was at the bakery every week. Everyone was.”
“Only she hasn’t been at the bakery, because of her allergy.”
“No, you’re right. Not since she developed the allergy. But before that, she was there every week for years. I got accustomed to her.”
It was awkward phrasing. They hadn’t become friends. Gema had gotten accustomed to Angela.
“You weren’t close, then.”
“No…” Gema considered her words carefully. “Angela was a hard woman to know. She’d led a hard life. She could come across as… unfriendly. But she was an excellent businesswoman. She had a real knack for it. Not a lot of women do. Not naturally.”
“Just the bakery, or other businesses as well?”
Gema scraped her thumbnail along the waxy coating of the coffee cup, looking intent.
“Seems like she always had something on the go. Investments, promotions, new ideas of things that needed to be done around the town or to make a little extra money. She had her finger in a lot of pies.”
Erin attempted a joke. “But not literally.”
Gema stared at her with wide, surprised eyes and Erin suddenly had a sinking feeling that she had misjudged the situation and it was too soon after Angela’s death to joke. She was about to apologize when Gema burst into laughter. Wide, open-mouthed, side-splitting laughter. “Not literally!” she repeated, barely able to catch her breath. “No, definitely not literally!”
Erin was feeling a lot better after Gema’s visit. The coffee, baked goods, and companionable conversation had soothed her soul, and she was feeling less out of sorts and more like herself. She had the energy to take a shower and get dressed, deciding she would try reading in the nook in the attic again. Having had a chance to rest and to talk about the accident, maybe she would be less distracted and would be able to concentrate on it.
She was just about to climb the stairs to the little attic retreat when the doorbell rang. Another of the town’s women come to chew the fat? Erin had heard stories about the nosy, gossipy women in small towns, but she had never really believed them. Not the more extreme ones, anyway. She’d seen enough gossip in small communities and school to know that it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, but she thought the stories were exaggerations. Maybe the women of Bald Eagle Falls were the ones the stories were all about.
As she composed herself and moved toward the door to answer it, the doorbell rang again, followed by a hard rap of knuckles. Someone was certainly impatient to talk to her!
Erin opened the door and found herself face-to-face with Officer Terry Piper. For a moment, she was disoriented. She had only ever seen him downtown at the shop, so it seemed out of character for him to come to her house. But of course, they were only a few blocks apart and the police department for Bald Eagle Falls probably covered a wide geographic area, expanding outward to include the more rural homes around the town as well.
“Officer Piper. I didn’t know you were coming.”
He nodded. K9 panted at his side. Erin just looked back at him.
“Can I come in, ma’am? I have some more questions for you.”
“I was hoping… that you were just here to tell me that I could go back to my bakery. Have the police released the scene?”
“Not yet, I’m afraid. Probably by the end of the day. It’s not a big area, there’s not that much to search.”
Erin reluctantly stepped back to let him in. What else could he have to ask her about? She had already told him everything she could think of with regard to finding Angela’s body. As he’d said, it was a small area. There wasn’t that much to tell. She went down the stairs, turned the corner, saw the body. By that time, it was too late to do anything for Angela. The opportunity for intervention was long gone.
Piper came in, wiping his feet on the mat. The dog was quiet at his side, well-behaved, though looking around and sniffing the air eagerly, gathering information about the unfamiliar surroundings. Piper raised his eyebrows and Erin directed him to the couch, sitting across from him in a Queen Anne chair.
“Have you found anything?” she asked. “I mean, it’s probably too early to have tested any of the food for wheat ingredients, if they were contaminated at the warehouse.”
K9 made a grumbling noise as he lay down at Piper’s feet. He would, Erin was sure, much rather have done some further investigating, sniffing out all her secrets.
“Yes, they have to be sent to a lab in Memphis. They’ve all been bagged and tagged and sent over on a rush. But it will be a few days before we hear anything back.”
“You have a courier to Memphis?” Erin hadn’t seen any courier companies around town, though she supposed one of them might have a drop box somewhere. Or would they make a special trip to pick something up for the police department?
Erin hadn’t even thought of that. She gave it a little consideration before she decided that it really was nothing to worry about. They had special procedures and protocols. Ways to ensure that the chain of evidence was maintained.
“So… what did you want to ask me about? I haven’t thought of anything else that would be helpful to you.”
“How much did you know about Mrs. Plaint’s allergy?”
“Nothing. I didn’t know anything about it until she told me at the counter that day.”
“Exactly what did she say to you?”
“Exactly?” Erin closed her eyes and tried to conjure it up. “She said… she had a very severe allergy to wheat. She was worried about if I used any wheat at all in the bakery. She said she would know if I did. She’d be able to tell.” Erin opened her eyes and looked at him. “She was sort of intimidating. But I know how it is with people with severe reactions… they have to stand up for themselves and sometimes act like a bit of a bully… because people don’t understand or won’t believe that they have a life-threatening condition.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Because other people adopt special diets as fads and they don’t really keep them, or are casual about them. Someone who says they are allergic to gluten and then picks at the pasta on the plate of the person next to them. Or order beer. People who think that it will help them to lose weight. Or just that it’s a healthy thing to do for one reason or another, but they’re willing to bend the rules. So then servers and restaurant owners think it doesn’t really matter. They think that everyone who comes into the store with ‘allergies’ is just being a pain in the neck and they won’t react if there’s a questionable ingredient or cross-contamination.”
“Did Mrs. Plaint tell you that she had an…” Piper pulled out his notepad and referred to it. “An autoinjector?”
“No… not that I recall. Gema Reed was by here earlier and she said that Angela had one. She said that everyone knew about it, that Angela told them how to use it if she had an attack.”
Piper gazed at her for a moment, considering this, then made an additional note in his pad. “It’s interesting that you would offer that information.”
Erin shifted uncomfortably. “What do you mean? You asked me about her autoinjector. That’s all that I know about it. I didn’t hear anything from Angela. Just from Gema, today.”
He rubbed the space between his lip and his nose.
“Why didn’t Angela use her autoinjector?” Erin said with sudden realization. “Didn’t she have time to realize that she was having a reaction? Or was it faulty? Did she use it and it didn’t help?”
He held up his hands to stop her from asking further questions. “She didn’t have an autoinjector on her person.”
“What? But Gema said that she had one. That she told people how to use it.”
“And when she needed it, not only was there no one there to help her, but she didn’t even have it with her.”
“But that doesn’t make sense. Gema said that Angela has had a number of close calls. If she knew she was that sensitive and she had had close calls in the past, why wouldn’t she have it on her?”
“We’ve looked for it. We’ve checked every inch of the bakery, in case she dropped it and it rolled under something. But no luck. It isn’t there.”
Erin covered her mouth, horrified. Angela wouldn’t have left it in her other purse or pants. She wouldn’t have left it at home just once. Or in her car. She knew she was going into a bakery, potentially a hot zone for contamination. Surely she wouldn’t have walked into a bakery without making sure her autoinjector was handy. Or two. A lot of people carried two, in case the first wore off before an ambulance could get there. With how far Bald Eagle Falls was from a major hospital, she might have even had a stockpile of them, to last her however long it would take to get her to proper medical care.
“She wouldn’t have gone anywhere without an autoinjector. Especially not into a bakery.”
“You said that you didn’t know her that well and had never talked to her about her autoinjector.”
“And that’s all true. But would you? If you knew you were deathly allergic to wheat, would you walk into a bakery without one?”
“Maybe into a gluten-free bakery. It was supposed to be safe.”
“But she didn’t know that beforehand. She didn’t know whether I catered to multiple special diets—like I do—and only some of the product was gluten-free. She could have been walking into a cloud of flour dust hanging in the air.”
“And that would have been enough to trigger her allergy?”
“From what everybody has said, it would have.”
K9 let out a big sigh, breaking the tense atmosphere. Erin laughed and Piper allowed a tiny crack in his facade, one corner of his mouth curling into a dimple. He nudged K9 with his toe.
“Decorum, partner. Maintain an appearance.” He looked at Erin. “He prefers foot patrol to the cerebral stuff.”
“I can understand his point. He doesn’t know why he has to come sit here and listen to us talk. He doesn’t understand what happened to Angela.”
Piper nodded. He rose to his feet, tugging his heavy belt up a little. K9 jumped eagerly to his feet.
“You’ll let me know when I can go back to my shop?” Erin asked. “I’m really anxious about having to stay closed today. The day after opening… it’s not good for business. And I’ll have a ton of baking to do before I can open tomorrow, if it’s been cleared. I can’t just open without anything to sell.”
He nodded. “You do all the baking yourself? No assistant?”
“I’ll need to get someone before too long. Even if it’s just an after-school student to take care of the till. Otherwise, I’ll burn out.”
As soon as Officer Piper told her she could go back to the shop, Erin was there. Almost before she even got off the phone with him. He rolled his eyes when she arrived there before he was finished removing the police tape from the front and back doors.
“Ready to get cookin’?” he inquired.
“More than ready.” Erin looked at her watch. “But only for a couple of hours, because I have to be up early in the morning. That’s assuming that everything was left clean in here?” She unlocked the front door of the shop.
“There may be some fingerprint powder to wipe down, I don’t think there’s anything else to worry about.”
“And what was removed from the scene, other than samples of my baking?”
“Small amounts of ingredients. We didn’t take the whole bags, just a sample to test for contamination.”
“Okay. Thanks.”
She hurried into the shop and locked the door behind her, not wanting Piper or anyone else to interrupt her. She didn’t have a lot of time and she didn’t want to talk to anyone.
Her sensitive nose picked up on a chemical smell that still hung in the air. She wondered what they had used and what they had been testing for. She was pretty sure that fingerprint powder wouldn’t leave any detectable scent. She remembered K9 sniffing the air at her house. Would it be a blessing or a curse to have a nose as sensitive as a dog’s? She always regretted hers when there was something noxious in the air. Other people seemed to be able to ignore it, but Erin would have to leave the room gagging. She’d always been that way. Probably no one else would even notice the chemical odor. The chemical smell would be gone by morning, replaced by the smells of chocolate, vanilla, and fresh-baked bread. There could be nothing better.
The fingerprint powder was all over everything. The display case where little Peter had pressed his hands and face into the glass to look at the baked goods. The wall. The chrome around the glass case. The steel countertop. The door handles. Everything. Deciding she didn’t have the time to go downstairs to see what state the basement had been left in, Erin just locked the doo
r and took down the placard. If anyone wanted to use the facilities, they would have to try a different store. She didn’t need any ghouls snooping around in the basement, trying to identify the exact spot Angela had died in. She would keep public access to the stairs locked until interest had petered out and she’d had a chance to do a thorough cleaning.
There were a couple of muffin batters in the fridge, so Erin started by pouring those into paper liners and throwing them in the oven. She had a sourdough as well and took a portion to shape into loaves, getting those started. While the muffins baked, she quickly wiped down all the fingerprints she could find and then started on some cookie dough. She would use the same base mixed with several different add-ins to cut down on the prep time required for a variety of cookies.
She hadn’t put her earbuds in, working too quickly to even stop to do that, so she heard the noise at the back door, quiet though it was. Erin froze, elbow deep in a vat of bread dough, and listened.
It was just a tree branch rubbing against the outside of the building.
Or something equally innocuous.
Though she tried to make herself get back to work, she couldn’t focus on her work, trying to hear what was going on. Was somebody trying to pick the lock of the back door? They had to be able to see the lights on in the bakery and know that someone was there.
Or was that part of the plan? Maybe it was someone who wanted her to be there. Someone who wanted her out of the way. She had thought that Angela was her only real antagonist. The competition. But what if there was someone else? Someone who had previously picked the lock or used some other method to get into her bakery. The entity who had broken her mug and shifted the papers in her office.
It was just paranoia. Anxiety. Because Erin was tired and because she was involved in a police investigation of an unexpected death. Her imagination was getting away from her.
Erin determinedly went back to kneading her bread. Though, since gluten-free bread doughs were more liquid than gluten bread dough, it was really just mixing rather than kneading.